, Said the Painting to the Brush

One side of her living room was occupied by 20 or so oversized, half-finished canvases. Antonia flipped through them like they were dollar records in the bargain bin, leaning the tall frames against her hip one at a time, taking a moment to recognize each one, understand it, and then dislike it for some unspoken reason. She wore the disappointment in the smallest ways — tightening her lips now and then, as if to make certain that no word would not fall carelessly over her teeth and out of her mouth.

We were juniors at the University of Nebraska, having met (I think) at a house show where I played bass in a band named after a Dylan Thomas poem. After the set, I stood for a bit too long in front of what I did not know was one of her paintings. Not hers in the sense that she owned it. Hers in the sense that she made it, painted her initials in blue in one corner of it, and then gave it to someone who liked to have shitty bands come play in her living room. I didn’t know how to talk to a painter. Especially not about paintings.

I tried but couldn’t remember anything we had said about art at the house show and, from my angle on the edge of the couch, couldn’t see much of anything of the paintings she was looking through, so I kept asking her stupid questions like “What’s the canvas made out of” to which she replied “cotton” and then I’d sit there with my High Life bottle, check how much was left, and maybe try to think of something else. “Do you ever make your own canvas?” to which she replied “no.” I took a long pull from the bottle.

Antonia did not say, but perhaps wanted to say to the blue painting and its blotches of pink and maroon: I owe you something still, and I’m not sure what it is.

Antonia did not say, but perhaps wanted to say to the dense green and yellow forest painting: Do you remember me?

Did not say, but wanted to, Why did you betray me?

Did not say, but wanted to, It was me. It was my fault. I’m so sorry.

Antonia held all of this guilt behind her lips, but it escaped in the form of a long sigh finally as she lifted one canvas out to see it better in the light.

“There was this logging truck I saw in Oregon,” she said.

It was quiet, and I understood only that she was waiting for me. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t make it out. “Is it finished?” I asked.

That was the wrong question. “No,” she said.

I drained the bottle and left the dead soldier on the coffee table. Walked to her fridge for a new one, found one, and twisted off the cap. Standing in the doorway of the room now, I could see it at a much better angle. “That’s really interesting,” I said. I had expected the side of the truck maybe, or even the front, but the painting was of the back of the truck, seen from the perspective of a vehicle following it. The logs, maybe 30 of them, were all stacked up, with the ringed centers of their trunks taking up most of the canvas.

“I was bicycling up in Oregon and almost got run off the road by this huge logging truck. I think I have the actual photograph somewhere.” But she didn’t bother looking for it. When I sat down on the couch, she reached toward me with her bottle. Only the neck of hers was gone. “You can’t drink without a clink,” she said. “Bad luck.”

“I’m sorry I’m no good at asking questions about art,” I said.

“I’m sorry I’m no good at talking about it,” she said.

Clink.

She walked back across the hardwood to where the logging truck painting was leaning against the wall and sort of took it in. She was inches away from it — a distance that made me anxious until I remembered it was her painting. I kept thinking of bad art questions, but managed not to ask them. “Who paints the back of a truck?” and “Why is it beautiful?” or “How does this painting of the ass end of a logging truck somehow make you more beautiful?” It was her hands, specifically.

Antonia drew her fingertips over the part of the painting where, in the distance, a dense fog was enveloping the forest. She had dried paint around the edges of her fingernails. Someone could have mistaken it for old nail polish.

“Hey Tony, would you ever sell me one?” But none of them were ever finished enough for her to let go of and I didn’t have the sort of money to buy a painting anyway.

“You’re the only person who calls me that,” she said.

“Well that’s because you’re the only Tony I know,” I said.

I let her borrow my copy of Ginsburg’s HOWL and Other Poems that summer. She returned the book with her phone number on a post-it inside the front cover. She asked me about poetry all the time after that, even spending time googling “ginsberg howl meaning” before I hung out with her so I could say things like “rockland was a mental hospital, so he’s writing to his friend who is in a mental hospital.” It was nice to be thought of as someone who understands poetry.

One night her roommate threw a big party at the start of the school year and we kept stepping out of the growing noise and seeking the edge of the party until we located it in her bedroom with a well-worn book of Keats poetry and our friend Dave who had absolutely no situational awareness or sense of his three-wheeled-ness.

“Can you read these?” she asked.

