My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (36 page)

“I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people,” he said, sitting on a sofa across the room from the easels. “The number one quote critics give me is, ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.” He sat up and started to laugh. “I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was, ‘The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.’ And you know, that’s the dead art we don’t want anything to do with!” He laughed again and slapped his thighs. “We’re the art of life, man! We’re bringing the life back to art!”

The door of his studio opened and a slight blond girl walked in. “Daddy, how do you spell ‘schedule’?”

“That’s an important question,” Kinkade said. “S-c-h-e-d-u-l-e, honey.” The girl drifted out of the room. “The fact is we have a grassroots movement emerging in my art and in the country, and there’s ten million people out there that if I give the word will go out and picket any museum I want them to,” he went on. “I won’t give the word, but they’re dying to have an art of dignity within our culture, an art of relevance to them. Look at someone like Robert Rauschenberg. What’s his Q rating? How many people have his art? A hundred? Where is the million-seller art? What about the craftsmanship of expression?”

I asked him why he even cared how the art establishment viewed him, since it hadn’t had any effect on his work.

“It’s irritating,” he said. He cocked his head and grinned. “I’m thinking of starting this program of loaning a few of my paintings to some of these critics and letting them live with them for a year or two and see what they think then. Because art really grows as you live with it. See, I have faith in the heart of the average person. People find hope and comfort in my paintings. I think showing people the ugliness of the world doesn’t help it. I think pointing the way to light is deeply contagious and satisfying. I would want to argue that I’m not an antagonist to modernists. I just believe in picture making for people. I’m a firebrand. I will sit down and debate the grand tradition with anyone. I am really the most controversial artist in the world.”

I asked him what he would have done with his life if he hadn’t become a painter. “What would I have done?” he repeated, gazing across the room. “I would have probably become a motivational speaker.”

WHEN I WAS IN THE GALLERY
in Bridgewater, I wandered into the stockroom. I had toured the manufacturing area of Media Arts in California and had watched a crew of Hispanic workers peel images off wet paper and smooth them onto canvases and then slide them onto racks like pies set out to cool. Now, in the Bridgewater stockroom, I came across a stack of boxes fresh from the factory, with the names of the pictures scribbled on the side: one
Light in the Storm,
one
Clearing Storms,
two
Conquering the Storms,
and one
Sea of Tranquility.

By then, it was midday. Several more paintings had been highlighted and taken away by their owners; Glenda was now sitting with a man and a woman, meek and awkward, their new painting,
Clocktower Cottage,
on the highlighting stand.

“Is this your first Kinkade?” Glenda asked. They nodded. “Well, congratulations. Let me tell you a little about what is here. This is about the changes of time. You see, everything changes. The sky changes, and the clouds change, and life changes.” They leaned in so that they could follow Glenda’s finger as she pointed to details in the picture. “Do you see this?” she asked, resting her finger on the clocktower. “Here the clock says five oh-two, which is Thom and Nanette’s wedding date. And here are the initials NK—that’s for his wife, that’s how he honors her. It’s his love language for her.”

They were transfixed now. Glenda took a brush and dipped it in the green paint, then with quick, short strokes dappled the underside of a tree. It was just a touch, but the tree suddenly stood out from the other trees, and it seemed newly bright and full. “Wow!” the man said. He glanced at his wife and then back at the picture. “I hadn’t even noticed that before.”

Intensive Care

These are the questions I’ve been asked since I worked on Show No. 6079 of
All My Children,
which will be broadcast on Tuesday, June 29:

Q
: What’s Susan Lucci like?

A
: Perky, sharp, thin, underappreciated—but I’m just speculating, since she wasn’t in my episode.

Q
: What was your part?

