by Geoff Gouveia
illustration by Geoff Gouveia
The morning Xavi died he spent it like he always did, painting on two large canvases in his tiny Los Angeles apartment before leaving for work. His coworkers wondered why blue paint splattered on his fingertips when he manned the register at the local taco shop. His customers’ faces tilted with puzzled glances when he didn’t tell them the reason for the small flecks of blue on his knuckles. He painted in part to satisfy the creative desire but also to release the struggles that gripped him in his sleep. When he woke, early and on time, he painted and painted, keeping the paint wet while working at a feverish pace.
Xavi worried, like everyone who paints, about money. He kept his money bundled in stacks under the mattress and tucked in the small bookshelf that held his paint brushes upright. He swore the landlord knocked twice a month but it was the timelessness that occurs when work and passion and life overlap, the passing of days retreats into the passing of hours and then seconds. Before he knew it, he had managed to live more than seven months in this new city. The first weeks had been difficult for him.
An equal mix of anticipation and nervousness gripped Xavi as he flew to see his cousin in the new country that brought promise. His cousin, Edgar, had been living there for the past 5 years, carving a small piece of real estate in the form of a smoke shop on Spring and Sixth. When the wheels to his plane touched the ground, Xavi hadn’t spoken with Edgar for a month. The plan had been set but the trail had gone cold. Xavi shrugged this off and decided to venture out anyways.
Xavi walked to the smoke shop after taking the bus from the airport. The corner read Sixth and Spring but the smoke shop located there had plywood boards covering the windows. Graffiti sprawled over the loose boards and the metal bars rusted alone. A homeless man with a fire-red ball cap sat outside the shop but Xavi couldn’t communicate in English well enough to ask about Edgar. The family next door that owned the taco shop, Jorge’s Taco #3, told Xavi the news: Edgar was gone. Gone from this earth in a mistaken shootout. One night after counting the till, a man burst through the door focused on his own need for a fix. Edgar refused and the man shot him in the stomach. Xavi's hand still clutched the ticket that cost him everything.
Jorge and his family found Xavi a studio to move into above the taco shop. The second day in the country Xavi had a position at the cash register working for Jorge’s Tacos #3. By Xavi's request, Jorge pointed him towards a place to buy paint at discount on the edge of Little Tokyo. In addition to the small air mattress and food essentials, Xavi purchased two large canvases with three buckets of blue paint the same week he arrived.
Xavi painted in all blue paint, the varying values and hues spiraling over the surface in a fitful frenzy. Layers upon layers of the blue paint built up until the canvases themselves were heavy and unresponsive. The color blue had taken its toll on the months he painted with it, the hues mirroring his interior as he struggled to compete with the cold city. The swirls on the canvas became like the infinite loop of working nonstop that distorted Xavi’s view of himself.
Money seeped into Xavi's new warped soul and forced him to choose.The choice was either new canvases or new paint and he sided with the latter. His never-ending layers erased his own mistakes and he became better and better without proof. Xavi only saw what was on the canvas and it was never what started in his mind. The lack of recognition coincided with a vanishing confidence in his talent.
Xavi had battled the city’s frigid realities with his paint brush up until the day he died. Do my paintings even matter? Why do I even try? he thought after a painting session and it was during one of these thoughts that the gun metal blue Suburu clipped his leg as it made a quick left turn, pushing his body into an oncoming gray Yukon. The paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.
Jorge knocked on Xavi’s door the third day he didn’t show for work. Jorge and the entire #3 shop thought Xavi skipped town. The cash register rang the following day with slender hands with clean, unpainted knuckles. After ordering his tacos, Xavi’s landlord asked Jorge if he had seen the man, noting the rent was due. Jorge shrugged when he handed over his meal.
The landlord, a short Romanian man with hair everywhere except the top of his head, unlocked the door after he knocked twice. The landlord found nothing except for the bed, expired milk in the refrigerator and two large canvases with thick layers of blue paint on them. No sign of life for the next week forced the landlord cleared out the room, placing the canvases behind the building near the dumpster.
Later that evening a shivering man in the February chill found the two canvases propped against the wall. He moved one to a hidden side of the building to create a roof. He broke the frame of the second canvas and ripped the layered blue surface off. The canvas fit in the space between the wall and the building, thick enough to keep the man’s warmth from soaking into the earth. Before laying his head to rest on the canvas, he removed his fire-red ball cap. That night he slept the best he had in years and when he looked up at the canvas in the morning, he thanked the Lord for whoever painted blue upon blue upon blue upon blue upon blue upon blue...
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