Chapter 5: Glad to Be Unhappy    (print this)

SCOTCH ALWAYS HELPED, thought Henry to himself. It's helping me to get over this fence right now. He tottered, unsteady, as he swung his leg over a jagged ridge of chain link. He knew he wasn't going to land gracefully, sensed the pain in his knee before he even hit the ground. No matter. Scotch helps that too.

After he brushed himself off, patting his jacket pocket to make sure his silver-plated flask had not dislodged and spilled his little helper all over his lining, Henry walked toward the great skeleton of steel that rose in intersecting lines into the neon-drenched night. To the south, the clouds reflected an evil green, green like a cartoon character about to be sick, courtesy of the emerald monolith that was the MGM Grand. But here, just behind The Paradise Resort and Casino, there was only mundane orange-sodium light bouncing off of what was to be Win Stevenson's crowning glory in his bid to turn High Kulchur into an attraction that would pack the rubes in as surely as any white tigers or motion simulator rides.

Henry stared up into the spaces of night between the girders where no stars would ever be seen. Vegas had obliterated the stars quite efficiently, and somehow the knowledge that a mere hour's drive would put you into a wilderness so black you could see every jewel in the firmament didn't quite take the edge off of Henry's melancholy. He was now just drunk enough to trespass without a second thought, a direct result of the evening's oddly disturbing events.

Leaving the gallery, his mood had quickly spiraled downward. What the hell had he been doing there tonight? At first the whole thing had the intriguing camp appeal of a detective story: Poor Jack's weird warning, Madison Monroe's "mysterious employer" (Henry half-expected him to say he was working for Keyser Sose), the pulp theatrics of Maude S—, who clearly was a talented sculptor in no need of any smoke and mirrors (perhaps defensive because she was doing figurative work?). But to have Win Stevenson so richly thrown in his face at evening?s end, to see his old students and know that people had spotted him and were whispering madly about his sudden re-appearance had turned his soul sour. What had he been doing there?

Henry walked cautiously, stepping over construction detritus to get a better look at the new satellite branch of the Margaret C. Dressler Museum of Modern Art that was now opening like a grand weed in the Strip's money-soaked soil. He had seen the plans, of course, in what seemed like a million years ago in Win's panoramic office atop The Ravenna. "I couldn't get Pei," Win had boasted, "so I bought everyone who had ever worked for him." The result was going to be a vast, transparent museum, its structure wrapped in semi-opaque materials that would make it feel (in the language of his PR flacks) "like a palace of ice in the desert oasis of Las Vegas."

"More like an ice cube with some bits of metal frozen in it," Henry had opined.

Win looked up toward Henry's left and smirked. "That's why I hired your wife and not you, Bethel."

And Jill had smirked as well, but in a tolerant, such-is-the-humor-of-the-Patron manner she had long ago adopted. Jill always referred to Stevenson as The Patron, in a manner that combined mockery and flattery in equal measure. Win, naturally, got a big kick out of it. He had gotten a very big kick out of Jill Bethel ever since he had hired her to be the consultant to his buying spree of the few top Impressionist paintings still on the open market.

Jill, thought Henry. He took a sip from the flask, and tried her name aloud in the vast emptiness of the construction site. "Jill," he said thickly. Her name came out like a bit of nonsense, a piece of dada without meaning. "Jilljilljilljilljilljill?" Henry repeated, his voice trailing off. He smiled in the dark.

It was the conventional wisdom among his friends and colleagues, Henry knew, that his withdrawal had begun with the failure of his marriage. And why not? It was conventional wisdom for a conventional pattern. But Henry knew better. Hadn't his withdrawal begun much earlier, with Jack Samson's death? Or earlier still, in a way, when he had relocated to Vegas from L.A. in the first place? Or perhaps, Henry mused, couldn't it be said that his withdrawal had been ongoing before he ever even made a deposit?

Henry took another slip. Nothing is so simple as that. It's not one dramatic thing, but a whole series of them, like a string of firecrackers going off in your hand, racing up toward your flesh as you watch, paralyzed, dumbfounded. It's only the last one that blows your fingers off.

Henry walked a little ways into the structure. Shadows lengthened all around him; the dim bustle and noise of the Strip, only a few hundred yards away, seemed to be sucked into silence in his wake. Henry stood there some moments, listening to nothing in particular, looking up into the grid of dark steel. They should leave it like this, he thought, and hang the art from rusty chains. It will never look any more transparent then it does now.

"A good critic merely articulates his response to something," he said aloud in a soft voice. "And a great critic focuses his responses to the things that he loves, the things that bring him to passion."

Henry took another sip. "And when a critic can no longer look upon things with love, he should shut the hell up."

That was the secret, really. But most people, especially the lot of careerists and pedants he had suddenly found himself surrounded with, couldn't quite understand why he had thrown away the edifice that was Henry Bethel. Some of the artists he knew understood, of course. Jack would have understood implicitly.

