Dark Passenger (excerpt)
I still couldn’t believe it was a real thing, I mean a real place, even when I saw pictures on a website. A whole museum dedicated to the paintings that had obsessed me since college, by an artist named Clyfford Still. I had to go see them. The Clyfford Still Museum was in Denver, Colorado. The Mile High City. This trip would be my Mount Kailash climb. My journey to the underworld.
The long, bleak winter was behind me, literally and figuratively. It was springtime in my life. A new dawn. I managed to wrangle a week off work, confirmation that society would not regret the temporary deprivation of my talents as Assistant Manager of Produce at Plum Market. Among the qualifications for my employment was a love of natural, organic and local produce. Among the benefits were career growth and twenty percent off groceries. I had worked up to the position over five embattled years. It wasn’t a calling. I had most certainly missed mine.
I had no trouble deciding my mode of transport to Denver since I was poor. I researched the routes: driving would take twenty-one hours each way, but at least I could sleep in my car. There would be three stages to my pilgrimage. The first day, I-90 to Spokane plus a ninety-minute dog leg down to Washington State University, where Still had studied and taught painting. Then back north to the interstate and east to Sheridan, Wyoming. The third day, I’d cover the remaining six hours and arrive in Denver by the afternoon.
This past winter felt different than other winters. What’s a word for thaw that isn’t a temperature? The word appetite keeps coming to me. And l’appel du vide. Spring had loosened my shoulders. I was eager to drive through purple mountains majesty and amber waves. In the days before my departure I savored the anticipation of doing something manifestly physical, a raw new reality that I was still trying out.
I cleaned my apartment top to bottom to make it welcoming on my return. In the morning, I set out as the sky lightened above the trees with a thermos of coffee and a pile of sandwiches. I hit traffic on 405 through Bellevue and again over Snoqualmie Pass, but otherwise the drive was smooth. I resented the interstate’s northward bearing at Ritzville when my destination was southwesterly, but the map on my phone showed no such hypothenuse shortcutting the beige expanse. In Spokane I stopped for gas and coffee. My ETA at Washington State University was three o’clock.
My idea was to go poking around the art department, look into any open studios or classrooms and riffle the storage racks to see what students were making. I missed the smell of paint and solvent. The colorful fingerprints smeared on rickety studio furniture. The chaotic teachers. Maybe there would be some sort of dedication plaque or a gallery named after Clyfford Still? I wasn’t sure what I’d find, or even exactly what I was looking for. A tug in the gut, maybe. The bone deep sensation of a summons. People humored you up to a certain age or place in life and then you woke up one day and you were as old as Jesus but you’d performed no miracles, and any interest or anticipation about you has faded away and you’re on your own night sweating in whatever bed you’ve made.
Many of my past desires had an insubstantial, powdery quality of having been satisfied only in my head. How do you translate the cryptic symbols in your dreams to a concrete to-do list? My brain just overheated. I couldn’t react with all that thumping and knocking going on. I used to watch this tv series. I relate to the main character, Dexter—his pragmatic lack of emotions and his view of the impractical absurdity of some relationships. Dexter uses a phrase to express his impulse to murder: his dark passenger. If you suspect there is something odd about you, it probably tends toward the bad end of the spectrum, and maybe you have a dark passenger or something.
What behaviors or quirks or beliefs do I possess that turn people away? Do I dress like an idiot? Is my hair ridiculous? Really, I want to know. I’ve been considering what makes me me, and how to deploy myself among others. My early guess is that I may just like having secrets. What secrets? The secret that I can see you but you can’t see me. That I know where you live. That as a teenager, I enjoyed the thrill of carefully running my thumb against a blade until it broke the skin. That I’d rather not hang out tonight, so I can stay up late and listen to music and look at art and feel a perverted feeling. I needed someone to hear my secrets. It was fun admitting the things that made me feel alive. Telling my secrets was like glimpsing a poor reflection of myself in the toilet bowl water, after having had only blank walls to stare at.
