In my run-down Williamsburg studio, I keep artifacts to remember my ex-lovers by. Artifacts. I say it like they’re dead. The majority of these artifacts sit on one shelf above my desk, cramped and crowded together in a heap on an Ikea-branded twenty dollar slab of wood. It’s my own personal graveyard. Ballpoint pens from 5-star hotels, finance books with curiously attractive men on the cover, a shotgun, a small glass Tiffany giraffe. This isn’t counting the many artifacts I’ve put to use in this shabby excuse of a living space. There’s the napkins from the Yale Club in the cabinet I keep for special occasions, (a new lover in the house) the stacks of rare baseball cards on the fireplace mantle (one Joe DiMaggio an ex claimed was worth thousands, I have yet to check on Ebay) and the drugs.
You can’t forget the drugs. I don’t keep them out in the open. They’re somewhere in the walls, back from when Jackson taught me how to hide drugs. He told me the worst place a person could hide their shit was somewhere obvious. A picture frame, he said, too obvious. The first thing the cops will look for. You have to put your stash in the walls. So we did. Not like I ever did the drugs — that’s why they’re hidden. They were all for him. So as you can imagine, it was no shocker to come home from work one morning and find Jackson sprawled on the hard concrete floor like a starfish, his eyes glazed over and iridescent. I dragged him down the stairs and propped him up about half a block down from my building. A dummy. No one thought anything of it. Sad! I imagined the passing pedestrians disparagingly commenting to themselves. Sad what drugs and neoliberalism have done to this city. It’s not like I care. I have bigger problems.
Friday, riding the L, I found my next lover. His artifact by his side, covered by a dingy, paint splattered blue tarp.
“What’ve you got there?” I asked him, motioning a delicately painted red fingernail towards the mystery object. He removed one of the ears of his headphones and turned cautiously towards me. I may have looked a little strange. It’s the way I sit, cross legged and upright with my hands folded on my lap. An ex lover once compared my posture to that of a lotus flower.
“What?”
“I said, what’s under that tarp you’ve got there?”
“My painting,” he said, raising one of his wriggly caterpillar eyebrows. He had a unique sort of attractiveness, attractive in the way artists are attractive.
“Are you an artist?” I asked him with a warm tone I hoped would soften his austere exterior.
“What do you think?” He said, gripping onto the covered canvas tighter with one of his hairy hands. He had a lot of hair. Coating his brows, his veiny hands, his meaty arms. The crook of his nose reminded me of a crow. His eyes had the piercing look of one too, but they were not yellow.
“Where are you headed right now?” The music, which I had since distinguished as rock, continued to blare in his right ear.
“What?”
“Take your headphones off.” He did.
“Where are you headed right now?” I repeated with slight irritation.
“Home.” He said. His eye bags were dropping so low they nearly melted into his cheekbones. He didn’t get much sleep. The struggling artist, I mused.
“Me too.” I said, unsure of when to make my next advance. The train came to a stop. “How do you feel about dinner?” I asked. “You look hungry.” I hoped he wouldn’t take that as an insult considering his hollowed out frame.
“I could eat.”
“Well, do you want to?”
“With you?”
“Why not?”
No, I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I collect artifacts, or why my lovers never stand the test of time. Why I don’t behave like a normal woman, letting my home become a museum for my lovers and their bones; bones from the same fossil, the same man. I take the train up to the Museum of Natural History every now and then. I look at the dinosaurs. Those magnificent creatures, now just a pile of bones in Manhattan. No amount of physical strength is enough to negate the will of God. Maybe I’m a paleontologist. Stripping men of something they’ll never miss in hopes to understand them. I can’t love what I have while it’s still with me. Only in the ruins, in the leaving, in the left-behind do I find meaning. Maybe I’m the big bang.
My new lover and I found ourselves shouting over the din of a saxophone solo, some guy in a mustard colored tux performing a horrible rendition of My Funny Valentine. The stuffy bar around us closing in, the sweat of smell and alcohol growing more pungent by the second. The bar was supposed to be Irish. He ordered a beer stein and a dish of pretzels.
