ARTST STATEMTNT REDUX

Blog Post 6

Artist Statement

There was a joke that my cousin Javier told my brother Gabriel when he was five years old. The joke went, "Fat and Fat-Fat and Pinch Me were in a boat. Fat and Fat-Fat fell out, who was left?”

And my brother said, “Pinch me” so my cousin pinched him.

So when my brother got home he told my mother he was going to tell her a joke, and he said, “Fat and Fat-Fat were in a boat. Fat and Fat-Fat fell out. Who was left?”  And my mother said, “Nobody.” 

My brother repeated the joke, and when my mother said “Nobody” a second time, my brother kicked her.

Its been 20 years, now, I was always older than my brother, and my Mother still talks about this; How it didn’t occur to him that he was telling the joke wrong, but still he was furious about her incorrect response. He just wanted to do to her what had been done to him.

I was talking to Vick, she lives in Boston, on the phone. We hadn’t talked in a while and I had been telling her about the program.


“Is it really all that bad?” she asked  “I was thinking of applying to something like that”. I could tell she wasn’t listening. “Victor,” I said, “Its not New York, but the girls still have hundred dollar hair cuts and sterling silver belt buckles. Next time, if they ask me, I will take the job at VICE.”

I didn’t know the situation with her work, but honestly, it didn’t sound all that bad. I said, “I’d better go, this is my only chance to get groceries this week,” and hung up. I felt it for quite a while.   

What I really should have told her is: See, Fat and Fat-Fat fell out, and in Gradschool, all that’s left is Pinch Me.

At the grocery store I remembered another joke Vick and I both heard, when I was 22, which went like this:

“There was this guy I knew. Freshman year in the dorms, I had this roommate, he was a total Asp and he just played W.O.W. and never left our room.

 One day I went over to him, on his computer, and invited him to a party. I wanted him to do cocaine with me. I thought it would bring him out of his shell. So I talked him into it, we did about 4 bumps and we went to the party. Two days later (I met a girl there and didn’t go back to the dorm right away) I saw him again and asked him how it was.

He said

“Normally when I try to communicate with people it is like they are on the other side of the wall”

And I said “Yeah…. What about that cocaine?” fully expecting him to say that on the powdery confidence, the wall was scale-able, or maybe even crumbled down, like when they tore down the berlin wall when we were kids. Instead he said

“Well….on the cocaine…. It was like not just a wall, but there were men, with machine guns, guarding the wall…. And all the checkpoints were closed.”

I never tried to hang out with him again after that, waste of my stash, am I right?”

Well when I heard this, I was totally shocked. I mean, I didn’t know anyone else could see the border.