painted, printed, framed, and hanged

part 4

 

On his doorstep with a neckerchief of gunk, Terry-today composed a smug vision of brightly lit spires and marble columns; a symbolic gesture, his middle finger to the classes surrounding him. Terry was a force unto himself, and so in a class of his own. He stood apart, downcast but with angel's wings and now with purpose in hand, that was exactly his prerequisite cross to bear, he deemed himself complete in greatness – ready to be adored.

He began in the sitting room, which consisted of a sofa and coffee table piled high with debris and papers of various importance. Below all was a creaky old farmhouse wooden floor, upon which lay a rolled out carpet that had seen better days, then all that followed – none too good. Out of the back door and two steps the whole lot went, right down to the worn floor boards which stayed, and pleasantly creaked underfoot. Terry stretched his arms wide to exalted emptiness. He had here a room, devoid of all character. Bare walls, commonplace floors, and a pale ceiling just beyond reach. Looking about Terry saw no need to capitulate, so he attacked.

From his kerchief, Terry plucked the gunk, his prime acquisition, and surveyed the back wall. A tape measure, he thought, might be prudent, but inaccuracy was ever the template of admiration, so he judged the center by eye and rushed the plaster, striking definitively with a heavy purpose. And so the shmear did stick. It stuck and stayed so, and Terry sat Indian style upon the worn boards, tread worn, grooved deeply by the years and the dragged furniture it saw come and go. But the gunk and ghastly composure of its ingredients was now the talk of the room. It hung there on the blank wall like a threatening storm cloud in an otherwise impotent sky. Terry wanted the sky to speak as well.

From the kitchen counter Terry retrieved a grocery sack filled with jars and plastic containers of a yellowish substance, and he took it to the entrance of the empty room (but for the splotch of shmear) and set it on the floor, just inside the arch. In his wandering among the retail shelves of the supermarket the containers spoke to him. He walked every aisle and section of the store and picked one of each of the hue. Some were all one uniform color, a sickly xanthous shade of being. Other jars were filled with the yellow stuff speckled with flakes of red or green, or red and green, or like a silver maple leaf in autumn, fallen on the dying grass: yellowing with black specks and curling at the edges. Terry opened one glass jar and dipped in it a finger and sucked off the cheese. He made a pleasant face then reared back and heaved the cheese, jar and all, at the wall. The jar burst far left of the shmeared gunk and splattered out in a starburst pattern. Again Terry sat, his legs folded neatly, until he rose and repeated the process until each container met the wall. The contents were dispersed, they stuck, they dripped, they cascaded to lower elevations, they fell upon the floor in ragged, oblique heaps of sticky shards of glass and plastic secretions.

To preserve neatness, Terry removed the empty sack to the kitchen, then exited the house. Toward the alley was a decrepit lean-to filled from dirt floor to dusty rafters with rusting tin cans and nails and all the stuff associated with dark dank corners and mildew and yesterday. Terry picked out several long pieces of wood molding from the days of yore and took from a bowing shelf a coffee can of aged and crooked nails. Returning to the house he picked from beside the stoop a fist sized rock and took the armful into the gunk room, and flung it all the floor. Back to the shed he hunted out and retrieved a heavy section of pipe which he manhandled into the house. Terry also found some wooden blocks that he hammered (with the rock) into the studs high upon the walls on non-adjacent walls. With the moldings he created a frame of sorts around the entire yellowish aggregate; it took up completely the entire wall. With one last trip into the lean-to he found several lengths of rope, a pocket knife stuck to an open position, and a sledge hammer.

Inside the room, Terry hoisted the lead pipe, end by end, up to the wooden blocks creating a sort of joist that lay just below the ceiling. He cut lengths from the rope and threw them over the pipe, knotted up three nooses and spaced them evenly in the room. Then beneath each swinging rope Terry smashed ragged holes into the floor boards, sending chunks and slivers of wood flying to every corner of the room.

Terry stepped from the room, dragging the hammer and leaving in the dust and shards a snaking trail. From out of the yellow wall, the glittering glass specked drabness with its lumps and drools of gack, a great round shmear of gunk stared across the divide, and struck Terry smack dab in the middle of his perverse amygdala, and he swooned.