Scumbler
A joyous novel of art, love, and one man’s unquenchable thirst for life, from one of America’s best loved authors.Sixty-year-old American painter Scumbler (‘Scum’ to his friends) makes a living by creating rentable apartments out of the most unlikely Parisian spaces. He spends his days jaunting around the Left Bank in Paris, stopping regularly to paint, and revelling in the art of creation and the remarkable characters he meets along the way: students, prostitutes, and craftsmen, like him. At night he returns to his wife and children. He is an undeniable success. He should be happy.And yet, Scumbler is pestered by the unavoidable symptoms of his age: the grey hair, the aches, the increasing waistline. Scumbler knows he must face up to the fact of his mortality, but he is adamant about doing so in his own inimitable way.
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WILLIAM WHARTON
Scumbler
Acquiescence, Wishes …
Dreams
Why? Why?
‘cause I’m
Gonna die.
That’s why.
SCUMBLING: to modify the effect of a painting by overlaying parts of it with a thin application of opaque or semi-opaque color.
– American College Dictionary
Table of Contents
1
The Rats’ Nester
Right now, here in Paris, we have seven different nests. That’s not counting our old water mill, two hundred miles from Paris. I spend half my time rousting out, fixing up, furnishing these nesting places.
Rats’ nesting’s what it all is; can’t seem to keep myself from burrowing, digging in; always stuffing bits and pieces into one corner or another.
Even before we snuck away from California, we had four nests and forty acres; not a single one of those places there you’d call a real home: a trailer dug into the side of a hill, a tent nestled against a cave, then the shack on top of a hill we called home before it burned down. There was also that place I built with rock and cement at the edge of a streambed in a gully up on the forty.
We furnished all those nests complete to knives and forks; every one a hideout, places we could run to if things got too bad; holes where we could go to ground, wait it out, hide from the crazy ones, learn to like radioactive eggs, a purple sun over green skies, a stinking stagnating dead world.
A family man’s got to think ahead these days, especially someone like me, living on the outside, ex-con, a man who had his first nest – wife, two little ones, house, everything – snatched out from under him. I’m always looking for someplace for us to hide.
In California I cadged stuff from the Salvation Army, junk shops. Here in Paris I haunt flea markets; sometimes I can fix up a whole hideout for less than fifty bucks.
A MAN FOR A WOMAN. EACH TO EACH
OTHER: MOTHERING FATHER.
FATHERING MOTHER.
We’ve been living in Paris more than twenty years now; I’m not sure why anymore; maybe I’m a new kind of bum, rats’-nest bum. Every New Year’s morning, I check with the family, ask if they want to go back.
No, they like to stay, like being aliens.
I still think of myself as a serious artist, paint hard and heavy when I’m not caught up in nesting fevers, father juices.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about masterpieces, museums; used to dream that war; just don’t care so hard anymore. When the end gets closer, those kinds of crazy ideas don’t mean much; everything gets sucked into the painting itself.
ONE LEG OF A ZIGZAG, MY LIFE
TACKS WINDWARD WITHOUT A LUFF.
I like to rent out our Paris hideouts to last-ditch people: students and artist types, end-of-the-line people; they appreciate my hiding places, feel safe.
One of these nests is in a quarter behind the Bastille. This part was supposed to be torn down fifty years ago. I’m nibbling around over there one day, looking for something to paint, something to fix up, something, anything; helping me delude myself into believing life makes some kind of sense, any kind.
I’m on my Honda motorcycle. I traded a painting for this Honda seven years ago; it’s over ten years old now and has 160 cubic centimeters displacement with around 75 cubic centimeters of power left. About like me: plugging up, wearing thin, metal-mental fatigue, general sludgishness.
I have my box and canvas strapped on my back, they rest on the carrier. Sometimes I paint sitting ass-backwards, straddling the bike, with feet jammed on the foot pegs. At my age, the back can’t take much stand-up painting without stiffening. If the back goes, I can’t get out of bed in the mornings; need Kate, my wife, to give me a push up, just to get going, moving.
I’m scumbling, stippling around, in and out courtyards, all crowded with wooden sheds and shacks. They’re piled tight, holding each other up. I’m ass deep in broken windows, old wet mattresses, sacks and boxes of garbage – everything smelling of mold. Rats are playing in the garbage. I’m feeling at home, in my natural place, delayed decay, festering under gray Paris skies.
There’s a marble workshop in back of a court, beautiful pieces of cut marble, sliced like cheese for tabletops to make French-ugly-type furniture.
On top of the other smells is cut-wood smell, sawdust, greased tools. This is a furniture-making part of town, gradually going downhill, out of business. Factories are making modern, glue-together furniture – cheap, throwaway stuff, nobody gets bored. Change your furniture with your husbands, wives; hard come, easy go; the new life.
I stop and get talking with a great older guy – older than me, even. He’s wearing a gray denim cap and could pass for Khrushchev, the Soviet shoe banger. He’s built like a four-poster fire plug. I wrestle the motorcycle onto its stand and follow him into his shop. He has a mattress business, makes mattresses from the wire up. I love seeing this kind of thing, helps me enjoy sleeping in a bed.
