[ON HOLD] LOVE ME LIKE ART

3

— IMANI "BAMBI"
L. CRAWFORD 🫦

I REMEMBER HOW I stumbled into this bar by mistake. Except, I didn't push through those doors with a parcel of good news. A cause to celebrate, a fitting tribute.

Life isn't that kind.

I found it because it was the only one that was open in a street row of closed bars. The only bar I could afford after I crashed out. I wanted to bury my wounds in more than one drink that would leave me bitterly drunk. Because, if I'm drunk... I forget.

Complete erasure happens whether I wanted to remember the night or not.

Things don't hurt as much because I lose all feeling. Rejection is the greatest betrayal. Like, how I cruelly found out at the end of that shitty meeting that my dreams were just... dreams.

Dreams that were that of a dying plant.

A dying root, buried under a patch of arid soil.

I had met with Luca Gioppio, in his studio loft in New Malden. We sat, surrounded by genius–ones he'd mentored and some he didn't, splashed in colour. He told me that Symone, my best friend, had flagged him down someplace and her voice was more cutting when her lips weren't on his flesh so he was hosting me more as a reluctant obligation, rather than genuine interest. To anyone that understands art and her intricacies, Luca's acclaim is never given and his critique is never spared.

The Luca I spent that evening with wasn't at the table to discuss business.

Or art.

Or the painful stake in fighting your dreams. He wanted something else. Something more tangible, something that might remedy his wasted time. I won't ever forget his galling baritone where he implied that the game is the game, pumpkin. And that nobody that looks like me and that does what I do, will climb all the way to the summit without giving out a few party favours.

It was a flicker of recognition, a black uncomfortable dawn charting through the sun that I am, if anything... a vehicle for his own twisted indulgence. It was then that I realised that it didn't matter what I could say about what I know, what art even meant to me or the things I felt when I first lay my eyes on Vermeer's Girl With The Pearl Earring. He saw me and many women like me that we will do whatever we can to get closer to the sun.

Luca thought I would play putty with my dreams.

He thought I would oblige because I trick for grumbly, old married men for money. Why should I suddenly grow a conscience on my dreams? But, I didn't want to pollute what was and still is my safest place, the place I go to cry because the world is so dark.

To sully my dreams so that my name will be a song he never forgets. I'm promiscuous, yes, but at the hands of a man who holds all the cards, I won't lose my integrity. If this is supposed to happen, if I'm supposed to get a seat at the table, it has to be because I'm good enough.

Not because I sucked the dick of a renowned art dealer with the expectation that he will show my work.

And so, I ended up on a barstool at MacIveys, sitting with a rotting apple that my dreams–my beautiful, scary-to-live-out dreams died that day. I wish I could've said that I felt empowered, enthused, spurred on... but I didn't.

I was just bitterly drunk.

Embarrassed.

And heartbroken. The gravity of my dying dreams was here, right in my face, whilst the world still tilted on its axis. But Willy showed me kindness. He doesn't know but he made me feel less alone and buttered my spirit. I left drunk but renewed.