He always told me he got it at an estate sale, though I have no idea what kind of estate sale would sell a shitty, ugly button clearly made with a home machine by some furious yet crafty ’80s stonerpunk. It had a hand-drawn zombified bald eagle front and center with the words The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics carefully inked in a circle around the poor thing’s rotting wings. Our witty artist had turned his A’s into anarchist symbols, obviously. The level of artistic ability on display topped out at “obsessively doodled in the Health Sciences textbook of a tenth-grader with borderline personality disorder.” Jason saw it in a box of similar homespun antiestablishment arts and crafts items and bought it instantly. He pinned it on the I’m-an-edgy-artist-but-don’t-make-a-thing-about-it-man leather jacket I bought him for Christmas and showed up to my birthday dinner proud as a peacock with a 4.0. Hey, don’t look at me like that, Sam. It spoke to me! I like an outraged political statement that’s thirty years out of date. If they’d had one that said Warren G. Harding Is the Anti-Christ, I’d have grabbed that one, too. Occupy Yesterday, baby!
It cost him $1.50.
It made him a god.
Not, like, Zeus or Shiva or anything. Not God god. One of the minor ones, the redneck backwoods cousins of the fancy cosmic pantheon that only people who actually speak ancient Greek have ever heard of. I’m not being catty about it, I promise. Even Jason would admit the rest of the Avant Garde have way better powers. But Jason’s was the prettiest. No contest.
We met in art school in New York like we’d been cast in some kind of indie romance flick. I called him my manic pixie fucktoy. He silkscreened it onto a T-shirt and wore it to his thesis defense. I was photography, Jason was graphic design and emergent urban media, which is how tenure-tracks spell graffiti on your diploma. We were two peas in a student housing unit: young, on scholarship, profoundly convinced of our own genius, highly enamored of Adderall, fashionably cynical, and comically well-read. We had matching his-and-hers eating disorders. We both hated our parents. (His: hardware store owners. Mine: professional alcoholics.) We both dyed our hair with the same cheap beauty supply store goo: #143 Lady Sings the Blues. We were hateably adorable. Only art divided us: my work was all about permanence, capturing time and feeling and freezing it forever. His was devoted to ephemerality: temporary, illicit, testament to the vitality of the fleeting and the impossibility of the very permanence I worshipped.
I was always pretty good at writing those little cards that hang next to your pieces in galleries. All about the active verbs, man.
Jason started doing his thing long before graduation. We’d light out from the dorms after midnight, his backpack clanking and jingling with cans of paint, my camera strap snug around my neck—as if it ever left. He’d cover the side of a bank in a Warhol-style portrait of the guy on the cover of the Monopoly game’s big round face, or spray a little medieval goblin on the door of every apartment block on the East Side that had voted majority Republican, or paint a graveyard on the parking lot of an NYPD station with the names of every person shot by police in the last year lovingly stenciled on the asphalt. Signed them all with a flamboyant drop-shadowed letter C. That was his nom de paint: Chiaroscuro.
See? Hateably adorable.
That kind of thing was hot shit back then. Street art, ninja galleries. Art wants to be free. The gallery system is a noose around the neck of the artist. You know. Jason didn’t always go political; he re-created the unicorn tapestries on the walls of a public elementary school. He thought the kids would like it. Everyone likes horses. I shot him working. I shot people’s faces when they saw him painting at 3 AM. I shot the finished pieces. I think the longest one of Jason’s pieces lasted was seventy-two hours. They broke out the big rollers and painted over his goblins and gravestones real quick. Except for the unicorns. The school kept them. The kids changed the foursquare rules to require hitting every unicorn hunter in the face before you can win. Everyone likes horses.
Jason railed against the contemporary scene, the cults of personality, the eagerness with which other students talked about selling installation pieces to cancer hospitals or tech campuses. Me, I never minded the gallery system. It’s a tight collar at worst, really. The summer after we graduated, I showed a series of my Chiaroscuro photographs at the Eugenia Falk Memorial Gallery. Everyone ate white cheese and white wine and said white things about my work. I called the series The Gallery System Is a Noose Around the Neck of the Artist. Sold like candy at fat camp.
When he bought that button, we’d just moved into the kind of apartment stand-up comics build sets around. How small was it? So far uptown, you’re basically in Canada, am I right? But it was ours. We only had one roommate: our tech. When a photographer and a graphic designer love each other very much, their gear merges into one big lump of wires and monitors and reference books and laser cutters, then starts multiplying. But as a roommate, gear is kind. Pirated copies of Photoshop could not tell us to fuck quieter or stop having five-minute dance parties every hour on the hour. We spent a weekend turning the bathroom into my darkroom, packing the medicine cabinet with developing chemicals instead of shampoo.
“Art doesn’t need to pee!” Jason crowed, and kissed me like he majored in it.
I stopped off at the pound on the way home from a grant-writing seminar and got a cat in lieu of an endowment. A big, fat Abyssinian, tragically born without whiskers. We named him MacArthur the Genius Cat and let him eat people food. It was a lifelike photographs capturing the early 2000s zeitgeist that people will be sick of seeing in special exhibitions a hundred years from now. If I’d been any happier, I’d have been a Prozac prescription.
Then a fucking hideous undead bird landed on our little world, shitting everywhere and squawking The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics i
n the general direction of the next millennium.
I never told Jason this. I guess I probably never will. But that first time it happened was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. So beautiful I forgot to go for my camera, and I was born reaching for a camera.