I hated Keats, but I read the love poems to Tony who was lying flat on her back with a serene look on her perfect face and I read the love poems to fucking Dave who just sat there like an asshole and then all three of us talked about poetry and making art and Star Trek captains and George Bush and Nirvana albums and anything but ourselves. The rest of the party started to boil over from the living room and Dave was going hard in on Janeway not being half the captain Sisko was. Some disembodied arm pushed in between a few bodies and handed Tony a fresh one. She twisted it open and reached toward me, winking.

Clink.

Tony pulled herself closer to me on the edge of the bed. She put her palm over my arm, two thin streaks of light blue paint across the back of her knuckles, and she waited for a moment of calm, then looked at me and said “Tell them the thing about Murder She Wrote.”

This is not what I told them:

I started watching the show on VHS tapes when I was ten or eleven. One of the few other expats we knew living in Budapest, I think his name was Alex, had a near fanatical dedication to the show. Alex, for most of his 20s, had been a stage assistant to a touring magician. The tour bus had a VCR in it, and they’d watch Hart to Hart or Father Dowling on the road between towns. He talked about the magician constantly, and about how he could never tell me what he knew about levitation or telekinesis, but I didn’t care. Alex couldn’t even make small things disappear.

The only souvenir he really had from those days was a ridiculous VHS collection, so he would bring over a few tapes up to our house and we’d make popcorn. He was very lonely, but we never said so in front of him. “It’s been a tough couple of years for Alex” someone would say softly after he was gone, as though we were congratulating ourselves for having been kind in the most basic way possible.

I wanted to think that Alex wasn’t like us–that he was lonely and we weren’t. I tried to believe that my being an American ten-year-old kid growing up in Eastern Europe had nothing to do with his being an American ex-magician’s assistant living in the exact same city. He couldn’t always keep himself from breaking through the illusion. Sometimes Alex would say something like “I was in this Újpest market yesterday and got asked again if I know Michael Jackson — I think that’s the third time this week” and you’d shout “Oh my god, me too!” And then you’d think that maybe after Alex left your house maybe he’d say softly “It’s been a tough couple of years for Johnny and the rest of them” to himself and congratulate himself for having been kind in the simplest way possible.

Every American who set foot on European soil in the early 90s got asked if they knew Michael. My classmates at the Rózsakerti Demjén István Református Általános Iskola asked so many times if I had ever met Michael Jackson that I just started answering, “Yes.” I was the only American that many of them had ever met, so sure, I guess, and Michael Jackson was an American too, so had I met him? Of course I had. It was mostly a lie, but not entirely.

I did see Michael Jackson in the Budapest Airport once. The usually-comatose terminal had a frantic energy. A crowd of people pushed and pulled against each other for a better view, shouting “Michael” and craning toward the arrivals doorway. We tried to elbow our way through toward the baggage claim, but it got louder and more crowded and more frantic by the second. The way they shouted his name was all wrong. With the accent, it sounded like they were saying “Máj kell,” which translates directly as “I need liver.”

When the automatic doors finally slid apart, everyone lurched toward this small, thin man with dark sunglasses. I was carried with them. My feed slid across the floor and I unwillingly lurched, along with a hundred other bodies, toward Michael. I had no desire to throw myself at Michael Jackson, but here I was, being thrown toward him along with everyone else. He disappeared behind a wall of bodyguards. The crowd was screaming about all the liver they needed, pushing themselves into the brick wall of bodyguards, thrusting their hands through the small spaces between bodies, trying to touch him. I managed to move against the current and free myself. I walked away from it feeling awful for Michael, but this was in 1992 before we knew the rest.

At the party with a now-discarded book of Keats and third-wheel Dave and Tony, whose soft hand on my arm felt electric, I did not say anything about Alex or Michael Jackson, even though both of them are inextricably linked to Murder She Wrote in my mind. Instead, I told them this:

The problem with Murder She Wrote is not that JB Fletcher is just a writer. It’s not her lack of qualification to conduct a murder investigation (let alone 264 of them). That’s a thing in television that we just accept. If somebody told you about a new show where a pastry chef solves murders, you wouldn’t say “that’s a stupid idea — what does baking have to do with murder.” You’d want to know who was playing the pastry chef.

Only I didn’t say this exactly. I gave some less articulate version, because Tony’s hand was on my arm, paint on her knuckles, and I could feel my pulse punching against my neck from the inside.

I told them that the problem is JB Fletcher’s proximity. She only investigates the murder only because she is involved. Maybe knows the prime suspect. Maybe knows the victim. Discovered the body. The point is that in this universe, which is meant to be our universe, there is a woman who has been in the proximity of 264 murders. I think after the 13th or 14th murder you have to start believing in something causal.

There’s no way I used the words proximity and causal.

