“I’m a student,” he said. “I’m directing a documentary about Bastian, and I wanted to ask for your permission and to know if I could interview you as well.”
A customer walked in. An older white gentleman with a mustache.
“Hey, Anthony,” she said.
“Whew,” said Anthony. “It’s hotter than a pot of neck bones out there.” It was a 100-degree fall day.
She crowded Sam and Bastian to the side, out of her customer’s way. “Pineapple mint?” she asked. He nodded. While she made his juice, she called from the back over the buzzing machine.
“It’s a little late to ask for permission if you’ve already started, don’t you think?”
Sam had no idea how to answer that.
She handed Anthony his juice. Anthony took a long swallow and studied Sam up and down. “If you riled up this one, best of luck to you.” He nodded, fished two fives out from a long wallet pulled out from the back of his jeans and left.
“What’s it about?” Luz asked.
“Being a kid in Austin,” he said.
“So Oscar-winning stuff,” she said.
Sam felt Bastian watching them closely to see who had the upper hand.
“Look, I’m a college student,” said Sam. “I’m not some rich trust-fund kid, either. I’m putting myself through film school.”
“Film school?” said Luz. “Sound like a rich-kid plan to me. Why not go into computer programming or something that makes money? Do you know the odds of being a director?”
“I knew you were going to say that!” complained Bastian. “Ask her about art school if you want to have your dreams punched in the face.”
Luz knocked Bastian on the skull again. Bastian scowled and rubbed his head.
“Look, I don’t want to be interviewed or anything,” she said. “That isn’t for me. But don’t shoot during school hours and I want to see this movie before you show it anywhere. I don’t want anything inappropriate.”
Sam nodded.
“And if you get rich and famous, you’re paying for this kid’s college,” she said.
“Can it be RISD?” asked Bastian. Luz responded in Spanish for a while. Bastian said something back and laughed.
Sam knew they were talking about him.
“Do you want a juice?” she asked.
“Sure. I’m sure I could use one,” Sam said.
“You need milk shakes more than you need juice, flaco,” she said. She made him something with beets. It was thick and the color of rubies. As he drank he imagined his withered cells revitalizing.
“Not bad,” he said, taking another slug. It was disjointing. A juice that tasted of beets.
“Yeah, your people love it.”
“My people?”
“She means the whites,” said Bastian.
“What do I owe you?” said Sam. He hoped he had cash.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and waved them out of the store.
They got back into the car.
Bastian pulled on his seat belt. “She likes you,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. She charges everyone.”
“What were you guys saying about me?” he asked. “That made you laugh. Something about college.”
“Oh,” said Bastian, laughing. “She said I could maybe go to art school as long as I don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Say, get a bunch of tattoos so I can’t ever get a real job like you.”
Sam laughed.
“I told you she was cold.”
Sam wondered if Bastian knew how lucky he was to have Luz. To have a mother who actually seemed to like you. Sam hung a right from the Taco Cabana and across the train tracks to a section of town so dicey it didn’t even have a bar.
“Park here,” said Bastian. They were on a nondescript street near a chain-link fence. Bastian hopped out, leaving his skateboard in the car and slinging his backpack over his shoulder.
He crawled through a clipped hole in the fence. Sam followed. Bastian scanned his surroundings quickly, pulled out a key, and unlocked a thick padlock on the metal door of a brown building that had graffiti on the front in white. NSB was scrawled in menacingly giant letters, and Sam wondered if they were going to get killed execution style for trespassing. “Don’t worry,” said Bastian about the North Side Bloods tag. “I put that there so the bums don’t jack my shit.” To Sam it sounded like exactly the kind of genius plan that got you killed.
The kid had made a huge deal out of whatever it was that he was going to show him. Sam wondered if it was a skate ramp or a meth lab. Sam followed him into the cool hallway, which smelled of wet concrete.
“Come on, man,” griped Bastian. “Get your camera out. You need to be getting all of this.”
The cavernous room was flooded with natural light. You couldn’t tell from the street, but there were panes of glass high on the wall and the vaulted ceilings that served as skylights. It was a miracle that some hipster developer hadn’t already bought the place out to turn into a design studio or a vegan co-working space.
“This is incredible,” Sam said, panning the room.
“Roof leaks,” complained Bastian. As if he were making mortgage payments on the place.
In the middle of the space there was a lone folding chair and paintings of varying size.
The still air hung thick with chemicals. Nail polish. Or primer.
“So, this is what I’m working on,” said Bastian, gesturing at the canvases standing sentry. “Other than becoming the Mexican Nyjah Huston and getting that Nike SB money.”
The kid painted the same way he skated. The brushwork was confident, clear. The streaks and dabs made sense where they were and held your attention. There was a series of heads, misshapen, with haphazard rows of teeth. Another with angry marker cross-hatchings over brown faces. One said FOR MOM on it with the words crossed out, a mountain of angrily drawn tiny stick figures piled high with a series of interlocking rainbow hearts repeated over the image. What Bastian brought into the world commanded the space they occupied.
“Where do you get this stuff?” Some paintings were the size of shoe boxes, others taller than Bastian at six feet.
“I make the canvases,” Bastian said, shrugging. He stared square into Sam’s camera. “They’re such a rip-off at the art stores. Plus, those snobby assholes hate when I come through. They follow you around like you’re brown or something.” He laughed.
“I rack most of my shit from hardware stores anyway,” he said. “And you can steal wood from any of those big dumpsters when they’re building new subdivisions but you gotta go early.”
“This is my prized possession, though,” he said. Sam followed him to the far wall. It was a silver and yellow circular saw.
“It’s a miter saw,” he said, pronouncing it “meter” saw. Sam didn’t correct him. “For the frames.” He pulled out a box of acrylic paints and showed it to the camera.
“Shout out to Ms. Mascari at Burnet Middle School!” he said. “She gives me these because she’s in love with me.” He smiled devilishly into Sam’s phone.
“Why painting?” asked Sam, zooming in.
“The god Basquiat obviously,” said Bastian. “He’s legendary. Devin Troy Strother is the truth too. And Warhol. Man, that creepy old dude was the G.O.A.T. He wasn’t even making his own work anymore and still got paid.”
Then Bastian got serious for a second. “I hate Richard Prince though,” he said. “He’s a thief. And Jeff Koons is washed.”
“Do you learn about this at school?” Sam asked.
“Nah,” said Bastian. “Instagram.”
Art was something Sam wished he knew more about. He felt too self-conscious to visit museums on his own and didn’t know anyone who would want to go with him.
Sam walked backward into the middle of the room so he could capture as much of Bastian’s paintings in the frame. This moment felt important. A story he’d be telling someone someday in the future when Bastian was known by everyone and no longer remembered him.
They walked outside and split a smoke.
Sam shot Bastian picking a fleck of tobacco off his tongue.
“What makes you think you of all people get to be an artist?” Sam asked, focusing in on Bastian’s face.
Bastian exhaled a perfect circle of smoke. The kid was so famous already it was ridiculous.