Clip-On Tie: The Diary of a New York Art Museum Security Guard
by David Berman, published in Baffler #6
"If there's ever a problem, I film it and it's no longer
a problem. It's a film"
- Andy Warhol
It would be a tragedy to spend your whole life desperately
wanting to be something that you already were, all along.
On Fridays the guards are given ten minutes to take their
paychecks to the bank. The beautiful tellers have become arrogant from
handling money all day. If they have time, they flirt with the big
accounts.
European tourists move about the museum half-interested, exactly
fifty percent interested. Do they ever spill a drink or piss on their
shoes?
Sometimes, when a beautiful Italian girl wanders into an empty
gallery I fantasize about walking over and kissing her on the neck. When
she turned around and saw that I was a guard, I would straighten up
and whisper "no kissing allowed."
The classicist's theme is the recovery of the subjective mind,
the healing of the subjective mind. Well, our courts are clogged with
these minds.
The nineteen year old Cusies are the only twins on the guard
force. The girls insist that their spooked grandmother tried to murder
them twice during their infancy. First, she gave them diet gum in an
attempt to dehydrate them. Second, she sent them new blankets in the
mail-the blankets had been soaked in insecticide.
Christ's message twisted: Only love your enemies.
If the fable of "The grasshopper and the ants" was amended so
that the world ended before the turn of winter, then the grasshopper
would have been wiser and the moral would have vindicated him. In a
story, the location of the ending is very deliberate.
I've been photographing the imprints that deck chairs leave on
the back of people's legs.
A lady comes into the museum: "I am a woman on TV. You have
never had a TV. . . now get off my show!" It only took a few
minutes of this kind of talk to make me feel like the intruder.
"He" was a sensitive reader, almost too delicate to withstand the
commands and admonitions of punctuation.
Two drunks outside the Greenpoint subway: "You better leave an
hour early to get there on time." They are lying, they never go
anywhere, I thought to myself. For whose benefit would they be
acting? Why am I so suspicious?
John Baldessari burned all his pre-1967 paintings. "I think
that's odd behaviour but I would like to get in touch with him anyway, to
see about using the ashes as makeup for this play I'm writing about
British coal miners."
After guarding masterpieces for weeks, it feels good to stand in
my dentist's office before this cheap painting of a ship.
If the world was a bit smaller, just three neighborhoods smaller,
maybe things would work out. I've heard that there's a scarcity
of luxury. In the movie theatres each person has to share an armrest
with a stranger.
What Duchamp did with the urinal no longer surprises me, what
surprises me is the idea that they had urinals back then.
I am waiting for the bus when I smell something burning. I turn
to the man standing next to me and ask if he smells it too. In preparing
to speak he lets a cloud of condensed breath out into the freezing
air. For a half second my mind plays a trick on me. "Oh no, he's
burning," I think.
No one gets hungry at the sight of a lush cornfield or a herd of
cattle. It's enough to tell you that we're full of education, not
awareness.
The painter eyes his subject. It's a single piece of fruit,
yellow and shaped like a lightbulb, split open to show the cavity where the
pit would normally be, if the pit were not swirling around inside the
painter's mouth.
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