The painter wanted her friends to laugh or be impressed, and when they did neither, she said to a room that wasn’t listening that she loved Murder She Wrote. One of the guys there said that his college roommate’s dad was an advisor on the show CSI and got to see all the scripts before the show was shot, and everyone felt like that was more interesting, which was fine with me. Tony shrugged.

“I probably over-thought it,” I told Tony. “But at some point, you’d think they’d start to suspect that JB Fletcher was a serial killer, right?

She punched me in the arm and said “you should have told them that.”

Maybe I should have.

I should have said a lot of things.

Or I should have said them differently.

It’s a problem I have, not being able to say what I mean exactly. I’ve never been good at it. It was roughly about that time that I started writing. It felt better than talking. I loved the power of the backspace key. I loved the opportunity to come back into it and make the words right. Or at least drag the language, kicking and screaming, closer to what I meant.

I remember a decade or so ago when we were all catching wind of the Michael Jackson stuff I said out loud something along the lines of, “If it costs us as a society a few kids, but we get stuff like Billie Jean out of it, maybe that’s a decent return on the investment.” It was crass and terrible and I regret it. I wish now that I’d never even spent money on Michael Jackson records. I stole money out of my parents’ dresser in order to buy the “Black or White” single on cassette. The b-side was an instrumental, but I never sang along to it because I didn’t like the sound of my singing voice.

Once, on a trip to Székesfehérvár, a friend’s dad let me play the tape on his car stereo. I had the single in the small pouch of my black backpack. Opened it and passed the off-white cassette forward to the front seat. The tape was only slightly different from the music video, which we only would have seen if we had ended up somewhere with a satellite dish. Both start with a kid (Maculay Culkin in the video, but not the tape) who is listening to some sort of rock music. Dad starts banging on the bedroom door telling the kid to knock it off. In the video, Macaulay gets revenge by wheeling a huge guitar amp into the living room and turning the volume up to “ARE YOU NUTS?!” A single strum sends dad, still seated in his La-Z-Boy recliner, rocketing into space. In the tape version, the kid just says “eat this” under his breath and you hear the sound of a new cassette tape being dropped in. It felt like listening to yourself in that way, so I got in the habit of just saying “eat this” every time I put it in.

In the car, with a pair of Hungarians who didn’t speak a lick of English, I had to explain the whole skit, including what “eat this” meant. My hungarian wasn’t very good, so for that reason, and maybe others, I lied.

“Azt mondja, ‘nos ezt hallgasd meg.’ (He’s saying, ‘listen to this’),” I said. We listened to the kid shoving the cassette tape into the player and telling his dad to “listen to this” and then the whole song six times in a row, alternating between side A with vocals and side B with the instrumental.
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time through, I loosened my seat belt and laid down in the back seat. I listened to the quiet rumble of the road and the engine pulling us along. Half paid attention to the song and half didn’t. I forgot completely about the blue passport hanging in a pouch around my neck under my shirt and about the index card with phone numbers and some indecipherable text about the Amerikai Nagykövetség. It was the first time I had been able to ignore them. Sometimes the ability to forget is a gift.

There is no way to say this softly. There is no clean grammar. To understand what it means to lie down in the backseat of a Trabant 601 and listen to the sound of the M7 as you roll southwest, and to understand how a blue passport can feel like a millstone around your neck, you have to understand what the Americans did not do in 1956.

The American post-WWII policy had promised aid to any citizenry that could manage to overthrow its own communist government. They broadcasted this message over Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian youth on the other side of the Iron Curtain swallowed it whole. In October of 1956, Hungarian revolutionaries tore down a statue of Stalin, took over the national radio, gained control of the armed forces and ousted the entire government. 200,000 Refugees poured over the border and into Austria. Those who stayed held the line and used the radio station to call the West for help.

All of western Europe and the Americans ignored them. Krushchev didn’t. 13 Days after the bronze Stalin statue had been torn to pieces, Krushchev sent the Soviet army over the border and murdered Hungarians in the streets of their own capital city by the thousands.

35 Years later, when Michael Jackson released his Dangerous album, you could still see bullet holes in some of the buildings downtown. As far as anyone there was concerned, the streets were still stained with blood. The last unanswered radio broadcast was in English “The last remaining station… requesting you to send us immediate aid in the form of paratroopers…. For the sake of God. And Freedom…”

It wasn’t the Russian tanks that had spilled their blood. It was an American lie.

Sajnálom. Sajnálom. Sajnálom.

I said it when my classmates recited the once-banned revolution poems from memory. I wasn’t allowed to say the words along with them.

Sajnálom.

