The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  Still, she had spent five hours yesterday trucking shit in. She had a key. Her tenancy was for real.

  So what then? Well then, bad news, son: Stan worse than invisible. Not even neutral, like say a woodchuck, but actively repellent, like a skunk.

  And Stan way out of it: unable, metaphorically, to feel his face.

  * * *

  “The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  Editors Note: In our May issue, we will be reviewing two forthcoming books about The Blaisdell Street Artists Cooperative, Vivian Leibling’s Blaisdell Street: The Counterculture as Academy, and Rainer Ryerson’s Arnold Cloud: A Life-in-progress. In this issue, Lucy Young provides an informal history of the place Leibling calls “a greenhouse of modern art.”

  #4 Blaisdell Street, in Canterbury, Massachusetts, was built in 1919 by the Canterbury Institute of Technology as a focal point for laboratory research in biology. By 1979, not surprisingly, the facility had become obsolete. The work which began here after World War I in beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks had long since graduated to computer modeling and genetic splicing. The scientists who did this work had graduated as well, to state-of-the-art venues within C.I.T.’s vast biotech village.

  Rather than simply raze the older structure, C.I.T. offered to convert the laboratories into artists’ studios and rent them for a nominal fee. This gesture, part good will and part good public relations, reflected widespread changes wrought by the campus upheavals of the late 60’s and early 70’s. As City Councillor Ariana Duff (who brokered the deal) stated: “It was a feather in both caps, the city’s and the university’s, to nourish the creation of fine art where lots of Haz Mats were created in the past.”

  Blaisdell Street sits at the eastern edge of what has become a one square mile enclave of cutting-edge experimentation. As this enclave was expanding year by year, the Blaisdell Street Artists Co-operative stood out more and more, but it did stand out from the start. Every other building in Canterbury’s Area 6 was dedicated to research and development.

  The array of signage visible from their windows was sufficient to alarm that first wave of working artists, the self-styled “Original 12.” NO TRESPASS, NO VEHICLES, High Voltage—DANGER, No Flame, Card Entry Only, NO VISITORS—to give a small sampling from Ken Battle’s early photographs of the neighborhood. Battle has pictures of 18-wheelers he recalls “backing in to unload 50-gallon barrels marked CAUTION and pallettes of small evil-looking yellow canisters that said HIGHLY FLAMMABLE EXPLOSIVES on the side.”

  “Why not just write ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’,” says dramatist Stanley Noseworthy. “I’ll tell you why. None of them read Dante. No one knows who Dante is anymore. A steak house? A spaghetti palace? Dante, Dante.…”

  Whether or not they had read the classics, members of the research community suffered many a Strangelove skit and Frankenstein sighting at the hands of the wary and cynical artists. The sculptor Arnie Cloud recalls “a guy who looked exactly like Edward Teller strolling out to lunch every day with the guy who looked like Albert Einstein. And they could almost have been Teller and Einstein.”

  Cloud also relates the episode of The Blondes, two extremely attractive young women who were accompanied (each day for a week) into Blaisdell # 6 by men in black suits. This became known as The Do Blondes Have More Fun Project. According to Stanley Noseworthy, the men would have their way with The Blondes that week, then repeat the experiment with two Brunettes the next, before writing up their “scientific results.”

  (Deirdre Wright, another of the Original 12, has this to say: “There was definitely a lot of Us-against-Them humor, you know. But that particular joke tells you a lot more about Stanley than it does about the Institute.”)

  The fine arts may have been minimally represented in this rapidly modernizing area of the city, but nature was wholly absent. Prior to 1998 (when the ribbon was cut on Hallowell Park) there was no meaningful green space to be seen in this vast planned village. The small, triangular park between Thalia and Dunham, was nameless and treeless. Until the leash laws were enacted, it was where people from the adjoining Old Port district brought their dogs to defecate.

  The painter Monk Barrett saw this as symbolic: “Tech was happy to shit on nature and culture. That’s what they always did do, from the atom bomb to napalm and beyond.” Others were more sanguine. “It really wasn’t far to the river,” says Jan Edelman, “less than half a mile. Good exercise for the overeaters, like me, and the shut-ins, like Monk. But Monk didn’t want to weaken his case.”

