In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [30]
IX I INTRODUCE FLICK TO THE ART WORLD
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” Flick said.
Two truckdrivers had taken places at the far end of the bar. Flick ambled down; served them up a pair of boilermakers. One of them got up immediately, crossed to the jukebox, dropped in a coin, pressed the buttons, and returned to his stool. Immediately a wavering reddish-purple light filled the room as the enormous plastic jukebox glowed into vivid neon life. Waterfalls cascaded through its plastic sides. I watched it for a moment, and, forgetting where I was, said:
“Pure Pop Art.”
Flick paused in his glass-polishing. “Pure what?”
It was too late to back out.
“Pop Art, Flick. Pure Pop Art. That jukebox.”
“What’s Pop Art?”
“That’s hard to explain, Flick. You’ve got to be With It.”
“What do you mean? I’m With It.”
I sipped my beer to stall for time.
“Flick, have you ever heard of the Museum of Modern Art in New York?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Well, Flick.…”
X MY OLD MAN AND THE LASCIVIOUS SPECIAL AWARD THAT HERALDED THE BIRTH OF POP ART
I “hmmmmed” meaningfully yet noncommittally as I feigned interest in the magnificent structure before us. “Hmmmm,” I repeated, this time in a slightly lower key, watching carefully out of the corner of my eye to see whether she was taking the lure.
A 1938 Hupmobile radiator core painted gaudily in gilt and fuchsia revolved on a Victrola turntable before us. From its cap extended the severed arm of a female plastic mannequin. It reached toward the vaulted ceiling high above us. Its elegantly contorted hand clutched a can of Bon Ami, the kitchen cleanser. The Victrola repeated endlessly a recording of a harmonica band playing “My Country Tis Of Thee.” The bronze plaque at its base read: IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET.
The girl nodded slowly and deliberately in deep appreciation of the famous contemporary masterwork, the central exhibit in the Museum’s definitive Pop Art Retrospective Panorama, as the Sunday supplements called it. I closed in:
“He’s got it down.”
I paused adeptly, waited a beat or two and then, using my clipped, put-down voice:
“… all of it.”
She rose to the fly like a hungry she-salmon:
“It’s The Bronx, all right. Fordham Road, squared. Let ’em laugh this off on the Grand Concourse!”
I moved in quickly.
“You can say that again!”
Hissing in the venomous sibilant accents of a lifelong Coffee Shop habitué that I always used in the Museum of Modern Art on my favorite late afternoon time-killer—Girl Tracking—which is the art most fully explored and pursued at the Museum of Modern Art. Nowhere in all of New York is it easier, nor more pleasant, to snare and net the complaisant, rebellious, burlap-skirted, sandal-wearing CCNY undergraduate. Amid the throngs of restless Connecticut matrons and elderly Mittel European art nuts there is always, at the Museum, a roving eddying gulf stream of Hunters and the Hunted.
It was the work of an instant to bundle her off to the outdoor tables in the garden where we sat tensely; date and cream cheese sandwiches between sips of watery Museum of Modern Art orange drink.
“Marcia, how many of these clods really dig?” I shrugged toward all the other tables around us. “It’s really sickening!!”
“Bastards!”
She whistled through her teeth. I sensed the stirrings, faint but unmistakable, of an Afternoon Love. Up to her pad off the NYU campus, down to the Village by subway for a hamburger, and then.…
“Only the other day,” she continued, “at the Fig, I said to Claes: ‘Top Shmop. Art is Art, the way I see it’….”
She trailed off moodily and then bit viciously into the raisin nut bread, her Mexican serape sweeping the ashes from her cigarette into my salad.
“Good old Claes.” I followed her lead, “He lays it on the Phonies!”
I wondered frantically for a brief instant who the hell Claes was!
“And they lap it up,” she added.
Our love duet was meshing nicely now. Point and counter-point we wove our fabric of Protest, Tristan and Isolde of the Hip.
A light fog-like rain descended on us from what passes for sky in New York.