Life Givers and Death Dealers

When Julio walks into the gallery he doesn’t know what to expect. His main reason for going in the first place is he hadn’t been out in a long time and thought it would be fun to get out and be amongst other human beings. Secondly, he’s there to support a young artist he knows — not all that well but well enough that he decided it’s worth the trip downtown.

The gallery is in an old cast iron building on lower Broadway. He’d never been to it before, never even heard of it, in fact. He's impressed that his friend has work in a SoHo gallery although he’s not too sure if that actually means anything anymore. SoHo is a shadow of its former glory. It no longer caters to artists. Chelsea does. Still, it has to mean something, especially to his friend, whose work — photography — he genuinely admires.   

He stands in the middle of this small gallery with a couple of friends he’d run into and a couple of others he has no intention of ever knowing. No one seems to be all that interested in the art but are instead more interested in making the scene and feeling as though they were an interesting lot hanging around a SoHo gallery. There’s so much talk that after a while it’s hard to hear oneself think or even hear one’s own voice above the noise. He talks to a young girl who seems to be a little too interested in what he has to say. It makes him suspicious. Perhaps it’s the wine. In other words she doesn’t seem the least bit sincere but he keeps talking anyway. The six cups of red wine he’s consumed makes his mouth move a mile a minute. He winds up speaking to about seven or eight different people, listening to their ideas, their hopes, their aspirations, their goals, or just general bullshit about things. The one thing he notices is that one can divide them into two distinct camps — life givers and death dealers.

The life givers make you laugh, make you have hope for art, creativity, and most importantly, life. The death dealers are all the same — life is too painful and all their talk is about destroying everything. The Indian girl with the nose rings, the ‘Supermodel’ with the match stick legs, the shaved head, goatee sporting painter, they all have the same thing to say — destroy, deconstruct, parody, satire, irony. How full of shit they all are, he muses. It’s the ‘suffering artist’ bit and he’s tired of it.

All he does is listen. He make no comments, make no scene, nor does he even bother to challenge their points of view, mainly because he knows this is exactly what they wanted him to do. Instead, he just drinks the free wine and listens, which is sometimes best.

As he makes his way home, he observes the faces of the wasted and the dead on the subway, the single mothers and the downtrodden, and he realizes all this ‘suffering’ these young people were talking about is not ‘suffering’ at all. There are too many death dealers in this world as it is. We don’t need a bunch of twenty-somethings telling us about the meaningless of life, especially when they’ve only begun to live. He was one of them once, wearing the exact same costume, espousing the same tired clichés, and he hopes he has moved beyond that. Or has he? Perhaps he just moved into a new phase, where it’s merely a retread of the same tired ideas and attitudes. He just doesn’t know anymore.

New York City, October 1998