The couple has brown skin, which, aside from the connection to his mother, is probably why Hank likes this particular painting so much. The brown-skinned couple is at the center bottom. The man wears a puffy white outfit and a pointy hat that makes him look like a cross between a clown and a magician and a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, which is sort of ironic, being that he has brown skin. The woman wears a hat that looks like a beehive, a blue dress lined in orange and yellow, and a white apron.
Arm in arm, they share a concerned glance as they move out of the trees and into the cleared land—maybe like they just finished doing something dangerous in the forest. Believe me, I know that fucking look.
Jessica used to say shit like “The play between the moonlight in the sky and the barren forest is fantastic.” To me it was just another painting in a place filled with thousands, but I was no artist. I admit that I couldn’t paint anything remotely as interesting as Henri Rousseau could, but I still didn’t get why Jessica loved this dude so much.
So I asked her. Turns out Henri Rousseau was a lowly toll collector for much of his adult life. Some old-time French elitists used to call him a “Sunday painter,” which meant he was not a pro. They also called him a “naive painter,” which basically meant the same thing, only it had the added effect of making him sound like a child. Others called what he did “primitive,” which would have been racist had he not been white, albeit French.
Any fucking way, Henri Rousseau started painting the way he felt like painting, which often meant dreaming up crazy scenes that featured animals he had never encountered in real life and in jungles he had never been to.
He has this crazy painting hanging in MoMA in New York City called The Dream, which depicts a naked woman reclining on a couch in the middle of the jungle. A black werewolf-looking cat man plays a horn behind two female lions emerging from the leaves and flowers. I know because we had this one hanging in our house too, in the TV room. I’d stare at it whenever TV got too boring, which was often. An elephant, a snake, a monkey, and a few birds are in the foliage. This is some crazy LSD-trip shit, believe me. And everyone said so when it was first displayed, only they didn’t know about LSD yet, they just thought it looked fucking insane.
Rousseau would hang his wild paintings at the big fancy French art shows, and people would openly mock him. That Spanish motherfucker Picasso even got a bunch of artists together to throw a mock party to “celebrate” Rousseau’s peculiar brand of genius, and mock him they did unmercifully. All of the critics and great artists of the day thought Rousseau was a fucking bush-league hack at best and completely bonkers at worst, but he believed in what he did enough to keep going, painting his bizarre jungle scenes like a middle finger held high. Something inside his heart told him he was a genius and all of the French assholes around him were wrong, which I could understand, being that the French are almost always wrong, even about themselves.
A week or so after Jessica and I met, we went to MoMA in New York City and looked at The Dream for the first time, because she had always wanted to do that. She stood in front of that big-ass painting for ten years, and then she told me that when a reporter asked Henri Rousseau about The Dream and why he had painted a sofa in the middle of the jungle—no doubt mocking him under the guise of journalism, because all reporters are petty gossips and liars—Rousseau allegedly replied, “Because one has a right to paint one’s dreams,” only in French, not American English. I didn’t give a shit about any of this, but I loved the way Jessica’s face lit up when she was talking about art or painting or gazing at the work of her heroes.
And that’s all Jessica wanted to do. Paint her dreams. I remember all this shit about Henri Rousseau because Jessica told me about the French toll collector billions of fucking times and we took countless trips to art museums all up and down the East Coast, for many of which Hank was present, so instead of facts about baseball players and comic books, he knows these art stories too.
And so while Ella and I were talking about knights and princesses in the armor section of the art museum, Hank was probably telling Sue the same shit about Henri Rousseau that I’m telling you here, not that you probably give a flying fuck about art, being that you work for the government. But you did tell me I had to tell you absolutely everything that has happened to me since I returned from Vietnam, especially everything related to my disabilities, and I’m trying to do my best here, condensing almost fifty fucking years into this little narrative, which is a truly heroic feat considering that your employer—Uncle Sam—cut out part of my goddamn brain not too long before all this shit went down with Sue and Hank. Fuck you a lot for that, by the way. And I am still to this day not entirely myself, so this isn’t exactly easy. You already know I have never backed down from hard.
But standing there looking at the fake horse and man in armor at the art museum, holding my granddaughter’s hand, talking about my dead wife, all of a sudden it felt like a lightning bolt had struck my skull. Before I knew what was happening, I was on the floor, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. I kept trying to pull myself together because I didn’t want to frighten Ella, but I had no control. Zilch. It was like someone had plugged my brain into a socket and then jacked up the electricity as high as it would go. Fucking seizure.
The next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance headed back to Jefferson Hospital and all of the fucking moron doctors and cold bitch nurses within. And the Puerto Rican EMT riding next to me is saying everything is going to be okay. So I said I just wanted to go home and we didn’t need to bother with the hospital. He kept trying to smooth-talk me like Puerto Ricans do, saying I just needed to undergo some routine tests, using that easy Puerto Rican way that helps to get them laid so often by women of all ancestries, but I wasn’t Tony, he wasn’t Maria, and this sure as hell wasn’t West Side Story, and I told him so.
I don’t think he had ever seen West Side Story, because he made a strange face, which was surprising, because I would think all Puerto Ricans would have seen the only musical about their struggle to integrate into American society. Maybe Puerto Ricans don’t like musicals, which would explain why we haven’t yet made Puerto Rico a state, because musical theater is in every true American’s heart, whether they are brave enough to admit it or not.