PAINT A MONKEY FOR A FRIEND
Paint a monkey for a friend and make the sky a fuzzy red. Monkey has eyes like wedding rings.
Watch over him, monkey. Bobby has skin the color of glue, his hair sloppy. He drives the car, he has
a discovery. Most aren’t that lucky. There’s a lot to be said for the right brown jacket and slumming
through the basement of the museum, those marble heads like candies. Bobby likes his art serious
and I can’t paint like that. I’ve sent chocolates, made proclamations. I’ve stolen things and driven
across the countryside. There are many kinds of love, yes. There are many kinds. Bobby of muscle,
Bobby of varnish, Bobby of twilight, Bobby of caramel. I would paint him in olive and gold, give him
a piano and a room to drag it through, smoke rings and French onion soup but I’m not painting his
picture, I’m painting him a monkey for a wall in the set of rooms he paces through. Sometimes your
inner life is a sheet of black glass and a small white pill. Bobby of wanting and Bobby of getting,
Bobby of sleeping and Bobby of waking. There’s a man in the monkey’s head in the original. I
painted it from a picture of a monkey suit. There was a parade. It might have been raining. I am not
a serious artist, but I feel things, like kindness, occasionally, and I worry about you. There will be a
time in the future when the picture is on the wall and the light will be fading and the blocks of
light from the windows will slide across the monkey and it will look like he’s in jail, back in a cage,
but it passes Bobby, and you are not trapped, you are not alone, because I have painted a monkey,
for the fabulous hall outside your room, and he will watch over you and remind you that someone
liked you enough to paint you a monkey, Bobby. Even when your skull feels like a toilet bowl, even
when the blocks of light are gone, even when the light is gone, Bobby, and you can’t see the monkey,
there will still be a painting of a monkey in the hallway, smiling in the dark. Monkey of darkness,
monkey of witness, monkey of kindness, monkey of love. There are many kinds of love, Bobby, and
this is one of them.
THERE’S A MAN IN THE MONKEY’S HEAD
There’s a man in the monkey’s head in the original. I painted it from a picture of a monkey suit.
There was a parade. It might have been raining. The more I enlarged the mouth, the more the dude
went blurry. He looks French, or drunk, which is hard to paint, has few legible features except for a
little mustache. So, instead of what was there—which I ignored the first time—I painted in the
likeness of the actor Enrique Murciano, who plays a cop on TV on Thursdays. In all actuality, the
face looks more like Matthew Fox, who plays a doctor on TV on Wednesdays. Or, if you insist, it
doesn’t look like a dude at all. It looks glued-in, not-round, like one of those drama masks, Comedy
and Tragedy, a forgery, which he might as well be. An example, a lesson. A mask inside a costume.
And which mask is which? Which one is man at his best? His worst? How do you talk about the
inside—your inside, anyone’s—how do you say it in words, let alone in painting, which is flat? How
do you find the center, internal world, which might only be an algorithm, a set of procedures,
inclinations? What if my innermost me is just a buncha math? Run Program. Notice craving (arrow)
vocalize hunger (arrow) procure cake (arrow) ingest. Why is cake my favorite? Because personality.
Because software. Because there’s an invention in my head that I call myself and he’s in jail, locked in
a cage of monkey teeth. Television, Actor, Monkey Suit, Painting. It’s not that you can’t put a frame
around everything, it’s that there’s frames around everything already always. It’s masks, all the way
down. And notice the monkey’s teeth. They’re different now. A continuity problem, if it was a cop
show. Faulty memory, if I was testifying on a cop show. But it’s not a cop show, it’s a house inside a
house, a painting, double vessel, two different versions of the same lie, a test of the elasticity of the
social construct. Once you recognize your source code, can you read it? Once you read it can you
change it? Can you mess with the Chain of Command? Can you dot dot dot questionmark.