Does it get any richer or stranger than soaking in the bath of someone’s mind long enough to wrinkle? It’s the insecurities that are the most succulent, the most private and taboo. People are puzzles. A mind is a jigsaw of avowals and disavowals. There’s something satisfying about trying to ask a brilliant question that tricks the interrogated party into offering up the perfect response. Like what do you secretly obsess over? Is not the art of dialogue to feed a distracted mind with provocative proposals? To spook an idea loose with the sudden glare of attention? I love figures of speech, the loopholes of untidy thinking. I have no interest in things people know for sure. Probably my strangest secret? The most indulgent thing I can imagine is being comfortable enough with someone to describe my dark passenger. There’s an explanation. Or at least that’s how I feel. In relationships people act as if they want to know everything about one another.
I arrived in the drably named city of Pullman, which featured the halls and parks and pubs and cheap eats of any college town. The campus architecture was all sunny red brick and reminded me of train stations and Americana, nostalgic but not old. I located the Fine Arts Plaza and paid for parking. I was hungry. I needed a meal and some respite from the pressure to categorize my thoughts as good or bad.
I bought a big greasy slice and took it to eat under a tree on a hill. A few paces in front of me was a huge blue heart sticking out of the ground. I wiped my hands on the grass and walked up to examine it. It was big and plump and at least twelve feet high, made of cast bronze painted light blue, roughly textured and stuck all over with bronze tools, gloves, shoes, shells, a vice, a pickax, hands and faces. I liked it. It was clumsy and funny and a little sad, a heavy blue heart that tumbled down a hill and got all this life stuck to it.
I had to find my bearings. Reorient myself to my lodestar. I envisioned the paintings I’d be beholding in a matter of days, their graphic reds and yellows and blacks, the witchy, flaming forms and spellbound mists. Man, I loved them. I always mentioned them to any artist I met. Most people had never heard of Clyfford Still, as I had not before a teacher enlightened me. Wouldn’t it be great to always be near such vast images and feelings? It’s what makes me want to have another go.
I went into the Fine Arts building and wandered the hallways. It amazed me that the doors were just open to anyone with any intention. The day’s final classes appeared to still be in session. Students in dirty jeans disappeared behind doors or clustered to talk. I saw a ceramics room, a nearly empty digital media lab and a woodshop with safety instructions posted everywhere attended by an older man who glared at me as I backed out of the doorway. Another door to what looked like a gallery was propped open and I went inside. No one was there. The space was brightly lit and a folding chair and a small card table were placed near the entrance. The walls were pristine and hung with paintings. Something in my chest unhitched and relaxed, and I exhaled roundly. It felt keenly luxurious and vital to stand there in the quiet and be invited to look.
The paintings depicted interior scenes with what appeared to be bumper stickers stenciled on top. I peered at one painting, a darkened living room with daylight glowing through patterned curtains. Overlaying the scene was a confusion of lurid decals and slogans you see plastered on cars and laptops and campaign posters.
Let me know if you have any questions, said a female voice at my back. I turned around and standing there in filthy jeans and a loose flannel shirt was a gorgeous woman. I stared, abusing the privilege I’d just won. I quickly looked away. Are these yours? I stammered.
No, it was a grad student show, she explained, and she was just the acting gallery attendant. And an undergraduate and painter herself, as I’d guessed. She was plain but beautiful. Unembellished. Long, light brown hair pulled back, blue eyes, wide mouth. A farm girl. She was probably used to getting attention from local deadbeats.
He’s a great painter but I’m not into these, she said. It’s political, right? We get it. The politicization of the domestic.
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that and just nodded, and she gave a tight, polite smile and sat down in the chair to look at her phone. I wanted more than anything then to be listed among her contacts. No. To be important in her life. I concentrated on the paintings, moving unseeingly between each one. Are you visiting? she called out. I nodded. I hardly knew if she meant had I come for the show or had I come from the moon.
What do you paint? I ventured.
Oh, this and that. She was a senior, about to graduate.
And then what?
A year off to work. Then maybe Yale.
I felt a tug in my stomach. My own blue heart tumbling. My voice gurgled out thick and hopeful. Do you know the painter Clyfford Still?
Of course. He taught here. Come look.
