A Pinch of Ooh La La Read Online Free

an artist myself and not nearly as talented as my musically and artistically inclined siblings, but Bendrix and I had earned a name for ourselves back in high school as graffiti artists. We were serious enough that we were getting commissioned gigs by the time wewere seniors. (Oh, how I was tempted at times to tell people that the one and only Dr. Bendrix Henderson was once known as Benz to the graffiti world.)
    Bendrix had felt even more trapped in high school than I had and was always coming up with oddball ideas: “Let’s go to a hockey game!” “Hockey? Who goes to hockey? We live in Oakland.” Or, “Let’s go see Pearl Jam!” “They’re in town? Where are they playing?” “Oregon! We could take the train!”
    He’d been going through some of my art books one night (I was obsessed with graffiti art back then, especially that of Barry McGee and Shepard Fairey), and he looked up from one of the books and suggested that we find an abandoned building and make graffiti art just as easily as you might say,
We should take a walk
. I was hardly paying attention because I was struggling through my algebra homework. Bendrix had been whisked off to gifted and Advanced Placement classes two weeks into freshman year and was already taking trig, but math remained my nemesis. “What do you think?” he asked.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œAre you listening?”
    I tried the formula I was working on for the millionth time.
X minus Y . . .
“Yeah. Graffiti. God, I hate algebra. Who cares about Y? I hate Y. I hate Z. I hate all these stupid formulas. And why are we using letters with math?”
    At this point Bendrix sighed, climbed down from my bed, and grabbed my book. “Here, child.” He took my pencil and began marking up my page like Zorro signing his signature with masked flair. “There.”
    I stared at the answer.
    â€œNow will you pay attention?”
    Neither Bendrix nor I could really draw, per se, so we made abstract portraits of our favorite artists instead. Van Gogh ridinga skateboard. Paul Klee bungee jumping. Or we’d spray-paint a poem or haiku.
    Daddy was big on three rules: Be honest, be yourself, and stay out of jail. So when I told him I wanted to try my hand at graffiti art, he made me promise to make my mark only on abandoned buildings and freight trains—as if we knew where to find a freight train. Our odd creations caught on, and at the height of our “fame” an indie rock band took a picture of one of our designs and used it on the cover of their CD. Later, the owner of a skateboard shop in Alameda asked us to come out and paint the side of his building. Thanks to those early years in high school, I hadn’t merely
studied
art like my colleagues in grad school; I’d also created it. I’d learned in some small way what it was like to feel a creative spark, to experience the aliveness and elation that come from creativity.
    All this is to say, while I wasn’t model gorgeous like the women Avery usually dated, I was able to meet him in a place other women couldn’t—that place where we could spend hours on end at MOMA gazing at a piece of art or sitting at a café discussing favorite artists and evaluating their work. I also introduced him to artists he’d never heard of, mostly female, who were ignored in academe and the art world. I knew a bit more about art criticism and history than he did, only because he was mostly self-taught. He once told me he thought one of the sexiest things about me was my love and knowledge of art. He proposed a year after we met while we were traveling together in Italy.
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    L ike Pollock and his alcoholism, Frida and that pole (!), van Gogh and that ear (!), Avery also came with the requisite Artist’s Story, his involving a drug-addicted mother and a series of foster parents. It also didn’t hurt that