GRAND TOUR

Dear P. B. Shelley, 
          I shouldn’t be writing you, in view of my misgivings about tradition—"grand" ones in particular. Three hundred years ago, it was customary in parts of Europe for a person—provided that person was male, of a certain class and means—to take a Grand Tour, trekking though Italy and France to fraternize with other aristocrats and experience firsthand the legacy of the Renaissance and classical antiquity. For many a post-Oxbridge gent, like yourself, a continental tour marked the culmination of his cultural education, but now? 
         Thanks to good fortune, I’ve beheld many tokens of "the legacy". I am a demonstrable heir, and yet I do not know, as a presumptuous agent of culture (an artist), how best to be beholden.
          Forgive me. I suspect you're sick to death of introspection. Please enjoy the enclosed paintings, wherein I impugn my good fortune. I hope the irony of my boasts isn't lost on you!

What Being a Painter's Painter Means to Me

          Visitors will find the airport happily navigable, walled with signage illustrating every unlikelihood in triangles of charming pictography. The baggage claim, however . . . the experience was as foreign to me as an arranged marriage and comparable in its sacrifice of individual control for what I can only hope is the broader social good. The thing everyone else obviously knows is that it's customary, here, to pack for someone else. Your luggage will never be returned, so thank you, no one, for the forewarning. 
          I suspect whomever's unpacking my paints and sketchbooks will not cherish my late smock or share my eye prescription. I also suspect, given this tradition of detatched packing, the vogue is unisex, one-size-fits-all, charcoal and khaki colors commonplace—not so, it turns out.

The (Not So) Secret of My Success

          My nylon duffel bag originates from a radiology conference, or so its snazzy embroidery would suggest. Inside are random toiletries, a toddler outfit, keys (why?), a recharging station with voltage adapter (thank you!), a too-small biker jacket coursed with zippers, a silver medal from the London Olympics, and a hodgepodge of other clothes.  I end up in a sundress and the silver medal but insist that my reader suspends judgement until after sufficient meditation can be had on what it means that everyone wears the random outfits of another's opting, irrespective of age, shape, sex, size, or weather (not that it gets cold, here).
          Once dressed, I'm congratulated everywhere I go and constantly asked for autographs. I would oblige, but there's no pen among my impersonal effects. My radiologist was not a jotter. 

How I Nightly Slay the Avant-Garde

          There’s an ATM a toll road away on the other side of the island, the way milk is the antipode of supermarket doors. I marvel at how clean everything appears, even the infrastructure has new-car smell.
          Turning out the nylon bag in search of money, I arrange and rearrange the same pile of clothes like a prospector panning a kiddie pool for gold. A passerby asks about the biker jacket. "Its not going to fit me," I say, indulging the request. More follow, requesting other items strewn upon the sidewalk. "Take it. Take it," I say. Until a parking attendant leaves a car door open and says, "Here're your keys back, Champ." 
          I explain my situation from the driver's seat, about the ATM on the paid periphery of the toll road. "Wait, am I supposed to tip you?" The attendant responds smiling, "Your money's no good here, Champ."

Why My Paintings Are So Lifelike

          I fasten the seatbelt and adjust my seat, optimizing the space between my legs and the steering column, add an extra click to the headrest, and assay the equilibrium of my recline. Sensing heat, I turn off the seat warmers, change the units from Fahrenheit to Celsius, and enter my desired temperature, fan strength, and flow configuration. I marshal air vents like battalions on a field, unfastening my seatbelt to reach the extreme passenger side. I refasten the seatbelt and glimpse myself in the rearview mirror, which I adjust. Between the toggle of side mirrors, I inspect the instrument panel and power the onboard navigation and infotainment. Select language (English). Units (metric). I raise the steering wheel a tick and readjust my seat. Is it warm in here? A disembodied voice inside the car keeps prompting me to enter a destination.

My Life as a Reluctant Paragon

          While there's no local word for the English, allegory, there's a loan word (pronounced the same) that means you've done something, so long as someone else was there to watch when you did nothing, as in: "Last Wednesday had congealed last Monday's paint palette, by now a diminutive range of dust-capped peaks, varicolored and wasteful. Sylvanus's mouth was dry from staring.
          He woke that morning, like most mornings, just in time to watch his paintings put on makeup and leave for work. He'll be asleep when they return, when the paintings remove their makeup and ready for bed.
          Alone, dreaming, Sylvanus wonders if his paintings sleep. During the day he wonders, alone, if his painting are the same paintings as the day before, staring at nothing and doing less than allegory." 

