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"Frog on Wall with Mad Monk"
by Tsun
27 November 2003
"Helga" was a semi-slatternly, very busty girl I'd known since high school. She lived with her younger boyfriend in a small apartment behind another friend's "headshop," which she also managed. This apartment was tiny, and messy in the extreme. Its two main rooms were filled with all the couple's worldly goods, as well as two or three cats and the ubiquitous cat-box. Bobbie, the boyfriend, was an aspiring punk rock artist. He could draw pretty well, but he preferred to smear. Smear he did: bright colors in shapes and blotches, criss-crossed with jagged lines, crusted with tiny dots. His goal was to express his feelings, which were just about as mixed up as his painting, probably because the couple suffered from a serious lack of money. They lived on minute rice and pancake mix. Day after day after day... Lack of funds caused Bobbie to mix extraneous junk into his paintings to make up for the paint that he couldn't always afford to cover his canvases with -- I shouldn't really say 'canvas,' because he couldn't afford that either; he usually created his works on cardboard, odd wooden planks, or even old suitcases and LP records from the nearby junk shop.
Bobbie wasn't ashamed to "extend" his precious and costly paint with shit from the cat box. He took a cynical pleasure in selling (more often only "presenting") such works to the many "art fools" who always seem to cluster around such depravity. Later, when our mutual friend, the headshop owner, got busted for dealing PCP, the town's competing headshop owner bought him out and inherited the attached rear apartment and its occupants. Helga lost her job managing the shop, but the new owner let her continue to rent the place at the original low rate. He also commissioned Bobbie to do a wall-sized mural in his shop, seeing as how Bobbie was a semi-famous local artist.
Alex, the new headshop owner, was what you might call a Philistine, except he was such a vain-glorious ignoramus (credulous and greedy at the same time) that I hated to waste a three-syllable word on him. So I just called him an asshole.
Alex had a couple of henchmen, including one real lamebrain, fresh from the government schools. We called that guy "Dude," for dude he was. Dude now manned the counter at the head shop, where he was visited by his various buddies, all of whom were as dim-witted and unopinionated as he was. I'll use the term, "unopinionated" to designate people who have what would certainly be opinions, if only they could express them, or have even some thoughts (no matter how wrong) about them. The empty-headed parroting of other people's non-sense should not qualify as opinion. Don't you agree?
Alex, Dude, and their friends did not know exactly what to make of Helga and Bobbie. They didn't like them, but they viewed them with a sort of grudging awe: probably because Bobbie was so crazy (and semi-famous, locally); and certainly because Helga had absolutely mammoth tits (though in other physical ways, she was not quite "starlet material," by a long shot).
Helga was also an extremely bright girl, and a very funny one, and someone who would usually render criticism you had coming and not ignore or lie about shortcomings that could probably be corrected -- either in herself or in her friends. Bobbie was also intelligent, though he continually did totally stupid things, like ripping off and alienating friends and potential patrons. For a number of months one Summer and Fall, I spent many evenings with this couple, dining on instant rice and pancakes and staying up late into the early morning bull-shiting about art, politics, music, and everything else as we played an interesting little game where everyone took turns adding to a drawing and watching what it turned into. I'd usually bring beer or wine, and I often crashed out on the studio couch, subjecting myself to being a foot path for two (or three) house cats and listening to Bobbie make obscene slurping mouthsounds in the dark of the other room, which he did just to embarrass and piss of his bosomy girlfriend, Helga.
Bobbie didn't think much of many people, but for some reason he seemed to admire or respect me. He said it was because my occasional attempts at "art" had very good "line quality." I think it was probably because I liked him, but I refused to put up with any of his nonsense. Also, we shared an interest in Big Band music. One day I brought over an old saxophone and played a talentless rendition of "Begin the Beguine." Bobbie recognized it immediately, as Artie Shaw.