  The building itself was minimally remodeled in 1979. Edelman recalls that there were ragged holes in the sheetrock under desks and tables, ostensibly as shortcuts to a power outlets, though there was one documented case where a tall biologist simply sought more leg room on the other side of the wall. “Scientists are renegades, too, I guess,” Edelman concedes.

  C.I.T. covered the damaged partitions with thin paneling and the stained, pitted floors with industrial-strength carpeting. The rows of steel doors remained, as did the long banks of fluorescent lighting. This halfhearted upgrade reinforced a general assumption that the Institute planned to house the artists for only five or six years.

  Five years seemed a lifetime to these young men and women, however, and the Institute’s indifference had its advantages. Because the new tenants were given free rein, the new paneling was quickly papered over with sketches, posters, and notices for shows. Edelman’s mural of the Civil Rights movement, which wound its way up the stairwell walls, was featured on the TV show “Local Color” and brought her several commissions. Cloud stationed one of his first fullscale figures (a gorilla in Rodin’s “thinker” pose) by the pay phone, where it became a sort of house mascot. “He had such a worried look, that guy,” says Deirdre Wright. “He was so damned real I wanted to talk to him. Or feed him.”

  Charles Largent (then the liaison agent for Hargrove & Drew, who manage the Institute’s Canterbury holdings) admits they were “shooting in the dark with #4. Painters were what we had envisioned, chiefly. There was talk of commissioning artwork for some of our offices. But we got a real potpourri. There was one fellow who made masks, these wild and crazy masks that were ten times bigger than your head.”

  There was Cloud with his sculptures and Edelman her murals; there was Wright with her stained glass panels and Battle, the photographer who was initially excluded on grounds his processing chemicals might be hazardous. “Can you imagine?” Battle laughs now. “I said fine, let’s run a few tests on existing conditions here, buildings and grounds, see what’s lying around. And they handed me two sets of keys right then and there. No further objections, your honor.”

  There was even a writer. “A literary artist, he told us,” recalls Largent with a shrug. “We didn’t argue the point. We wanted artists, we wanted full occupancy. And he was willing to take the one inadequate unit, a tiny room. Probably couldn’t have put even one of those nutsy masks in his space.”

  The “literary artist” who arrived in 1979, Stanley Noseworthy, was still ensconced in that tiny studio in 2004, making him a witness to the entire history of the experiment. It is, by all accounts, an unusually stable track record for an artist.

  “Stanley is stable in a lot of ways—or maybe consistent would be the better word,” says Cloud, who enjoyed a similarly long run. “But then so was the Marquis de Sade. You can be stable in some ways and really round the bend in others, no?”

  * * *

  Clapper and I barely had time to spar over Rose Gately before we were thrown together in our one common cause, our staunch guardianship of the Bozarts.

  For years now the threat had been shadowy and unscheduled. We never knew when Tech would strike or how far they would go. Would it be death by 100 cuts as they nicked up the rent and attrited our spirit with a collapsed infrastructure (the toilet at my end of the hall had been clogged for a month) or would they simply burst in and begin defenestrating us?

  Clap
per and I were the last two tenants-at-will. This had been a popular arrangement with the Original 12—no one was committed beyond the next rent check—and Tech would wax unctuous and self-congratulatory about it in their newsletter. (“As a concession to the needs and preferences of our very special clientele …”) After a few of those special clients had taken advantage by falling a few months in arrears before skipping out, they changed the policy. But they did so room by room, as vacancies occurred. The Original 12 were grandfathered.

  For me, the tenant-at-will thing had no particular appeal. I was as steady at the Bozarts as I was unsteady in everything else, as reliable here as I was unreliable everywhere else. Which placed me at their will, not they at mine. The freedom to be extricated was never one I sought, whereas the freedom to be terminated was one I had come to fear.