I said it every October 23rd, when the front of the school was adorned with flags with large holes cut from the center. It was the same flag, with the red-star topped socialist republic’s coat of arms carved out of the center of it, that flew above the National Radio Station, that was draped over the fallen Stalin statue’s face.

Sajnálom.

I said it when the Irodalom teacher stood me up in front of the class, placed her shaking hands on my shoulders, and asked me where the Americans were in ’56. Asked me why her father bled out in Vörösmarty Tér.

Sajnálom.

I am sorry.

More literally translated, it means “The regret is in my posession.”

It is mine.

It doesn’t belong to everyone.

It doesn’t even belong to every American.

From the 1950s through the end of the 80s, Soviet messaging pushed American racial inequality as evidence of Western inferiority. I’d call it propaganda, but they weren’t wrong. Black Americans were given a pass on carrying the guilt for 1956. Michael Jordan, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, and yes Michael Jackson, and so on. For Michael Jackson it was more than just a pass. I know people in the states loved MJl, but he was a god in Eastern Europe. Not like a god. A god.

I was back in Budapest in 2009 when he died. Stores across the city converted their front windows into shrines. Maybe a pair of white tube socks and black penny loafers resting on top of a copy of Dangerous on vinyl. And not just in the record store windows. Those penny loafers would be in like a butcher shop window or something. Or a single silver glove next to a handful of those battery powered candle lights you get at IKEA in a pharmacy’s window display. And this was well after we all knew about what he did.

MJ was just sort of everywhere all the time. Even the gym teacher at Rózsakerti Demjén István Református Általános Iskola used to make us run laps around the handball court for the duration of exactly one “The Way You Make Me Feel”. She’d sit on a bench and sort of tap her foot to the music and just yell out the name of whoever was lagging at the back of the pack. Next to her would always be my friend Döme, who was never quite sick enough to miss school, but managed to always have a note that excluded him from running. The whole chorus of that song had a sort of repeat-after-me thing going on, so under our breath, we’d all whisper out the echoes.

The way you make me feel (The way you make me feel)

You really turn me on (You really turn me on)

Even Döme, sitting there on the bench feigning an ankle sprain would whisper along to it. Later that gym teacher also turned out to be a total piece of shit pedophile, but we didn’t know about that yet, either.

We were supposed to put on a class play that year and so Döme and the rest of them talked the gym teacher into letting our class do one about the invention of the slam dunk. They cast me as the player who invented the dunk and I didn’t understand why, so I told myself it was because I was good at basketball.

I wasn’t fluent enough to fully understand the planning. They did all seem to feel strongly that the dunk had been invented by a Black American. Maybe it was Michael Jordan specifically. Maybe not. But a black man for sure. They wrote the play and we did three or so half-hearted rehearsals. We felt like we were ready.

About fifteen minutes before the play started, six of my classmates sat me down in a chair, neatly lifted my glasses from my face, folded them and gave them back to me. They told me to close my eyes, and proceeded to smear brown Nutella hazelnut cream all over my face, arms, and hands.

They pushed the Nutella across my skin and painted me with it. The color was a deep brown. Michael Jordan brown. They stepped back now and then to look at me and seemed delighted. They came back and smeared it across my forehead and cheeks. It was stubborn, but they kept working. Pushed it over each hand and finger and knuckle. Pushed it into the softness under my chin, behind the jaw bone. Opened a second jar or maybe a third. Pushed it across the bridge of my nose, still pink from the weight of my heavy glasses. Pushed it around the edges of my eyes. Pushed it into the valley between my bottom lip and chin. A hundred careful thumbprints on my American face. Döme asked if I had ever met “I-need-liver Jordan.” Sometimes a touch can feel like forgiveness.

We walked down the hallway toward the gym and lingered just out of sight until it was time for our play to start. I felt the nutella dry and harden on my skin. We waited together, all of us.

There was one night when Antonia and I had too much to drink. We got high in the mostly dark and talked over a bad movie, both complaining about and loving a series of increasingly absurd stunts in a bad action film. Vin Diesel jumped out of a convertible as it flew off a bridge–who knows where the parachute came from–while the lights from the night traffic on the street outside my house made strange shadows and shapes move across my living room walls.

There was no poetry. No thought in my head except the name that I had given her and the noise of my own pulse, blood thinned with alcohol, and just being twenty-something and alive. The room spun around us like a tilted carousel, and I kissed her on the mouth.

She kissed me back, and then she didn’t.

She said something that I didn’t quite hear. About how this wasn’t what I thought it was. She stood up, tightened her hair into its elastic ponytail holder, and walked toward the door. Pulled it closed behind her. Simple as that.

