It goes round and round, kneading and grinding

 

 a wad of nicotine gum.

 

 His gray sweatshirt and canvas pants are flecked with dried raisins of red, dark-red,

 

 yellow, blue and green, brown, black and white paint.

 

 His hair tumbles behind him, a tangle of brass wire, tarnished dark with oil

 

 and dusted with sticky flakes of dandruff.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

 

 a slide show of portraits and allegories, still lifes and landscapes.

 

 All of this ancient art, it uses his face, his chest, his stocking feet in sandals

 

 as a gallery wall.

 

 

 The Duke of Vandals, he says, “No one calls Mozart a corporate whore”

 

 because he worked for the Archbishop of Salzburg.

 

 After that, then wroteThe Magic Flute,

 

 wroteEine kleine Nachtmusik,

 

 paid by trickle-down cash from Giuseppe Bridi and his big-money silk industry.

 

 Nor do we call Leonardo da Vinci a sellout,

 

 a tool,

 

 because he slopped paint for gold from Pope Leo X and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

 

 

 “No,” says the Duke, “We look atThe Last Supperand theMona Lisa

 

 and never know who paid the bills to create them.”

 

 What matters, he says, is what the artist leaves behind, the artwork.

 

 Not how you paid the rent.

 

  

 

 Ambition

 

 A Story by the Duke of Vandals

 

 One judge called it “malicious mischief.” Another judge called it “destruction of public property.”

 

 In New York City, after the guards caught him in the Museum of Modern Art, the judge reduced the charge to “littering” as a final insult. After the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the judge called what Terry Fletcher did “graffiti.”

 

 At the Getty or the Frick or the National Gallery, Terry’s crime was always the same. People just couldn’t agree on what to call it.

 

 None of these judges should be confused with the Honorable Lester G. Myers of the Los Angeles County District Court, art collector and downright nice guy. The art critic is not Tannity Brewster, writer and knower of all things cultural. And relax, no way is the gallery owner Dennis Bradshaw, famous for his Pell/Mell Gallery, where just by coincidence people get shot in the back. Every once in a while.

 

 No, any resemblance between these characters and anyone living or dead is a complete accident.

 

 What happens here is all made up. No one is anyone except Mr. Terry Fletcher.

 

 Just keep telling yourself this is a story. None of this is for real.

 

 The basic idea came from England, where art students go to the post office and take stacks of the cheap address labels available at no charge. Every post office has stacks and stacks of these labels, each one the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A size easy to hide in your palm. The labels had a peel-off backing of waxed paper. Under that was a layer of glue designed to stick to anything, forever.

 

 That was their real charm. Young artists—nobodies, really—they could sit in their studio and paint a perfect miniature. Or sketch a charcoal study after painting the sticker with a base coat of white.

 

 Then, sticker in hand, they’d go out to hang their own little show. In pubs. In train carriages. The back seats of taxicabs. And their work would “hang” there for longer than you’d guess.

 

 The post office made the stickers with such cheap paper that you could never peel them away. The paper tore in specks and flakes at the edge, but even there, the glue would stay. The raw glue, looking lumpy and yellow as snot, it collected dust and smoke until it was a black smear so much worse than the little art-school painting it had been. Folks found that any artwork was better than the ugly glue it left behind.

 

 So—people let the art hang. In elevators and toilet stalls. In church confessionals and department-store fitting rooms. Most of these, places where a few paintings might help. Most of the painters just happy to have their work seen. Forever.

 

 Still—leave it to an American to take something too far.

 

 For Terry Fletcher, the big idea came while he stood in line to see theMona Lisa.The closer he got, the painting never got any bigger. He had art textbooks that were bigger. Here was the most famous painting in the world, and it was smaller than a sofa cushion.

 

 Anywhere else, it would be so easy to slip inside your coat and cross your arms over. To steal.

 

 As the line crept closer to the painting, it didn’t look like such a miracle, either. Here was the masterwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and it didn’t look worth wasting a whole day on his hind legs in Paris, France.

 

 It was the same letdown that Terry Fletcher felt after seeing that ancient petroglyph of the dancing flute player, Kokopelli, after seeing it painted on neckties and glazed on dog-food bowls. Hooked into bathmats and toilet-seat covers. When, at last, he’d gone to New Mexico and seen the original, hammered and painted into a cliff face—his first thought was:How trite . . .

