Collective

Around the last bend, the streaks of dark trees opened to a grassy field, whose swelling hills exposed the shape of the land without obstructing the sun on its horizon. At the end of the road, a faded red barn caught the light as Frank rolled up to the driveway. Johnny with his long hair and half-zipped blue coveralls smoked a cigarette and stretched a piece of canvas over a wooden frame. He shouted, “Hey man!”

Something fell inside and Ben raced out the door to greet him first—Johnny squinted the smoke out of his eyes and kept pulling at the blank material. After a hug, Ben returned for a growler of amber ale and brought it to the porch, whose weathered slats curled up to the sky. He and Frank drank from tin mugs and picked up where their last email correspondence left off: the price of rent, the reason Ben and Johnny lost their security deposit in the City (wear and tear, shitty landlord), the themes of the last piece Frank sent him, and if Ben had finished his demo (not yet). Soon, Johnny completed his canvas and joined them. The three of them talked and drank until the cicadas tried to drown them out. Frank looked up at the chipped paint on the barn in the half-light and said all this was too easy to romanticize for a sentimentalist like him. They were starving artists, but not in any true sense—Johnny might have been cut off from his father, “the Senator,” but Ben had his fingers on the heart and purse strings of his real-estate mogul mother. That night, Frank theorized about the significance of an old barn in the collective consciousness, which was his chief concern in those days. What once was a sign of a healthy farm—a home for animals, storage for crops—now represented the decay of that very concept in modern life.

That prompted Johnny to show Frank his paintings. He pounded nails into the exterior of the barn and set up a series of flashlights. Tell me your thoughts, Johnny said. Frank admired how much effort went into defying symbols in each, the way each color and shape inferred something about the color and shape of those surrounding it. They had a way of coming up again throughout the painting without feeling like a strict pattern, implying both form and its absence. Ben pointed out a color that needed to be changed. They argued about it for ten minutes. Finally, Johnny agreed. Ben went in to find another pack of cigarettes, and Johnny said, “He knows good art, man. He’s got the best eye of anyone I know.”

After the viewing, they finally showed Frank to his room. It wasn’t so much a room as it was the space between the two lofts, separated from the kitchen by a single y-beam. And much like that architectural support, Frank would bridge the gap between Johnny and Ben during the time he lived there. If the two were fighting about the dirty dishes or a pack of smoked cigarettes, Frank's mere presence put them at ease. And often Frank would tell one what the other didn’t know how to say. For instance, to Johnny: “Ben's so invested in you. He loves you, man.”

The art collective was Frank's dream. He envisioned a commune with all kinds of artists, their ideas cross-pollinating across genres. From the porch, he’d point out where they’d put the music studio, a stage, a greenhouse, a vineyard maybe. All our families could live there, Johnny said. Ben told them he was working up a proposal for his mom to buy the barn and its lot and let them all live on it. He posted a list on the wall with the names he’d invite as members of the collective. “The beauty of it is,” Johnny said, picking one of his long hairs out of his eye in the mirror, “whoever makes it big brings notoriety to the whole gang.”

In the fall, Ben put his musical aspirations on hold and landed a job for an art dealer in the City. Every morning, he’d strap one of Johnny's paintings to his back and motorcycle in. He’d show them to galleries and dealer contacts before and after work, even during his lunch period. At night, he’d come back and tell Johnny why they wouldn’t take the work. “Don’t get upset,” Ben told him, “We’ll get there eventually.” Still, Johnny would often get drunk, accidentally break things (the faucet, toilet cover, coat hooks), and leave a voice message for ‘the Senator.’ As a form of protest, he changed his style entirely. He'd take all the things he’d broken, plus nails, wires, and cigarette butts, and affix them to his canvases. He painted a beam that had fallen off the roof, which Ben refused to bring. Johnny refused to pour him any coffee. “You’re off my coffee list,” he said. After Ben left, a dead-eyed Johnny held the wood up, “It’s the hottest new thing made by Pratt’s most celebrated drop-out.”

The next weekend, Frank received a copy of his very first publication. Ben bought a case of old Bordeaux, rented a car, and drove six friends of theirs from the City to the barn to have a reading party. They were all drunk by the time Frank started his reading and even more so when he finished. Everyone clapped, except for red-lipped Ben, who yelled, “You didn’t add my line!” Johnny took him outside for a smoke to set him straight. When someone went to check on them, they were arguing about whether or not Johnny could ask Ben's high school friend out on a date.

