The Birdman
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2015 by Angus Brownfield
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The Birdman
“I shall overcome,” said Donald MacDonald. He dipped his tiny sable brush in the little jar of gold craft paint. “I shall overcome,” he said as he brought his eye to within an inch of the canvas board and dabbed the outline of the bird’s beak, a millimeter at a time. He did this again and again. The outline of gold paint was exceedingly fine and exceedingly straight. One waver of the brush, one waver of his concentration, he would ruin his painting. If he ruined the painting his life was ruined and the world was doomed. He must prevail.
The tiny gold line was almost a disaster, because he felt his attention beginning to wander. He set down the brush on the upturned apple crate he used as his work station, turned to the window where his finished paintings stood along the ledge, four across and three deep, and faced the one on the far right. It was a bird like all the rest, and yet it was different from any of the others.
I shall prevail,” he said to the painting and bowed to it. He took a sidling step to the left, facing the next painting. “I shall prevail,” he said. At the next painting he said, “I shall prevail.”
Before he began painting he had been a mathematician. Some would say math was an opposite brain activity, but maybe Donald MacDonald used both sides of his brain because, you know, he was exceedingly bright. Too bright, some said. He worked for a very large software firm with hundreds of employees variously called software engineers, coders, programmers or developers. Among them they might know a hundred or two hundred programming languages, some specific to certain machines, some that talked only to the central processing units, some constructed for the use of gamers or persons who constructed proprietary programs for specific companies dealing with vast quantities of data or, conversely, highly complex traffic manipulation.
When engineers got stuck, logic or mathematics stumping them, they would seek out The Guru. They did not call Donald MacDonald “The Guru” to his face, because he wouldn’t answer to it, and would often cry or throw things if someone did.
(It was not uncommon for old hands to send new hires in to see Donald MacDonald, telling them to be sure and address him as “Mr. Guru, sir.” A practical joke. The women engineers never did this, it was the guys who tried to sound like hipsters and played basketball or handball on their breaks, who scarfed the goodies the company put out next to the espresso machines, who thought Mariah Carey was passé but Pink Martini was a kick.)
Came a day they sent one newbie too many to Donald MacDonald. He didn’t cry or throw pencils or Styrofoam cups, he came off his desk, on which he’d been sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed, and charged the offender. The newbie, seeing something truly scary in the genius’s eyes, ran. Donald MacDonald, though skinny and wearing rather floppy sandals, ran faster than the programmer. It took two husky young men in Debugging Unit South to unlock Donald MacDonald’s fingers from the newbie’s throat. And although they had no idea how they would replace this fellow who could unlock conceptual problems faster than Houdini unlocked manacles, management felt they had to fire him. It was just too foreign to the workplace culture they sought to foster. Not taking a joke is one thing; throttling a fellow employee for being the unwitting executioner of a joke was not exactly collegial.
After a few days of stomping about his apartment, fuming and crying, Donald MacDonald decided he was glad they’d fired him. He hated the place. He had intended to leave someday, and this saved him the anxiety of telling the bosses that.
When the check for his severance money came he bought a collection of sidewalk chalk from Amazon. It seemed right. He had seen two young girls chalking a hopscotch court and the idea struck him. He envisioned chalking the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper. The very instant the UPS truck brought the package he went out and made art. He cringed when pedestrians walked through his work, not noticing how curiously they looked at him. He cried when, during the night, rain washed away all but a faint ghost of his first picture. He made a bigger and better one as soon as the sidewalks dried, leaving his auto cap aside when it grew warm. When a passerby dropped a handful of change into his cap he was mystified but terribly pleased. He left the hat and the change lying there, and the amount grew. In one day he made seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents. A barista from the coffee shop across the street came over and took a photograph of his work and the next day gave Donald MacDonald a print from his computer. “You should show it to the merchants, they’ll all want their own masterpiece, man.”
Donald MacDonald knew nothing about business, but something urged him to move on and find new canvasses for his art. He sent away for more sidewalk chalk. He tramped over to the closest Home Depot and bought knee pads like roofers and masons wear. Soon he was going out at first light and drawing until he got cramps in his hand. He would forget to eat. He went into alleys to urinate when he couldn’t hold it any longer. He attracted crowds, and at first merchants welcomed this, but there was a purse snatching and a man’s pocket was picked. Merchants became afraid petty criminals were cashing in on Donald MacDonald’s growing popularity, creating a potential liability for them.
One day a man with mean eyes, the owner of a deli, came out and told Donald MacDonald to move along. The artist said, “You don’t own the sidewalk, the city does.” The merchant went inside, to return with a pail of water and dowsed it on the magnificent sunburst Donald MacDonald had almost finished. The artist’s rage was as swift as that he showed the new hire. He threw chalk at the man. He tried to pick up a newspaper rack and throw it, but it was chained to a lamppost. So he screamed. The deli owner retreated into his shop. “Fascist,” he cried. “Iconoclast.” “Meathead.” Donald MacDonald stomped after him in giant, threatening steps. The owner of the dry cleaners across the street phoned the police.
After screaming “Gestapo” at one policeman who drove up, and then at two, gesticulating with windmill gestures and spraying saliva on both cops, he was arrested. They wouldn’t let him pick up his chalk, although he was able to retrieve his hat, which he put on his head money and all. They handcuffed him and put him in the back of the first policeman’s cruiser. He wailed with enormous sobs. He thrashed about. The policeman debated taking him to the loony bin but in the end took him to the district courthouse. It was more routine and took less time.
The upshot was, Donald MacDonald was so mortified by the experience of being arrested and tried and fined that he planned never to go back to drawing on the sidewalk. After a few days of fuming and crying, Donald MacDonald decided he was glad they’d arrested him. He was too good an artist to be drawing on sidewalks. He had intended to stop anyway, and this saved him the angst of saying goodbye to street art.
“I will become a great painter,” he said aloud. He had a credit card. He went to the local art supply store and bought artists’ boa
rds, twenty that were exactly twelve inches by twenty inches, a ratio close to the Golden Mean. He would like to have bought a bigger sized board, but none came as close to the Golden Mean as twelve by twenty. He purchased as many boards as he could lug home.
(Donald MacDonald didn’t own a car, had never learned to ride a bicycle, didn’t like the crush of people on busses or streetcars and hated the smell of taxis.)
He made another trip to the store and bought paints, dozens of tubes of all different colors, some oil, some acrylic. He bought two collections of brushes, sable and camelhair. Not finding any gold paint (he must have gold paint), he went up to a woman stocking shelves and asked where he might find it.
“We don’t carry that kind of paint,” she said.
“You must,” said Donald MacDonald. He must have gold paint.
“They carry metallic paints at craft stores,” the woman said. She wished they did carry gold paint. There were legitimate uses for it, she assumed.
He said, “Do they carry these kinds of paints too?” gesturing with the tubes in his hands.
“Not the same