The Birdman Read online

variety as we do,” she said, afraid of losing such a large sale. The brushes alone were worth over two hundred dollars.

  While she rang up his order and processed his credit card, she told him where to find a craft store. She packed his purchases in a complimentary canvas tote to carry home. As she was packing them she asked, “What do you paint?”

  He said, “I haven’t painted anything yet. I've been learning by chalking the sidewalk.”

  “Oh,” she said, “are you the man in the You Tube video?”

  “No, I can’t be.”

  “Did you do a picture of leaping dolphins?”

  “Yes,” he said, suddenly fearful of exposure.

  “And another with prickly looking palm trees?”

  “Yes.” He felt his throat constricting.

  “You’re famous. Go home and google ‘sidewalk artist,’ and you’ll see. When I looked at it there had been over a hundred thousand hits.”

  Donald MacDonald mumbled, “I don’t own a computer,” grabbed the canvas tote and dashed from the store. On the street he stood panting. If he were still at work, the work-work place, he could use a company computer, but he didn’t own one and had no desire to. He thought for a moment and dashed back in the store. “I'm going to paint birds,” he said. “But pleasepleaseplease don’t tell anyone.” He dashed out again.

  Tramping up the hill, his mind was a kaleidoscope of images and numbers: the number of tubes of paint, the number of brushes, the number of contraction joints in the sidewalk, which he counted while he thought of everything else. He lost count, though, when he began wondering how he could be on You Tube. Who’d filmed him? How did he not know about it? What would be the upshot of a hundred thousand persons knowing something about him? He thought about finding a computer to use. They had them in libraries, but you had to sign up to use them. He could buy one—too complicated. He had no friends, so he couldn’t borrow one. He would positively freak out if he went to a Walmart and used a demo machine.

  “When I am famous for painting birds,” he said to no one in particular, “I will buy a computer.”

  As he was coming up to the deli belonging to the man who’d caused his arrest, he put his hand up to the side of his face, shielding his features from the store windows. He loved the smell of cheeses and sausages, but he would never go in that deli.

  The hand did no good. The proprietor dashed out and tapped him on the shoulder as he passed. Donald MacDonald jumped, nearly spilling his paints and brushes.

  “No, no, it’s okay, mister. You come and make your pictures on the sidewalk in front of my store any time. Folks are mad at me for shooing you away.”

  As the man was talking, Donald MacDonald was backing away, the man advancing. Finally Donald MacDonald turned and ran. The deli owner didn’t run after him but yelled “I'm sorry,” to his retreating back.

  Donald MacDonald was completely mystified, although by the time he was safely home he decided his You Tube fame had become known to the deli man and his drawing in front of the deli would attract customers.

  No way.

  No, he would not be exploited.

  \^^^^^

  It came to Donald MacDonald in a dream that he should paint no less than one hundred and fifty-three pictures of birds. One hundred and fifty three was the sum of the first seventeen integers and also the sum of the first five positive factorials. That he had a goal that could be explained mathematically made him think of the two halves of his brain coming together to form a perfect circle.

  It likewise came to him that each bird should be rendered like the nobles on face cards: looking the same whether mounted right side up or upside down. He felt very confident that he would be famous as soon as he finished his one hundred and fifty-three bird paintings.

  The concept set him atingle. It was as exciting as when he started his thesis on asymmetrical Ramsey numbers. He said aloud, as he arrayed globs of paint on a dinner plate, “Wizard!” and “Golly-gee!” as a way of expressing his pleasure. He was so excited he had to go to the bathroom. But his excitement was put on hold when he realized his apartment was totally wrong as an artist’s studio. He wanted a place with lots of space and no neighbors below him, so that he would dance around and sing and shout. He wished he hadn’t squeezed out the globs of paint on the plate, because he couldn’t get them back in. So he threw the plate and paint in the trash and went out and rented an empty factory.

  The factory wasn’t part of a gentrification project, it was a rat-infested, asbestos-ridden shell of a brick building with exposed wiring and no source of heat and no interior walls except for a couple of glassed-in offices, a locker room and a restroom. The windows were painted over, there was trash strewn on every horizontal surface, it was, as described by the real estate agent who found it for him, “A frigging junk heap.” But it was big, the windows were only covered with whitewash and so emitted light, and he could shove all the trash into one corner and it would be just right. He agreed to rent it until the owner found a buyer, for which he’d been looking since the real estate bubble burst back in Ought Eight.

  So Donald MacDonald quit paying rent at his apartment, spent the last of his savings as first and last on the abandoned factory, hired a gypsy mover to take all his “stuff” to the new address, and squeezed more globs of paint on a dinner plate. As he envisioned his paintings, there would be a black line across the exact middle of the panel, it would be in the blackest black, so he had bought a giant tube of what was labeled Mars Black.

  His problems multiplied. He had no money left, so he had to go out each sunshiny day (he slept on rainy days) and chalked on sidewalks with his cap in a conspicuous place and finished one work or sometimes two, until he had enough money for a couple of Big Macs and a couple of cans of condensed soup, which he ate in the evening straight out of the can. But the light was gone by the time he got home, so he had to do more sidewalk drawings to buy some floodlights. He worked on his birds most of the night—or, rather, he worked on his first bird.

  He found a sheet of cardboard among the trash in his factory and on it, with a ballpoint pen, he wrote:

  Buy rat traps

  Figure out how to find the exact center of the panel

  Would a real artist use a straight edge to draw the black line across the middle

  Buy toilet paper

  Buy more underwear so I don’t have to go to the laundromat as often

  Buy a heater

  Buy pencils

  Buy more white stuff to paint over mistakes.

  It took Donald MacDonald a month to finish the first painting and, in his opinion, it was a frigging failure. Before he started on his second bird he decided that the significance of the hundred and fifty-three renditions was that each would be better than the last until, at the hundred and fifty-third iteration, he would have a frigging masterpiece, the bird of all bird paintings.

  (He wasn’t aware of the word, frigging, until he heard the real estate agent use it. Then he adopted it as his favorite adjective. It was the frigging quarter inch brush and the frigging cadmium scarlet, which he wished he had selected as the divider of his panels, et cetera, et cetera.)

  The only problem was, he went out the next morning as soon as it was light, having painted all night, as usual, and started another drawing . . . when he collapsed. He woke up in the emergency room of a hospital. He was dehydrated, emaciated, anemic, filthy, unshaven and, when he regained consciousness, raving. He had an IV in his forearm which he tore out. He was dressed in a peek-a-butt hospital gown and he shouted for his clothes. The ER doc and a nurse wrestled him onto a gurney and shot him up with benzodiazepine. They wanted him to sign a consent form but he was judged too agitated to get a signature.

  So they shipped Donald MacDonald off to the psych ward.

  ^^^^^

  “My name’s Doctor Crane, what’s yours?”

  “Donald MacDonald. You’re a crane like a bird? Or a crane like a thing that lifts?”

  “I'm distantly relate
d to Stephen Crane, the author.”

  “But he was named for the bird, no doubt.”

  Dr. Crane smiled and said, “It could be that he was. —May I call you Donald?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Crane smiled again. He had never thought about looking like a bird, especially a crane, because his legs were sturdy as a Roman legionnaire’s, his mustache drooped and his hair tended towards wavy. He had been a wrestler in high school and still looked like he could grapple.

  “What may I call you?” he asked

  “You may call me Donald MacDonald, but I'd rather you just let me out of here.”

  He was in a room with a bed that was firmly fastened to the floor, that had a large skylight but no other windows, that had no doorknob or light switch or any other protrusion. High up in a corner a closed circuit TV camera looked down on him from a little dome, darkened so that the camera wasn’t visible.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Dr. Crane asked.

  Donald MacDonald shook his head.

  “You passed out on the street a couple of days ago and you were in pretty bad shape.”

  Donald MacDonald said, “You mean because I'm scruffy. I've been too busy to shave or go to the barber, and barbers cost money, which I'm a little low on just now.”

  “You were badly dehydrated and malnourished. And then you acted out when we tried to help you.”

  Donald MacDonald shrugged.

  “It’s serious, Donald MacDonald. You seem to be a danger to yourself, and the way you carried on, the emergency