Photo by Anthony Gucciardi on Unsplash
Maybe it demonstrates I’ve had a blessed life even saying it, but I’ve known hell in the hours I’ve put in at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Maybe it shouts out loud I’ve had it too good if standing around doing nothing all day looking at masterful artwork is my idea of fire and brimstone. And sure, yeah, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. Laying it on thick. But it really says something when the highlight of my day is going around in circles, a merry-go-round of careful driving in fresh and old snow, ice that won’t melt for another four months, feeling the beat of my heart that tells me I’m still alive when I finally find a tight space that just might work and I hold my breath to attempt the urban winter parallel park. When that’s the scene that lifts the heavy drapery of thick, cloying malaise up over my head and shoulders and allows to me go on taking in air for one more day that will be like climbing Everest and I’m not even into that mountain climbing shit, then you know you got yourself a job you don’t love. A life that doesn't exactly regale you with zest, with much of anything.
Anyone who has worked security in an art museum knows how minutes can be turned to hours, days to months, months to epochs. If you make it a whole year before your mind goes to rot, your soul goes to mush, your spirit dries up like oil paint that’s been on that canvas for three or four centuries, well then, I’d say those years become a flickering of on-and off ice ages. That’s what it felt like. Just standing there. That’s what it really did feel like, staring at that Tahitian Landscape you just know Paul Gauguin painted specifically to torment you, a century and some later, to remind you of places you’d rather be. Places you’d never go.
Once I was so bored I farted just to get embarrassed. To feel something. To determine it was only metaphorical, me being dead on the inside, that I’ve still got some biology doing things inside me I don’t understand. Some pretty girl was looking wonderingly at that Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun. I swear, I heard van Gogh himself laugh from somewhere behind one of those olive trees. I never did like Vincent. He got on my nerves. All those short little lines. Like my lifeline when that palm reader gave me a troubled look and still took my money with a smile. The pretty girl left the olive grove and my humiliation let me know I was still human. Still alive.
You’d stand, or pace, look at art you knew better than the back of your hand, than the stain on your clownish, clip-on bow tie that might’ve come from the nosebleed of the guy who last worked here and decided either to kill himself or quit. Maybe he got fired. And I bet if he did he left the building with worry in his gut that his wife was gonna give him hell but he left with a smile all the same, knowing he ain’t ever again going to lock eyes with that Seated Girl that stared back like she hated you and maybe she was sick too ‘cause for whatever reason Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted her face green.
Maybe it meant something. They’re always telling me art is profound. So I guess choosing green on a whim wasn’t a likely story. Some profound meaning in that green. Green with envy? Green with youth? Maybe if I’d just read that placard it’d tell me why. Maybe it would explain she ate her split pea soup like a dog cause her dom got kicks out of treating her like a bitch. Just read the placard. I was bored, but I wasn’t that bored. Besides, if I read that thing I just might fall asleep on the spot and I can’t afford to lose this job even though I’d leave the building smiling. I just know it.
Green, huh? Looked like the wicked witch of the west. I tapped my heels and hoped some benevolent spirit, or Glinda, the good witch of the north, would whisk me away. Anywhere would do. Hell, even the McDonald’s drive-thru I could just make out as I stared out the window, those yellow arches the only bit of color across a sprawl of homes draped in white, marred by black lightening bolts, dormant trees that looked as glum as me when I caught myself in the mirror.
Green, huh? Green just made me bitter. Made me think of the green I didn’t have. The green my wages didn’t allow me to save up. The green that had turned brown around October and now will remain under snow until about as many more months as I have fingers on the hand that hurts like hell cause I punched a wall this morning. Did it to stop myself from crying. The sobbing had gone on all too long and the snot dribbling down my chin wasn’t something I wanted to freeze to my face as I scraped the hard snow off my windshield. Green, huh? Green just made me think of how the grass is greener. On the other side of these walls decked with magnificent artful treasures.
Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris. Well, here, at least, is a piece that does not lie. I looked out the window then I looked at the 19th century impressionism painting. I was seeing double. White on gray, mud and slush. But those street lamps in Paris were sure outshining those Micky D’s arches that today look anemic through the snowfall. I looked a little closer at Paul Signac’s impression of Paris on a winter’s day and suddenly I saw all the colors within that seemingly strict tandem of white and brown. But no, all sorts of pinks and blues, yellow and violet. I looked back out the window. There was no comparison. So maybe, after all, this is an art piece that fibs like all the rest. Or maybe Paris is Paris. And Minneapolis isn’t Paris. Not a soul could argue on that one. These are the sorts of things that go on in one’s mind when the minutes are turned to hours.
After an hour that could’ve been a day, could’ve been a week or a fortnight or the time it takes to get home at rush hour in a blizzard, the radio at your belt would fizz and crackle, the asshole that was your boss, G-1 or G-2, guard numero uno or dos, their voices sounded muffled, like they were talking out your ass cause the walkie talkie was clipped to the loop at your backside or maybe they were talking out of their own asses, like they always did, to tell you to shuffle your deadweight to the adjacent gallery so you can do shit-all just like the last hour, but look at a whole different set of art you knew better than the water spot on the ceiling above your bed. Another hour, another lifetime, a different gallery with beautiful treasures you could’ve sworn were all painted with shit. Cause that’s what each one of them had turned into. Only took a week, or was it a generation?
Felt like a long time, anyways. But then again, so did that last quarter hour, and that one at least had the thrill of a semi-boner ‘cause I got to daydreaming about the cute woman taking pictures of the art. I didn’t have the heart to tell her not to. Even though that’s my job. That really is it. Put on the uniform, that old moth-eaten sports jacket and Bozo-the-clown bow tie. I was a walking, breathing, visual deterrent. A reminder to the bold enthusiast they cannot stroke the rough ridges of the cracked and craggy peaks of hardened oils of a priceless van Gogh. A stern warning to those youthful miscreants that vandalism may merit a few fist-pumps whereas high school toilets are concerned, but not at all for works of fine art. A gentle reminder, a moldy, musty, billboard over flesh and bone, soulless by now, to those would-be selfies that they had no business making it to their intended social media platforms. ‘Don’t touch the artwork.’ ‘No pictures, please.’ The only words I ever needed to say but never did. I was long past caring.
‘That’s why you go to college, dear.’ Some mother said to her eight or nine-year-old son who asked why I was standing off to the side. I was pretty numb from doing a whole lot of nothing, a whole lot of staring at Poussin’s Death of Germanicus and wishing I could trade places with the Roman general. Even numb, that one kind of stung. I did go to college. Wish I fucking didn’t. Now, how in the hell am I going to pay off all those student loans making jack-shit per hour without a hope or prospect for climbing the financial ladder? Even if this job did pay well, had direction, I don’t think it’s a direction I’d willingly head. I don’t think I could stomach the hours that turned to weeks, the slow crushing of my soul as I looked at the soulful works of better men.
Sometimes I got so bored I could swear I was going insane, had gone insane an hour ago, last week, maybe a day after I started this job. There was a saying among the security guards at the MIA, the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It went, ‘You work here long enough, you’ll go MIA, missing in action.’ The saying referred to becoming lost. In no way did it elude to getting lost within the exquisite pieces of art. It had no implications of going missing -- in action or in this case in inaction -- within the museum. It referred to the mind of the security guard. How his mundane duties, his tedious, purposeless shuffling with all those oil and acrylic and pupil-less marble eyes staring him down, the sheer pointlessness of his presence and meaningless of his self, his minuscule worth, the mountains of boredom and oceans of ticking seconds on a clock, each one a stern rap upon his crown, how it all added up to a whole lot of nothing that often as not made one mad. Losing one’s mind. Sanity missing in action. MIA.
I didn’t believe it.
But then the Rembrandt starting chit-chatting with me. I slept real bad and had too much coffee that morning to compensate for the thick wall of haze that came with two hours of shut-eye and a big-league hangover, the kind that came with most mornings these days. But even a foggy notion had me realizing quite clearly that the voice from that painting wasn’t coming from an over-tired, over-caffeinated, under-stimulated mind. It was coming from behind that canvas, or maybe from in the canvas, from the image itself. But why was Lucretia, stab wound from suicide, driven by shame after being raped, as if it was her fault some foreign king’s son pinned her up against a sturdy column in the atrium or perhaps down upon a straw-stuffed mattress in the cubicula, why was Lucretia speaking like a man with a smoker’s voice and why was she talking about baseball, about that episode of Seinfeld where Keith Hernandez allegedly spits on Kramer and Newman?
