The Square Diner. 1969
Shaped like an old railroad dining car, with pressed metal walls and formica table tops, counter stools and booths, the Square Diner served traditional American food for decades. Nothing fancy - meat loaf, pot roast, pork chops. Nothing dainty, no salads or fruit, only meat that came with brown gravy. The menu was written in chalk on a blackboard over the cash register. The waiters and the bad tempered counterman were Greek. All men – no women worked there. The customers were mostly men too – workers from the area and truck drivers from the Washington Market, a couple of streets over. It was the old produce market that kept the diner open twenty-four hours, but it was being moved now, away from the narrow cobble-stoned streets, up to the Bronx where those huge refrigerated trucks could swing about with ease. Some of the less trodden sidewalks were sprouting weeds and tall grass. Many buildings were being knocked down or sat empty. Small light industry buildings, where you’d make buttons or glue hair on to dolls or stitch handbags – 19th century loft buildings. Here and there artists were moving into the area. Soho, a few blocks to the north, had already been given that name and become expensive. This forgotten neighborhood was nameless and cheap. And a loft made a pretty nice studio.
Jake Beacher, forty, newly divorced, and still without pots and pans or a kitchen, pulled open the door. He stopped it swinging back with his foot, hesitating as he looked over the customers for a familiar face, or an empty seat. The diner was crowded. Tomorrow’s Daily News had already been delivered and sat in a stack on the counter – Vietnamese villages on fire - more pictures of a useless war. There was nothing open up front so Jake passed by the row of broad backs hunkered at the counter, and made his way toward the last booth where Francis Pete sat behind an almost empty plate.
“How’s it going man?”
Francis Pete held a fork and a pencil in one hand while the other hand, clenched into a fist, held down an open book. He was staring at the page as if he were angry at it. He looked up, surprised.
“Hey.”
Jake slid into the narrow booth opposite him kicking his legs under the table. Francis Pete was younger, early twenties, and skinny. He had the look of a romantic poet with long curly hair, almost ringlets, and long slender fingers. The two men barely knew each other but they were both artists in a place where nobody else was. Francis was glad of the company and slipped a napkin into the book and pushed it aside.
“That the goulash?”
“Yeah. It’s not bad tonight.” Francis ripped off a hunk of his roll and finished swabbing the remains of the gravy.
“Least it’s not tofu and bean sprouts.” Francis didn’t catch the reference to Jake’s married life and let it go.
Jake studied the upside-down cover of the book while Francis chewed his food.
“The Theory of wha? .... Theory of Syntax and the Mind. Noam Chomsky? What the fuck. You kidding me?”
“It’s interesting. About language and ...”
“Spare me the details.”
Jake held up a hand. Syntax and the mind was sinuous enough without having to watch him chew through the details. Francis was serious about his book. Jake let him finish while he looked out the window at the triangle cut out by the merging streets. A baglady had stopped at the far end, near the Franklin Street Subway Station, and begun unloading her posessions from a beat-up shopping cart. The air was heavy and warm for a May evening.
“You know about hot water heaters?” Francis shoved the empty oval plate aside and pulled a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from shirt pocket.
“What. You need one?”
“Yeah.”
“Used?”
“Used, yeah. Gas is better, right? Cheaper?”
Al the Greek waiter appeared beside the table holding a damp rag in one hand. He held it away from him like it was something he didn’t want.
“What’ll it be?”
Al didn’t look at them, he looked out the window at the baglady. In some ritual of her own she was placing the bags in a line on the ground, a few feet apart, evenly spaced. With each bag she paused and made some sacramental intonement toward the long blank wall of the ConEd sub station. Al watched expressionless. He was a handsome man, in a silent movie idol way, except for the pencil mustache which he fancied as the icing on the cake. He had on a crisp white short sleeved shirt and a pair of black pants which he wore pulled up high over his stomach.
“You got stew tonight?” said Jake.
“Goulash.”
“No stew?”
“No stew. Goulash.”
“All right. Goulash.”
Al pulled Francis’s plate away and leaned across the table giving it a lazy swipe of his limp rag. He left them with the smell of stale food and armpit sweat.
“I’ll take a coffee,” Francis called after him.
Al didn’t turn. The slight hesitation in his stride showed that he’d heard.
“You know Lee Sam’s, on the Bowery?”
Francis worked his Zippo and frowned as he lit his cigarette.
