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No-one Driving
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The guy with the funny eye made a wry face and shook his head. "You'll...never do it"
"Do what?"
"Get Vet"
"Who?" "Jacky V" His eyes closed and for a moment his face relaxed.
I sat there as if I were paralyzed; for a second totally
immobilized, a suddenly frozen mind and body that had solidified into
one great silent scream at the mention of a name I had long ago consigned
to a grave somewhere. Then the terrible cold was drenched with an even
more terrible wash of heat and I sat there with my hands bunched into
fists to keep them from shaking.
Vet? The guy with the funny eye might have the answers. He was no other than street art writer, groovy blacked-up homeboy Dave Hickey. I got the call from the Hick around about midnight. Drawing on his crack pipe, the Hick shuddered uncontrollably as he tried to blank out thoughts of Vet’s erotic skulduggery in his beloved artworld. He was is a man of honour who knows sins of the flesh to be tantamount to the transgression of wearing anything other than the most shadowy Burberry. His vintage Nike air Jordans rapped on the latex floor of Grenwich Village sidewalk, as he covered his ears to avoid listening to a hoard of gangsta choir boys singing falsetto 'bout leather, leather everywhere. "Word Vettriano's pictures is sadass muthafuck. Bitch couldn't draw his ass 'cross da sidewalk. Am tryin ta tell ya right now!” Averting his virtuous eyes, he sauntered past the most licentious exemplars of contemporary manlove East of San Francisco. Where can I hear more, I wondered. The word on the streets was that top god fearing critic Sister Wendy James Beckett knows otherwise. Love is the key to her aesthetic predilections. The following day, I went down to chapel to put the heat on the bitch. Her eyes had death in them, hers and mine. Her belly was bloated and I could smell the stench of a festering wound, the sickening odor of communion wine impregnated into cloth. She squealed like a new born chinchilla. “The lovely man’s paintings are simply divine.” Journeying chastely towards a popular Vet print of a guy in a demob suit mounting a high class hooker, the nun saw no ungodly menace. Is such Vanity Fair? Predisposed as they are to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, unconstrained fornication is surely a diversion to be endured only by rabbits and Romanists. I thought I’d need to do a little bit of poking around on my own if I was gonna nail this creep. My first place of rest was the kingdom of Fife, birthplace of Vet, and no doubt home to his sexy look at life. It was easy. Way back in the nineteen seventies, Jack started off his career with a bunch of no good punks on a hiding to nowhere. I found an old picture of Jackie playing in his boy band – coitus. Here his is, banging away with his young friends. By 78 the top young stylist had joined up with Czechoslovakian dog mod outfit - Cunts in Wheelchairs. He embarked on a world tour of Warsaw pact countries. Jackie worked hard as a hair stylist for the Cunts. Here he is with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he is simply standing against a fence, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head doesn't turn and his eyes don't seem to move, but we know he sees us. I can feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I think he felt something stiffen the same way. By 79, he was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I started to see in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal or a dangerously deceptive baroque edifice. From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of. It seemed our man Jackie had set his sights on reclaiming the past, working with the now famous Victorian pimp look. His body wasn't fifteen years old anymore. Then Jackie got a break. He joined Vetrianos Nouveau Vo. He decided never again to have his photograph taken other than in profile. The trenchcoat and hat he wore were the keystone to the whole ensemble, and when it was adorned the whole affair, reflected the moonlight from above and eclipsing a pale brilliance. The young men turned, and they didn't smile. The group performed mainly in the vicinity of modernist architecture as can be seen in Vettriano's tableaux for Vettrianos Nouveau. The group also worked on elaborate stage performances such as the critically acclaimed Chiarascuroagogo. The group's director of violence - the piston fisted Yoko Homo - can be seen in the foreground with a bow and arrow - as she prepares to take out an unsuspecting member of the audience. Meanwhile, a sexually aroused Jackie can be seen behind the large screen - elevating a fellow bandmember's member by shouting obscenities through a big megaphone. The other members of the group never warmed to Jackie's obsession with profile shots. Jackie decided to make it out on his own. He used