“Exactly. I
heard you had a show recently, too?”
I tossed the crumpled pastry bag
towards one of the useless blue trash bags the city had put into place after 9/11.
With no guard around it, it shifted in the wind, turning its back on my wad of
paper, which went careening to the ground.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal,
really. Actually, I have to go see about it now. Something’s sold, I guess,
and—”
“I get it,” said Patrick, slipping
back on his helmet. “You were always a busy man. It’d be great to really catch
up, though, hear more about what you’re up to. We could go for a coffee, or
hell, our kids could have a playdate?”
I smiled at him, weakly. “Seriously?”
He shrugged. “If someone approached you saying, ‘Lead me to the music’ how would you
respond?”
I blinked. He blinked back at me. He
shrugged. “It’s from my show.”
“Oh,” I said, pushing a laugh out. “Cool.”
“Okay, buddy,” he said, starting his
scooter. “I’m gonna shove off, but I really would love to hear from you.”
“Will do,” I said, watching him
circle around me and ease his scooter to the pavement.
And off he went. Godamn Patrick Madsen
who was so generous and wholehearted I couldn’t even hate him and his rip-off
show. Back at RISD, he’d majored in kinetic animation—for his sophomore
evaluation, he’d imbued the heads of four taxidermied boars with recordings
from the film version of “Roe vs. Wade” that were only activated when a woman walked
past. For his thesis show, he wired and grooved a series of his German grandfather’s
photographs from the Second World War so that they could actually be played on
a record player. The sounds that came out of the photographs were terrifying,
scratched. He won a grant award for that, which he used to study robotics and
engineering in Osaka, Japan. And now he was doing performance art. If I hadn’t
felt like enough of a hack for making a sell-out show of accessible oil
paintings (scenes viewed through doorways? Jesus.)
I certainly did, now.
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