  The same was true for Clapper, for different reasons. Practically speaking, I could have left in a flash. Some books, some papers, desk, cot, lamp. One load in Barney’s gas-guzzler. Whereas Clapper would need to hire professional movers, specialists at that, high-priced riggers of valuable art. He has tons of equipment, and he always has a gaggle of those startlingly realistic figures milling in the sculpture grove like metal guests at a cocktail party.

  Even to deliver a single piece puts Clapper through weeks of angst, and renders him officially prostrate. He makes a point to miss all his own openings now, laying low while the champagne glasses clink. This has become a sort of signature: the reclusive Cloud, the sensitive artiste Cloud, undone by his all-night wrestlings with the angel of Art. The first time, however, it was real. The Clapper was drained, man, drawn and quartered by the sight of that grappling hook swinging out over the street with his “Cassius Clay v. Muhammad Ali” dangling in mid-air.

  So now we had the rainbow sign. We had our first new colleague since the Exodus began—glasses up, so recently!—except that right on Rosie’s heels (round or no) this other other shoe falls. Celia Firestone and Tad Smith both were gone. We had not fluffed up to nine, we had shriveled down to seven.

  Seven working artists, that is. There were only six occupied studios, since Liz Clougherty, who wrote childrens’ books, and Ed Bellingham, who illustrated them, shared one. They worked on either side of a folding screen like the ones people in old showbiz movies would stand behind to change their costumes. Oddly, despite their happy proximity and their common line of work, they were not a couple and had never even done a book together. Liz’s were for young adults and had no pictures; Ed’s, for little kids, had minimal text accompanying his elaborate, precise drawings.

  In any case, pretty Rosie Gately was just a stalking horse, or a Trojan horse—a fucking smokescreen is what she was—as Tech struck with new subtlety and then compounded the fraud by having Hargrove memo with a straight face “like you, we have suffered two losses.” They meant to imply they could hardly be blamed if Celia, who had moved up from New York, decided to move back “so suddenly she could not even give us notice.”

  Nor could they be blamed that Tad had died.

  For Tad had not given notice either, to Tech or to us. That he stayed out of sight for months was never a surprise. Since inheriting his mother’s cottage in Wellfleet, he would “camp” down there for long stretches, whole seasons. He also traveled to friends in the South of France and on Maui, so one never expected to see his bright boyish face (boyish at 39, the sweetest fellow, blushing at hello) until one did. Voila! he would say, as though you were the one who had materialized after long absence. The two-cheek kiss, the blushes, and then a few wild tales (blushingly told) to account for time elapsed. That was Tad.

  It was plausible enough that Celia had gone back to the city. She had always understood that to make the big time you went to the Big Apple. It was equally plausible that Tad had died, if indeed he had full-blown AIDS. How could we not know such a detail? Well, because Tad was Tad: elucidation was never his thing. Even when he revealed he was “doing” AZT he made it seem like a madcap self-test, to see if he could tolerate the drug. Anytime you asked Tad how he was, you got the stock response, that he was “really really happy”—as if happiness (not health) were the true opposite of disease.

  Why did I question the maudlin little memo from Hargrove & Drew, positively reeking of plausible deniability? Why did I see their heavy hand in the sudden loss of two fine artists? The timing, for starters. And the elegant model: give one, take away two. Too cute by half, no?

  My true love Nina was quick to label me paranoid, of course, though after all our time together she might have known me better. When a theatre group in Portland rejected work of mine far superior to the work they had once mounted on their stage, all I told sweet Nina was that apparently their tastes had changed. I have never alleged my phone was tapped (even at times when I had a phone) or that my space was being surveilled. Yet she persisted. She believed them, not me.

  To Nina, Tech and their beards at Hargrove were the good guys. Hadn’t they provided these studios for nearly two decades? Hadn’t they just written a lease for the new person? (As a precaution, I had said “person” rather than “fetching young female.”) And was I not still “happily ensconced” there—happily ensconced was Nina’s favorite poison dart—after years of moaning and groaning that the end was near?

  “What harm is there in checking out their story?” I said.

  “Their story? Whatever harm paranoia can do to a person’s mind. Plus the time you’ll waste—”

  “Aha. Time, wasted. A good thing, surely?”

