One might expect that Buddy had spent a lifetime in this combined studio and home, but in fact he and our man Evans had only finished university sixteen months before. Buddy has only been in this particular fourth floor apartment for thirteen months. The rate at which art and its required debris pile up can boggle the mind.

Our man turns up on Buddy's doorstep two days after his impromptu date with the art journalist Carrie, and his head is still a jumble. Evans buzzes and Buddy buzzes him in, and minutes later Buddy is clearing a space on the couch for Evans to sit down.

"Well?" Buddy says, retreating to the kitchen corner. "What happened? How did it go?"

"What?"

Buddy pulls two bags out of a package marked "200 Tea Bags" and drops them into chipped cups. "You went out with Carrie, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Um. It was a bit of a mess."

"Really? I thought you two hit it off."

Evans pulls out his cigarette pack and looks around the room. Buddy doesn't smoke, but Evans was hoping there would be an ashtray out anyway. It seemed like everything else was out in the room.

"Yeah," he says. "We hit it off. I don't know. Too well, maybe. We ended up going back to her place and doing it. It didn't go well."

Buddy looks at him from the kitchen corner. "What do you mean, it didn't go well?"

Our man shrugs. "I don't know. I wasn't up for it."

Buddy brings over two cups of tea and sets them down on top of a stack of magazines on the coffee table, pulls up a old wooden chair with green paint peeling off and sits down. "What, you donĄŻt think she's hot?"

Evans shrugs. "Sure she's hot. I'm too screwed up for it right now. I'm still a mess from taking off on Trish. Carrie wanted to go to bed and I didn't want her to think I didn't want to, so I went and couldnĄŻt really get it going. I don't know. I guess I'm too sensitive or something."

"No, I get it," Buddy says. "It's like someone brings you this awesome food when you've got a sick stomach. You know you won't enjoy it, but you eat it because they brought it for you."

Our man blows on his tea. "Yeah. It's like that, I guess." He looks at one of the canvases. It has a thick, textured background of gobby blue-green. In the foreground is a silhouette in deep red, maybe of a sailing ship without detail. The whole painting has the slick sheen of wet paint.

"What are you going to do?" Buddy says, sipping his tea.

"I don't know. I feel too embarrassed to talk to her know. I like her and all, but what's the point, right?"

"Okay. But what are you going to do with yourself? You can't just sit and do nothing all the time."

Evans does not respond.

"Okay, how's this?" Buddy says. "You get yourself a bunch of groceries and like, and ounce of pot, and you just stay in the house smoking and meditating until you see what you actually want to do. Not like, what you should do next right now, but what you actually want to do with yourself. You know?"

A rare smile spreads across Evans' face. "Do the perma-bake? No, I've done the perma-bake before it's no good. You remember when I had that apartment with Kevin and Christie in second year? We had that girl Jen move in and she was selling pot out of the apartment? We didn't think it was cool, so to keep us quiet she just gave us free pot. We just turned the place into a total hot box for like, two weeks. We were doing wake-and-bakes, smoking between classes, smoking all night. Too much man, just crazy."

"I didn't think you smoked that much."

Evans laughs. "Yeah, usually I don't, but this chick was letting us have it, so we just took advantage. It was like, I was so constantly baked that I thought IĄŻd changed. Like I could see how the world really worked, like I could see the truth about everything. Like I could see through everything, including myself and everyone else."

"Sounds cool."

The smile disappears. "No, not at all. It was really dark. I could see this truth, but it was really grim and unsatisfying. Just hanging out getting high was fun, but it was too much. It brought us all down."

"So what happened?"

Evans sips his tea. "Jen stopped coming back to the apartment and we ran out of pot. We were all too cheap and broke to actually buy any, so that was it. I never really asked Jen why she stopped coming. I figure we were smoking up all her profits, so she started staying somewhere else. We didn't care. She paid her rent for the whole semester up front."

The two young men sit in silence and sip tea for a while. Buddy doesn't know what else to do for his friend; his first and only idea for cheering up his friend was to try and help him get laid. Having done that and finding that it failed to bring Evans out of his funk, Buddy is at a loss of what else to do. Evans, for his part, has no idea at all what he should do.

"Do you remember Thomas?" Buddy asks Evans. "No? He was at The Hornet last week. Maybe you didn't talk to him. He's got a blue Mohawk? Well anyway, he's got a sculpture show opening at a little place tonight. I was going to head down there later. Do you want to go?"

"Is there anything else we could do?"

Buddy shrugs. "I guess we could hang out here and drink some beers."

Evans thinks for a moment. "No, let's go to the show. I want to look at some sculptures."

"Sure. We can hang out with the artists and make fun of them behind their backs."

"Aren't you an artist?" Evans asks.

"No," Buddy says, taking his cup to the kitchen. "I'm an art school graduate, but I'm not an artist. I'm a customer contact representative for a major bank."

"Right. Phone monkey. It's funny," Evans says, gesturing around the room. "It looks like an artist lives here."

"No. A quitter lives here."

* *

In time, Evans and Buddy free themselves from Buddy's apartment and start walking to the gallery where Thomas' work is being displayed. Buddy hangs out with a lot of guys like Thomas, artists at the bottom of the food chain, working or not working, trying to create careers for themselves out of the ether or no longer bothering but still hanging onto the scene, trying to prolong the good times of their school years. Obviously Buddy falls into the latter group. He thinks he has seen through the illusions and delusions of the artist life, but he still like drinking with art kids and talking shit.

Have we discussed what program Evans pursued in university? If we haven't, it's because it isn't important. What is important is that he chose the program in first year, thought it was the only field worthy of study in second year, buried himself in it in third year and thought it really doesn't make much of a difference at all by fourth year. He finished, but doesn't really give a damn about it now.

Our man Evans allows Buddy to lead him to the edge of the garment district and to the door of a brown brick warehouse building. There is a placard on the street directing people to join Thomas on the fourth floor for the opening reception of his art show in such-a-such gallery. Evan and Buddy walk in through the open doors, find the elevator out of service and begin climbing stairs.