to be able to look at himself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made him look. Now he was a shadow pushing through his own outline, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. His metrosexuality took him to Europe, where he whored and toured for several years on a lost weekend. He was twisted and rotted inside. At one point he was taking up to 40 polaroids per day. Maybe he would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What stopped it from happening? Jackie parked the car and started walking in the rain. He didn't want to look in that damn mirror any more. So he walked and smoked and climbed to the hump in the bridge where the boats in the river made faces and spoke to himself until he had to bury his face in his hands until everything straightened itself out again. He decided to abandon the culture industry for the progressive world of oil painting, his first big exhibition Sex Pest being held at the Peter Stringfellow Gallery in Zurich. His early paintings were strong juxtapositions of men’s stuff like high fidelity sound equipment - and dame’s things, such as looking out of the window at builders, while adjusting the seam in their black nylon hose and pretending not to notice. Breathing the air like it was the first time they’d ever noticed it, the dames sure were hot. As she slid into that seat, she let show one long, slender leg that started at her ankle and then went on upwards forever. I remembered the garter. And she smiled at me. She was blonde with those kind of blue eyes that white clouds and sunshine were made for. He looked like Michael Hutchence. We guys have our pride, you know, and being ogled like that was very disconcerting. We didn't do that to women, did we? But because itw was her, he didn’t say anything. She sure was beautiful. It was almost 7am and, miraculously, had stopped raining. The street outside had a couple of cars parked and a few over-full garbage cans littered the sidewalk and provided a feast for a half dozen cats. The dames were now behind them. The men knew who they were and where they are going. Probably. Did I mention that he painted guys in hats as well? This cat Jacko sure was subtle. I mean, I had nobody really noticed that there was always lots of incredibly complex somethings going on in the background. Someone there watching, a living halo of light in this sad and bad city, those eyes sparkling like summer sunlight on the ocean of a dream. And that’s sexy without being dirty.
"Now I understand Jackie was responsible, I could now see, for putting things back in their place. The wife might leave, but she would be back. Every inch of her was beautiful. Every inch of her was a lady. A playful smile danced upon her lips and a twinkling flame shimmered in her eyes. But inside this dame was playing games and they both knew it. I don't remember a lot after that. My long serving narrator Mike Hammer was called away unexpectedly. His replacement was Anthony Burgess. I was worried that Burgess might not be up to the job of finishing of the critique, but there was me, that is I,and I was very wrong. I awoke elegantly studded with the sharpest spikes à la porcupine, they combined the most recherché appearance with perfect protection from murderous attacks. I now carried a Stanley-knife, bayonet-revolver, knuckle-duster, stun-gun, pepper spray, coshes and was adept at fitting satellite-tracking burglar alarms onto hunt dogs. As always, I drank champagne and played piano.There were some weird sneeties about hen-korm and lavatories, lewdies with like pots and some without, and there was the dame humming fairground music at me. I was in and out of these semi-conscious states for bog and all his angels-only-knows how long. Finally I came round at the 2005 Turner Prize. Funky Dave the Hick was there, malenky and rodent-like with like padlocked ookoes, as if he had stepped out of a painting by Goya. Hicko was a chelloveck who knew the way but couldn't drive the car. It was raz for hip Hick to snuff it violently - a cancer lighter flicked into his glazz socket, stripped of his street credibility and whipped. Jackie Vetriano was not odin to gooly away from the drat, for he was nothing if not critical, O my brothers. Vetriano were the topof the trans-class smash gangs, the cane-carrying Mohocks, who regularly demolished taverns, slit the noses of their victims and pissed on their suppurating wounds. Do not fuck us’, Vetriano exclaimed as he ransacked Hickey’s best Nikes. ‘Destroy sentimentality’, Hickey instructed as I put him out of his misery by digging my Cuban heels into his glazz sockets The one whose judgment counts most in your life – said your Humble Narrator as he was being arrested - is the one staring back in the glass. I am only what lives inside each and every one of you. . . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. Do not hate me! |
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