By Ed Staskus

   “What the hell am I doing?” Jackson Pollack asked himself,, giving a once over to the rising road, driving up too fast toward the top of it for what was on the other side. He couldn’t dope it out. He wasn’t planning on going over the rainbow, or was he? He was driving like a crazy man, like what all the couch men he had ever gone to always told him he wasn’t.

   Not crazy, at least not exactly. One of them said, “You’re just in search of a nervous breakdown.” He didn’t tell that one about 1938. It didn’t matter. He knew he was raw on the inside. That’s why the work on the floor had worked. It was raw, just like him. He wasn’t a nutcase because he saw psychiatrists. But in the last five minutes he had twice caught himself steering the car straight at the soft shoulder.

   He might be a nutcase, but he was usually on the ball behind the wheel, even though he could be dangerous. He was the next-best driver in Springs, next to Harry Cullum, who told him he was second best on a late afternoon one day in mid-winter when the two of them were having cherry yellow pickled eggs and cheap beer at Jungle Pete’s. The eggs were spicy like Harry, who gulped them down twice as fast as Jack.

   “You’ll have the last laugh, just wait and see, Jack,” Harry said, laughing and clapping him on the back. “Maybe not on the road, but you’ll get ‘er done, son.”

   Jackson Pollock’s convertible didn’t have seat belts. Harry, the best driver in town, had recently outfitted his family car with belts. He told everyone it was for his wife’s sake. “In stock car racing we never used seat belts if there wasn’t a roll bar, suicide if you do,” he said. “Family life is different, different kind of suicide. You need a belt, for sure, for that.”

   The young woman in the middle of the front seat, squeezed between Ruth and him, was screaming. “Stop the car, let me out, let me out!” He wasn’t going to stop the car, he knew that, but he had a bad feeling. It was a clear night, splashed with stars and no moon dark, hot and muggy. The road felt spongy. He felt strange, not himself, not yours truly.

   It was the second weekend of August 1956. The car was an Oldsmobile Rocket 88. It was an open-air car, robust and fast. Jackson had taken his shoes off and was driving in his bare feet. It made him feel alive. He got his first convertible, a Cadillac, when his action paintings started to get some action, after Life Magazine put him on the cover almost exactly seven years ago. He was wearing denim pants and a denim jacket in the photograph showcasing him. The jacket was dirty and spattered. It was his high-octane light-of-day “look at me now ma” year of success. They said he was the new phenomenon of American art. 

   “I don’t know about that,” Willem de Kooning said. “He looks more like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.” 

   When the year 1950 got done, the next month Art News published a list of the best exhibitions of the past year. The top three shows belonged to him. It wasn’t bad for somebody who never graduated from high school. He never talked to anybody about high school. It was a lifetime ago. It didn’t mean anything then and it didn’t mean anything now.

   Even though he purposely used to throw his car keys in the bushes whenever he was getting drunk at parties, he had smashed the Caddy after a party. He got off easy, only a citation and no broken bones. The car didn’t get off so lucky. It went to the graveyard.

   Action painting, he thought, and snorted, spraying saliva on the steering wheel. What the hell did that mean? There wasn’t any action, at least not the kind they meant. It was all just headlines. What critics didn’t know wasn’t worth a pot to piss in.  “If people would just look at my paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them,” he said. “It’s like looking at a bed of flowers. You don’t tear your hair out over what it means.” He had meant it when he said it. He’d say it again.

   Most of the art critics these days, if they saw him walking on water, crossing the Hudson River at Canal Street, would scribble something about him not being able to swim. All they wanted was to see the other guy go down. The only time he met Man Ray, at the Cedar Tavern when the Dadaist was on his way back to Paris, Man Ray told Jackson, over a boatload of drinks, that he hated critics.

   Franz Kline laughed across the table. “Manny, tell us what you really think.”

   “All critics should be assassinated,” Man Ray said. Jackson liked the Frenchman because he liked fast cars and beautiful women, like him. Jackson hated critics, too. He thought Man Ray wasn’t wrong.

   Lee Krasner wasn’t beautiful, but he had long since gotten over it. His wife called his work all over painting because he got it all over the flat canvases nailed down on the floor, the hard plank floor itself, and his boots and jeans and hands. Bugs and bits of litter and blackened shag from his cigarettes fell into the paint.

   “Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?” is what Life Magazine asked, blowing the balloon up, with a picture of him slouching against a wall with a gasper dangling from his mouth, and a couple of pictures of his paintings. He looked good, like he didn’t have a care in the world, didn’t give a damn, like he had the world by the balls. Now it was different. He hadn’t made a painting in more than a year. He knew the ballgame was over. He was washed up. He didn’t have anything to say anymore. He was sure of it. There wasn’t a place for him at the art world table anymore.

   “She started to scream,” said Clement Greenberg, one of the city’s kings of culture. “He took it out on this pathetic girl by going even faster. Then he lost control on the curve. The screaming is what did the killing, finally.” The Clem had a strong opinion about everything, no matter whether he knew anything about it, or not. When he was done holding court about the killing he went on to the next thing.

