The Best American Essays 2013 Read Online Free

crest of a blue jay, Jim wore his standard paint-spattered work shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. The room behind him was full of dense blue cigarette smoke that curled in the sunlight from the southern windows. He smelled strongly of turpentine and beer.
    “Jim,” I said, “we could hear you shouting all the way down the hall.”
    “Was I shouting?”
    “Yes. At the top of your lungs.”
    “Come in, man. I’ve got coffee.”
    Jim’s eight-by-ten, brick-walled studio was furnished with a small fridge and a card table with a coffeepot and a boom box on it. Nine years earlier he had fled his previous life as an L.A. salesman and migrated six hundred miles north to Eureka to start over as a painter at the age of thirty-eight. Stacked against and hanging from every wall were hundreds of his acrylic paintings, all of which he refused to sell or show. Jim’s style was postimpressionism: Matisse, Pissarro, Cézanne. He admired foremost those who had started late, such as the stockbroker-salesman Paul Gauguin and the wretched lunatic Vincent van Gogh. Though I was not qualified to judge Jim’s work, I would’ve liked to own his
Black Cattle Against Orange Moon at Dusk
or
Portrait of Camille Benoit Desmoulin’s Head in a Basket
.
    Though I had quit drinking and doing drugs the year before, I allowed myself the occasional consolation of a few cigarettes with Jim in his studio. I also planned one day to write a story about a fictional Jim jumping from the window to his posthumous fame. I poured myself a cup of coffee while he raged at the people on the street below, calling them “philistines” and “slobs.” It was unusual to find him in such a state so early.
    “Is everything all right?” I asked.
    “The sleepwalkers!” he bellowed like an animal in pain.
    “They’re going to call the police,” I said.
    “They’ll only be doing me a
favor!
” he shouted, sweeping his arm across the room, as if to indicate all the canvases he’d stretched that morning, the color-blobbed cardboard boxes he used for palettes, and the rows upon rows of acrylic paints in plastic squeeze bottles along the floor.
    There was no point in talking to him when he was this far gone. The shouting would soon run its course and be replaced by a desperate apprehension that he didn’t have long to live. I drank some coffee, shook a cigarette from Jim’s pack, and fell into one of two yellow velveteen swivel chairs, a smoldering pedestal ashtray between them, like a giant clam with indigestion.
    “I’m going to buy an albacore today,” I said, applying a flame to the tip of my cigarette.
    “The sycophants!” he snarled and then whirled from the window. “A what?”
    “An albacore tuna, down on the docks. They’re only a buck a pound. Do you want one?”
    “No, nah.” He waved in disdain and began to hunt for the cigarette he had just lit, his brow furrowed. “We need to get some more cigarettes.”
    Around one that afternoon Tarn McVie rapped lightly on Jim’s door and stepped into the room. In his mid-twenties, Tarn already had paintings in galleries across the country and routinely sold single works for sums that could’ve sustained me for an entire year. His gigantic oil canvases awed me, and one sticks in my mind to this day: an orange nude coming at you through the water, flash of white at the knee. In spite of his conventional training, European-museum background, postmodern leanings, and early success without apparent struggle, McVie was the sort of natural, congenial artist that Jim and I both longed to be. He was also one of the few painters who refused to sign the petition presently going around to remove Jim from the building.
    “Hello, men,” he said. “Hear the news?”
    “What news?” Jim said, teeth clamped down on his cigarette, another burning in the colossal ashtray between us.
    “Market crashed.”
    “What market?” I asked.
    “Stock market. Dow Jones fell over five hundred points,” he said. “Highest