"Artists."
The one artist painted chickens, cartoon chickens over and over
in various hilarious situations.
One Saturday she went over to his house in her blue Pinto
to clean.
She was 16 and this is what she did.
She cleaned houses $10 an hour.
It was good money.
Soon after she arrived, he asked if she'd go to the liquor store
and pick up a bottle of booze for him on the clock of course.
Well, sure, anything was better than swabbing toilets,
and she could do it.
She had a fake ID.
Off she went to the liquor store,
came back with the bottle, continued to clean.
She started on his bedroom bathroom.
There were girlie magazines on the floor.
No big deal.
The other guy she cleaned for had them too.
But then something was wrong, some new sound or presence.
She looked out the window.
The trees were close and throbbing with insects.
This was summer in Connecticut.
She looked out the bathroom door to his bedroom.
He was on the bed pulling out his penis.
She retracted her head and stood in the bathroom.
She thought for a second.
Only one way out and that was through the bedroom.
She started walking fast through the bedroom down the hall,
down the stairs.
He was following her.
She was out the door.
She was at her car.
She was in it.
He was right behind her, scraggly beard
and thin little chicken body fucking artist.
And she was rolling up the window in his face.
He wasn't the first artist she'd met.
There was the man who painted nudes,
very handsome that guy, very.
Much older than she was.
She and her friend were now with him
and his friend and his blue van and there was some but not
complete sexual activity in the back of the blue van
during the drive in.
And there was the return to his house.
Vast canvases of naked women emerging
from the ocean, covering every wall,
not only the ocean, once a meadow.
He was also a very competent artist, a photo realist.
The breasts of the women were rather large,
their expressions breathless.
She herself was a sophisticated girl.
She made some comment about composition or color
as if there were no women there at all.
Those whimsical years she also met a photographer.
He came up to her and two friends at the beach.
He was older too and certainly not the type of guy
they'd even consider for boyfriend status.
But he was a photographer.
He said, in fact, that he was looking for models.
He paid $100 for a half hour.
All you did was take off your top, nothing else.
His studio was just 15 minutes away in Norwalk.
It surprises me that I had forgotten
about the photographer until now 20 years later.
A 14-year-old girl has been abducted.
It's all over the national news.
Photographs and videos reveal her insouciant smile,
her gazelle body.
My friends and I giggled and considered, though I do not
know how seriously, the offer.