Glitz and Murder, Into the Lion’s Den
David and the Lion’s Den, Chapter 10
They were waiting for me when I got home.
When Jill and I stepped out of the limousine and the cops asked my name, I figured they must be reporters.
I never suspected the New York Inquisition.
Howie hadn’t been been wrong about the party. That fundraising boat cruise was the wildest, glitziest, most glamorous event I’d ever imagined. OK, I’d just graduated from college in Kansas; it wasn’t all that on the grand scale of glamour, but it felt like it to me.
The TV cameras really got me going. Channel Two was there, the WABC society reporter sticking her mic in people’s faces as they walked the red carpet up the ramp. Joe — remember him? Guy who only sold 5 tickets? — was a Broadway stage manager. He’d pulled in some big stars. Another volunteer worked in television and had convinced a big daytime talk celebrity to attend.
My parents said the TV stations played the footage over and over — of me walking up the ramp and telling the world I was a painter. “De la Fréta Fine Arts in Soho. We open day after tomorrow,” I prattled into the blinding spotlights. I never imagined they’d air my spontaneous plug. I’m sure Renaud was delighted.
I leaned against the rail and watched Hilda struggle up the ramp on Carla’s sequined arm, flash bulbs popping. I thought Hilda looked disoriented and out of breath. Carla looked plain scary. Lightning-blue strobe flashes scattered off the metallic scales of her scarlet gown — and off the jagged bits of steel embedded in the strands of her whip.
With her impressive height plus the 9 inches of her heels, she towered over all the reporters.
Richard was nowhere to be seen. Raphael was working. I’d invited Renaud, but he was busy with last-minute details at the gallery. So, Howie, Jill and I stood at the rail and watched the boarding circus as the sun began to set and the hard, white lights of the City flickered on above our heads.When the boat slipped out into the channel, we elbowed our way through the crowd and down a wide set of stairs past an oversized bouncer. Music began to pound and pulse as Howie opened the door into a quiet, relaxed little bunker that became our evening’s HQ.
Hilda sat propped up at a table already, chatting away with the oversized TV doyenne whose jewels sparkled almost as fiercely as her mascara.
What can I say about that night? It passed in a blur. I remember it more for what happened after. Howie and I started drinking immediately and heavily. Dewars, weed, coke. We kept it up for hours. I’m not sure if I remembered to load up a plate from the groaning buffet tables.
I know I danced on the top deck, shirt tied around my waist, cold river air stealing away my sweat, the heatwave finally breaking.
The skyline floated above me and past me, gliding. I was a fish, drifting and darting with my school as the surface world so far above stared down silently, sternly, insensibly.
We left together after we moored, all of us piling into a black car, dropping Hilda home at her Village apartment.
“Can we take you home next?” Jill asked Carla. The old dominatrix threw my roommate a look down her long nose that was comical in its severity. We dropped her at some dive in the meatpacking district. The place had no sign and no outside lights, but plenty of beefy, intimidating door staff who practically bowed down as Mistress Carla flicked her whip and slunk inside.
Howie, Jill, and I had the limo and driver til four. We hit the elegant piano bars of the East 50s, sawdust-strewn saloons on Christopher Street, and some new trendy clubs in Chelsea. I’d never appreciated how popular Howie was. Every bar we walked into, he met at least a handful of people he knew, even at the odd place where he hadn’t actually worked once.
The night was a climax for me, a roaring, blinding, dunken punctuation mark. Did I think about anything important? Did I understand that a page was about to turn? I have a hard time sorting out when I knew what. I think what had already hit me was this:
Leaving my childhood cocoon of family and security, I’d dropped into Manhattan like a raw soldier hitting a shrapnel-blasted beach. People dropping around me left and right, I’d crawled through the sand until I got comfortable with chaos, until I learned to ignore the fiery fragments whistling right past my ears. I got so comfortable that I was busy leveraging the turmoil to build a life and ground my art.
I didn’t feel guilty. The battlefield was exhilarating.
When we got home, I stumbled out of the car and held the door for Jill, swaying.
“Sir, excuse me.” Almost morning and some big dude in a wrinkled brown suit was pushing up too close to me, staring.
“Sir,” he demanded again. “Are you David Martin?”
“Huh?” I squinted as some other guy jostled me from behind.
“Don’t fuck with me, kid. Is that your name, or not?”
Yeah, I actually thought he was a reporter, that’s how swollen my head was. The New York Post art beat was after me at 4 AM! Handcuffs bit into my wrists hard and punctured my ego. The guy behind me jerked my arms back so far I yelled out in shocked pain.
“What the fuck! Get off me!”
“Shut your fuckin’ piehole, asswipe,” was what I heard — incredulously — right before a searing pain in my tailbone snapped my mouth shut. I’d been slammed into the sidewalk.
“Siegler? Howard Siegler? Get out of the car. Now. We have a warrant for your arrest.”
I remember being glad we’d finished all the coke. They searched us right there on the sidewalk while Jill screeched at them. Turns out she has a thick Brooklyn accent when she’s pissed.
The cops laughed when they found Howie’s stash — laughed and pocketed it.
“That’s just a little weed, man, what the hell?” complained Howie. “You can’t do shit with that. They’ll laugh you out of night court.”
The bigger detective scowled. “Night Court? You think this is about drugs? I don’t care about your damn grass. I’m takin’ it home for my girlfriend.”
I was shaking, couldn’t make my arms hold still.
The detective pulled out a notecard. “Howard Siegler. David Martin. You’re under arrest for premeditated murder.”
He read us our rights off that little card, just like on TV.
Excerpted from Conceptual Arts Quarterly
Volume II, number 2
Summer, 2012
In surveying David Martin’s body of work, his early, post-student portraiture is most instructive. For all its radical attention to color and shape, it is oddly not at all apperceptive. His investment in texture and nod toward a Modernist cult of “essential properties” belie an almost Romantic lyrical expression that prizes, seemingly, the very renewal of perception.
In examining the rather sprawling set of portraits, some 12 of which came together this winter for an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, one is initially seduced by the product of a painter whose masterful technical skills draw one into a world that entices, seduces, horrifies, and finally forces one to grapple with them on their own objectively ideological and pictorial terms.
The paintings, subtle distortions of Realism, portray people, men for the most part, in the final stages of HIV-related illness. Martin builds history into his portraits, conceptualizing both individual past and political present through a prism of fine grained, distracting detail.
The eye is drawn from the suffering, patient expression on one face to the almost-legible fine print on an IV bottle hanging just outside the center of focus. From a crisp, white, blood-speckled sheet in another piece, one’s eye is captured and diverted to to a sharply rendered discarded syringe.
Martin himself has denied any potential for political, lowercase-c conceptualism that many critics find inherent in his work, yet his portraits are undeniably more sophisticated both conceptually and compositionally than “mere” realist portraiture. His mashups of melting, thickly textured faces with surroundings of crisp quotidian detail suggest a powerful new form of visual literature, a move toward a seductive, dislocated, yet romantic Modernism.
Reviews of Martin’s debut exhibition, organized by the late Renaud de la Fréta, focus uniformly on a work not seen in more than 20 years, a portrait of an elderly woman that de la Fréta claimed acted as a lynch pin, conceptualizing Martin’s vision of AIDS as politics. Copies of de la Fréta’s Fall 1989 catalogue containing a narrative history of the woman were scheduled to be displayed at the Getty but were pulled by curators at the last moment in response to unspecified “legal issues.”
One is reminded of the scandal surrounding Martin’s debut, in which …
You just read chapter 10 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie — and Raphael — are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen.Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