Crackle and fizz came from my hip. G-1 or maybe G-2. Every voice sounds the same coming out of those walkie talkies but in any case some asshole was giving me the prod to move on to the next gallery. Modern art. Great. For the next hour I was going to look at shit I could have made when I was four. No, no, everyone was saying, telling me I’m missing the point, saying this and that or whatever else they were told in art school, how I had an unsophisticated outlook, a blind eye for true art, how even though I could have spilled a Bloody Mary while I swayed trying to forget the world and the contents on the white tiles at my feet wouldn’t look much different, that it was true genius, the purest of art. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was crazy not to see it. The profundity of that “masterpiece.” Maybe I was crazy because Lucretia was yelling at me from the other gallery, screaming that I was crazy not to see the genius of that orange square drawn almost perfectly but not quite, as if that was the point of the piece, imperfection. Or maybe I was crazy cause that whole MIA thing was happening to my mind.
Three centuries later, or so it seemed, I jump back three centuries into the next gallery. I look at samurai facial armor, demonesque guises snarling and staring back at me with hollow eyes somehow less dead than my own. The room is dim and quiet and cleanses all that loud and in-your-face modern art that reminds me of my toddler nephew’s efforts on his drawing pad. I view the finely crafted blades, the gleaming claws of fearless feudal warriors, the blood-tempered fangs of killers devout to a code that makes them all the more horrifying if you are the target of their unflinching intent.
I wished to take up one those ornate blades. Maybe walk it down to the security office and show G-1 or G-2 my moves. Slice them up like nigiri, sashimi, or maki. Make a California roll out of their asses. But those blades were behind locked plexiglass and alarms, and besides, the moment I held up one of those things, I wouldn’t be able to resist throwing myself on that sword, take part in a little ritual to make things better by ending them; Harakiri. The tatami mats at my feet would pool up with red, outshine that modern art, and I’d have something to talk about with Lucretia.
Giant gas clouds coalesced to become a budding protostar, maturing as stellar winds and radiation whisked away in slow motion celestial gases and space dust, ripening to the main sequence, the prime of one’s life, becoming a red giant, like Clifford the big red dog, then trying to hold yourself together a little bit longer but failing, exploding, a supernova, the end of the line, the end of an hour in another gallery I’d rather not pace with legs that feel like lead by the late stage in my shift. And when ten stars are born and flourish and go cold and explode my shift ends and I drive three miles in three hours cause the roads are hell out there and the snow is thicker than that McFlurry that’s making my tummy feel like it’s about to supernova.
But I don’t mind the drive. Those three hours. I got the radio playing baseball, which is weird ‘cause it’s winter and then I realize the radio is off but I’m hearing all about pitching prospects, home runs, and stolen bases just the same. It’ll give me some chit-chat ammo for Rembrandt, or Lucretia if she’s still only in her death throes and not yet dead. Those three hours went by like three minutes. The Cheeseburger Hot Pockets from out of the microwave tasted like fine dining. Everything was a little brighter. A little greener. Even if everything was white. White until two weeks after the May Day parade, and it was hardly December.
Everything was better. Much, much better. ‘Cause I was home, or more pointedly, I wasn’t at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I was home, soon to be drunk. I’d drink until the haze hid the reality that tomorrow would be another day. I’d drink with maybe an old rerun of Seinfeld on and I’d take it in with blurry vision and only remember it ‘cause I’ve seen it ten times before. I’d drink until everything was oblivion. Like an imploded star. I’d drink till my mind went blank, till my mind went MIA.
James Callan grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand on a small farm with his wife, Rachel, and his little boy, Finn. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bridge Eight, White Wall Review, Maudlin House, Beyond Queer Words, and elsewhere. His novel, A Transcendental Habit, is due for publication in 2023 with Queer Space, an imprint of Rebel Satori Press.