What I Loved

art—performances. For a guy who's only twenty-four, he's done a lot, you know." I remembered that Mark had said Giles was twenty-one, but I let it go. He paused for a couple of seconds and then looked me in the eyes. "I never met anybody more like me. We talk about it all the time, how we're the same."
    Two weeks later, at one of Bernie Weeks's opening dinners, Teddy Giles came up again. It had been a long time since I had been out with Bill and Violet, and I had looked forward to that dinner, but I was seated between Bernie's date for the evening, a young actress named Lola Martini, and Jillian Downs, the artist whose show had just opened, and I didn't get much chance to speak to either Bill or Violet. Bill was on the other side of Jillian and they were deep in conversation. Jillian's husband, Fred Downs, was talking to Bernie. Before Giles came up, Lola had been telling me about her career on Italian television as a game-show hostess.
    Her wardrobe for the job had consisted of bikinis that related to the game's fruit theme. "Lemon yellow," she said, "Strawberry red, lime green, you get the picture." She pointed to her head. "And I had to wear these fruit hats."
    "Carmen Miranda style," I said.
    Lola looked at me blankly. "The show was pretty stupid, but I learned Italian, and it got me a couple of film roles."
    "Without fruit?"
    She laughed and adjusted her bustier, which had been sinking slowly for about half an hour. "No fruit."
    When I asked her how she knew Bernie, she said, "I met him last week in this gallery—the Teddy Giles show. Oh my God, it was so disgusting." Lola made a face to indicate her revulsion and lifted her bare shoulders. She was very young and very pretty, and when she talked, her earrings shook against her long neck. She pointed her fork at Bernie and said loudly, "We're talking about that show where we met. Wasn't it disgusting?"
    Bernie turned toward Lola. "Well," he said. "I'm not going to disagree with you, but he's made quite a stir. He started out performing in clubs. Larry Finder saw him and brought the work into the gallery."
    "But what's the work like? " I said.
    "It's bodies all cut up—women and men and even kids," Lola said as she wrinkled her forehead and stretched her lips to telegraph her distaste. "Blood and guts all over the place, and then they had photographs from this show he did in some club—spurting an enema. I guess it was red water, but it looked like blood. Oh my God, I had to cover my eyes. It was soooo gross."
    Jillian looked at Bill. She raised her eyebrows. "You know who's taken Giles under his critical wing?"
    Bill shook his head.
    "Hasseborg. He wrote this long article about him in Blast."
    A brief look of pain crossed Bill's face.
    "What did he say?" I asked.
    "That Giles exposes the celebration of violence in American culture," Jillian said. "It's Hollywood horror deconstructed—something like that."
    "Jillian and I went to the show," Fred said. "I thought it was pretty hokey, thin stuff. It's supposed to be shocking, but it's not really. It's tame when you think of the artists who've really gone the distance. That woman who has plastic surgery to change her face to look like a Picasso or a Manet or a Modigliani. I always forget her name. You remember when Tom Otterness shot that dog?"
    "Puppy," Violet said.
    Lola's face fell. "He shot a little puppy?"
    "It's all on tape," Fred explained. "The little guy's bouncing all over the place and then bang." He paused. "But I guess it had cancer."
    "You mean it was sick and going to die?"
    Nobody answered Lola.
    "Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm," Jillian volunteered.
    "The shoulder," Bernie corrected. "It was his shoulder."
    "Arm, shoulder." Jillian smiled. "Same area. Schwarzkogler, now there's radical art."
    "What did he do?" Lola asked.
    "Well, for one thing," I said to her, "he sliced his penis lengthwise and had the whole thing photographed. Pretty gruesome and bloody."
    "Wasn't there another guy who did the same thing?" Violet said.
    "Bob Flanagan," Bernie said. "But it was nails. He hammered nails into it."
    Lola's mouth dropped open. "That's sick," she said. "I mean mentally sick. I don't think that's art. That's just sick."
    I turned to look at Lola's face, with its perfectly plucked eyebrows, little nose, and gleaming mouth. "If I picked you up and put you in a gallery, you'd be art," I said to her. "Better art than a lot I've seen. Prescriptive definitions don't apply anymore."
    Lola moved