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"I'm giving you a hundred dollars and I'll sign it for you - like some anybody famous bullshit nothing I'm offering you the future or at least the idea of the future as you buy it - I'm an artist and anything I do can be made to work for you for money fame or the most egregious tactic of all - notoriety and if you believe in me this can all work" and that was the essence of some putrid form of conceptual art back then whenever it was - wall hangings with rope and lights and pencil drawings scribbled into a scrawl with horoscopes and birthdates and newsreel images of Cambodia and Ankor Watt and everything like that while chocolate-covered music (I'd guess) sounded from the yellow amplifiers and a few skinny girls danced near naked in flesh-colored mesh from two pedestals set high and any man in the room if you could see them would only be seen from under their chins - as their depraved voracious heads were pointed up and watching pussy on parade and dancing high above their heads : artscene 101 artworld as it is today mother's milk of inspiration and every man (in some oblique reference to Islam itself) intends to get a virgin before he leaves for home - and then this artist guy comes over and with papers in hand says "I profess to tell you here and now that if you buy something today and sign right here I can guarantee you a forty percent return over the next five years - as simple as that - on any art you buy today" and I told him I was 'fucking astounded' at all that because I'd never figured art could appreciate so fast and that "I always thought art was to BE appreciated and not bought to appreciate" or something like that but he didn't understand either and the point was lost but I couldn't stand the guy anyway mainly because he was wearing leotards for NO reason I could see and they were colored with printed 'paint-splashes' as a motif and the entire thing looked pretty sick and the guy himself was no one I'd care to lunch with anyway so I said (with some affected drawl) "I'm gonn'a hafta' pass because I can't find anything I like" which was - by the way - as true as one can get without lying and so it was and he smiled back and said "suit yourself there's a lot more where you come from and by the way your eyebrows should really be trimmed" and then some girl came over and she was wearing furs and I said "is that stuff real?" meaning the furs but she opened the coat and - wearing nothing underneath - stuck her tits in my face and said "if you mean these honey they're just as real as anything else and they'll probably last longer too" and I said "thanks for the info" and kept on smiling and then she bent over slightly and took my hand and kissed my face and licked my cheek before leaving and if that was some new form of high-art style I figured to have it framed ONLY if I could but she was gone - into a reverie of smoke and noise and alcohol too - and only much later did I actually see her talking deeply with someone else (a 'fur merchant from Bratislavia' I was told) and then I figured that if one doesn't have a head for business one also probably doesn't have a head for art either (but maybe that's why dollars are green in a monochrome way) and I really didn't want to talk to anyone any more so I sat down by the broad-cloth-covered window where it bayed above the street and sitting there like Poe himself I rifled through the pages of some guestbook to see if I'd signed in (had not) and so I did - Edgar Alan Poe was what I wrote - to be sure they'd know I'd been there.