   What was her name? Jackson chewed it over, tossing a glance at the woman next to him. He couldn’t remember. He had a headache. His headaches had been getting worse and worse for months. They were on the Fireplace Road in East Hampton, not far from his home. It couldn’t be more than a mile. Not much of a home anymore, though. Lee was in Paris with her friends. She said she was coming back, but he had his doubts. He thought she might have her own frogman across the ocean. He wanted her back, but it had all gone wrong.

   Hell-bent in his Rocket 88 with two broads in the car while his wife was gone free and easy to Europe wasn’t going to get it done, wasn’t going to get it all back. He had to get back on track. Maybe he could start painting again. Maybe the last analyst he’d seen was right, maybe there was something gumming up the works. “We are going to try a fresh approach,” that shrink said. He called it hypnotherapy.

   He was one of the top downtown brain doctors. “It’s not hypnosis, at least not how most people think of it,” Dr. Robert Baird said. “We’re not going to try to alter or correct your behavior. We’ll try to seed some new ideas, sure, but we’ll talk those out before we go ahead.” Jackson told Lee he was going to get his head clear this time. “He isn’t full of the old-time shit,” he said about his new man.

   Whenever his neighbors saw his car fast and sloppy coming down the road they laughed and said it was like his paintings. Most of them still thought he was nuts, even though they didn’t say so anymore to his face, not now that he was in galleries and museums. When he was a nobody, they looked down on him like he was a nobody.

   “I could see right away he wasn’t from here,” Frank Dayton said after he first bumped into Jackson Pollack. “I asked a fellow later who he was. ‘Oh,’ the fellow said, ‘that’s just a loony artist.’”

   “To some people he was a bum, just someone to laugh at,” Sid Miller said. “They didn’t think much of his work. They didn’t think he was doing anything.” Ed Cook said the same thing. “Folks said he painted with a broom. Near everybody made jokes about his paintings and never thought they’d amount to anything.”

   “To hell with them all,” Jackson said to Ruth, his elbow twitching on the shelf of the door. Ruth was a looker, that’s for sure, the kind of juice he needed to get him going again. He had gone dead inside. He knew he had. She was the kind of gal who could crank him up. What’s-her-name at his other elbow kept bawling.

   “What?” Ruth asked, leaning towards him, twisting around the screamer.

   “To hell with them,” he muttered to himself again. “What do they know?”

   “Slow down just a bit, Jack, the car’s a little out of control, take it easy,” Ruth said.

   The joke was on them. When he was painting, straddling a canvas, it was when he was most in control. It was when he didn’t have any doubts about himself or what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. “I can control the idea, the flow of paint. There is no accident in the end, not by my hand,” he told anybody interested in listening to him.

   “He picked up a can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas,” Hans Namuth said. “It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished, His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance-like as he flung black, white, and rust-colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there. Finally, he said, ‘This is it.’”

   “I work from the inside out,” he told Hans. “That’s when I’m in the painting, in the middle of life, but outside of it at the same time. I can see the whole picture.” A gallery owner told him his pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, more like a sneer, but it was fine by him. It was a fine enough compliment. All the twisted lips who said it didn’t know what they were talking about.

   He knew what he was doing driving his Rocket 88, too, even when he was drunk as could be, which was what he was now. “He came in for his eye-opener, a double, just after breakfast before train time, the day it happened,” said the morning bartender at Jungle Pete’s. “Start your day the way he did sometimes, you’d be in the same fix he was. If you said he was half bagged, you’d be about right.”

   Doc Klein, his on-again off-again family doctor, said it was OK for him to drink and drive. Jackson liked that. He knew trees never hit cars except in self-defense. “But stay on the road,” said Doc Klein, a big man laughing his big laugh. “Goddamn right, I always stay on the road,” Jackson said. “Except when I’m pulling into Al’s or Pete’s, then I get off the road. I have to. There’s no trees in those parking lots, anyway, thank God.” If there had been they wouldn’t have lasted long.

   Everybody who was an artist in their neck of the woods was drunk at night, especially the writers and painters. They liked to drive around in their cars when the streets were more empty than alive. If Jackson was out in the dark, he was at the head of the parade.

   He wasn’t driving right tonight. He was driving wrong. The screamer grabbing at his arm was right. He usually lived it up driving. But tonight, instead of being sure handed with the steering wheel, like he was with paint out of a can, he was being clumsy, as though he was at cross-purposes, heavy and herky-jerky. The on-target gestures he put to use to stream paint from a stick when he was working were usually the same when he drove his car. Tonight, they were too big around, whiplash gestures, like they had a life of their own.

   “He had to be moving fast, 85 to 90, anyway,” Harry Cullum said. “There is a crown where the town tar road begins at the beginning of the left curve. Jeez, I almost lost my car a couple of times there when I was a kid, but finally you smarten up and ride that crown, the one they fixed after Pollock got killed.” It was after the fact, though, like an empty bottle of beer thrown out a car window at a stop sign that isn’t there anymore. “Jackson died of drink and the Town of East Hampton Highway Department,” Wayne Barker said.

