The Modern Story

Technicolor Eulogies: Art's Suicide.

a short story by Steve Rineer

We walked the well-worn path bar home. She was dead and, by implication, so was our triangle…but it hit him harder than it had me and he didn’t smile…even nervously. His jaw set knots in his face. Wired and inspired, the past deaths of mine and the impending death of my grandmother had loosened the bowels of my mind. I rambled on into the flat amphitheatre of the desert, of Reservations:

“I don’t know how to say it completely. There’s no way to be able to tell if someone is a great writer; a Hemingway, a Joyce, a Cervantes, an Austen, a WC Williams…but a lot of just good ones with no style get praised as masters for their clever technique and their ability to tell a story which is wonderful and great and something that I will probably never be able to do as well as they do…but….but….but…there is no honesty or courage or anguish or fire that seems to be hidden and whispering ‘I am a fucking human’ in the corners of their work. It only takes one book. Fan‘s Notes. Under the Volcano. The Moviegoer. Fuck, Homer only wrote two and he didn‘t even write them…And, fine, fine, I buy into the theory that the life of an artist must not be connected with the work of art because yes…the art should stand on its own. All I am saying is that it still must buzz with life on the part of the maker---fuck him, her, he can be Anonymous. 1979. Cool kids never have the time. You, I mean, the author must have faith. A supreme confidence…that’s what a masterpiece breathes with – fucking supreme strange confidence…could be mistaken for arrogance…but it’s not…come to think of it, sometimes it is. Yes. Sometimes. It is. Arrogance of the spirit. There’s a lot of great writers I wouldn’t want to meet. They probably wouldn’t want to meet me“.

“It’s style, my friend,” he said.

“Style is nothing but the rhythm at which perception is reached. It is the most important thing. And not in any postmodern, detached way…it is where the soul is located or maybe it is found in the soul. One of them is bigger than the other…like a bigger circle holds a small one and on and on...you know.”

“Profound in short bursts. You are. A dumb asshole for the long haul. Will you write one for me?" Art asked.

“What”

“You know. Oh. Don’t worry about it, kid. Take it easy.”

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He closed his door. He must have ran and got the gun because I had barely gotten in my own door to stare into the beerless refrigerator (only three beautiful and vividly green apples) when I heard pop and thump. The steady night’s silence broke and bounced off boundaries we had suddenly become aware of. Mountains. The moon. The desert that stretched from here to there. The flat dull pop of the pistol echoed in its effort to not die. It finally whimpered, it gave up. Let in the silence that existed before us.

Duty reverberated through apartment walls, floors and shot straight up into my legs it floated me to his door and I opened it. Strangers and neighbors let light out through finger cracked mini-blinds and thrown open doors. It might be better to stay at the peephole and just stare into the void people; pull the covers over your face.

Arthur lay on his couch in the darkness; relaxed and free like a forgotten marionette. I switched on the lights. A thin trickle of blood fell from his mouth. That metallic smell. Gun hung on his lap, almost falling off the couch. I walked in so as to fully face him, to realize…and as he had pulled the trigger Art had let loose blood teeth hair brain matter into a instantaneously appearing bloom that sagged wrinkled and dripped red down the wall, that large empty field behind him. The wall and couch were covered with fly bait. Communication broke down, legs and brain, I fell reeling backwards into his TV set as if to give myself a full panorama of the scene, as if I needed death to seem larger. Who knows? If there wouldn’t have been the TV and walls and mountains and sky to stop me I might still be moving back to get a better, bigger, more gruesome look at his end; at all of our ends. The end. Or maybe I moved back to see that surrounding Art’s suicide scene, little crevice of mess and pain, there was life and some of the walls in his apartment looked white and clean. I don’t know.

Fuck fuck fuck Arthur. Cried into the night. Doors slammed. Why? A cop’s sirens blared blue and red as he cruised towards us on an upside down street. One neighbor came in to see the mess; he gagged and wouldn’t let anyone else in. “You don’t want to, trust me. Trust me…” he said in a slowly fading mantra. I was on my knees and like a lot of nights are to a lot of people the rest of it was a blur. Fucking Art. Why does it have to be like this? Life is a long lonely practice run at death. Eulogies, eulogies everywhere…we are surrounded by them and they are inescapable. The vibrations of dying time, moment after moment. That buzz in your ear. Prepare to die. Prepare to die. Write your own. You are going to die. Yes. I know.

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A eulogy, in a best case hypothetical experiment of my mind, would be performed by a newborn baby, the newer born the better, covered in juices and blood would be a bonus; they would get up, a person, their mom for example, would hold and steady them under the microphone on the brown slanted lectern (probably got a funeral word for it) and let the baby murmur, cry, spit and begin to divide the world soundlessly out and over the mourners. Get the youngest of our species right before they begin to chisel paradise womb pussy worlds gods with the help of words into what is so often referred to as reality and let them communicate something about the dead…something, we-the stuck ones-, can’t remember and were never told completely anyway.

…but no. A person who knows words, is sensitive. Let’s pick him! He’ll preen and use his bigger than average vocabulary and his ego; he might even pull out his dick, cry or hit himself in the head with a blunt object. Bingo was his name-o. We’ve got our man. Start writing. Make us laugh and cry, son, the man says as he punches the young boy in the arm. Aw shucks, sheepishly, it’d be an honor mister, I said to his father whom I had never met.

“…We all wish we coulda bought ’em a Cadillac. My baby does too. I ain’t gonna pay any respects the the dead, never met one of them. I knew Art when he was alive…The type of guy that liked T-Rex and a lot of the early glam rock. He’d ask people when they were talking about Homer if they meant the cartoon character or the poet." I fished in my pocked for some Valium and washed it down with my beverage. "That’s how I met the bastard actually, I said 'both.' We laughed. We did a lot. But I guess, like a lot of us, he wasn’t happy all the timeand I can only imagine how much he probably cried in his room by himself. And I was on the other side of those thin walls. Alone. Alone. I loved him in a strange drug buddy way. Two selfish men. Happy in their isolation. If you are Catholic please don’t think he went to hell. Hell. Please. If you love him. Thank you.” So much left unsaid. Unremembered.

Not all the people liked the eulogy. But there’s a saying along those lines. His dad liked it and came to talk to me once we were both halfway drunk. Me on vodka, him on chivas regal neat. He was very old. I knew his first wife, Art's mother, who was also a suicide.

"I'm tired," he said.

"I am too."

- Steve Rineer

Steven Rineer currently resides in Santa Monica, Ca. He earned his B.A. in English at San Francisco State. His work has been published in various online journals such as Litvision and Subtext and print journals such as Transfer, Hornet and Criterion. He is currently at work on his first novel.