The DISCOVR gallery commissioned me for a piece for their new sculpture room. I said yes because I’m a career artist and I say yes to everyone that offers me money. I don’t have to agree with their ethics. DISCOVR is one of those hip new for-profit galleries that upper-middle-class people take their dates and use as leverage for sex afterwards. It’s interactive. They have a Kusama Infinity Room and a bed of nails. This is all hearsay—I’ve never been in there. Tickets are sixty bucks a head.

On installation day I show up with Kenny. The sculpture room is disarranged with blank white pedestals, and some idiot has painted the walls lime green with bubblegum splotches. The head curator and her art school goon squad are chatting under a crystal chandelier. I present Kenny. 

“This is not a sculpture,” they say, “this is a person dressed in aluminum foil.”

“It is a sculpture,” I say. “He tells lies. Ask him a question—he’ll lie to you.”

“Are you a sculpture?” they ask Kenny.

“No,” says Kenny, “my mouth is bleeding. I’m tasting tons of blood, and I think I’m dying.”

“See?” I say, “and good point, check out his teeth.” I peel back Kenny’s lips like a horse. His teeth are all the same size, like baby teeth swimming in adult gums. “I filed them down,” I explain.

The gallery staff stand there in all black button down shirts and black slacks and golden belt buckles and click their tongues. I’ve already gotten my advance. The curator sucks in her cheeks. She’s wearing floral, but she looks like she’s about to cry. 

“Just wait until the show,” I say, “You have to trust me that this is art.”

“But we wanted a sculpture,” she says. “Not performance. Who is this guy anyway?”

“This is a fucking sculpture,” I tell her. “A sculpture that can fight. He can fight the other sculptures, or even your patrons. He fights artists—he can fight me.”

Kenny flashes his baby teeth.

“And how are we going to—”

“Feed him? Don’t worry about that. Kenny is efficient,” I say. “He’s a scavenger. He eats paint.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. “You’re on the edge of a breakthrough here, don’t you get it? I’ve already had that breakthrough, and so has Kenny, which is why he’s helping me with this.”

Kenny nods crinkly. A beat of silence. I know she’s sold. Kenny is an artist too, and he knows exactly what not to say—this is why we’re great friends. 

I look the curator in her scared, rabbit eyes. “Are you in?” I ask, “Or should I pack it up?”

The curator’s face breaks into resignation. As long as he doesn’t accrue extra costs, the lines in her mouth seem to say.

I’m there at the opening wearing a white T-shirt and giraffe print pants. I don’t have to pay the seventy-five dollar entrance fee for the night. The curator is wearing a red romper and gold hoop earrings that are bigger than her head. They’re essentially a hazard. She keeps her distance from me—there’s always a weird vase or deer made of rusted fishhooks between us.

Some of the sculptures are incredible, like the fishhook deer. Someone’s constructed a refrigerator with anxiety issues. Other pieces, like a bean-shaped piece of driftwood, kind of suck. 

Kenny isn’t confined to his pedestal, but he hangs around, in range of it, like getting too far away from his name tag will make him forget.

“Kenny” – NFS

And my name underneath with a short bio, which is entirely fabricated. I did not graduate from college. 

A woman with a tiny sequined handbag hanging from her shoulder is squatting below Kenny and trying to check out his genitals. I can tell Kenny is nervous.

“You’re doing great,” I tell him. “You’re in a coveted position right now.”

The woman stands up. “Does it have a cock?” she whispers. 

I say, “What the hell is wrong with you, lady? This is a sculpture, not a burlesque dancer. And no, he doesn’t have a penis. Can’t you read the signs? DO NOT TOUCH.”

“You remind me of that woman I killed,” says Kenny, in one of his inspired lies. 

The woman clutches her little bag to her heart. Her penciled-in eyebrows skyrocket—she paid seventy-five dollars for this experience. She splits into a new crowd of gawkers who have come to pay Kenny some attention. I remind him to show off his teeth—they took forever. I’m going to get more wine. 

I end up in line behind the curator, and when she turns to me she isn’t as upset as earlier.

“Everyone keeps bringing up your sculpture,” she says, and sips a plastic glass filled to the brim with red. “I don’t know what I expected.”

“I was raised in a circus,” I say, accepting a cup from a college student clad in black. “That’s the context to my style. Kenny is like the plein air painting of sculptures.” I just learned what that phrase meant an hour ago, and I’m sure what I said doesn’t make sense, but the curator nods like she gets it. 

I glance over at Kenny. He’s flexing for a little girl with a hair bow. Another patron feeds him pieces of soft-pretzel. 

“You were right,” says the curator. “It’s art. We could all learn something from Kenny.”

Because this is as good of a time as ever, I say, “I haven’t gotten my check yet.”

Her open-mouthed glare compliments the giant golden O‘s hanging from her ears, but she pulls out her checkbook regardless. She signs twenty-thousand dollars and zero cents. I bring it to Kenny and crumple the paper into a pearl-sized bead. 

“Try not to swallow this,” I say, and slide it down the velvet underbelly of his tongue.