• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 398 0

a collage commenting on teen celebrities as commodities and the fleeting nature of fame. My motivation made less sense. None of these former heartthrobs mean anything to me, not the teen-idols-turned-has-beens like Kirk and especially not the obscure never-weres like Scott Grimes. And yet I’m sort of fascinated by how important these “hunks” once were in my sister’s life. She’s eleven years older than I am, and I’ve always appreciated her generation’s cheesy contributions to pop culture—the movies, the music, and now the magazines—more than my own. That tenuous pop cultural connection kept me from drifting away from my sister throughout the decade or so when our only other commonality was a nine-month stint in the same uterus.

I kicked again.

“Hope?!”

When she didn’t answer, I bumped the volume up a notch.

“Hope? You there?”

I already knew she was there because a mass of orange curls dangled off the edge of the mattress. Even in the gentle early-morning light, Hope’s genuine coloring resembled something not found in nature, like the chemicals added to any fake-Cheddar snack product.

“Hope?”

After my third attempt with no response, I decided to let her sleep. Hope needs all the rest she can get. She’s working as an assistant for an event photography firm called Capture the Moment, so she’s gone every Friday night, and usually double-booked on Saturdays and Sundays. Her weekdays are spent going over proofs and helping clients put together the albums that will help them remember that special day for the rest of their lives. All this work puts a major crimp in her own social life, but it’s enabling her to pay her way through graduate school. In two years she’ll have a master’s in art therapy from Pratt, and she’s planning to make a career out of working with physically and mentally disabled individuals of all ages. If Hope wasn’t so damn likable, her do-gooding would make her the most annoying person I know. And in this city, sheer numbers make it impossible not to know a lot of annoying people.

When Hope’s not dealing with psychotic brides, bat mitzvah brats, and not-so-sweet sixteeners, she and two other almost-starving artists share a so-called Swing Space, thanks to a grant provided by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In this makeshift gallery/studio on Maiden Lane, once the site of a former office building, Hope is working on a series of paintings she doesn’t want to talk about until her group show on Friday night—her first Friday off in three months! This reticence to discuss her works-in-progress, as far as I can see, is one of only two manifestations she exhibits of the tortured-artist cliché. The other is her full immersion in her work at the expense of food, sleep, and fun. Her breakneck creativity amazes and exhausts me.

Art spaces like these are obviously hard to come by, and even harder to hold on to, and I greatly admire the council’s efforts to preserve and protect the city’s creative class. The five boroughs are quickly being bought out by slumming fauxhemians, i-bankers, hedge funders, and their moneyed spawn. One day, not too far in the future, Hope and her poor, arty brethren might find themselves the last of their kind, left behind by those who have fled New York City for artistic colonies in the greener, cheaper pastures of Santa Fe, Portland, or Paducah.

But for now at least, Hope is here with me, snoozing away in the top bunk in our Park Slope sublet. Our bedroom—the Cupcake—is only ours for a year at most, after which it will return to Claire and Chloe. We are reminded of this fact every time we walk in the room because the twins’ names loop into the flowers-and-vine design stenciled in strawberry mousse script onto the angel-cake walls.

I just nudged the mattress again.

I fell asleep before she came home last night, and didn’t wake up upon her return. I suppose my impenetrable slumber was aided by the sleeping pill washed down with booze. Now, before you get too alarmed by the suicidal implications of my self-medicating, let it be known that the pill was all-natural melatonin from the