A guy named Knox (don’t know his first name), a commercial artist, somehow started finding his way to The Last Mile Lounge on a corner of that busy, barren strip near the Lynn/ Revere line. This was fifteen years ago. He was originally from California. Someone suggested he got lost leaving the airport (a joke, of course). Then the guy who owned the woodframe block in which The Last Mile sits at street level let him rent an apartment upstairs. There was a back porch facing Revere Beach ( barely visible and only in the dead of winter) where he found light to do more “serious” work. It was a strange choice of real estate for an artist, if you ask me. He’s still living up there.
And he still come downstairs at least once or twice a week and sits at the bar nursing something called A Blushing Monk — Benedictine, Aperol, Suze, Lillet. Blanc and Lime juice. Deano, as forbearing a bartender as you’ll ever find, obligingly indulged old Knox, who is probably not a day under sixty, his rare potion. Deano had to special-order the ingredients. (Sticky Sammartino took a sip of it one once and confided to Jackie The Crow that it was like sipping terpentine and Sticky should know because, having made his livelihood as a painter, he’d regularly sniffed, if not actually drunk, toxic solvents.)
But Knox (actually, recently I heard his first name supposedly was Wilfred) is a hoary-headed, slender, tall bearded figure no one could mistake for anything but an artist.
Some weeks back, I made a rare Thursday night visit to The Mile and found Knox seated at the end of the bar over his Monk with his sketch pad. I decided to sit down next to him — I’d chatted him up before — and, over my tonic and cranberry juice, saw that Knox was working on a face — many version of a face. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was in what I would call (remembering what little I learned from a humanities course in college) the style of the artist called Modigliani. (Pull out your college arts book, if you still have it or went to college, and look him up — or just go on-line. You’ll see all these narrow, s t range faces.) These wre just pencile sketches, with red pencil scribble. But I noticed that Knox had brought two Crayola crayons for the evening’s work (he’d found time to work his Monk down about half way — more sipping than usual) and his sketches were a shade of yellow and a shade of brown. Each of his rather beguiling female figures had hair that blended both.
“Might I make an inquiry?” I said. It was all I had to say. For he told me he was doing multiple images of a Maltese hairdresser he’d met in a Florida department store in his youth. She was in the hair salon, and was, yes, born in Malta.
“She was beautiful,” Knox said. “I was in the hunt for some interesting shirts, saw the salon on the second floor and, awary my locks had grown a bit shaggy, went in in to have them trimmed. As wonderful good fortune would have it, she was the stylist on duty. From that very moment, I just wanted her for myself — a beautiful figure, wonderful brown eyes, charming manner, hair that, given her Mediterranean liniage, was probably not blond but, given her profession, she’d managed to bring to a wonderful, albeit artificial shade of blond. It might have been the only time in my life I settled for something artificial.” He glanced at me. “Which, perhaps, should have been taken as an omen.
“We talked, oh, did we ever talk! She spoke in that wonderful Maltese accent! I went back to her in just a few days under the ruse of needing a slightly closer trim and a neck massage — she gave wonderful massages. And I think she saw through the ruse. She knew I’d come back just to be near her.”
“This all sounds very promising,” I said.
“She was unattached, but she confided that she’d been living with a fellow.”
“Shameful,” I said. He ignored thesarcasm, the false moral indignation. He was dreaming — was, in his mind, back in Florida and in love. “She shared with me that she and her paramour had parted company, utterly separated.” Again he glanced my way. “Now, you seem like a man of the world, Mr. Wayland.”
“Indubitably,” I said. More sarcasm.
“Well, then you know that a woman, a virtual stranger, does not share such information with another stranger — be it a customer and other such client — and that she would not have been telling me unless her romance was lying on the slab at Cupid’s coroner. This was clearly an invitation. She was imparting to me, Mr. Wayland, that she was lonely, that she was rid of a nuisance, that she was about to be homeless (for she’d had been living at her boyfriend’s domicile), and, most importantly, that she was, as they say,’ on the market.’
“And, of course, we can alway use someone with whom to share our room and board, correct? Especially a beautiful someone. I was quite impecunious in those day , making my living with drawings as best I could. My angelic hair stylist was also quite enthralled by the knowledge that I am an artist. I knew her to be — or, at least, claimed to be — a fan of the opera. Perhaps she had seen a Miami production of La Boheme. Perhaps she took me for a Rudolfo in search of his Mimi. On my third visit to her — not for my hair but for my heart and my aspirations to be eternally near her — I brought a finely drawn portrait in acrylics that I’d hastily but no less carefully made of her entirely from memory, a perfect but artistically rendered portrait of her. In the style of (ah! I knew it) Modigliani. She was flattered to tears, though perhaps might have hoped I’d done something with a bit greater photraphic likeness — like the pictures of herself all over her mirror (another omen) .
“Then I invited her to come share my apartment with me — my own Parisian garrett which was, in fact, a former garage tucked away in The Grove. She agreed. I was feeling a thousand miles high.”