How to Accept a Seven-Figure Commission

          In fact, many local concepts diverge, like allegory, from their usual understanding. So believe me when I say: They still tell stories of my fathers, who vacationed here as young men, impregnating all-you-can-eat buffets.
          I arrive at the hotel, and sign my name (THE END) in the registry with bravura typically succeeded by silver-screen credits. The concierge says, "Welcome home!" to everyone, while I review the hierarchy of suites: Imperial, Royal, Presidential, Princely, Ducal, Baronial, C-Level Managerial, Rabbinical, Ministerial, Diplomatic, Gentrifying Liberal. 
          Atomizers in the lobby wheeze cologne, which I'm told is available for purchase in the gift shop. Good to know. 
          "Surely, they're not all prostitutes," remarks a honeymooner.

My Difficulties As a Muse to Many

          In certain parts of the world, every other person is a descendant of Gengis Khan, whereas I suspect Gauguin is the arch-progenitor of this cantina. Drunken preteens climb lemon trees and hollow palms that run extension cords to the juke lights. Their bodies, spangled with tan lines, glisten with cane syrup, with unction, while at my table's edge, a peacock waits for scraps in a puddle of amethyst.
          You can tell the natives by their vests and bow ties; how they count celery stirrers on the placemats to calculate the arc of breakfast's bloody mary experiments; the glow of pride anytime someone buys bottled water to brew coffee or brush teeth. 
          Listening to the slurping sink, the gulping bath, the chugging drains of aftermath, I reflect upon the inelegance of poor ice sculpture. 

Why My Paintings Are So Clever

          The sun, between the pristine beach and sherbet clouds, below the thinnest unit of crescent moon and the full stop twinkle of Venus, eclipses itself upon my retinas in blue brown bursts. Keep looking. The electric afterimagery pulsates in ultramaritime. Keep looking, keep mistaking my umbrellaed vantage for violence in a remote hemisphere, for the foreplay of a tidal wave, for the onomatopoetry of a machete. 
          While obvious in retrospect, I couldn't fathom at the time how I managed to knock over an ashtray full of coins, yet for the rest of the night I fumbled though the sand, sifting shilling from sataang, penny from peso, searching the residually warm layer of top sand, exhuming colder, moister strata, and still deeper: to the necropolis of mollusks. The next morning I  awoke with a terrible beachcombover.          (Groan)

Places in the Dictionary Where I'm Portrayed

          Someone is knocking at the door. A few someones? I can’t discern what’s being said but hear my name, then the chirp of an accepted keycard. I recognize the concierge from the lobby. The other two are dressed in identical blazers—lilac banded in metallic mint. Their manner is apologetic to a point and, thereafter, emphatically official.
          The shorter of the two opens an oversized portfolio and reads aloud, while the other brandishes a pair of scissors. I don’t understand the decree, but the dialect sounds how I imagine backmasked doowop would. The decree concludes, as the scissor bearer approaches. She holds the silver medal from my chest and snips the ribbon. I'd been stripped. 
          Would anyone believe me back home? Olympic medal-stripping scissors and Grand Opening ribbon-cutting scissors are the same!

Whereas My Opinions Are Artifacts 

          That museum with the painting everyone likes, the one behind bulletproof glass, is a short drive from the hotel, but the admissions line snakes through the hotel parking lot and into the lobby, up flights of stairs and to the foot of my bed. Did I mention the cosmetics bag within the duffel? The one with the pistol inside?
          The line doesn't move, and I wonder: What's the holdup? So I walk parallel the throng, waved on by docents because I'm inspecting the line itself and not the painting at its end, when I see it: the holdup. She's clad in my former smock, refusing to budge. 
          "Be advised we have an active viewer."          (Groan)
          And suddenly, I'm the answer to my own question: Why would a painting need a human shield?

Epilogue: Sylvanus Incarnate

          You may find this funny, and it is, somewhat, laughable how I spent my life-savings on that vacation. I'm at work now, doing exactly what I did before. I've read that each time you remember an event you overwrite the original memory with the remembered one (wasn't I on an illiterate beach when I first contracted this factoid, this trivia that trivializes like a Midas curse?). 
          And what of my many grand experiences? What has become of the spectral episodes of this higher-order tourist? Unknown. Are they wholly sublimated or do they merely fail to manifest? Could I ask the same of my despondence? Probably not. Debtors call so often I can barely do my job, but what else is there? What else is there for a disgraced Olympian to do but work? Answer the calls and work. Answer the call. Work.