The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom Read Online Free

assholes tended toward “go fuck yourself,” I needed this particular asshole get my senior portfolio accepted, and hence to graduate.
    â€œWhat is it you want?” he’d asked, earlier, at his studio, after taking one look at my studies of the telephone, pronouncing them “horseshit,” and lighting a cigarette. The man smoked like a chimney, and the studio attached to his house was tiny (which was weird, because he was so famous), so the place was always hazy with smoke.
    â€œI want to be an artist.” He didn’t know what a big deal it was for me to say that out loud. People from my background didn’t become artists. They were considered wildly successful if they got steady jobs dealing cards at the casino or working at the gas station. The fact that I had gone to college at all, much less to an elite liberal arts school in a posh Massachusetts town eight hundred miles from home, was almost unheard of. So what I should have done to fulfill the whole “poor boy made good” thing was to pursue an actual career, something lucrative. Like a doctor or a lawyer. But, hey, I figured I was already used to being poor, so art it was.
    â€œWhat you have here”—with a flick of his wrist, he brushed my paintings and drawings off the table they’d been spread out on—“are some pictures. What you have shown me so far this year is that you are a person who makes pictures. You are not an artist.”
    I swallowed my frustration. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
    â€œYes, you do. Your entrance portfolio was better than this shit.  That  stuff was why I agreed to take you on. There was a spark in that work. Feeling.”
    He was talking about the works I had submitted to be accepted to Allenhurst as an art major. And they weren’t better. They were amateurish and naïve, and, nearly four years later, I was embarrassed by them. I had learned so much in my classes, had my eyes opened to technique and to the canon. It was why I endured the preppy cult-fest that was Allenhurst College. Why I killed myself getting A’s and logging twice the amount of studio time I needed to. Why I shut out everyone and everything that wasn’t getting me closer to my goal. Because I was getting better . Not good enough, I feared, but better. But Curry hadn’t even glanced at that phone cord that had given me so much trouble.
    â€œThe assignment was to depict a mundane object,” I said, wondering why I was bothering to argue. Experience had taught me that arguing with my so-called mentor never yielded anything but aggravation. “I don’t know how much feeling a telephone can generate.” For some reason, my mind had flashed back to all those phone messages from Jenny on my door. Maybe I should have drawn those little pink slips of paper—they had irritated the hell out of me. That was a feeling, right?
    Curry stood. “We’re done.”
    I had taken two buses to get into the city to meet him and missed a much-needed shift at the pub. And he had spent five minutes with me—and less than thirty seconds of that looking at my work. As the weeks slipped by and June drew closer, I was worrying more and more about my fate. The senior portfolio was supposed to be a big work, or a collection of smaller works, that functioned as an emblem of what the about-to-graduate student had learned. Our mentors and faculty advisors would jointly review and grade our efforts. It was the first week of April, and Curry and I hadn’t even started talking about the actual portfolio. He just kept making me do these bullshit exercises and then tearing them down.
    But I had been too proud to push him on it. To stand in front of him and say, “But what about my grades? What about not flunking out of college?”
    That was the kind of thing Rainbow Brite would do. She would push and push and push until she got what she wanted. I was not