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The Last Show

Daniel R. Snyder

    Adam, not the name his parents gave him but what he liked to be called, was a drunk, which made all of us happy because he was an asshole when he was sober. As a senior at California State Northridge, he was beginning to get more than a little notice as an up-and-coming artist. He had put on a few viewings and had even been paid for several of his pieces. He was insecure though, and a wrong word or criticism would set him off on a verbal attack, a strike at your weak spots that would puncture your skin and leave you bleeding in places you never suspected existed.
    We all liked to hang around him because he was the first of us to leave the idyllic safety of college art, enter the real world, and get paid. He allowed us his company because without us he would have been alone.
    He was fun to be around when he started drinking. After two drinks the perpetual scowl was gone. Four, and he was smiling and talkative. It would have been fine if he could have stopped there, but the fifth and the sixth would always soon follow. Those were the most difficult ones for us because he would get too friendly, like a needy child. He’d start babbling about how wonderful we were, what great friends we were, how well we understood him, how comforting it was to have people around who would never betray him. But you could only stand that for so long, and so you fed him the seventh and eighth drink until he passed out or decided to go for a walk.
    One night, over several joints and a bottle of wine, he claimed that he hated art. It didn’t matter what the medium or the period or the style was. He claimed no pleasure in looking at anyone’s work, including, and especially, his own. There was no purpose to art except in the process of creation. The thing created was inconsequential. To look at people’s art is to look into their souls, and the soul is a perfect thing, but since matter is not, art was always an imperfect reflection of its genesis. It was disappointing, useless, and obscene. We asked him why he wanted to be an artist, and he said it was to piss off his parents.
    That same night, he finally told us that his parents lived in Reseda, only twenty minutes west of us, but they’d cut off his funding and hadn’t spoken to him since he’d switched his major from business to art. After that, he never willingly mentioned them again, and every time we asked, he’d give us a different story. He was raised in an orphanage, his parents lived in another state, they were dead, they’d abandoned him as a child, and he didn’t know where they were.
    A few months later, after another successful showing, when the bottle was almost empty, he left us for a walk and did not come back. When we finally called the police, he was already four days dead. We heard that the gun was still in his hand and the smell made both the cops throw up.
    The landlady eventually scrubbed out his apartment, hid the blood-stained floor under thick green carpet, hung wallpaper covered with little pomegranates in the kitchen and bathroom, then gave the rest of his place a new coat of paint. Afterwards, she shipped all Adam’s sketches, paintings, and sculptures to his parents, who threw every single one of them into the garbage.

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