By R. Hutcheson    

     I should start out this story by explaining that I became a fine artist by lying in a college alumni newsletter. I had been happily fibbing away for years in this little newsletter that told of the goings on of all past theater majors at Western Michigan University. I had been reporting that I had been painting gigantic sideshow banners for some of the biggest carnival freak-show acts in the business. (This was an obvious lie, freak shows don't travel with circuses and carnivals anymore, they just put them on television as the reality shows.)

I had been working on this commission painting for these friends of mine, Stan and Sandy. It was a painting of their dog and cat. Suddenly in the middle of doing the painting their dog up and dies. Now this is unexpected and not a good development. Now I had a tribute painting on my hands. This is a type of painting in which the person requesting it is deeply attached emotionally to the subject. Tribute paintings are a whole other ball of wax—much tougher to handle, because if they don’t like the painting when it is done, you have upset people who don’t like you anymore, and then they do this trick of not buying the painting.

So I was trying to get that handled and done before it had a chance to blow up in my face, when these two girls call me at the studio. My wife, Rachel, had met these two at our art booth at the Hollywood Market the day before, when I was off buying us lunch. They were college co-ed types, only Hollywood style. The girls wanted to buy this one painting they saw at my booth. It was a painting I had made of a little rat that was dressed like a certain young girl rock singer, and the little rat was taking a little pee on a ball that looked as if it might be the planet earth. It said "Welcome to Hollywood" on it. It was controversial—some people thought that I was saying that the young girl singer was a rat, and others were saying that I was saying that Hollywood made you break your own moral codes in order to succeed, and others thought that I was saying that the society was so degraded that it the people in it wanted to be treated poorly; that the whole race was dropping down into a muddy pit of sadomasochism and body worship.

I have found that I make more money selling paintings if I never comment on these types of things, so I am not picking a side on that debate. If you ever see the painting you can make up your own mind.

I arranged with the girls to go over to their place the next night and drop off the painting, since I was already going to be nearby to meet the people with the dead dog and give them their painting. I was also supposed to go over to my friend Maripat Donovan’s house to talk to her about doing a painting of a stray cat that lives under her house. Maripat is the author, producer and star of Late Night Catechism, the hilarious play that’s been running continuously all over the world for the last 12 years.

Now the big night had arrived. I had to drop off two paintings and hopefully get another commission. And it was all going to happen in a little one-mile-square area that the world knows as Hollywood.

I met Stan and Sandy at a restaurant with the finished dog-and-cat painting. Now usually when you show someone your painting of them or their pet or their house and they start crying loudly, that is a good indication that you should sprint to your car and take off, but in this case it ended up being because they loved the painting, so all was well.

(Later on they told me that when they took the painting home and hung it on their wall the cat would walk up to it and just stare at it. And then he would turn and hiss at them and walk away. They weren’t sure if the cat was pissed that the dog was dead, or if the cat thought that they had taken the dog and made it two dimensional, or if the cat was just pissed off because he was a cat. But I figure it is pretty good to get any kind of reaction out of a cat for a painting, even if it is hissing.)

Stan and Sandy paid me, and I headed over to Maripat’s. Maripat lives in a compound with houses and studios and out-buildings and tenants and a heated swimming pool and gardens and wooden privacy fences and the whole works. It’s right near the famous Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles Restaurant.

So I walk through the gate and I’m in the beautiful yard with the holiday lights and tiki lamps, but I don’t see anybody. I call out loudly, and I hear what sounds like a swarm of bees. And here come six little Chihuahuas, roaring out of the house and heading right for me. I think they are cute and I lean down to greet them and one leaps at my face to bite me! I dodge in the nick of time and it is lucky I have a large box with another painting in my hands, because I need it to fend off the six vicious little killers, who are now surrounding me and thrusting from every side. The evil pests were starting to figure out my defense strategy and were about to overcome it when Maripat came out of one of the buildings in the compound and saw what was happening. She yelled at the dogs to stop, and they ran off back into the house. I had been yelling too, but nothing had happened then. They seemed to back off so quickly when she yelled at them, it was a little embarrassing.

I was so rattled by the attack that I must have appeared very excited to do a painting, because I quickly closed Maripat on the commission, which was to be a big three-painting series of the cat that lives under her house. I settled that with Maripat and got a big down payment, which really came in handy. I got out of there in one piece, with only one of my shoelaces ripped up by the dogs.

The dog attack put me behind schedule, so as Rachel and I raced over to West Hollywood to deliver the Ratgurl painting to the co-eds, I fixed it with Rachel to stay in the car and keep the motor running, as there are no parking spaces in this neighborhood.

When I got up to the co-ed’s apartment on the 2nd floor, I knocked, and I hear a breezy, "Who is it ?" and I say it is me and she says very sexily, "Oh, we've been expecting you."

And danged if I don't walk in the door and here are these two absolutely beautiful 20-something girls in their underwear.  Of all of the events of the evening, I really wasn't expecting this one.

I immediately realize that I have a real problem—where to focus my eyes. There is very little furniture except for a couch and a bed, and these girls hardly have any clothes on at all.  Just little baby doll t-shirts and panties.

So I decide to look off into space as if I am deeply contemplating my art, which works for a moment.

I pull out the painting from the box and give it to them while I am blabbering away about anything I can think of, carefully hiding the claw and slobber marks the dogs have left on the outside of the box.  One of them writes me a check, and I just start to get used to the situation when they start asking me these obviously bogus questions, just to get me to hang around—as they start to slowly stretch themselves out on the couch seductively.  They ask me, "What is it like to be a painter ?" and "What famous people have you met?" and "Which of us do you think is more tan?" and "Show us where exactly."  I have no answers for these questions, but they were all rhetorical questions leading up to the big question that was coming.

"How would you like to sit down and have a drink with us?" they asked in unison, pointing to a very small space between the two of them on the couch.  They both then laughed that they had said the same thing at the same time, and as they were laughing they bumped each other's head, which made them laugh even more as they looked into each other's eyes, and then slowly turned and smiled at me and gestured for me to get over on the couch with them.

It seemed as if the room temperature just gone up 30 degrees.  Everything caught up with me at once and my body went slightly out of control and I jumped a little in place, prompting the girls to ask me if I was cold and needed to be warmed up.

As my whole wife flashed before my eyes, I took a breath and gulped, and I got down to business.  I told the girls my wife was waiting for me down in the car.  And then I told them that we had been married a long time.  And then I told them, just for good measure, that we had been together for over 20 years.  And I told them all of our secrets for success and tips on staying together and pretty much anything I could think of about Rachel and myself for the next 10 minutes.

And then a funny thing happened.  Those two girls looked me in the eyes, took a breath and gulped, and told me how they were both really hoping to find "the guy" for them, and that they were both hoping to find him right now and settle down with him, and how this was all they thought about pretty much all the time.

So they told me how great it was that I had my wife, and I told them how they would find the guys they were looking for, and we both wished each other the best, and I left and hightailed it to the car.

Rachel asked me how it went, and I smiled and told her the whole story, hook, line and sinker.  After I had finished, I mentioned how crazy it was

to me that I ended up giving these girls advice on how to have a good

relationship.

Rachel sat there for a second taking it all in, and then said to me, "What you should have told them is that the main key to having a great relationship is to not hang out in your underwear with men twice your age."

We drove the rest of the way home in silence. There was no need to say

any more about it, really. Rachel had said it all right there.