Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 16

Saint James left the earth before he was ready, before he was finished, even though he once told the merchant he rented the garage from, “The Throne is my life. I’ll finish it before I die.” He had been working on it in the garage for fourteen years, thinking about it perhaps forever, and he wasn’t done. He had had stomach cancer for some time, though it had only recently been diagnosed at the free clinic for World War vets. He refused to believe he was dying. It wasn’t his time yet. He worked on The Throne up to the very end, and the work eased his pain.

Death kept Saint James from knowing so many things about his “Throne.” Like just after his death when the merchant brought a reporter named Ramon Geremia from The Washington Post to look at it in the garage, where he poked at it and picked things up and probably didn’t quite put them back in the right spot, thus slightly altering the entire history of time. And he never got to read the story, which ran under the headline “Tinsel, Mystery Are Sole Legacy of Lonely Man’s Strange Vision” on December 15, 1964. And he didn’t get to see the photographer out there either, the guy with the Beatles haircut, telling everyone in the local art community what an amazing thing The Throne was and how a little black janitor with absolutely no friends and an unknown history had made it over many years. He never got to know that critics would write about his life and work, comparing him to people and movements of which he’d never heard. But most of all, he never got to see The Throne, sparkling amid a field of purple in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, never got to stand on those marble floors in his best Sunday suit, his Saint James crown glittering on his head, and be proud of what he’d made using nothing but belief and thrown-away things.