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He always told h I have no idea what kind of estate sale would sell a shitty, ugly button clearly made with a home machine by some furious yet crafty ’80s stonerpunk It had a hand-drawn zoes of Sin Are Reagano’s rotting wings Our witty artist had turned his A’s into anarchist symbols, obviously The level of artistic ability on display topped out at “obsessively doodled in the Health Sciences textbook of a tenth-grader with borderline personality disorder” Jason saw it in a box of similar hoht it instantly He pinned it on the I’-about-it-ht him for Christmas and showed up to my birthday dinner proud as a peacock with a 40 Hey, don’t look at ed political statement that’s thirty years out of date If they’d had one that said Warren G Harding Is the Anti-Christ, I’d have grabbed that one, too Occupy Yesterday, baby!

It cost him 150

It od

Not, like, Zeus or Shiva or anything Not God god One of the minor ones, the redneck backwoods cousins of the fancy cosmic pantheon that only people who actually speak ancient Greek have ever heard of I’ catty about it, I promise Even Jason would admit the rest of the Avant Garde have way better powers But Jason’s was the prettiest No contest

We met in art school in New York like we’d been cast in some kind of indie romance flick I called him my manic pixie fucktoy He silkscreened it onto a T-shirt and wore it to his thesis defense I was photography, Jason was graphic design and eraffiti on your diplo, on scholarship, profoundly convinced of our own genius, highly enamored of Adderall, fashionably cynical, and co disorders We both hated our parents (His: hardware store owners Mine: professional alcoholics) We both dyed our hair with the sas the Blues We were hateably adorable Only art divided us:and freezing it forever His was devoted to ephemerality: te and the impossibility of the very permanence I worshipped

I was always pretty good at writing those little cards that hang next to your pieces in galleries All about the active verbs, man

Jason started doing his thing long before graduation We’d light out fro with cans of paint,around my neck—as if it ever left He’d cover the side of a bank in a Warhol-style portrait of the guy on the cover of the Monopoly gaoblin on the door of every apartment block on the East Side that had votedlot of an NYPD station with the naly stenciled on the asphalt Signed them all with a flamboyant drop-shadowed letter C That was his nom de paint: Chiaroscuro

See? Hateably adorable

That kind of thing was hot shit back then Street art, ninja galleries Art wants to be free The gallery system is a noose around the neck of the artist You know Jason didn’t always go political; he re-created the unicorn tapestries on the walls of a public eleht the kids would like it Everyone likes horses I shot hi at 3 AM I shot the finished pieces I think the longest one of Jason’s pieces lasted was seventy-two hours They broke out the big rollers and painted over his goblins and gravestones real quick Except for the unicorns The school kept the every unicorn hunter in the face before you can win Everyone likes horses

Jason railed against the conteerness hich other students talked about selling installation pieces to cancer hospitals or tech caht collar at worst, really The suraduated, I showed a series of enia Falk Memorial Gallery Everyone ate white cheese and white wine and said white things about my work I called the series The Gallery System Is a Noose Around the Neck of the Artist Sold like candy at fat camp

When he bought that button, we’d just moved into the kind of apartment stand-up comics build sets around How small was it? So far uptown, you’re basically in Canada, aht? But it was ours We only had one rooner love each other verylump of wires and monitors and reference books and laser cutters, then starts ear is kind Pirated copies of Photoshop could not tell us to fuck quieter or stop having five-minute dance parties every hour on the hour We spent a weekend turning the bathroo thechemicals instead of shampoo

“Art doesn’t need to pee!” Jason crowed, and kissed me like he majored in it

I stopped off at the pound on the way hoot a cat in lieu of an endowically born without whiskers We named him MacArthur the Genius Cat and let hi the early 2000s zeitgeist that people will be sick of seeing in special exhibitions a hundred years from now If I’d been any happier, I’d have been a Prozac prescription

Then a fucking hideous undead bird landed on our little world, shitting everywhere and squawking The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics i

n the general direction of the next millennium