“Lee Sam’s,” Jake repeated. “For your hot water heater. It’s on the Bowery. Cheapest place I know.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay. Lee Sam’s.”
Francis knew Jake was a painter, he’d seen his work in a group show a few months before. It was where they met. He looked at Jake’s hands resting on the green formica tabletop. Strong, short fingered, hands with broad spatular fingernails with dirt under them. There were nicks and fresh cuts in the skin.
“You been working?”
“Shit. I’ve done nothing but work on the damn loft for months now. Whole bathroom, space heaters, painting walls, sanding floors. Still building the kitchen counter. I’m real regular at Zelf Tool Rentals. How ‘bout you. You painting?”
“I don’t paint.”
“You don’t paint?”
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you were a painter.”
Al the waiter was back putting a cup of watery coffee in front of Francis and sliding an overflowing plate of goulash and noodles in front of Jake. Then he stood there waiting beside the table motionless, gazing out the window at the baglady. Waiting for what? The two men glanced at his red and swollen hands dangling in front of his black stained pants. He’d been doing dishes. Someone called him from up front.
“I stopped painting years ago.” Francis watched Al walk away. “It wasn’t going anywhere.”
Jake followed the waft of smoke Francis blew out that replaced the smell of goulash. Was Francis one of these phonies who’d given up and gone into real estate? Art was something for a year or two like having a rock band, then it was time to make money. He worked the pepper shaker over his meal without taking his eyes off Francis.
“You one of those ‘painting is dead’ guys?”
“For me anyway.”
“Hmm.”
Jake left it alone. Francis looked passed him to the dinging cash register where Al was making change for a couple of cops from the local precinct taking out coffee.
“See ...” was he justifying, or explaining, or just talking to himself? “You know, I can’t see where painting is going right now. You look at Warhol, Litchenstein. Pop Art guys. It’s making images. Pictures. It’s not about painting, painting. You know, DeKooning or something. It’s just flat color. Advertising art. I look at the color field guys that Clem Greenberg likes and they don’t do much for me. And for the last few years it’s been nothing but Minimalism. I don’t fit in there either. Boxes, frames, bricks. Look at those guys – Judd, Morris, LeWitt, Andre. Look at them. They’re not making that stuff themselves. They make little sketches, a plan, a blueprint on the back of an envelope and give to a carpenter. Make this out of three-quarter inch plywood, four feet by four feet. And Flavin! Flavin! He doesn’t even do that. He sends a guy down to the hardware store to buy a box of fluorescent lights.”
“So? What? You’re pissed they’re not working so hard?”
“No ... no. That’s not my point.”
“What is?”
”What I’m trying to say is that if the artist can hand off the work of making the thing to a carpenter or a mason or some gallery assistant hired for the day, then ... then, what’s that about? The finished product? It’s obviously not so important, right. They’ve removed the craft bit, the signature, the handwriting. It’s like dictating a letter to a secretary. It’s not the typing that counts it’s the message, the sketch, the plan, the idea.”
“You think that’s what they’re saying ... the Minimalists?”
“No. They’re still presenting objects. They’ve industrialized it, but it’s still the same old capitalist thing. Unique objects for a few wealthy collectors to speculate on. Precious objects. The whole thing’s corrupt. It just perpetuates the system of ownership by the elite. But if you eliminate the preciousness of the object so anyone can have it, then no one can own it.”
Jake put his fork down, pulled a napkin from the dispenser, and wiped a splash of sauce from his chin. He didn’t want it thought that he was not up on the latest developments. He lived in the thick of the art world, after all, it couldn’t just change while he was fixing his loft.
“Sure, I heard about this. I talked with some guy, Joe, in Saint Adrian’s. Concept Art, right? You know that bar, Saint Adrian’s, up on Broadway?”
“I know it. Sure. Kinda gloomy. Yeah, some people are calling it Conceptual Art.”
“That’s what you do?”
“Yeah.”
“How long you been doing that?”
“Couple of years. Not just me there’s a bunch of others doing it. Larry does little books. There’s a group in England that do philosophical kind of stuff. Bob does these word drawings. There’s a guy down here on Chambers does things with numbers. A guy in France who pastes printed stripes to walls. This one guy, Ian, just talks. That’s his whole thing right there. He talks. There’s..”