  “Oh God, Stanley. I really don’t care to hear you on the subject of the absurdity of life. Not today.” (Nor tomorrow, by the way.)

  There was no known limit to what my investigation might pay in days wasted. Playing phone tag with Celia Firestone and arranging a coffeehouse interview with Tad’s special friend Calvin Farnham would be the least of it. The big payoff would reside in my magnificently futile attempts to locate Kristen Dane, our “liaison” at Hargrove & Drew. A liaison is a bridge; Kristen was a drawbridge, with open water below.

  Hargrove handles Tech’s leases and rents, a service they provide for institutions all over the country, not to mention half the high-rises in Tokyo and London. They are big, and every single building they manage is far bigger and far more profitable than the Bozarts. We have been a write-off, a sop. And yet they spared no gesture in maintaining public relations. This was their intercontinental M.O., I suppose, and they did not bother adjusting it for us.

  So you always got a card on your birthday, and every April a form for suggesting improvements. Christmas week you would always find an elaborately wrapped package of goodies (chocolate this and cheese that, mingled nuts and championship toffee) in your studio, which to me was no more than a stark reminder they had a working key after all these years and could enter my realm at will.

  Cornered, Kristen Dane was always our ally, our friend at court. Nothing could be more vital to “The Institute” than that we flourish at #4. But to corner Kristen for purposes of hearing such outright balderdash was as likely as riding the perfect wave through downtown Milwaukee. Her first term in office, her first four years, I never saw her. She was a voice on my voice-mail, a note under my door, never once flesh-and-blood. She could be 4′11″ or 6′9″, for all I knew. She might be a big empty head like the Wizard of Oz. No one could say for sure she existed at all, though admittedly it was a time when the smoke-and-mirrors aspect of technology was a trifle less sophisticated.

  They say you can knock forever on a dead man’s door and I say you can call forever on Kristen Dane’s “inside line.” Hargrove had refined a chamber in voice-mail hell that put all other such exercises in obfuscastion to shame. Eight choices where two would suffice, robotspeak so slow your brain fluids drain away before a sentence ends, the business where you are disconnected at what had seemed a promising crossroads, and constantly the your-call-is-important-to-us canard until you scream and smash the receiver against the nearest wall. But you know all this, everyon
e does: just please remember to multiply your worst experience by a factor of five.

  Then one fine day a Hargrove underling let slip the locus of Kristen’s daily latte stop at the Wismer Avenue Starbucks. I did not abuse the knowledge. I hoarded it: confirmed the tip through clandestine observation, bided my time, and “bumped into her” every other blue moon at most. Had I done otherwise, she would simply have changed her spots, like Saddam Hussein sleeping in a different palace every night.

  Now, however, in the wake of Tad’s death, she was laying even lower. No sign of her at Wismer Ave., nor at any of the half-dozen other Starbucks within a quarter-mile radius of Kristen’s lair. I didn’t even call the office, knowing she would be (take your pick) in a meeting, with a client, on the other line, just off to lunch, gone for the day.…

  “Maybe she’s on vacation,” said Nina. “Or maybe she has the flu. Why don’t you just leave word with her secretary, or something.”

  “Tell you what, Neen. I’ll give you every contact I have—phone, fax and e-mail all over town for these people, from the company president on down to the lowest desk bunny. And if you get connected to anyone, if you get a response of any kind, from any living person, I’ll take you to St. Croix for a week.”

  “Why St. Croix?” she said, as though she had a chance of winning the trip—or as though I could really pay for it if she did!

  I did hear back from Celia. With her, the trick is to leave a shameless slew of messages, as she responds to volume, not content. Celia’s testimony was blunt: “I’m 49 this year and do not wish to turn 50, much less fucking 55 or 60, and still be in the provinces.” When she failed of traction in SoHo almost 20 years earlier, she had drawn up a game plan, like Bill Belichick, or better, a military strategy for the taking of New York, like Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants. And it worked. With a shot at immediate occupancy in the old meatpacking district, she was ready to slip the provincial noose and go.