 

 All the dinky old masterpiece paintings with their puffed-up reputations, the British post-office stickers, what it meant was, he could do better. He could paint better and sneak his work into museums, framed and wrapped inside his coat. Nothing too big, but he could put double-sided mounting tape on the back, and when the right moment came . . . just stick the painting on the wall. Right there for the world to see, between the Rubens and the Picasso . . . an original work by Terry Fletcher.

 

 In the Tate Gallery, crowding the Turner painting ofSnow Storm:Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,there would be Terry’s mom, smiling. She’d be drying her hands in a red-and-white-striped dishtowel. In the Prado Museum, butted up against the Velázquez portrait of the Infanta would be his girlfriend, Rudy. Or his dog, Boner.

 

 Sure, it was his work, his signature, but this would be about heaping glory on the people he loved.

 

 It’s too bad that most of his work would end up hung in a museum’s bathroom. It was the only space without a guard or security camera. During slow hours, he could even step into the ladies’ room and hang a picture.

 

 Not every tourist went into every gallery of a museum, but they all went to the bathroom.

 

 It almost didn’t seem to matter, how the picture looked. What made it art, a masterpiece, that seemed to depend on where it hung . . . how rich the frame looked . . . and what other work it hung beside. If he did his research, found the right antique frame, and hung his picture in the center of a crowded wall, it would be there for days, maybe weeks, before he got a call from the museum staff. Or the police.

 

 Then came the charges: malicious mischief, destruction of public property, graffiti.

 

 “Litter,” a judge called his art, and slapped Terry with a fine and a night in jail.

 

 In the cell the police give Terry Fletcher, everybody before him had been an artist, scratching away the green paint to make pictures on each wall. Then to sign their name. Petroglyphs more original than Kokopelli. TheMona Lisa.By names that weren’t Pablo Picasso. It was that night, looking at those pictures, Terry almost gave up.

 

 Almost.

 

 The next day, a man came to his studio, where black flies circled a pile of fruit Terry had been trying to paint when he was arrested. This was the lead art critic for a chain of newspapers. He was a friend of the judge from the night before, and this critic said, yes, he found the whole story funny as hell. A perfect story for his syndicated column about the art world. Even with the sweet smell of the rotting fruit, the flies buzzing, this man said he’d love to see Terry’s work.

 

 “Very good,” the critic said, looking at canvas after canvas, each of them small enough to fit inside a trench coat. “Very, very good.”

 

 The black flies kept circling, landing on the spotted apples and black bananas, then buzzing around the two men.

 

 The critic wore eyeglasses with each lens as thick as the porthole on a ship. Talking to him, you’d want to shout, the way you’d yell to someone behind an upstairs window, inside a big house and not coming to answer the locked door.

 

 Still, he was absolutely, positively, undeniably NOT Tannity Brewster.

 

 Most of the best pictures, Terry told him, they were still in lockup as evidence in future trials.

 

 But the critic said that didn’t matter. The day after, he brought a gallery owner and a collector, both of them famous from their opinions being in national magazines all the time. The group of them look at his work. They keep repeating the name of an artist famous for his messy prints of dead celebrities and signing his work huge with a can of red spray paint.

 

 Again, this gallery owner was not Dennis Bradshaw. And when she spoke, this art collector had a Texan accent. Her red-blond hair was the exact creepy orange-peel color as her tanned shoulders and neck, but she was not Bret Hillary Beales.

 

 She’s a totally made-up character. But as she looked at his painting, she kept using the word “bankable.”

 

 She even had a little tattoo that said “Sugar” in lacy script on her ankle, just above her sandaled foot, but she was in no way, absolutely not, nope, NOT Miss Bret Hillary Beales.

 

 No, this fake, made-up critic, art collector, and gallery owner, at last, they tell our artist: Here’s the deal. They have millions invested in the work of this messy printmaker, but his current output was flooding the art market. He was making money with volume, but driving down the value of his earlier work. The value of their investment.

 

 The deal was, if Terry Fletcher will kill the printmaker—then the art critic, the gallery owner, and the collector will make Terry famous. They’ll turn him into a good investment. His work will sell for a fortune. The pictures of his mother and girlfriend, his dog and hamster, they’ll get the buildup they need to become as classic as theMona Lisa.As the Kokopelli, that Hopi god of mischief.