“WHY DON’T YOU GET SOMETHING?” He yelled, swatting a tattered low-hanging Irish flag out of his face.
“I’M A LIGHTWEIGHT,” I said with full seriousness in my face. He laughed. I tilted my head sideways and watched him guzzle down gulps of beer. It wasn’t an attractive angle. He looked like one of the frat boys I’d seen in college, sweat greasing black curls to their foreheads, killing themselves over a keg. I deemed that sort of behavior animal a long time ago. Men can be primal, prehistoric. I continued to watch as he reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a cigarette case.
“I DON’T SMOKE.”
“THESE AREN’T CIGS,” He snorted, with that stupid snotty Soho House entrepreneur accent I had been pretending to ignore.
“JOINTS?” I asked.
“CAN YOU BE QUIET?” A pimple on his crow’s nose glimmered in the bar smog. I wanted to pop it and wipe it clean off his face, letting the pus run down my finger.
“WE AREN’T IN HIGH SCHOOL, WEED IS LEGAL HERE.”
He threw me an irritated glance and removed two of the tightly wound green bulbs.
“I’M NOT STUPID, I KNOW THAT. IT’S JUST, WE’RE IN PUBLIC.”
The more he talked, the more juvenile he sounded. He was a boy. A shell of his teenage self. But I needed the painting in my apartment by morning. I digested the idea that I could not get the painting in my apartment without its owner. I swallowed it.
“Jeez, this place is a dump!”
My lover commented, trailing intoxicatedly behind me as I hauled his canvas up the stairs, my left armpit clinging to the tarp.
“That’s awfully nice of you to say.”
His face was painted with new shades of flushed disappointment as we made our dreary way to the door of my apartment. No security guard had stopped us on our way in, no elevator operator gave us a tip of the hat, in fact, the building had no elevator. I lived, as he had so kindly put it, in a dump. I set the painting down and unlocked the door. He wandered in behind me, knocking off the sides of the walls. He looked like a tired fifth-grader, hours into a tour of the Met, overwhelmed by noise and the nude human form. I set my keys down on the counter and set the covered painting up against my bed.
“Wow,” he said, eyes wide, wandering over to the fireplace. “Is this a 1941 Joe DiMaggio Play Ball card? Shit, I didn’t know these existed in real life. Only seen them on Grailed.”
“It is.”
He then wandered over to the refrigerator, where I held the door open, searching for another beer to calm his nerves.
“The love of your life will appear in front of you unexpectedly! Lucky Numbers 21, 54, 33, 8.”
“That’s right.” I spoke to him with the affirming yet condescending tone of a blonde first-grade teacher named Ashleigh.
“Think it’s you?”
“What?”
“Do you think you’re the love of my life?”
“I doubt it. Take one of these on your way out.” I stuck out my arm, a cold beer bottle in hand. He didn’t seem to notice. He was distracted by something.
“You have so much shit.” He said the word slowly, ending it as if the letter T was stuck to the roof of his tongue.
“Thanks.”
“You know that uh, painting?” I felt my palms get clammy, my joints tense up. I had hoped he had forgotten about it. I didn’t say anything. I let him answer his own question.
“I stole it. It’s not mine. I went into some fucking uptown art gallery and I took it right off the wall.”
“You’re lying.”
I closed my eyes in the middle of the kitchen and tried to picture this scrawny skeleton of a man performing a heist. I couldn’t. He was a joke.
“I’m not. Go look at it, the signature on that thing. It’s legit. Worth a lot of money.” I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t want to believe him, I wanted to laugh, but a force deep inside of me told me he was telling the truth. It was a feeling I couldn’t shake. A terrible feeling that I was no longer safe in my home. More importantly, however, my possessions were now in danger.
He was a liar, a phony, a fake. He was no struggling artist. He was a nobody. A bathroom stall graffiti-scrawling beer-gulping stoner. And now he was here in my apartment, free to steal whatever he wanted. I wanted something special. I wanted a painting painted by this man, whoever he was. I enjoyed being the only one to know the origins of my obscure possessions. I did not want a stolen liability on my hands.
