Page 27 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Three

FOIL ART

“The last stop on the Outsider Artist Studio Tour is right here,
folks,” said Holly Bauza, gripping the handrail behind the driver’s
seat as the bus bumped over broken concrete curbing into the
driveway of a decrepit house. “Let me remind you again that
although the artists we visit have signed contracts with our agency
permitting us to drop in on them at specified hours on certain days of
the week, it is in their nature on occasion to behave unpredictably
and inappropriately. Please stay behind me until I have re-established
rapport, and hold your questions until—and if—I indicate it is the
proper time to enter into verbal communication with Mr. Lebec.”
The half-score Touresthetics customers trooped wearily and warily
out of the vehicle behind their still-perky guide. They now knew
about the electric cattle prod and aerosol can of mace she carried in
her capacious shoulder bag. The self-styled logorhetician at the
previous venue had first regaled his visitors with a recitation from the
first dozen or so cantos of his bodily-fluid-illuminated kilometer-long
scroll manuscript, then, perceiving unmistakable but purely
involuntary signs of restiveness among his audience, attacked them
with the Malayan kris he used as pointer. Now the boilerplate caveat
uttered by Ms. Bauza resonated with more than rote insistence.
She stopped them on the front porch and flipped through the
pages on her clipboard. “Alfonse Lebec was discharged from a
minimal care facility seven years ago. His remaining relatives had
passed away during his committal, and the state could not find a
category in the new statutes under which to continue his treatment
for a mildly psychotic paranoid schizophrenia. While undergoing
chemical therapy in that institution, Mr. Lebec began his early
experiments in foil art. It is theorized by no less an authority than
Roland Luce-Cannon, professor of art therapy and author of Dysthesia
and the Gorgonian Muses, that Lebec’s obsession with aluminum foil
stemmed from an early childhood experience in which his parents
perished in a kitchen fire triggered by the explosion of a foil-wrapped