As mentioned above, Alex the headshop owner had commissioned Bobbie to turn one of the walls in his shop into a colorful, abstract mural. Bobbie took great pride in working out, there in the shop, in front of the lamebrain Dude and his visiting pals. The mural was a real knockout; it was a brilliant and violent burst of conflicting colors, applied in shapes, blotches, and jagged, quasi-continuous lines. I had to admit: while Bobbie's mural didn't look like anything that ever existed, it did have a certain powerful quality, a sort of crystallized emotion, which Bobbie was always trying to achieve and which he actually did achieve in only a small number of his works. Dude and his friends dug the mural and even Alex seemed proud of it. Many customers exclaimed over it; Alex even paid Bobbie the agreed amount for it (something in the neighborhood of $100, not a bad fee for 1983).
Then Bobbie pulled one of his usual stunts. He told Dude and a friend what the abstract painting was supposed to represent. I've forgotten what he said it was, but it was something that offended them greatly and made them realize how dumb they were. Alex didn't like it either and the (by now semi-famous) mural was quickly painted over and nothing further was ever said about it.
By this time I was becoming pretty tired of the extremely sloppy way this couple kept their apartment. The place was so small that one could clean it in twenty minutes a week, but they hadn't cleaned it for so long that at least two or three solid days would be needed to clean it up now. Junk (and cat shit) was everywhere. Papers; magazines; books; cardboard; and empty rice and pancake mix boxes were piled high. Cigarette butts and ashes, and old beer bottles full of cigarette butts and ashes were scattered over the whole pile of clutter. The windows were yellow with nicotine.
Even more perturbing than the mountain of garbage, however, was one huge and distracting stain on the aged green wallpaper, just behind the table of the apartment's main room. Neither Helga nor Bobbie worked steadily and Bobbie always had a gallon or two of light-colored house paint around, which he used to extend his artist's acrylics (and his cat shit). Why couldn't these folks paint over that ugly stain? The disgusting stain had the form of a huge, dull, brown-yellow blotch with several protruding forms radiating from it. The stain spread over an area of about nine by ten feet on the wall. There was something about it I really didn't like, though I couldn't quite figure out what it was that made it so distasteful to me.
Then, one day I did figure it out.
Helga, Bobbie, and I were eating Uncle Ben's Instant Rice and Pancakes, and sharing a quart of beer. Suddenly, I looked up at that stain. A light flashed in my head and I saw the vile thing clearly, for the first time. Eagerly, I described the scene to my friends. No, it wasn't an image of the Virgin Mary!
There, on the wall, was an accidental work of artistic genius: a random stain, caused ( I thought) by a roof leak, at least twenty years prior to that evening. Amazingly, the stain took a form that was just too weird to be a coincidence. The lower part of the stain resembled a round pedestal table. Upon the table squatted a very large frog. You could easily make out the frog's body (with well-defined, muscularly bulging frog legs) and its head (complete with two protruding, bumpy frog eyes). The frog's posture, by gesture, projected an almost smarmy, smirking attitude. Next to the table, dressed in a coweled robe, crouched an extremely obese monk; this monk was exposing his misshapen, bloated erection, which he held with both hands as he hammered it down upon the head of the smirking frog, in an obvious attempt to dash out the unfortunate amphibian's brains.
As I finished my description and rested my case, I saw that both my friends could now see the stain in it's true form. Bobbie thought it was funny, but Helga seemed to shudder. The girl was no prude and possessed a earthy sense of humor. This image, however, was in no way humorous. There was something diabolical about it; the nasty thing spoke of some ultimate perversion. In fact, even before I'd been able to identify its true form, that stain had bothered me. We discussed it a little bit and I joked that Helga would now need to paint her wall, or her visiting friends would take her for a debauched pervert. Bobbie laughed and replied that nothing on earth could cause Helga to expend the amount of energy that would be needed to paint the wall. I also chuckled, trying to remember any time I'd seen Helga do housework, besides washing the dinner dishes.
The next time I visited, I was amazed to find the stained wall painted over.
You can play an interesting game with your friends, all of whom undoubtedly keep their noses buried in the televitz box most of the time. Call the game "Kikes Per Minute." Tell them to count the number of known or obvious Jews that appear on the tube in front of their faces. Then ask them to divide by the number of minutes they've been watching the jewish brainwash tube. The resulting KPM is guaranteed to be high. No, you won't be able to get them to clean up their Nation.... not right away. But if your friends are like mine, they'll never again be able to look at television without trying to decide if the people in the box are numbered among "God's co-pilots."
TSUN
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