I stood for a while near the front window and watched her walk down the sidewalk, pushing her bicycle south. I muted the TV and turned on a Pandora station of 90s hits. I finished the rest of the wine alone and watched until Cage and Yelena made it to Bora Bora. I remember hearing Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and sitting there, swirling the last bit of red in the bottom of a glass, not really high anymore and only somewhat drunk and suddenly realizing how terribly sad that song is.

The musicians all thought it was a dance number, but the lyrics disagreed. It was an empty heart that wrote “And when the night falls, my loneliness calls.” So much wanting and not having. The word “somebody” is haunting. Not “him” or “my man” or even “you”. Just “somebody.”

So I watched Tony walking her bicycle away from my house, a small splotch of white paint on her right ankle, and I tried to figure out how the song was broken and why it was broken and who broke it exactly. I thought about it so that I didn’t have to think about being the man who kissed Tony when she didn’t want to be kissed or say “I’m sorry” or acknowledge the regret in my possession.

They set a microphone in front of a boom box speaker and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” reverberated through the gymnasium. We came out of the hallway near the locker rooms and passed the ball back and forth once or twice.

If the play had been a subversive effort to get the whole school to laugh at having smeared the American (literally), then it didn’t work. The audience was completely silent. Just Whitney’s voice and the sound of a single basketball, bouncing between the hardwood court and the strategically-left-Nutella-free palm of a 10 year old American boy in hazelnut cream blackface.

If I should stay,

I would only be in your way.

My classmates stood around me and pretended to defend the hoop. I made a dramatic move through them toward the basket and sank a layup (light applause). I moved back, maybe ten feet from the rim. Another kid passed me the ball and I hit a short jump shot (light applause again).

When Whitney was about to hit the big key change, two of my classmates ran behind a curtain and brought out a ladder. I clutched the ball close to my chest and climbed up toward the hoop. Döme stood in front of the ladder, trying to preserve the illusion and block it from view. He was acting his ass off, waving his arms around in amazement while I “soared” over his head. Whitney finally hit that big “I-eee-I-eee-I” and I leaned out toward the basket and dropped the ball in, suspending myself awkwardly, body stretched forward with my fingers wrapped tightly around the rim. The defenders all fell onto the floor, physically overwhelmed at having witnessed the invention of the slam dunk.

I walked home from the school with Nutella brown skin.

I tried and failed to scrub it out of my ears and hair at home. Stained my t-shirt beyond hope of repair and, I am imagining now, probably did some kind of unimaginable damage to the shower and sink drain.

The aftermath is never the punch line.

A few nights later, Alex brought over another VHS tape of Murder She Wrote. As the episode wound down, JB Fletcher’s friend, a short man with a burly mustache, seemed a little too well-adjusted considering his step-father’s murder trial hadn’t even started yet. He told Jessica that since he’d been cleared of the murder charges (2 minutes ago), he was going to turn the old house into a bed and breakfast.

Jessica made a quick joke. Freeze frame. Associate Producer, Associate Story Producer, Co-starring, and so on.

The credits roll long before the short man with the mustache can start connecting the dots. Wait, how many murders? or maybe even Where was Jessica when all of this happened?

The credits roll before we begin to understand a larger world or the lines that carry Jessica from one murder to the next, or the way these 264 coincidences want to tell a larger story about a widow and mystery writer whose book tour leaves behind it a wake of dead bodies, manipulated investigations, and false indictments. Long before that.

The credits roll before we see the boy bent over the bathroom sink, pulling Nutella out of his hair. Before I sell HOWL and Other Poems to a used book store. Before the clerk flips through the pages and discovers Tony’s number, holds it up and says “Do you still need this?” Before I rediscover the cassette tape single of “Black or White” in a brown box (the summer my sister got married), its glossy black guts twisted into the spine of a spiral notebook full of bad poems. Before I cry over an email from the boy whose thumbprints were left in the nutella, whose thumbprints felt like forgiveness, who is older now and has children of his own, whose message to me 15 years later is a full-throated nationalist screed against Syrian refugees.

The regret is in my posession.

The credits roll before the logging truck’s canvas and its unidentifiable shortcomings are mercifully painted over with a thick white gesso and lost to memory. Before Whitney dies in her bathtub at 48. Before we know the truth about MJ or the gym teacher. Before the magician’s assistant can no longer remember how the tricks were done. Long before that. Long before I stand in the hallway, waiting in the quiet and looking over the empty walls in my living room where there is not a single painting.