The other boulevard artists were envious and once they beset him demanding that he bugger off from their territory. The artists were dispersed by the local cops who made it very clear to the creative lot whose territory it really was. The law enforcers collected tribute from everyone who earned money on the boulevard and they took the job of maintaining order quite seriously.
That was hell. Every day, the artist wondered how he had lasted another day. His dislike of human faces grew into real hatred. He hated people and he hated himself for what he was forced to be doing.
One day, the bubble of that hatred burst.
Generally, he tolerated children although some specimens were real awful. That one disgusted him at once – not because he was fat as his gigantic dad who was holding tenderly his heir’s hand, but because at such young age already, almost all the human vices were imprinted on the boy’s face.
The boy was eating an ice cream, picking his nose and driving a dog on a leash, all at the same time. The dog immediately started barking at the artist.
“Lose the ice cream,” asked the artist.
“Catch me!” the little monster cried and stuck out his tongue.
Encouraged by his cry, the dog burst into hysterical barking.
The artist did not have the energy to argue. He depicted the object just as he was – with ice cream in his mouth and his index finger immersed deeply in his nostril.
On seeing this, the father raised his voice:
“What do you think you’re doing? Mocking us? Do it properly!”
The artist picked a brush and added a few strokes to remove the ice cream and the finger.
Now the boy in the portrait was not a monster but just a little moron.
The father liked it.
“See, you can do it if you make the effort.”
The dog decided to take a more active part in the action. It ran up, tugged at the artist’s trousers, and then let out a yellow trickle on his leg.
“Ha! Watch Archie piss on the painter!” the boy cried, in raptures.
Then he started tugging his father’s arm.
“Dad, tell him to draw Archie!”
“Go ahead, do it,” the father ordered. “All right, I’ll give you half the price for the dog. I’m not some kind of cheapskate.”
“I don’t do animals,” snapped the painter, hiding his leg.
At once the boy got all worked up and started shouting and stamping his feet.
“You bastard! How dare you bully a kid?” The man approached threateningly. “I say draw it!”
“Go fuck yourself,” said the artist, folding his easel.
He did not even feel the blow.
When he came to, the father and son were gone. Collecting his stuff from the ground, the artist discovered that the loving parent had not forgotten to take the drawing with him while forgetting to pay.
He had had drinking bouts before, but those did not last long, just a couple of days. This time, he went into an alcoholic tail-spin in earnest. He made preparations – brought a large case of bottles to his studio – and started drinking in an orderly way.
For a long time, he did not see anything in his alcoholic trance – he was just hovering around in a dark, empty expanse.
By the end of the week, hallucinations came. His hallucinations were not about some banal imps but about paintings. Floating before him in a succession, were pictures that he had never painted.
From his youth, he was allured to urban landscape, but that passion was killed by a total lack of demand. Connoisseurs looked down on the genre considering it to be too conventional and bourgeois, while simpler people did not understand why they should pay for what could be captured on a mobile phone just as well. Now he saw his unpainted cityscapes in every detail.
Then the succession of landscapes stopped and he found himself within one of them. Only it was not his motif – a narrow, cobblestone street with low-rise houses standing wall-to-wall on both sides looked like an old town in a French province.
It was late evening, and the sky above was full of sparkling stars. The brightly-lit terrace by a cheap café was empty except for a single male figure at a table.
He approached. The man’s head was bandaged, the bandage keeping in place a cotton tampon applied to the ear. A large nose, high cheekbones, light eyes, red stubble. On the table was a cardboard on which the man was busily drawing something.