I woke up in the loft at the back of my studio, tucked behind cloth curtains I’d hung for privacy. My head was still swimming from the night before — another late night with Aldo at the New French — and the first thing I felt, even before my feet touched the floor, was that strange half-regret that comes after saying yes too fast. What did I agree to? Genet? The Balcony? I think he said something about building props. A jail. A courtroom! A confessional? I wasn’t sure. But it was Aldo. I couldn’t say no to Aldo. If he was in, I was in. That’s how it worked.

I lay there for a moment staring into the dimness, thinking: I need a shower. The problem was, I was living in the studio illegally, and the shower — a makeshift, barely-there thing I rigged up — was down the hall. And it was March 25th, 1986 — still cold.

The super’s studio was right next to mine. He hated me — maybe because of the shower, maybe because I was getting all the good press and he wasn’t. I was living there illegally and he knew it. But the landlord liked me, so I got away with it. If the super had his way, I would’ve been out in a week.

After the shower I got dressed, went downstairs, and grabbed the mail. Back upstairs, I lit a cigarette and sank into my ugly brown cushy chair — the kind you don’t choose, you inherit. I let the envelopes sit in my lap for a few minutes and looked around the studio like I was taking attendance.

Along the western wall were real kitchen cabinets bolted up like a bluff — a domestic gesture, a way of pretending the place was legal and civilized. There was no running water, so the “sink” was a slop bucket: plain and humiliating in theory, but in practice part of the studio’s strange magic. Still, I had a hotplate. And on the counter sat an Italian coffee maker — the metal kind shaped like an hourglass — just about ready to erupt. The smell of coffee mixed with glue, sawdust, cigarette smoke, and whatever chemical ambition I’d been playing with the day before. It didn’t smell like hygiene. It smelled like a life being built.

On the table in the middle of the studio was a big, half-built model — raw tan fiberboard, cut and layered into a little terrain. Not buildings yet. Just topology. Plateaus and channels, ramps and drops, like a small engineered landscape waiting for its reason to exist.

On the right was the back of one half of the neon assembly from the New Museum — not glowing now, just leaning there like the shed skin of something that had already travelled to New York and returned. Having that piece in the room steadied me. It was proof something real had happened out there — and came home with me.

And hung on the wall nearby was one of the portraits Shoshana made of me. It watched the room the way a judge watches. With its angry look, it sometimes felt like it was mocking me — but it was me — like it knew exactly who I was beneath the work. But studios are like that. They’re private enough that even objects begin to carry a soul.

And once you start feeling that — once the room starts to feel alive — everything in it starts to look like material. Even the ugly parts. The coffee grounds. The slop bucket. The little messes that “shouldn’t” be there. Instead of making me ashamed, they made me curious. I’d dump the coffee grounds, rinse what I could, and catch myself wondering — half joking, half serious — if something could grow out of it. Not rot. Not just decay. Something stranger. A little ecosystem of color and texture and accident.

That curiosity spilled out into the corridor, too, where I built a flat-file box in the corner — another illegal little annex — and started experimenting with what I can only describe as growing painting. Painting as organism. As chemical bloom. As surface weather. Like lichen on stone. Like minerals crawling outward, trying to become their own geography. I was having fun. Serious fun. The kind that makes you feel like you’re getting away with something.

And the truth is: I was.

I sat there with the mail in my lap, cigarette going, coffee almost ready, and the studio looking back at me like a jury.

Then I saw it.

An official-looking envelope from the Bush Foundation.

The kind that makes your stomach go tight before you even open it.

I opened it.

“I am very pleased…” it began.

That was all I needed to read.

For a moment I just sat there, holding the letter, letting it change the air in the room. I could finally exhale.