She led me across the hall to her studio. It was a small space wedged between several others, open to the hallway and enclosed by thin sheetrock partitions. There were notes and printed images tacked all over the walls. There were cups of thinned paint and crumpled rags and paint-soiled paper towels on every flat surface, paint splashes and spatters covering the floor and lower walls. Her paintings were inversely clean and fresh. The largest one was a blue expanse, like nightfall, shifting subtly from an intense indigo to the palest robin’s egg. Others were patterned with intricately lacy, striated bands like the insides of agates. She tapped her fingernail on a handwritten note pinned to the wall that read: It’s intolerable to be stopped by a frame’s edge. – Clyfford Still. I’m Dani, by the way.
David.
Are you a painter?
No. Well. I took a few classes in college.
Where are you from? How old are you, anyway?
I told her and she nodded expressionlessly. What was she thinking? I was thinking camp out in Pullman for a few days. Or weeks. Find out her last name. Address. Her lover’s name and address.
How long are you in town, Dani asked. Her straightforward questions kept landing too abruptly for me to craft a guise. I’m actually on my way somewhere, I said, and explained my destination and purpose.
So you’re on a mission.
I flinched.
Do you have room in your car? Can I tag along?
Had I been struck by something? Was she mocking me? She just stood there with that clear-as-day face. Never could I have pictured this course of events. But she seemed serious enough. I casually consented.
You don’t seem like a murderer, she murmured, thumbing through her phone. I need to tell my girlfriend where I’m going, just in case.
So she had her little plots and defenses. Good. Fine. We agreed to meet early the next morning in a grocery store parking lot.
I wandered around the campus under an electric watermelon sunset long past nightfall. This was turning into a personal watershed. I made a pact with myself to try to mix that goddamn gorgeous knockout color one day and make a painting with it. Some kids hung out in their cars at the far corner of the Safeway parking lot until late doing God knows what, but it was quiet now. I tucked a blanket around my legs and reclined the passenger seat in my Honda Civic as far back as it would go. I didn’t need any police shining their lights and telling me to be on my way. Oh, this world.
Along the way here a driver in front of me hugged the center line for nearly a hundred miles. Why? I had hours to wonder. The cop in my head would characterize a good driver as efficient and respectful. Then I found myself wanting efficiency and respectfulness in everything. What an asshole I am. There seems to be so much space between us these days. Do people even talk anymore? Is it all just customer service? To be honest I don’t even know how to act around people. I’m not a short format person. Isn’t that what we hate about the internet? Those clever singular remarks with no context or extrapolation, no connecting or inferring or wondering or pursuit or tangent, and then on to the next thing? Garbage. Give me someone standing on a tabletop, yelling about art and truth. Let’s get in a car and drive hundreds of miles. Tell me about your five-year disagreement with a sibling and what initiated the skirmish. Describe a hard decision, a stolen moment of indulgence, an aspiration kept private so as not to have to explain inaction. Where are the people with obsessions littering their apartments on little scraps of paper? When did we stop writing letters? That suits me better. I like conversations with words defined by words in a recursive loop. God creating himself. Where there is no bedrock and we’re standing on wisps and getting pretty goddamn high. I like to pull a thread. Notice something exquisite about a person and turn it over in my mouth, test it rigorously to ensure quality. Long format.
A crush is long format. God, it’s fun to shamelessly yearn for someone long after it’s appropriate. Or long before. Isn’t that just appreciation? Catching a whiff of character that floods you like pheromones? I was full possibility and life. I had a twelve foot-high heart crammed with life. Before drifting to sleep I took out my phone and sent a message to the one person who would understand.
In the morning I washed up in the store’s employee bathroom. Yesterday’s pink glaze had turned harshly fluorescent. All grocery stores smelled of refrigerators and milk. When I got back I would quit. I bought two coffees and waited in the parking lot. I didn’t think she’d actually come. But she showed up with a duffel bag wearing a pair of overalls, the least attractive item of clothing ever sewn. Was this some gesture of hostility? I handed her a coffee and made a mental note to ask about the girlfriend. In any case, she was making a foolish decision getting into a car with a stranger. Here was an impulsive woman, hedging her own reckless behavior with clumsy ruses. To what degree was she aware of herself? I would test her. Why did she really want to come along?
I’m here, aren’t I? Dani spread her arms. Open book. I want to see the paintings. I’ve never seen them in person.
What’s her name, your girlfriend?
