Skip to primary content

Puck | Aug 26 2004

A man comes every Saturday and brings me paint. He’s always the same man. For some reason I’m not allowed much paint at any one time. I asked the man about this once, and he just looked at me. That’s probably the biggest response I ever got from him.

In truth, I’m not really sure he comes on Saturday, because I’m not sure which day Saturday is. After a while the days are just days. You wake up, urinate, and fall asleep. Sometimes you urinate on Saturday, knowing or not.

I have an air hockey puck. I took it from my daughter. Long ago I had a daughter, and I still may have one. My daughter was a child when I took her puck. I didn’t mean to take it. The air hockey game had two pucks, so I put one in my pocket. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe I thought the second puck would get lost.

Yesterday I made a painting of the puck. It—the puck—is red and thin and made of plastic. It’s like a poker chip but bigger. In my painting, you can’t tell how big it is—not that you really need to.

Most of my paintings are of the puck. The man who comes on Saturdays, or whenever that is, has never said anything about my paintings. Maybe he doesn’t like them. When there are too many to fit in here, I put a stack outside. A different man takes them away. I don’t know what day he comes or what he does with the paintings.

One time—I still remember this—I read a book about a woman who believed she was the last person alive. This woman was a painter, or had been, and had lived for a time in the Metropolitan Museum, in the great hall, where she built a fire once.

I remember the part about the fire. She shot holes in the skylight in such a way that the smoke would go out but the rain would not come in.

That made a lot of sense to me.

In all these years, I’ve never understood how to look at a painting. You look, and it’s some thing, and that’s it. If I’m drunk, I might notice how the bristles make grooves in the paint and how these grooves look like the much bigger grooves between sand dunes in the desert.

I have to be pretty drunk, though.