“But what do you do?” There was a slight edge of defensiveness in Jake’s voice as if he should have known about all this long ago. He had stopped eating and was resting his fists on either side of the plate, his fork sticking up like a planted flag. “I mean if I came to your studio right now, what would I see?”
“Not much.” This was the awkward bit for Francis to explain, especially to painters. It was hard to tell them that he thought what they did, what they loved, was passé, out of date, over, culturally finished. He looked across the street at the long blank wall of the ConEd substation. “There’s not a lot to see.”
“So what’s the point of a studio?” Jake felt better seeing that he’d made Francis uncomfortable and started eating again.
Outside a police-car siren suddenly erupted and everyone in the diner turned to look. The two cops sitting in the car were laughing their asses off at some guy on the sidewalk. The baglady whose line of bags now stretched across the triangle, threw up her hands and started yelling at the cops. The guy on the sidewalk turned with a grin and gave the cops the finger. Obviously a buddy going off duty.
“It’s the idea.” Francis fumbled with his pack of cigarettes and lit another smoke seconds after putting out the first. “Listen. Hypothetically. If I say my sculpture is forty auto tires in four stacks in the middle of a gallery. You’d accept that, right?”
“Why would I?”
“You would. You’ve seen stuff like that. We’ve all seen shit like that. You could visualize it, right? Four stacks.”
“Even? Ten tires each? Symmetrical? Okay.”
“So.” Francis leaned back and allowed smoke trickle out the side of his mouth. “So, why do I have to do it? Why do I have to make it? Stack those tires. Who needs the tires? By simply saying it we both know what it looks like. We can both visualize those tires.” He leaned forward again shoulders hunched, elbows on the table. “And even better. You have your stack of tires in your mind and I have my stack in my mind. And we draw whatever implications we want.”
“So what’s in the gallery?”
“Nothing! Why does art have to be in a gallery? Or a museum. Why does art have to be confined to a particular place and owned by a particular collector?”
“It doesn’t but that’s the way commerce works. It’s gonna be short lived if the art market can’t make a buck off it.”
“So, you’re saying art is commerce? It’s about ownership, property?”
“It doesn’t do well without it.”
“Not necessarily. If I have novel, War and Peace say. I have it, it’s on my shelf, but I don’t own it. I own a copy, just like yours, just like the guy down the street. Just like millions of others. If I take my copy and burn it War and Peace still exists.”
“So, it’s a political statement. This thing of by-passing the collector, avoiding the whole art market. You’re an idealist, my friend ... or on a trust fund.”
“It’s trying to get around elitism. That art has to be some precious object in a special setting, in some rarified place where you talk in whispers and pretend you know more than you do.”
“That’s not art that’s the way it’s used. Marketed. You’re looking for a different way to market what you do is all, right? You want your art to be reproducible like War and Peace. So, what do you do?”
“What do mean?”
“What do you do? How does your art manifest itself? You’re talking art in the age of mechanical reproduction, right? D’you photograph stuff, d’you print things? What?”
“I’m making a little book right now.”
“A book? Like a novel, a story?”
“No. It’s just pages with words... ideas...no story. It’s about the relationships between things, states, ideas. Look, say you’re interested in the shape and form of things. You could take this coffee cup, the inside, the way it curves around, enclosing. And the way that it relates to the outside, curving away, the way that relates to the palm of your hand.”
“Yeah, but I use ideas like that in my painting. You saying there’s no ideas in painting?”
“Of course not. No. But that’s about physical things which is fine for paint. What I want to play with are all kinds of other relationships like endogamy and exogamy, currency and society, strategy and tactics. The relation of names to things, memories to reality. What we carry in our heads, or construct in our minds when we think about things. How words create or relate to the way we think.”
“Endogamy, that’s marrying someone within your group, right?”
“Yeah. Exogamy is marrying someone from outside.”
“Exogamy’d bring new genes.”
“And political ties.”
“So how do you express that? Like poetry?”
“The language is part of it. I use solecisms, colloquialisms, science words, slang, portmanteau words, you know. It’s like what Beckett said about Finnigans Wake ... ‘when the sense is dancing, the words dance. Form is content, content is form.’ You have to look at the words carefully, thoughtfully.”
“But it’s still words on the page? Like poetry then?”
“No. No, some people say it’s concrete poetry ‘cause they can’t grasp it any other way. But it’s not.”
Jake cleaned the last of the goulash from his plate and pushed it aside. He burped as he shifted in his seat to take in more of the view from the window. The evening light was growing dimmer outside, dusk settling in. The baglady had wheeled her cart to the end of her line of bags and was now reloading them in reverse order. Jake pulled a battered pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. Beyond the triangle, a limousine pulled up at Teddy’s over on West Broadway. Teddy’s was an old fashioned restaurant, night club from the fifties. It catered to wise-guys, celebrities and politicians dating someone other than their wife. A place to avoid attention trying to hide here in the middle of nowhere, the industrial wasteland, but it stuck out like Nixon’s insincerity with its ridiculous curb to lobby red carpet and tasseled awning. Jake’s wife had seen Liz Taylor and Richard Burton going in there a year ago. The thought of his wife snagged Jake in a sudden tug of remorse. He fiddled with the cigarette, straightening it, tapping it on a broad thumbnail. Loud guffaws came from the big bellied truckers at the counter.
“What bothers me.” Jake started, faltered, shifted and started again. “What bothers me is that it’s not concrete.”
“It’s not poetry. I said. It’s not concrete ...”
“Exactly, man. It’s what I’m saying. It’s not concrete. You’re dealing with the general, the abstract. For me art deals with the particular. The particular moment, the particular surface, the particular color. Not just red. Not just any red. Not the idea of red. This exact red, in this light, on this particular surface. D’ya see?”
“Why keep the fences? Art’s dealt with those kinda things for centuries. What we’re looking at allows us to broaden the possibilities. This can be art too. Just the way Pop Art said soup cans and comic books can be art too. It’s inclusive. Art can be any place, any time, made out of memory or history or philosophy.”
“And it sounds like philosophy.”
“Isn’t all art some kind of philosophy? You’re saying something, even if you leave the canvas blank. It still saying something.”
“I know, but it bugs me. You may be throwing out the craft, but you’re throwing out the sensuality along with it. You’re trying to use the general to provoke the particular. I think art works the other way round.”
“You’re putting limits on art again.”
“I’m saying, you’re making it too abstract, it’s like saying ‘six’. Six what?”
“No, no. We’re making art more rational.”
“There’s a fence. See, I like the part you’re throwing out. The irrational, the sensual. Take that Dylan line ‘Chimes of midnight flashing’. What’s that mean exactly?”
“Chimes of freedom.”
“Huh?”
“The words. It’s ‘Chimes of freedom flashing’.”
“See? Even better. You know what it means. I know what it means. But neither of us know exactly what it means. It’s irrational and it’s sensual. And what you were saying that Beckett said.
‘Form is content, content is form’. That is so much about the particular, the concrete. This exact form. This exact time. You know that poem of Auden’s about the museum?”
“No.”
“There’s some line about how the old masters understood that the human condition happened as someone opened a window or is walking dully along. Life. The human condition. You can see it. In that moment raising the window. Life happened, families torn apart, dreams busted, falling in love. Heartache. Life. It’s beautiful. You like the rational precision of the fugue. I like the messy undercurrents of inference. The inner voices, the subconscious, the unintended. Your consciousness is all surface.”
“Wittgenstein would say that’s all we have.”
“Fuck Wittgenstein!”
The two men laughed.
“What you’re doing.” Jake pressed the lighter mood. “Sounds like you have to believe it to see it.”
“It’s different. A different kind of beauty. It’s the kind of beauty that Einstein talked about in mathematics. He knew he had the correct solution because it had the cool, supreme beauty of perfection.
It was night now. Darkness was on the city. The triangular intersection was empty and quiet. The sulfurous street lamps had turned everything yellow.
“Chimes at Midnight .” Jake suddenly tapped the tabletop with his forefinger. “That’s what I was thinking of. The Orson Welles flick. Chimes at Midnight. You ever see it? About Fallstaff.”
“No. But that’s a great example of what I mean. You took those words and reshaped them and made something different. It’s a little art work right there in your head.”
“Conceptual art.”
“Anything else, guys?”
Al was back planted at the edge of the table ready to write out the check. Francis looked down the length of the diner. It was empty now except for the baglady who was getting a cup of hot water from the counterman. It was the first time Francis had seen the old grump crack a smile.
“We got apple pie, pound cake, rice pudding, cherry pie, er ...” Al drummed his fingers on the table top to aid his memory.
“What’s freshest?”
“Rice pudding.”
“All right. Rice pudding.”
“You?”
“Rice pudding.”
“Rice pudding.”