   It was close to three years ago, the last week of November, when he had stormed over the crown of the road like a firecracker. He had come back from the city on a Friday, on the train. It snowed all morning and afternoon and it was still snowing at the end of the day when he found his wheels in the lot, brushing a mound of snow off the front window with his hands, rubbing the cold out of them at the car’s heating vent. When he finally got on the road to Springs, he was one of only a handful of cars. A nor’easter was blowing in off the ocean. The car shuddered whenever the road flattened out and he was sideways to the coast.

   “I crawled up there, I could barely see, and stopped when I saw the pile of snow,” he told Lee later at home, their windows in their sash frames rattling in the wind gusts. “There was a snowdrift, five feet, six feet high, down the other side blocking the way. I backed up a little, to where my rear tires could get a grip on a stretch of clear road and stomped on the gas. I went as fast as I could, hit the snow head on, everything went white, everything disappeared, no color, just white. By the time I came out the other side the car was barely moving, just crawling.” They laughed about it all night, over dinner, and later in bed, curling up close together under a pile of blankets.

   Pale lips beside him was still screaming. How long could she keep it up? She was driving him crazy. He was driving wrong, all wrong. There was a reason. He knew it, but he also thought, how can there be a reason? His head hurt. What was it? He could feel it. Where was it? He knew it was right there, right at the front of his brain. It was like the images behind the abstractions in his paintings, right there but hard to see. When he tried to think of why he was driving wrong his head hurt bad like a next day hangover, before he could get his hands on some hair of the dog.

   He had a hangover all the time now, more than five years-worth of hangovers, but it wasn’t just from booze. It was from having catapulted to fame, putting everything he had into it, until he didn’t have anymore, and he quit pouring paint. He quit cold turkey. It was all over. When it was over he couldn’t make a painting anymore that anybody wanted. The magic was gone. When he finished his black paintings, he couldn’t give them away. Even his fame wasn’t enough to prime the pump. Nobody thought they were any good. He knew they weren’t any good. He had gone round the bend for good.

   “An artist is a person who has invented an artist,” Harold Rosenberg burst out apropos of nothing one night near the tail end of a long night of poker and drinking.

   Rosie always thinks he is right, Jackson thought. “He got it wrong on the train the day we were riding into the city together,” he told Lee. “When I said the canvas was an arena, I meant it like it was a living thing, not a dead thing. I didn’t mean slugging it out in the ring. He thought I meant it literally, even though both of us were sober at the time, and the next thing I knew I was an action painter. At least he got the inventing part right at the card game.” 

   Not like Hoffman, who was like all the others. When Lee brought her teacher, Hans Hoffman, to Springs to meet Jackson, he saw the sour look on the great man’s face right away. Hans was a neat freak, everything in its place, clean as starch and orderly. His own studio was a mess. Nothing was in its rightful place, even though he knew where everything was. There wasn’t a sign of a still life or a life model anywhere.

   “You do not work from nature,” Hans complained. “You work by heart, not from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself.”

   “I am nature,” Jackson said, and left it at that.

   There wasn’t a drop of hope left in the sky or anywhere on the other side of his windshield. He finally got to the curve at the dip, where the concrete stopped and the town’s blacktop started. He veered off the road, suddenly aiming for the trees. What the hell was he thinking, he thought. He stopped thinking. The car skidded in the sand. He let it slide, its front-end dead set on the big oak tree to their left.

   Going into a skid in the dirt off the road didn’t surprise him. He was going too fast, that’s all. It didn’t mean anything. The screaming woman stopped screaming. She got small next to him and her eyes got big. She was squeezing her handbag in her hands with all her might. His hands felt dry and relaxed on the steering wheel. He didn’t tense up at the wheel even when he smashed into the tree head-on. 

   The Rocket 88 broke every bone in its body when it hit the one-hundred-year-old tree. The one-time painter was catapulted over the windshield and into the woods. The front end flipped over, tossing Ruth into the weeds. When the car landed upside down, splintering the windshield, the young woman with the handbag in her hands suddenly stopped gripping it. She let out a gasp. The car horn blared, stuck in place. Gasoline poured out of the punctured gas tank. The taillights blinked on and off and on and off.

   He hit the oak tree hard as a meteor. “I’m going to become one of my paintings,” Jackson Pollack realized in mid-air, no longer in the crosshairs, on the way to forever. “I’m going to splatter all over. I’m going to be in nature, be nature, once and for all.” 

   When he caromed, he landed with a wallop, even though it was soft ground. There was a jutting out of the ground lump of rock mottled with luminous moss that had waited a lifetime for him. His neck hit the rock like a falling star. Gravity had been the heaven-sent hand that gave life to the paint and flotsam that dripped splashed flowed down onto his canvasses. It was now the hand that dealt him a death blow. He had stuck his neck out and now it was broken. He lay there like a lopped-off tree branch, cracked in the head, shoeless, arms and legs every which way.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication