RENT

The intensity of the street light outside the window gave my room the illusion of monochrome. The harsh brightness cast uneven shadows, jagged and sharp like the dirt and grime which created them. There was no furniture nor were there adornments on the walls. Jack Mecosta sold whatever arrangement I had set up and left nothing, not even a rug to bid farewell on.

I would love to claim I was caught but surprise, but it would be a lie. In total honesty, I was more shocked my presence was tolerated at all, more so for as long as it has been.

I’m an artist, to begin with. And I became an artist because I couldn’t pay my rent anyway; I figured an artist has a slightly better reputation than a vagrant, and like all else I endeavor I was totally incorrect. Contempt and artists go together like mistrust and lawyers. Jack wasn’t bad, though. Acceptance would be too strong a word, and understanding would be wholly inaccurate. I suppose the best summation would be he had a combination of intelligence and nonchalantness that made him amiable enough to tolerate but too distant to really care much for.

I like to paint and I like to take photographs. I know they are not the most rare of interests and I don’t pretend to be more talented than the amateur hobbiest or every modern sculpture I can recall, yet that doesn’t take the joy out of either. My love is not swayed regardless of how many share that love. Those who forsake the majority for its majority’s sake are fools. They are no more intelligent than the wind, carrying itself from high areas of concentration to low.

In the center of what was no longer my room was an upturned paint bucket. The sharp contrast from the street lamp outside made it impossible to judge the paint’s color. For all I know, it could have simply been black. It felt fitting enough.

I should have grabbed what little I had, thrown it over my shoulder and split. Jack left a red duffel bag, not my own but what appeared to be his only parting gift, outside the door. It certainly would have dulled the shock of being evicted, had I not expected it for some time. Like I said, I couldn’t pay the rent anyway. But I didn’t leave, at least not then. The day had been exhausting and my limbs were weak from lack of any supper, or for that matter, lunch. Instead of turning my back on yet another lost home, I shut the door behind me and sat down on the upturned bucket, burying my head in my hands.

The street light outside was blinding but there were no shades to block the brightness. There was nothing besides the dusty window and the empty, upturned paint bucket. And me, of course.

The morning had started as so many before it with the rise of the sun outside and the fading memories of the night’s dreams still swirling about behind my eyes. I yawned not like a waking lion but more as a waking cub, smacking my lips together to get rid of the terrible morning mouth everyone seems to awake with.

There was no shower nor bath in my apartment, so instead I went downstairs, changed into one of my five separate outfits I store in piles beside my mattress (there was no cot or bed, just a single mattress on the floor), washed my face with hand soap and ran water through my shaggy brown hair. I climbed back up the metal, clanging stairs again to my apartment, grabbed several cheap canvases splattered in paints and charcoals and ink, the previous day’s drunken masterpieces, and dragged my tired bones out the door, back down the stairs, and out to the harsh sunlight of outdoor life.

The docks are infested with others like me and unlike me and unlike any others I’ve met before, most of whom are struggling artists or beggars or the occasional street performer. I enjoy admiring some of the other painters and photographers who sell their works around me. All are poor, most are homeless, some are very talented, and all of them sell their art for prices low enough for even me to consider buying a photo or two. Once, a rich, professional painter bought the entire dock for an evening to exhibit his latest collection, where hundreds of people came and dozens paid thousands upon thousands for smudgy oils of nude women dancing with various animals. The visitors all called him a genius and a master and the artist seemed to believe just that. Personally, I think he just sucked at painting and was rich and egotistical enough to get away with it.

Reny is the closest vender to me. He sells black and white photographs of people on the beach, usually with an obvious piece of litter or trash somewhere in the shot. An observer once asked him what statement he was trying to make, and if all his photos were just snapshots of trash and scum. Reny’s response was of course, which is why all his pictures are of tourists. The man didn’t get it and walked away confusedly.

I think Reny might live either on or under the dock. Maybe even somewhere nearby on the beach. His hands were always wrapped in bandages, not thickly layered like a makeshift cast but seemed more like white gloves at first glance, giving his fingers freedom to move. And no matter how early I arrived or how late I stayed, he’d be sitting there, arms folded and hood raised over his dirty face, jeans caked with old mud, his pictures surrounding him like a cursed statuettes guarding an ancient mummy, bandages and all.

I liked Reny. He was funny but didn’t talk too much. I’ll miss him the most, I think, of all I’ve grown to know here in the past several months. The dock was nice, even though there was no covering and the sun would beat us down with its heavy rays, feeling as though it was pinning us to the hard, water-stained wood, and even though the smell of low tide would never leave your nose even after laying down in bed the next day. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize that perhaps it was the people that truly made the dock nice. People like Reny, not like those he captured in his camera, which I had never actually seen him with. Sometimes I wondered if he even owned one or if he was so in tune with the world around him he could take his senses and make them tangible and sell them for seventeen dollars apiece to fat tourists and the few locals who regularly visited us dockers.

I suppose I shouldn’t use “us” anymore, since it’s time for me to move on. I can’t, though. I’ve been sitting here, telling myself this is just the same as all the other times I’ve been kicked out, starting with my father kicking me out at the age of eighteen for not graduating college, or the millions of apartments and bars and public parks I’ve been shooed out like a common rodent. But the more I reassure myself it’s all the same, it comes to me harder and harder, like the accusatory flame of the sun above or the harsh reality of the street light beyond my, well, not mine anymore, but the window beside me. The voice is my head is screaming now, telling me it’s not the same. I won’t be able to live anywhere else. I love the dock, Reny, the other riff raff selling their artistic wares, all of it.

So, I haven’t moved yet. I may one day, when the light outside flickers and dies like a burnt out match. But not yet. The flesh around my bones has withered away in what was once my room but still I refuse to move on. These whitened bones still refuse to move and the artist in me refuses to die. I know one day Jack will sell the room to some other poor soul and he, too, will send me on my way. But until then, I doubt if I’ll ever get off of this bucket nor escape from the cruel light outside. I have no money, but that’s alright. I don’t worry about dying, artists like me are used to going without food. And it’s not like I have anywhere else I can go to.
A
fter all, I became an artist because I couldn’t pay my rent anyway.