Harold Brodkey
EGYPT AND FLESHPOTS, JOHNNO AND
WILEY
Noisy party . 1956.
You can hear the music- jazz in those days : a saxophone and
drums- from the cobbled, ill-lit street. There's no sidewalk, only
loading docks with marquees over them . Leather factories, meat
processing plants, other somber industries- boneyards, ragshops–
deserted at this hour except maybe for a guy with a German shep–
herd on a leash on one of the loading docks- a watchman. The ele–
vated highway between us and black Hudson carries a fairly solid
stream of cars, tusked with lights . Up shaky stairs past a sausage skin
plant and its smells to a room with only a few lights on, people scat–
tered here and there in the dim expanses, big windows open showing
black windows in other buildings, black roofs. The neighborhood
has few residents- derelicts, artists, prowlers- at this hour.
Near the door, a larger than life-sized canvas with a blurred
portrait of Eisenhower in a toga on it smeared with brown paint that
had on it in one corner the letters F E C E S.
"I see the honesty of it ," I said.
And an portrait of the painter's current psychoanalyst, a wom–
an : she stood naked by her desk -looking lost; she was blurred but
her genitals were carefully drawn , and that portion of the picture
was circled with red and inscribed H 0 M E H 0 M E 0 N T H E
RAGE.
Johnno was thirty-two, thirty-three. I was twenty-six.
Johnno talked for a moment to a woman painter about Matisse
and Picasso-
the idyllic and the enraged-
J ohnno had announced in a
series of pieces that
the topic of the year was clearly rage.
The woman thinks I'm uptown money, a boy collector. She
wants me to buy a picture: "I'm doing flowers saturated with time- "
"Drenched
with time ," Johnno corrected her.
He told her who I was. She said in a tough, challenging way,
"Hey, those stories of yours must make a lot of money."
Editor's Note: This is the opening section of a work to
be
continued.
