The Liquid Life Of Artists

Art, she said, is above & beyond all else.
I considered the statement while she flung dirty underwear into a suitcase. Maybe she was right, anyhow.
When she took to hard drugs, lavish promiscuity & Miller's lost weekends with libertines, she put it down to art.
I kept that thought in a bell jar. Along with all the other scrappits of random nonsense I had collected like used postage stamps.
Then she left no forwarding address. Sent me a postcard sometime later with Lautrec in Toulouse on it. I remembered that his name was Henri too.
She went way way down, subterranean, & far far out: Enterprising. Wrote later that she had hit a Homer, escaped the Iliad; she reminded me of Joyce, only with bigger tits and a better ass.
In the end, I stayed resilient. Made art. Thought that maybe one day I would Mailer a postcard back, poste resante. It would be a portrait of the artist as a dumb fool – swimming buck naked in Pollock's aquarium.
Nevermind.