Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [13]
Cy shares his house with two stunning females. This has earned him entry to our domain, without knocking, at any hour of the day or night. He usually chooses the dinner hour to exercise his option. But he always thinks to include one or both of his housemates. One is a dirty blonde gymnast named Natalia, the other is a petite, raven-haired, ivory-skinned half-Spanish, half-Russian, who has moved to Huidekoper directly from a convent in Germany. The nunnery wasn’t for her, and for that we are all grateful.
Cy, The Mad Painter, likes to sit up late in my basement office and drink Canadian whiskey and argue with Willy, Sam, and me, and whoever else has wandered in, about art, literature, and politics. The funny part about arguing with Willy and Cy is that we argue while at the same time agreeing on almost every salient point. Screaming our heads off, yet in near total agreement, each of us shouts his next point, forming layers of rhetoric like we’re from a secret society of Jesuit novitiates gone horribly wrong.
Cy takes us with him to gallery openings and leads us around to shows he thinks are important. He’s a big man and he picks fights with curators, patrons, waiters, and other artists over points of art appreciation. He is on a personal campaign to shame the government, chambers of commerce, and the various corporate headquarters in the region into supporting the Arts by adorning their lobbies and outer areas with original art. At this he is very successful and an inspiration to those cynics among us who think ivory towers unscaleable. He’s mad, of course, in both senses of the word, angry and insane. But who isn’t? It’s a great escape for me to stroll across the street and pace about his studio as he paints the day away, standing or squatting with his nose just inches from a very large canvas, his mind churning over the inefficiencies in whatever argument has been offered as the current fare. Hanging around writers suits him. In fact, I think it’s healthy for artists of different disciplines to inter-mingle. There’s no professional jealousy to alter our appreciation of one another. Visual artists are always looking for an outsider with a reliable eye, a different perspective. And besides, writers always have something good to read lying about.
One night while The Mad Painter, Willy, Sam, and I are in a harangue in my basement apartment, there’s a tap on the window A handsome thirty-something sandy-haired guy is standing there in the darkness above the back alley, wearing a lumberjack shirt, boots, and jeans. He introduces himself and says that an ex spook we all know told him we had a couch in the basement here he could borrow for the night. Washington, D.C., is a town full of spooks. Spooks, spies, security analysts, agents, and their administrators—the bleeding town and the surrounding environs are crawling with them. Aside from the fifteen hundred private security forces in D.C., there are twenty-two federal security agencies, populated by thousands of spooks and their enablers. And contrary to what you might think, these people, like the rest of us, like to get drunk and bitch (and boast) about their jobs. There’s a lot of ex spooks, spies, security analysts, agents and their ex administrators and enablers as well. They really like to bitch. The Huidekoper Team runs into them all the time. We are three blocks down from the new Russian Embassy compound at the top of the hill. We are five blocks from the vice president’s mansion in the old Naval Observatory at the top of Embassy Row. And every other person at the local bars appears unusually quiet, or foreign, and mildly amused when our troop comes stumbling in, arguing politics or working through the myriad of social issues that beguile and vex us from one minute to the next.
So we tell this guy okay, but just for a night.
He stays a couple of weeks.