In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [31]
“What do these Baby Machines know of Pop Art?”
I nodded toward a covey of Connecticut ladies eating celery near us. Our eyes met intensely for a long, searing moment. Hers smoldered; mine watered, but I hung in there grimly. And then, her voice low, quivering with emotion, deliberately she spoke:
“Pop Art, as these fools call it, is the essential dissection of Now-ness, the split atom of the Here moment.”
We looked deep into each other’s souls for another looping instant. I took three deliberate beats and countered:
“Now-ness is us, baby. The Now of Here!”
Her hand clutched convulsively at the smudged and dog-eared paperback copy of Sexus. A Henry Miller. I knew my harpoon had struck pay dirt!
Suddenly, without warning, she stood up and called out in a loud voice:
“Steve! Oh Stevie, over here!”
I turned and saw striding toward us over the marble palazzo, past a Henry Moore fertility symbol, a tall broad-shouldered figure wearing black cowboy boots and tight leather pants. Marcia hurriedly darted forward.
“I’ve been waiting, Stevie. You’re late.”
Stevie, her high cheekbones topped by two angry embers for eyes, snapped:
“Let’s go, baby. I’m double-parked. And the fuzz tag a Harley-Davidson around here quicker than a kick in the ass. Let’s go.”
Her rich bass voice echoed from statue to statue. Marcia, weakly indicating me, said:
“Uh … this is … uh … uh.…”
“Pleased ta meetcha, Bud,” Stevie barked manfully, her thin moustache bristling in cheery greeting. They were off arm in arm. Once again I was alone amid the world’s art treasures.
“You can’t win ’em all.”
I muttered under my breath as I wolfed down what remained of Marcia’s sandwich, salvaging what little I could from the fiasco. The competition for girls in New York is getting rougher and more complex by the moment. I ironically raised my paper cup of tepid orange drink to the gray heavens, sighting over its waxen brim the glowering bronze head of Rodin’s Balzac outlined craggily against the jazzily lit museum interior, the pink plaster arm of IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET seeming to reach out of Balzac’s neck.
“To good old Claes. And Pop Shmop.”
I drained the miserable orange drink with a single strangled gulp. Then it happened. Somewhere way off deep down in that dark, buried coal bin of my subconscious a faint but unmistakable signal squeaked and then was silent. A signal about what? Why? What was Balzac trying to say? Or was it Rodin? Once again I sighted over the statue’s head and aligned the mannequin arm at exactly the same position that had set off that faint ringing. The rain drifted down silently while I waited. Nothing.
I tried again; still nothing. My eye fell on Marcia’s half-empty cup. Could there be a connection? Carefully realigning the arm and statue, I sipped the sickening liquid. Far off, unmistakably, once again the bell tolled for me. There was no question about it. Unmistakably there was a connection between the orange drink and that arm, not to mention glowering old Balzac, the original woman hater.
By now the rest of the tables had been deserted by my fellow Pop Art lovers. Alone, I sat in the museum garden, contemplating the inexplicable. The pieces began to assemble themselves with no help from me. I slowly began to realize that I had been fortunate enough to be present at the very birth of Pop Art itself. And had, in fact, known intimately the very first Pop Art fanatic who had endured, like all true avant-garde have always, the scorn and jibes of those nearest to them. His dedication to his aesthetic principles almost wrecked our happy home. My father was a full generation ahead of his time, and he never knew it.
The Depression days were the golden age of the newspaper Puzzle Contest. Most newspapers had years before given up the futile struggle to print News, since nothing much ever happened and had turned their pages over to comic strips and endless Fifty Thousand Dollar Giant Jackpot Puzzle Contests. Dick Tracy became a national hero.