At 2 AM, Wall Street is a ghost town. Almost countryside quiet, sodium streetlights throwing post-apocalyptic orange flames all over the empty roads, signs flashing HALAL and ATM and NEW YORK STATE LOTTO with no one to see them. Jason climbed a ladder wedged in an alley between two office buildings while I kept watch. I smiled at the comforting whoosh-whoosh sound of his spray can hitting a stencil of Alan Greenspan dancing with the Statue of Liberty while lasciviously grabbing her ass. The love of my life finished up the prongs on Liberty’s crown, blew on the wet, bloodred paint, waited, and slowly peeled back the stencil. The moon squinted down skeptically. A little trite by her standards. Jason Remarque reached out his hand to scrape off a stray smudge above the Fed’s giant doofy glasses.
Alan Greenspan and Lady Liberty stepped off the wall of the New York Stock Exchange and into the open air. The wind off the river seemed to inflate them like red balloons, their aerosolized paint-bodies puffing out of 2-D and into an impossible 3. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve took his hand off Liberty’s ass and placed it gracefully around her waist, sweeping her into a silent, perfect Viennese waltz a hundred feet into the skyline and climbing. The Statue of Liberty reached forward and adjusted her dancing partner’s glasses. The stray smudge of paint still floated above the frames where Jason had left it. We watched them, dumbfounded, unable to reconcile what we saw with, you know, any possible goddamned definition of reality. We thought we lived in a universe where gravity is a thing, time moves at one second per second, the gallery system is a noose around the neck of the artist, and movies aren’t real life. Because that’s all your brain can say for itself when something that can’t happen happens in front of you: It looks like a movie. Oh! We’re in a movie now. That’s okay, then. Movies can’t hurt you. Oooh, look at that! Her torch just came on!
We watched Alan Greenspan and the Statue of Liberty for about an hour. They got tired of dancing after about twenty minutes and flew up to the roof of the Stock Exchange, where they dangled their fuzzy red legs over the edge and swung them like kids on a swing set. They talked, but no sound came out. At one point, they really got stuck into something. Lady Liberty flipped him off and hopped down to hang out with Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, but, as the figures decorating the Stock Exchange remained marble and not paint, they weren’t much company for her. Finally, Alan and Liberty started to fade and disperse, coming gently apart into thousands of tiny flecks of the paint I’d picked up for Jason at Art Mart on my lunch hour.
It took us a while to recover enough to talk about what the fuck just happened. Blah, blah, blah: did you see that/I can’t believe it/it’s impossible/did we get pranked/did we do all of the drugs and just forget that we did all of the drugs? All the while, my brain cheerfully munched popcorn and babbled away: I told you, we’re in a movie now. See, we even sound like movie people sound. We’re saying what movie people say. Everything is A-OK! Silly Samantha, the effects weren’t even that great.
“I made that happen,” Jason whispered. MacArthur the Genius Cat kneaded his lap plaintively. Make petting happen, please. “Somehow. Do you think I can do it again?”
We didn’t dare try it outside. The sun cannonballed obnoxiously through our windows. If it worked, everyone would see. He grabbed the smallest stencil from his “new” pile: a Roman-style double-headed imperial eagle in a Carolina Fried Chicken combo meal box with a side of fries. The fries had triggers and safeties and barrels: deep-fried assault weapons. Jason shook an Art Mart can of Yellow #455A Last Week’s Lemoncake and emerged urban media onto a patch of wall behind our refrigerator.
This refrigerator. Oh. I guess that’s what the New School kids call foreshadowing. Wow, it’s fucking easy to miss in real life!
Spray, blow, wait, peel. Nothing.
“You held out your hand toward it. To get the smudgy bit,” I reminded him.
“Oh, right! God, that feels lame.”
Jason held out his hand. He waggled his fingers like a bad stage magician in an effort to feel less stupid doing this stupid thing.
Slowly, the double-headed imperial eagle sloughed off the wall, still stuck in its Carolina Fried Chicken combo box. It plopped onto the dirty floor behind the refrigerator (this refrigerator), dragging the box behind it like a two-legged rescue dog dragging its little puppy wheelchair through the park. The imperial bird-monster looked up at us and squeaked soundlessly. A couple of gun-fries fell out of their bag as that weird tiny yellow latex mutant squeezed past us into the kitchen, firing useless puffs of anti–military industrial complex paint into the dust bunnies. MacArthur lost his fucking mind. He shrieked—apparently, cats can shriek—and reared up on his haunches. Our little guy thundered toward the combo box of (really, let’s be honest) muddled political messages. His paws scrabbled on the linoleum, flying out from under him with the excitement of the hunt, and thus, the Chris Farley of Abyssinians both pounced and fell on top of his prey. With a howl of triumph, MacArthur the Genius Cat chowed down on the symbol of the twelve-secret-herbs-and-spices might of Rome and Byzantium, ripping it in two and gobbling both halves up before we could yell no, no bad kitty don’t eat daddy’s magic paint golem thingy! We just stared at the Carolina Fried Carnage.
We figured out it was the button’s fault very scientifically. I said, “It’s that goddamned hipster anarchist shitbird,” and Jason agreed. “What is with you and eagles right now?”
The only other new thing in our life was MacArthur, and when we asked whether he gave Jason superpowers, he just showed us his very self-satisfied butthole and waddled off in search of fallen gun-fries. No man left behind. Plus, it didn’t work if Jason took the button off, and it didn’t work for me if I put the button on. We promptly got very drunk and giggly and busy making vaguely leftist spray-paint animated action figures, which went on for a week or so before the Avant Garde showed up to play Officer Exposition and drink the last of our beer.