A
: I was a nurse. I appear in act three, in the hospital sun porch scene, and I say, in a mean voice, “Intensive care patients are only allowed two visitors per hour,” and then, “We don’t want to overtax him,” and, finally, “Rules are rules.” I say this to Hayley, to stop her from seeing Adam, who is in intensive care after he and Natalie are in a car wreck while speeding to someone’s wedding—I forget whose—after Natalie has had a big fight with Trevor, who has recently discovered he was duped by Laurel Banning, who then mysteriously disappears, although she—Laurel—has just sent a note to Natalie’s son Timmy, which he reads to An Li, Tom, Trevor, and Myrtle, who are sitting around keeping one another company and are beginning to suspect that Jack and Laurel might have eloped.

Q
: Wait a minute—what were Adam and Natalie doing in a car together? They hate each other!

A
: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.

Q
: What did you wear?

A
: A white pinafore, a white blouse with big shoulder pads, homely white oxfords, white pantyhose, tasteful jewelry, no hat. I was hoping I’d be dressed in something skimpy, but the costume department informed me that only one nurse on the show is ever allowed to wear something really tight and short, and that’s Nurse Gloria.

Q
: Why?

A
: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.

Q
: What’s going to happen to Adam and Natalie?

A
: The powerful and mercurial Adam, who is married to Nurse Gloria, and is the twin of shy, gentle Stuart, discovers he can’t move his legs, although in real life he went jogging between the morning camera blocking and the afternoon dress rehearsal. I get the feeling he will recover. Natalie, on the other hand, is definitely going to die. I was told this by Natalie herself while I was having my hair done and she was getting her head bruise applied. “I’m flatlining either this Thursday or next—I can’t remember which,” she said. “Natalie’s sweet, so she’s got to die. If you’re on a soap, you want to be a bitch or be miserable, because then you’ll last forever.”

Q
: How were you?

A
: Really good. In fact, Conal O’Brien, the director, told me that I was “very steady” and that the sixteen million people who watch the show will probably appreciate my work. And this is a guy who can be tough: For instance, during camera blocking, he told Christopher Lawford—Charlie—that he was giving the camera “too much tush.”

Q
: How did you prepare?

A
: I studied my script, I practiced my lines, I got to the studio at seven a.m. for all the rehearsals and dry blocking, and during lunch I called my doctor for some authentic insight on nursing.

Q
: What did she say?

A
: She recommended that I consider my character’s back story; avoid wearing my hair in a bun, because nurses don’t do that anymore; work on understanding my motivation; and forget about a tight uniform, because only Nurse Gloria gets to wear one.

Royalty

My first apartment in Manhattan was on West End Avenue near Seventy-second Street or, as I soon came to think of it, about two blocks from Gray’s Papaya, which is at Broadway and Seventy-second. My husband’s office was around the corner from Papaya Kingdom, which was Broadway and Fiftieth. My gym was down the street from Papaya King, which was on Eighty-sixth between Second and Third. My best friend lived near Papaya Prince, in the West Village. I spent a lot of my afternoons at the mid-Manhattan branch of the public library, a few blocks from Papaya World. I can’t remember exactly where Papaya Princess was, but I know I passed it now and then, in cabs. Before I moved to New York four years ago, I hadn’t had much contact with papayas. I knew they existed, and I saw them in supermarkets—stickered with their country of origin, like luggage—but they never figured greatly in my life. Now papayas were everywhere I was.

My preoccupation with papayas didn’t hit me all at once. A few nagging questions only gradually turned into a full-scale fixation. It’s not that I was especially interested in consuming papayas, which I think taste like a vague memory of something that tastes a lot stronger; it’s that I grew increasingly determined to understand the phenomenology of papayas in New York. How did a tropical fruit come to be so prominent in a temperate-zone city? Why were there so
many
papaya stores? Why did all of them sell frankfurters, too? (I mean, were they health food stores or junk food stores?) Why did so many papaya stores include references to royalty in their names? Why were all of them decorated with signs using stilted, hyperbolic descriptions of papayas, like
THE ARISTOCRATIC MELON OF THE TROPICS, THE FAMOUS MAGICAL PAPAYA MELON,
and
GOD’S GIFT TO MANKIND IS OUR PAPAYA DRINK?
That nobody I knew could answer these questions, or had even considered them, came as no particular surprise; one characteristic of the New York personality I had noticed right away was an ability to overlook prevailing conditions, such as high taxes and sidewalk bridges. Papayas seemed to be just another prevailing condition.

