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WILLIAM WHARTON
Scumbler
Acquiescence, Wishes …
Dreams
Why? Why?
‘cause I’m
Gonna die.
That’s why.
SCUMBLING: to modify the effect of a painting by overlaying parts of it with a thin application of opaque or semi-opaque color.
– American College Dictionary
Table of Contents
1
The Rats’ Nester
Right now, here in Paris, we have seven different nests. That’s not counting our old water mill, two hundred miles from Paris. I spend half my time rousting out, fixing up, furnishing these nesting places.
Rats’ nesting’s what it all is; can’t seem to keep myself from burrowing, digging in; always stuffing bits and pieces into one corner or another.
Even before we snuck away from California, we had four nests and forty acres; not a single one of those places there you’d call a real home: a trailer dug into the side of a hill, a tent nestled against a cave, then the shack on top of a hill we called home before it burned down. There was also that place I built with rock and cement at the edge of a streambed in a gully up on the forty.
We furnished all those nests complete to knives and forks; every one a hideout, places we could run to if things got too bad; holes where we could go to ground, wait it out, hide from the crazy ones, learn to like radioactive eggs, a purple sun over green skies, a stinking stagnating dead world.
A family man’s got to think ahead these days, especially someone like me, living on the outside, ex-con, a man who had his first nest – wife, two little ones, house, everything – snatched out from under him. I’m always looking for someplace for us to hide.
In California I cadged stuff from the Salvation Army, junk shops. Here in Paris I haunt flea markets; sometimes I can fix up a whole hideout for less than fifty bucks.
A MAN FOR A WOMAN. EACH TO EACH
OTHER: MOTHERING FATHER.
FATHERING MOTHER.
We’ve been living in Paris more than twenty years now; I’m not sure why anymore; maybe I’m a new kind of bum, rats’-nest bum. Every New Year’s morning, I check with the family, ask if they want to go back.
No, they like to stay, like being aliens.
I still think of myself as a serious artist, paint hard and heavy when I’m not caught up in nesting fevers, father juices.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about masterpieces, museums; used to dream that war; just don’t care so hard anymore. When the end gets closer, those kinds of crazy ideas don’t mean much; everything gets sucked into the