“Well, well, well,” I said, “and as we always ask ourselves after reading each day’s installment of our favorite comic strip, what happened next?”
“Nothing comic about it,” said ole Wilfred Knox. “In fact, it was tragic from my fractured point of view. She informed me days later -after not answering her phone in all that time — that, upon hearing of her plan to move in with another man, her paramour blocked her BMW in the driveway with his motorcycle. His very unmistakable way of telling her their affair was not over, that he expected her to ride eternally on the back of his Harley Davidson. Nor was she about to resist, which surprised me. For, indeed, I took her to be a strong woman able to resist any man’s wishes.”
“Apparently she was resisting your wishes, Knox,” I said. ( I’m not strong in the consolation department for men who’ve been gulled by women and who should have seen it coming.)
Knox didn’t disagree. He let me see his sad eyes then. “I believe she used me, Mr. Wayland.”
Talk about stating the obvious. I sipped my cranberry and tonic. “I think that’s a very strong possibilty, Knox. You were leveraged for, shall we say, a healing moment between lovers — or, in this case, slave and master. She played you for a sucker.”
Then — I just had to know, I asked, “what happened to that portrait of this Venus?
“I saved it,” Knox said. ” And our esteemed landlord and prorietor here at this establishment has agreed that we shall unveil that very portrait amid great ceremony here Saturday night. ”
Wow! (Note: this was, as I said, weeks ago.)
” You see,” Knox went on,” I sat and told him this story just as I’m telling it to you. This was just a few days ago. And he was quite, ah, charmed by the whole thing.”
“You mean, amused.”
“Yes, that ,too.”
And, so, yes, ( to update things here), they did, indeed, hold a little ceremonial unveiling of Knox’s Portrait of a Maltese Viper. I made a point of being there, and seeing it. It was quite a spectacle — the gathering, that is.. There were about nineteen souls in the place — men, women, some regulars, a few visitors. But Knox assured everyone they were free to adorn his artwork with their own “expressive augmentations” (meaning everyone, women included, was free to vandalize it spitefully. I counted three different black Sharpie moustaches.)
Back to the night in question — the night on which I got to hear this story from old Knox — I spent the balance of the night catching a little of the Celtics game on the overhead Sanyo flatscreen, hardly thinking about what Knox had told me — while Knox continued his fevered sketching next to me. At some point, he abruptly gathered up all this sketches and disappered.
Then when I was walking to my car, I saw that he’d made a litte pyre out back in the dirt near the rear dumpster. It was miniscule — just a bunch of crumpled small white sheets (his sketches). I’m sure he reasoned that, since he’d created a large acrylic representation of his vanished, devious angel, he could destroy all other evidence of her. The pile burned out very quickly, sparks scattering over the ground. Good thing there weren’t any fire department jakes around that night. I know at least one of them drinks at The Mile.
I walked over to Knox. “What’s up?” I said. He said (as I expected), “one portrait of my deceiver is enough.”
Maybe I’ll grab a cellphone picture of that scribbled-over and desecrated portrait sometime and show it to you. I doubt this woman was as weirdly indescribable as that wild riot of intermingling colors would suggest — with eyes like ripe figs and brown/gold hair resembling the stuff that bursts out of old sofas after they been left out in the rain.
Stickie Sammartino, taking a turn as an art critic, described it as a waste of paint. He was a man who never wasted paint. He’d do a whole house with three gallons. But he was happy to toast to it — to the hideous Gorgon who broke old Knox’s heart. ( I suspected, somewhere on some south Florida highway, the woman whose name we never learned from Knox is still ridiing on the back of her lover’s cycle, clutching him around the mid-section, taking jobs at salons far and wide, now and then transforming herself with assorted highlights and extentions and multiplying variety in a wilderness of solon mirrors. Someone who doctored Knox’s painting (which hangs with various other framed novelties in the passageway to the rest rooms), gave her a very long, black tongue. I saw one female regular I know only at Trixie adding cauliflower ears.
Even before all the adornments, Jackie the Crow simpy called the portrait, “ugly.” A very direct soul, ole Jackie.Just what you’d expect from a bricklayer.
And I asked Knox, standing in the dark on that cool, mid-winter night as he made his miniscule bonfire three blocks from from the chilly Atlantic, ” did you ever see your dark Angel again?”
“Never,” he said. “I was told she married the fellow who barricaded her in his driveway . I trust she’s now blockaded in a very unhappy marriage.”
“No doubt about it,” I said. “She’d have been much happier parking her BMW in the dirt out here behind The Mile, living up over the bar as a seamstress to the starving artist Knox, sewing up your skivvies in a cut-rate version of La Boheme. .”
Knox smiled and said,”You are a most crfuelly cultivated fellow, Mr. W.” and, as I made my way to my old Subaru, he commenced to sing — almost certainly under the influence of a fourth Blushing Monk, a sonorous, barely in-key version of Che gelida manina…
Yeah, that was some night.
19 Cent Notebook 