Clip-On Tie

The Diary of a New York Art Museum Security Guard

By David Berman. Originally appeared in Baffler.

“If there’s ever a problem, I film it and it’s no longer a problem. It’s a film” - Andy Warhol

It would be a tragedy to spend your whole life desperately wanting to be something that you already were, all along. On Fridays the guards are given ten minutes to take their paychecks to the bank. The beautiful tellers have become arrogant from handling money all day. If they have time, they flirt with the big accounts. European tourists move about the museum half-interested, exactly fifty percent interested. Do they ever spill a drink or piss on their shoes? Sometimes, when a beautiful Italian girl wanders into an empty gallery I fantasize about walking over and kissing her on the neck. When she turned around and saw that I was a guard, I would straighten up and whisper “no kissing allowed. ” The classicist’s theme is the recovery of the subjective mind, the healing of the subjective mind. Well, our courts are clogged with these minds. The nineteen year old Cusies are the only twins on the guard force. The girls insist that their spooked grandmother tried to murder them twice during their infancy. First, she gave them diet gum in an attempt to dehydrate them. Second, she sent them new blankets in the mail-the blankets had been soaked in insecticide. Christ’s message twisted: Only love your enemies. If the fable of “The grasshopper and the ants” was amended so that the world ended before the turn of winter, then the grasshopper would have been wiser and the moral would have vindicated him. In a story, the location of the ending is very deliberate. I’ve been photographing the imprints that deck chairs leave on the back of people’s legs. A lady comes into the museum: “I am a woman on TV. You have never had a TV… now get off my show! ” It only took a few minutes of this kind of talk to make me feel like the intruder. “He” was a sensitive reader, almost too delicate to withstand the commands and admonitions of punctuation. Two drunks outside the Greenpoint subway: “You better leave an hour early to get there on time. ” They are lying, they never go anywhere, I thought to myself. For whose benefit would they be acting? Why am I so suspicious? John Baldessari burned all his pre-1967 paintings. “I think that’s odd behaviour but I would like to get in touch with him anyway, to see about using the ashes as makeup for this play I’m writing about British coal miners. ” After guarding masterpieces for weeks, it feels good to stand in my dentist’s office before this cheap painting of a ship. If the world was a bit smaller, just three neighborhoods smaller, maybe things would work out. I’ve heard that there’s a scarcity of luxury. In the movie theatres each person has to share an armrest with a stranger. What Duchamp did with the urinal no longer surprises me, what surprises me is the idea that they had urinals back then. I am waiting for the bus when I smell something burning. I turn to the man standing next to me and ask if he smells it too. In preparing to speak he lets a cloud of condensed breath out into the freezing air. For a half second my mind plays a trick on me. “Oh no, he’s burning,” I think. No one gets hungry at the sight of a lush cornfield or a herd of cattle. It’s enough to tell you that we’re full of education, not awareness. The painter eyes his subject. It’s a single piece of fruit, yellow and shaped like a lightbulb, split open to show the cavity where the pit would normally be, if the pit were not swirling around inside the painter’s mouth.