I did what I could to get answers. I put questions to countermen at various papaya outposts and got strangely specific but unsubstantiated reactions, among them “Eighty-five percent of all people in the world love papaya” (the bun man at Papaya Kingdom) and “The relationship between the hot dog and the papaya is very good” (the juice man at Gray’s). I also talked to Peter Poulos, the owner of Papaya King, which, I learned, was the original papaya store in New York. He said that his father had traveled to Florida decades earlier and had come back fired up with the idea of introducing New Yorkers to the tropical delights of papaya juice. The outbreak of other papaya stores, he said, was an attempt to copy Papaya King’s success. The romantic paeans to the papaya were his father’s own words and cadence, and the other stores duplicated them. The other stores’ reference to royalty were meant to fool customers into thinking that all the papaya stores were affiliated, like some tropical fruit juice House of Hapsburg.

A few days after talking to Mr. Poulos, I came across a United States District Court opinion in a 1989 case involving Papaya King and Papaya Kingdom. The former had charged the latter with trademark infringement, on the ground that the papaya-plus-royalty name implied that the two businesses were associated. Papaya King had won. The owners of Papaya Kingdom then tried to satisfy the judgment by merely covering up the “K” on its sign with a piece of tape. Peter Leisure, the judge in the case, observed wryly that the defendant was “contented apparently to be known as ‘Papaya ingdom.’ ” Less wryly, he imposed contempt charges on Papaya Kingdom—or, rather, Papaya ingdom: twenty-five thousand dollars in damages, seventy-five hundred for contempt of court, and more than thirteen thousand in attorneys’ fees. I went down to Papaya ingdom a few days after reading the opinion to see whether the store had a new name and a new sign. It was gone, and a pizzeria had risen in its place.

It was about this time that I began to get used to living here: I knew uptown from downtown, and I had finally figured out that the guys in my parking garage were denting my car because I hadn’t tipped them, and I had come to realize that there were certain things about the city that I would never understand. I wouldn’t say that I gave up; I simply started taking things in stride. This was when Gray’s was selling its frankfurters for fifty cents (they’re now sixty), and business was particularly brisk; I rarely passed by when a House O’Weenies truck wasn’t double-parked by the door, offloading product. (I never saw anything like a House O’Tropical Fruits truck parked nearby, so I assumed that the papayas were delivered late at night—just the way you’d expect exotic cargo to arrive.) I still dropped in for a hot dog now and then, but I stopped pestering the countermen with questions about papayas. The crowd at Gray’s was always the same peculiar mix of panhandlers, with barely enough money for a Gray’s special (two frankfurters and a papaya drink for two dollars), working people in a hurry, and one or two anxious-looking guys in suits. No one ever talked to anyone, and the radio was always blasting country music. I no longer drove myself crazy trying to figure out this combination of the tropics, street life, hot dogs, and Loretta Lynn. It had become a part of my neighborhood, period. In some ways, I felt relieved.

One day at Gray’s, I ordered a hot dog and a small papaya—I had finally come around to drinking papaya juice—and got in line for the mustard, which was in a stout gallon jug with a plastic squirt top. The man behind me was skinny and bedraggled, and in my best “I’m a New Yorker now” style, I pretended he didn’t exist. I certainly expected that, in keeping with the custom at Gray’s, we wouldn’t converse. As we waited for the mustard, though, he leaned over my shoulder and muttered to me, “It’s going to blow up.” I took a deep breath and looked away. “It’s going to blow up,” he repeated. I tried to look more explicitly uninterested. Garrulous strangers with the urge to share their apocalyptic visions appeared often enough in my day-to-day life that I had gotten good at this; in fact, I took pride in staying unruffled. I was now just one person away from the mustard, and I planned to dress my dog quickly and find a place at the window far away from the skinny man. He said it again, this time very distinctly: “Hey. It’s. Going. To. Blow.
Up.
”