I had only once before become involved with a criminal, a lover named Smith. He seemed to think he was a 50’s Italian mobster, wearing leather jackets and wife beaters that showcased his belly rolls. He ran a money laundering scheme out of a mattress store, Mattress Haven. The mattresses were purely for display, specifically for the IRS officers who would prowl our Trenton suburb. Smith and the officers were on a first-name basis. Mattress Haven was a worthless facade, a front. He promised me free mattresses for the rest of my life if I would marry him. I said no. He died of a premature heart attack, and I left New Jersey. I wished Smith was here to save me. He was 200 pounds heavier than the criminal currently roaming my apartment, and he would knock him out cold in a minute. My best bet was to threaten and intimidate.
“Get out or I’ll call the cops. I’ll scream and cry and tell them you held me at gunpoint the whole way up here so that you could rob me of my Joe DiMaggio Play Ball card.”
“You’re the one who brought me here.”
“I’ll call the cops if you don’t leave in the next minute. Here, I’ll count.” I began to count down from 60, maintaining the mother-child dynamic between us. He did not seem to want to play my game. I eyed him as he eyed the shelf laden with artifacts.
“Is that a gun?” He scoffed in disbelief at the sight of my Remington Model 870 shotgun, a gift from Tony, who owned a gun range specializing in pump-action models. I loved Tony, but he always loved his guns more. He loved them so much he died with one in his mouth.
“This isn’t I Spy,” I noted dryly, trying to hide my terror under a nonchalant tone. The foreboding force warned me once again. I felt it rise through my ribs, up the highway of my spinal cord, into my pulsating heart. Either he gets the gun, or you do. More than ever, I missed my ex-lovers. Their memories surrounded me, closing in on my shaking body. I felt protected. My artifacts were watching over me. Reach for the gun.
After almost a minute of perfect, sinister silence, we both flung ourselves towards the shelf at top speed. I felt like something inhuman had taken control of me. We slammed into each other with force, a thud sounding from the wall.
“LET GO YOU CRAZY BITCH!” My lover screamed, his bones clinking and clanking themselves against my frame. He latched his spider web vein hands around my neck, grabbing me tight. His hands are free. You’ll get the gun.
I can’t breathe. My airways feel like they’ve been filled with foam insulation that is not up to code.
“I’ll kill you,”
He breathed into my ear heavy and fast. Still, I felt the urge to laugh. I felt the urge to laugh because the shotgun was now in my hands, its fat barrel tightly in my grip. He was stupid. My neck began to burn. He’s given you no choice. I took the shotgun and promptly knocked him over the head with it. Thunk. I turned around, panting and out of breath, staring at his outline on my floor. My artifacts were now all in disarray. I hated that he thought he could disrupt my lifestyle in this way. Rob me. Ruin me. Carefully, I fingered the trigger of the Remington, its weight burdening my arm. Punishment should be ultimate for anyone who attempts to disrupt the course of nature. My nature is to collect, to curate. I was hunted, I was the prey. Now I will be the predator. I am stronger than a dinosaur.
In my run-down Williamsburg studio, I keep artifacts to remember my ex-lovers by. Artifacts. I keep the largest one in the back of my closet, stowed behind a barbed wire fence of hangers and an ammunition of unwashed jeans and sweaters. I don’t have a better place for it. Hands and legs and torsos don’t leave a lot of room in a 100-foot closet. This one, I imagine I would say if I was a docent, giving tours of my apartment on exhibit, is the rarest and the most special of my artifacts. People would coo with admiration and bombard me with questions. This here is a dinosaur. It could not wipe me, us, out. I imagine one bold observer, wearing a wool cardigan and thin-frame glasses, a vape in his raised hand, asking me, Isn’t this a bit tasteless? Isn’t this in bad taste? I answer him honestly. Just because something is uncomfortable, doesn’t mean it isn’t art. We each have our own ugly history.