Dani went to the rear of my car and took a picture of my license plate with her phone. I know what you’re doing, she said.
What am I doing?
Her name is Nikki. Last weekend I broke up with her for a day and a half. Told her I wasn’t attracted to her anymore. It may have come out wrong. Or spot on. We’ll never know.
I pressed. You have a girlfriend.
Dani opened the passenger side door, kneeled on the seat, rooted around in my glove compartment and pulled out the slim blue registration folder. She slipped the folder into her duffle and rose to face me. Listen, if you think you need something from me, then tell me now.
I laughed. I had never been very confrontational. You’re the one who invited yourself.
Fine. Let’s just lay it out. You are dangerous. And am I crazy.
I can only describe what I felt then as profound relief, that this woman knew that I had it in me. Wasn’t anyone with unfulfilled needs a danger to others? At least a threat. It took away the taint of humiliation. Maybe I had really changed. Maybe I wasn’t such a bad guy anymore.
You are crazy, I told her. Maybe she would be relieved as well.
In the car, Dani synced her music to the speakers. You like Scott Walker?
It was still too early for me to hold a conversation and Dani stared out the window as the playlist cycled and the miles slipped behind us. All along the roadside were meadows and sparsely forested hills under a milky blue sluggish sky. We managed to make small talk after two hours or so, and we stopped to stretch and find breakfast in Missoula. Dani offered to drive the next leg.
Why do you know about Clyfford Still? Dani said. You’re a painter. Come on.
I’m really not. I just took a class. I took it four times. I had this teacher, this woman.
You were in love with her.
Why would you say that?
Seems like it fits. Clyfford Still married one of his former students, did you know that? She was sixteen years younger than him.
Back then I was a heavy drinker, I said. If she was going to provoke me then I wasn’t going to hide anything. We passed through Butte, dusty brown and nondescript. Okay, I said. Tell me about crazy.
She shrugged. I read a lot about conspiracies.
You’re kidding.
Not really.
Like what?
Like JFK. The non-official narratives. Redacted for national security. That kind of thing. Black budgets. Contras. Psy-ops. Extraordinary renditions. The whole CIA iceberg. I want to know why things are the way they are. You know about Ab-Ex in the ’fifties and ’sixties, right?
Tell me.
The CIA took art very seriously. It’s completely perverse and insane that politicians knew more than most people that art means something.
Dani told me the story. During the early years of the Cold War, the CIA led a secret cultural warfare program to promote Abstract Expressionist art as a symbol of American freedom and democracy. The program was designed to win over European intellectuals and promote America’s international image. At this time, the Soviets and most of Europe thought of America as a cultural backwater. And there were those in the US government who considered modern art ugly, meaningless and elitist, at worst sinful and subversive, and that the message it conveyed was not free-spirited élan but an American people who were despondent, dissatisfied and deformed.
The CIA thought Abstract Expressionism could be a powerful weapon to challenge Soviet propaganda and totalitarianism. You couldn’t really be seen as a big power without a big art. American art could make Soviet art look rigid and heavy handed. Only a free society could foster such unpredictable and diverse artistic output. They figured anything Moscow hated was worthy of support. So the CIA and the Museum of Modern Art got together unofficially to frame international art exhibitions as celebrations of this rugged American mythology. The paintings were energetic, gestural, experimental. Jackson Pollock was elevated as the quintessential bad-boy painter. But the individual artists unknowingly swept up in all this were themselves leftists and anarchists, and would have resisted being labeled a vanguard. Even so, in a relatively short period of time Abstract Expressionism was canonized, standardized and commodified. De Kooning said that an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something—a member of a team writing American history.
Imagine what they get away with now, Dani said. People in glass houses should not throw stones.
All those guys died horribly, she continued. Car crashes. Suicide. Drank themselves to death. Rothko slashed his veins. Supposedly he couldn’t reconcile with all that fame and money. They all sold themselves out. But Clyfford Still, he wasn’t well-known back then. He lived a long life and then he had that sensational will that left all his work to Denver. His museum doesn’t even have a cafe or a gift shop.
I was silent as she talked, taking it in.
Why are you so obsessed with him?
That teacher, I explained to her, who before I wrecked everything, had said my paintings reminded her of Clyfford Still.