"Where the hell are you when I really need you, Jack?" he said softly.

At some point, Henry looked at himself in the mirror and had seen a bit of a fraud. At some point, the only thing he really wanted to do was to sit in a dark room, listening to the Voice, to the perfection of Nelson Riddle's arrangements.

Someone had once written that Sinatra's only real subject was loneliness—even his up-tempo numbers were really just about the temporary relief from loneliness.

At some point, Henry began to suspect that it was his only subject as well. Even with Jill, sadly.

His mind was rambling now, moving from thought to thought, seeing Jill flash by every so often. He sat down on the cold concrete foundation, then stood back up when he realized that he might not get up again until much later. What was he doing here now? His disdain and resentment for the city's most successful success story couldn't really account for it. He didn't blame Win for Jill's leaving him, though Win had been the catalyst (he had even briefly harbored the fantasy that perhaps they were having an affair, a fantasy that had dissolved into laughter when he actually tried picturing them in the act). Win Stevenson had seduced his wife with something far more invidious then sex: the promise of a globe-trotting, jet set existence and professional autonomy that Henry had long ago turned his back on.

Suddenly the memory of Jill walking down the sidewalk swam into his brain for the briefest moment. "Enjoy your records," she had said in voice beyond contempt.

Henry pushed it away, taking a deep swig from his flask. No, it wasn't that. It wasn't even Win Stevenson's reduction of art to the level of Pirates of the Caribbean. Getting Middle America to stand for ten minutes with an audio wand to their ear while looking intently at a Braque wasn't such a bad thing at all, ultimately, no matter how casually vulgar Stevenson's presentation of such things could be. It wasn't even the whiff of legitimacy that he would now shrewdly exploit at the Dressler's expense that angered him.

It was his purchase of Maude S—'s version of Sinatra as the Hierophant.

Win Stevenson was a huge, monstrous fan of Sinatra, the sort of fan who made other fans question their devotion. For Win loved everything that was wrong and flawed with the singer: his egomania, his tough guy persona, his sadly dated Rat Pack myth. His knowledge of Sinatra's art went no further than tuxedoed "New York, New York" twilight of Frank's career. Win's office was crammed with the worst sort of Sinatra memorabilia, collector's plate-style dreck that had astonished Henry in the level of its banality.

Worse, when accompanying Jill to one of Win's bloated soirees, Henry had been appalled at the sight of him yukking it up with a set of inept Rat Pack imitators, even to the point of Win bellowing a wretched karoke version of "Luck Be A Lady." It had nothing to do with art or even music: Win's devotion was the knee-jerk response to Sinatra as Vegas icon, the same kind of know-nothingness that kept a half-dozen Elvis impersonators working the low-rent showrooms year round.

It was hard, in fact, to think of Win Stevenson as anything but the Anti-Sinatraist.

Henry laughed ruefully to himself. Now he'd bought the perfect trophy for his attraction. Henry wondered if he would insist on foisting it upon the Dressler's curators, or if he would stick it in the Paradise's lobby like the bronzed asses of the Crazy Girls at the Riviera. Or worse still, that he would place it in his private cactus garden at his estate, like some kind of ridiculous garden gnome. How would Maude S— feel about that?

"Win, you're a loser," Henry hissed into the darkness. The flask was empty and his head was beginning to hurt. As he was trying to slip the flask back into his pocket, a sliver of light suddenly flashed to his right.

Oh fuck, thought Henry. It was security, of course. The flashlight was bobbing this way and that in the distance, coming toward him. Had he been spotted? He had to get out here.

Henry crouched and began backing, crab-like, out of the structure. Fuck fuck fuck, he thought. His breathing came in heavy little gasps, and he realized he was drunker than he thought.

As he came out of the structure, he stood up a ways, ready to dart behind a stack of steel. "Hey!" a voice suddenly called out.

Fuck! Henry sprinted behind the girders toward the fence. He reached it only to find a huge ditch on the other side, one that would likely involve the breaking of his neck. The point at where he had hopped the fence was several yards to the north, and the flashlight was now sweeping that section.

Henry followed the fence south, feeling far too old for this sort of thing. At last he reached a point where the fence abutted the Paradise's parking garage. He scrambled up the fence, breathing hard, suddenly getting stuck at the top. "HEY!" the voice called again.

Fuck it, he thought. I'll tell them I took a wrong turn in the casino and wound up out here. Or something. He was about to let go, when suddenly a hand shot out from over the barrier at the garage's edge above him.

"Need a hand, prof?"

Henry looked up into the thick glasses of Claude Griffith, whose wide grin above his soul patch gave him a demented look. He grasped Griffith's arm, and two seconds later was lying in a heap between two white lines, his head spinning.

Griffith kept grinning, and raised his camera up, snapping a shot of the discombobulated Henry. "The Great Escape," he said with a laugh.