Featherless Bipeds by Richard Scarsbrook Page B

Street. This is a place I avoided in high school, where the Bad Boys used to hang out to smoke, drink, and sell drugs in the shadows behind Faireville’s pleasant Victorian façade.
    A narrow storefront is wedged in at the end of the alley, between the backs of the bowling alley and the hardware store. The cement block exterior is splattered randomly with faded, cracking blobs of dried primary-coloured paint. In the single bay window beside the crooked wooden entrance door hangs a bright yellow sign that reads, in crazy hand-lettered purple paint:
    JACK-O’ S
O NE -W ORLD , N EW -A GE
C REATIVE S UPPLY S HOP
O PEN MOST EVENINGS
(P EACE, BROTHERS AND SISTERS !)
    I wonder if they have paintbrushes and paints? Bamboo chimes clunk and clank as I push the door open. The floorboards, which are splattered with a rainbow’s assortment of dried paint flecks, creak and groan as I make my way through the maze of half-assembled display cases, stacks of new canvases, opened shipping crates half-filled with tubes of oil paint of different colours, paint cans streaked with dried drippings, cylinders full of paint brushes, and a bookcase full of roach clips, bongs, and other drug paraphernalia. A small, hand-lettered sign above this particular display reads:
    FOR DECORATIONAL USE ONLY
(OF COURSE!)
    There are enormous abstract paintings hanging on all the walls: one resembles an enlargement of a blood-filled mosquito after hitting a car windshield, another appears like an extreme close-up of the guts of a green tobacco bug that’s been stomped by a hostile workboot, and a third looks like the remains of a watermelon dropped onto a sidewalk from a twentieth-floor balcony. The three paintings are respectively entitled Birthglory , Treedom , and Earthgasm , and the price tag affixed to each is One Hundred Thousand Dollars. Judging from the dilapidated state of the store, I assume that not many of this particular artist’s works have sold for anywhere near that price.
    â€œHello?” I call out. No answer. I walk behind the dust-covered cash register desk to a door with a sign that reads “STAFF ONLY”, and I knock. “Hello?” I call again. I can hear what sounds like Indian sitar music, accompanied by high-pitched chanting. I push the door open.
    The sitar music is blaring from a small stereo parked in the corner of the large cinder-block room. The strange vocalizing is coming from a man in paint-splattered overalls, who is suspended six feet off the floor from a bungee cord attached to a hook in the ceiling and looped through a rope around his waist. His eyes are closed tightly. He bounces slowly up and down on the stretchy cord, and as he levitates his voice rises to a shrill pitch, and drops to a gurgling sound like a drunk with the dry heaves. He sinks toward the floor again. His wild beard and mass of hair flies around as if alive. In one hand he holds the handle of a huge pail of blue paint, in the other an oversized paintbrush that he dunks into the bucket, then uses to fling paint randomly at a gigantic canvas spread out on the concrete floor.
    I clear my throat. He abruptly stops hurling paint, and his eyes snap open.
    â€œOhhhhhhh, yessssssss,” he says as he looks down at his handiwork, “Oh yes oh yes oh yes! Whalepassion! Whalepassion!”
    He plunks the paintbrush into the bucket, then reaches around with his free hand to release himself from the bungee cord. He lands on his feet just to one side of the huge canvas, but loses his balance, stumbles, and lands face down with a splat on one corner of the still glistening work.
    He lies motionless long enough to make me wonder if he has knocked himself out; then he peels his face away from the canvas, looks at the imprint in the thick paint, and rolls onto his back with his face cupped in his hands, crying, “Noooooo! No no no no no no no!”
    â€œUm, hello?” I say.
    He removes his hands from his face — one