On the Precipice, Stewart Finds a Home

The years in art school did little to settle the outrageous wanderlust that lay in Stewart, between the settled crevices of time-honored repetition and the soul-crushing exposure of mass criticism. Art School, in many ways had shown to him the cruel analytical nature of the world, though a fiery keyhole. It was just a glimpse, but the heat generated off of the toxic emotions affected him on a level he was all too conscious of.

Uncle Andy, as Stewart used to refer to his old babysitter, was the only family member at his exhibitions and he'd speak with him candidly, behind jutting bronze statues that all too metaphorically spoke volumes regarding the fathomable distance between them.

Andy and Stewart sipped their cocktails, wondering when the time was right to apologize for each's own behavior.

Andy for "corrupting" Stewart, by showing him a world he could never really be a part of. For Stewart it was running away, leaving Andy with the burden and the job of explaining to Mr. and Mrs. Kunderman (because they both still referred to them as the Kundermans, despite the strict biological ties that existed.) that Stewart ran away, to pursue the sort of career that Andy knew he was capable.

They stood there, eyes fixed on the surrounding artwork, halfway mocking the overall lack of possibility that someone might come along and break this trance they seemed to have found themselves in.

Word came by way of Mr. Smithe, Stewart's Art teacher and lone cheerleader in the vast and discouraging halls of Hamberg Hall.

"Stewart's shown a lot of promise during the past two terms, we'll see if it translates into a sale. Good Evening."

He brushed passed with slithery grace, onto the next student, to heap false praises upon.

Hamberg Hall, with it's surrounding annexes, resembled a high-ceillinged sarcoughagus, an inordinately large mausoleum where students walked with hands behind their backs, letting the hollow clacks of their footwear ring out, reflecting the dignity with which they placed on the establishment.


Students would walk through the halls and look back on the struggle to get in, proving a point enough to impress Mr. Smithe and his pack of ravenous Huns. They would get ideas this way, alone in the marbled hall, feeling the rise in sound, falling back down upon them, casting sonorous reverb until the vibrations created sparks inside cerebellums, and they'd calmly walk down the line, breezing passed the Ornithology wing, (a haven for bird-like people, literally, for their body types resembled overgrown sparrows)through to the individual drawing rooms.

One had to continuously prove oneself in order to maintain a residency at the school, and students were constantly dropping out, making last minute pilgrimages to Amsterdam, The Hague, walk-abouts in Australia, sport fishing in Cuba, anything but face the notion that their time was up, and the whole notion of 'talent' at least as far as they were concerned was an elaborate lie strung together with lace, wire and a vast hallway of emptiness.

The sound of the clacking hit Stewart as the ice cubes in his drink clanked as he put his hand on Andy's shoulder, put his head down, and apologized.

"Look, I'm not going to stare at the piece of shit works of my peers all night and pretend that this silence between us doesn't mean anything. I know I ran away and left you with the job of explaining this to "The Kundermans". I know that getting into this place probably wouldn't have happened if you hadn'tve been there all along. I know all that, and I'm sorry."

He held that gaze out for several minutes, until Andy, whose eyes began to tear up, bit his lower lip, lifted his eyes from the rotund copper statue he'd pretended to stare at for what seemed to him like an eternity, and gathered a response.

"It. It was me who showed you another way to live. I didn't want my own lifestyle to dictate yours, I just knew you had these talents, and it may not have been the most appropriate time for this, but your here now, the Kundermans are nowhere to be found, they left you afterall."

He stared up at the tribute to Miro as mobile, and stood on this last point as if on a precipice.

"Running away was a slap to my face, and I'm not going to pretend that it didn't make me regret everything I showed you, it felt fucking ungrateful at the time. But now, after everything, seeing you here with all of your determination just makes me grateful that you’re here, and at Hamberg Hall, one of the best Art Schools on the East Coast!"

Andy didn't know that Stewart was on the way out. He'd started out efficiently enough, creating proficient recreations of classic still life arrangements like the light bulb on a steel-brushed table, but painting, especially vague recreations of inanimate objects, he found demeaning. He'd had visions of self-written operas, of buckets of red paint swimming on mtoherly hips, hourglass shapes pressed against the paint, and rolling on the canvas;fleshy rollers on bone-white canvases. He pictured screaming rage and spit. He wanted canvases to look like entrails turned inside-out, illuminating the rage found in digestive tracts. He wanted the ugliest parts of science to be mixed with a thrashing humanity.

But recreating light bulb arrangements wasn't in the cards. As much as his professors would lecture on about 'learning to walk before learning how to fly', a metaphor he came to detest and after waking from dreams of larvae ripped apart to make a point on the machinations of nature, and how mixing them can be deadly one morning he had been given an ultimatum: to either faithfully follow the trajectory of their curriculum, or leave, and find solace in the gritty poverty of the East Village.

The sinking feeling that the gig was up came to him as he was basking the glow of reconciliation with Andy. Around the statues, mobiles and panoramas of Hamberg Hall, they now laughed, Andy's arm over Stewarts.

