Barney's Version Read Free

him, he had a stammer? So what? He’s become a chartered accountant and drives a Buick now.”
    Our loosy-goosy band included a couple of painters, so to speak, both of them New Yorkers. There was the loopy Clara and the scheming Leo Bishinsky, who managed his artistic rise better than Wellingtondid — you know, that battle in a town in Belgium. 4 He left a ball to go to it. Or interrupted a game of bowls. No, that was Drake.
    A garage in Montparnasse served as Leo’s atelier, and there he laboured on his huge triptychs, mixing his paints in buckets and applying them with a kitchen mop. On occasion he would swish his mop around, stand back ten feet, and let fly. Once, when I was there, the two of us sharing a toke, he thrust his mop at me. “Have a go,” he said.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    Soon enough, I figured, Leo would get a shave and a haircut and join an advertising agency in New York.
    I was dead wrong.
    Go know that forty years later Leo’s atrocities would be hanging in the Tate, the Guggenheim, MOMA , and The National Gallery in Washington, and that others would be sold for millions to junk-bond mavens and arbitrage gurus who were often outbid by Japanese collectors. Go anticipate that Leo’s battered Renault
deux-chevaux
5 would one day be succeeded, in a ten-car garage in Amagansett, by a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, a vintage Morgan, a Ferrari 250
berlinetta
, and an Alfa Romeo, among other toys. Or that to mention his name today, in passing, I could be accused of name-dropping. Leo has appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
in Mephistophelian guise, replete with horns, magenta cape and tails, painting magic symbols on the nude body of a flavour-of-the-month starlet.
    In the old days you could always tell who Leo was screwing, because,
tout court
, a white-bread-and-cashmere-twin-set young woman out of Nebraska, working for the Marshall Plan, would turn up at La Coupole and think nothing of picking her nose at the table. But today renowned fashion models flock to Leo’s Long Island mansion, vying with one another to proffer pubic hairs that can be worked intohis paintings along with bits of beach glass, bluefish skeletons, salami butts, and toenail clippings.
    Back in 1951 my gang of neophyte artists flaunted their liberation from what they,
de haut en bas
, denigrated as the rat race, but the sour truth is, with the shining exception of Bernard “Boogie” Moscovitch, they were all contenders. Each one as fiercely competitive as any
Organization Man
or
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, if any of you out there are old enough to remember those long-forgotten best-sellers, modish for a season. Like Colin Wilson. Or the Hula Hoop. And they were driven by the need to succeed as much as any St. Urbain Street urchin back home who had bet his bundle on a new autumn line of
après-ski
wear. Fiction is what most of them were peddling. Making it new, as Ezra Pound had ordained before he was certified insane. Mind you, they didn’t have to cart samples round to department store buyers, floating on “a smile and a shoeshine,” as Clifford Odets 6 once put it. Instead, they shipped their merchandise off to magazine and book editors, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Except for Boogie, my anointed one.
    Alfred Kazin once wrote of Saul Bellow that, even when he was still young and unknown, he already had the aura about him of a man destined for greatness. I felt the same about Boogie, who was uncommonly generous at the time to other young writers, it being understood that he was superior to any of them.
    In one of his manic moods Boogie would throw up lots of smoke, deflecting questions about his work by clowning. “Look at me,” he once said, “I’ve got all the faults of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway rolled into one. I will fuck just about any peasant girl who will have me. I’m an obsessive gambler. A drunk. Hey, just like