Frank didn’t mind, though. He was having a transcendental experience with Ben's work friend, Kassie. She was a trip, man, leading him on thought experiments, highlighting her Buddhist studies, showing him meditation tricks. By the end of the night, they were performing boko-maru with each other, and only slightly as a joke. Ben walked in on them rubbing the souls of the feet together in his room. “What the fuck are you guys doing with your socks off?”

“He’s just mad he’s not leading the orgy,” Johnny joked from the first floor.

By the end of the month, Frank and Kassie weren’t doing fake sacred rituals. They were doing yoga in the park. He was writing poetry for her he wouldn’t show anyone else and had a notebook devoted to her interesting thoughts. “I find myself not caring what anyone else thinks,” he told Johnny as they watched the dust of Ben's motorcycle coming up the driveway.

“Love is groovy.”

It wasn’t all groovy. In March, Kassie complained that she was nauseous for a week straight. Then came the positive pregnancy test. Her family wasn’t so free-thinking as her, but believed the Lord Jesus would certainly forgive them and they could too if they married and moved in together. She said, “They’ll cut me off if we don’t.”

It was the first of many disillusionments that separated Frank from himself. At City Hall, the only people on his side were his parents and Ben. Frank cut his hair and got a job writing about a technology that organized massive amounts of mysterious data into actionable insights for businesses. He moved onto a narrow street in Fairfield, Connecticut with a small yard behind the white picket fence he never wanted. Every square foot of their apartment was filled with a not particularly inspired piece of art. And most nights, he’d fall asleep on the floor next to the crib and dream about the wide-open spaces outside the barn.

Over the next two years, he saw Johnny's luck turn around. His work was profiled by a local newspaper, then a Brooklyn arts magazine. He sold a few paintings for $2,500 apiece. Long gone was the trash phase. He’d moved on to scenes of life in the barn, portraits of himself in the mirror, everyday things like that. He was quoted as saying, “I wanted people to recognize me in the work.”

When Frank and Kassie finally visited the next fall, the barn had fallen into disrepair and a trio of recent art school graduates with bowl cuts and coke addictions had moved in. Ben did a bump off one of their fingers and said to Frank, “This is it, man. We’re doing the collective.” Frank turned down his turn and looked at the walls. The art covered up the mold. It looked like the inside of a lunatic’s mind, but Frank kept the thought to himself. Behind the barn, Johnny gave Kassie a private art viewing, just like he had done for Frank all those years ago, who extricated himself from a conversation with Ben to come around back to see them too. Rather than ask her opinion, Johnny fell to his knees. He put his hands on her legs and hammed it up, “Please, bless my work. Tell me it’s good! If you think it is, then it is!” His hand slid up like he was creating a new canvas. He held her hand above his head like she were a queen and kissed it over and over again. She said she couldn’t say and laughed nervously.

He jumped to his feet and painted hastily over his old piece, “I must continue to toil away for your approval!”

“That one’s sold, you fucking idiot!” yelled Ben, who had come around the house to see what he was missing out on. Johnny tossed an open can of paint at Ben. He told him how much the shoes he just ruined cost.

“Yes, boss! Sorry boss! Let me lick off your shoes!” Johnny was lost in his own hysterics and disappeared around the edge of the barn.

“It should have just been you and me here,” Ben confided to Frank. “I should have known. We lost the entire deposit because he’d fucking take a random pill and think the place was a demolition derby.”

The three of them sat down in the grass and smoked. Ben told them about his growing number of clients, the new talent he was attracting, and how big Johnny's head had gotten. According to Ben, the problem was Johnny didn’t see how much he needed him. “It’s all my friends and all their money. They buy it because I tell them to buy it. It’s an alternative investment for—”

Something shattered in the house. One of the new artists came out to inform them that Johnny had ripped the mirror off the wall. He was painting the wall with blood from one of his nicks.

Frank and Kassie separated later that year. Out of everything facing a poorly matched, young couple with a kid, she said she needed someone who would stand up for her. She took all the furniture (her family had supplied it all) and the decor except for the piece that Johnny had sent on Ben's back for their wedding. The first night alone in the apartment, Frank drank a couple cheap red wines and carved up the canvas with the corkscrew.

Years later, Frank took a day trip upstate to hike a path that began on the side of a wooded highway. He only realized how close he was to the old place when he reached the clearing. Ben and Johnny had long since moved out to their own separate places in the City, but the latent sentimentalist in Frank had to see it again. It was about a mile to its corner of the field—three-quarters of the way there, he realized it had been torn down. He decided he wouldn’t rifle through the grass for its remnants. Instead, he returned to the path and wondered if they’d all learned how to live in a place without breaking it.

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