Out of the Jungle lies Dr. Livingston

I called it an idea that never could exist on the Internet.

James had reached central access to the central nervous system, and for now he'd focus on the heaps of joy he might heap upon himself.

But he carried on never the less, with pride in his top drawer, and the wringed-out-out panties disguised a clever ruse at the bottom of the drawer circling around it, becoming organic when handed over, it felt like the start of some deciduous tree branch, and it sat there, until he thrashed himself twenty times for feeling that way, and letting the rest of the world creep on into his own, by way of a book that would project, with a 15 watt light bulb, the truth his entrails read when magnified and reading out to its audience with a menu of forgotten lies that were to only be aired out at this time, as it was, afterall only fit to declare proper at the hour and the time spent within its walls, sleeping in the hanger with a notepad, fire and the vague attempt that anything in this direction has to be better than what came to him when it was written. If you could've known that..


He was looking for the kind of recognition in his own mind that one would find while alone in a library, and finding a velvet edition of a collection which seems oddly familiar, a framed once flashed before him, back when the time had spent hours with him , and the chill of winters past seemed enough of a reason to celebrate."

Al and Pauline Kunderman, 1973

Safely back in the US after a month spent traveling in Europe, The Kundermans settled in nicely after the four day after-effects of a nine hour time differential settled down in their sleep to the point where Al didn't wake at five am wondering which lightbulb to replace in the nursery.

Three and a half weeks into their honeymoon, The Kundermans, Al and Pauline were nestled in Lake Geneva when word came that Pauline was late on her period and her boobs hurt.

The Kundermans knew somehow that the spare bedroom in the rear of the home was to be a nursery, they just weren't exactly sure when it would actually be used as a nursery instead of a makeshift office for Al, who wrote early on Sunday mornings, after devouring the local newspaper.

Al was an insominac of the highest order, and he'd wake at the moment the newspaper hit the front doorstep.

It was February 26th, 1973. The Watergate hearings were on the Television all summer long, and Al sat in his favorite chair, coming up with short, rhythmic ways of illustrating the hope he felt for the remainder of the 1970s. A man who chose to live in denial from the constant coverage used it as a way that the Republican Party needed a new boy, as ballsy as Nixon, but with enough bravura and connections to get away with the dirt that would certainly be involved in the clean up of the moral schism that had recently crumbled away.

He was never much of a Ford guy either, the guys at work needling him at the obvious lack of staying power Gerald Ford held as successor to a defrocked Nixon.

These were the thoughts that interfered with his poetry when little Stewart was born.

Pauline came into the hallway on a warm Spring evening, her head soaked with perspiration, her eyes far aware. Al had read a description that matched this scenario perfectly in one of his History books he'd consult nightly. "A thousand yard Stare"

Stewart was raised on the outskirts of Los Angeles County in the early morning of May, 1973.

Al came home after the baby was born and Pauline was still at the hospital. Shed need to stay overnight, and Al came home to get dinner and collect a few of her things.

It was the first time he'd been home this early on a weekday in years. And in one isolated moment, Al looked in the mirror and realized suddenly that he was still chasing his childhood, and that twelve years of bachelor hood had laid claim to much of his robust, thick head of hair and much of his inner chutzpah, which he'd attributed to the often-castrating decision of middle management.

Al didn't stick around long enough to complete the picture. Four years after Stewart was born, Al left leaving Pauline a sizable income. Al had avoided the shame that was sure to come at work for a middle-management guy to abandon his family, so he paid Pauline half of his salary up front. He took the rest and spent in on a modest cottage with a view of Laurel Canyon.

Pauline, left with a sizable income considering the time she spent at University (two years on a secretarial binge, meant for better things, but knew that Al had a lasting career, hell he'd made it to middle management on the strengths of his design skills as a skilled engineer. He'd sweated out his dues on the ground floor and now he was literally coasting on a scaffolding that he had designed. There was nothing left to do but leave.

he'd vowed to be a supportive, loving father, even if he never really got the chance to do so.

Pauline, with Stewart in daycare all day (she to had her little share of lies.) Stewart was cared for by a woman named Daphne Gauphine, who was under the impression that Pauline was a high-powered career woman.

In the meantime, Pauline spent her daytimes sheltered by the comfort that Al's paycheck bought her and decided one day while cleaning to curtains to become a drug addict.

It didn't happen overnight, all of a sudden, but just as quickly she found herself in the throes of addiction to a packet of pills that came in rows of yellow, like the petunias shed had in her garden before the window shade to her bedroom came down in the morning and stayed that way until the reflection of light from the house-lamps reflected on the overgrowing grass.

In the wake of all this, Stewart was raised in the shadows of all this, by Daphne, and her boyfriend Nick had a "on the level" art job, although in all reality, he painted nudes and occasionally picked up strange men and brought them back to the studio while Stewart and Daphne baked cookies for the rest of the Unitarian Church on Elm Street.