Self-para 001; When things get fucked up, the fucked up get going.
Alright, fine, he’ll admit it - perhaps the exposing got to him more than he initially led on. He claimed there to be no motives behind the reckless outbursts of tweets, that he was just exercising his right to defend himself, the whole ordeal nothing but some online banter people would soon forget. After all, somebody literally got exposed for murder a week ago and it seemed as though nobody even remembered his name anymore. So, that was that, some rumors, a couple of mean-spirited messages, and wandering eyes following him as he walked down the hall - in a day or two, everything would go back to normal.
Besides, all he did was crack a few jokes - changing your twitter handle to fit the narrative you’re being accused of? C'mon, that's hilarious. And even if it's not, all it is is going along with the joke. With no receipts to support the claims, no secret confessions or account numbers linking the two together, no one had any reason to believe the whole Kapu thing was meant to be taken seriously anyway, there wasn't as much as a picture of Xavier in the same room as one of Kapu’s paintings, nor an acknowledgment that he's ever even heard of the artist at all. The only connection the two shared in the public eye was Mrs. Imogen Park. The same Imogen Park that has not spoken to her son in years.
Though he’d never admit it, not even to himself, somewhere deep, deep down - way down, buried underneath a pile of empty liquor bottles and cigarette buds - Kapu stood as a bridge between his family and him; an excuse to send an email to his mom, even though it boasted a stranger’s name. A hope that maybe, just maybe, creating a fake persona could stand to become a successful attempt at gaining his parents' respect. At the end of the day, did it matter if their letters of praise sung about one mysterious Kapu, an artist they relished and poured hours of support and appreciation into, unbeknownst to them that the words of love were read by no other than a boy who longed for them all his life? Did their words not hold the same kind of recognition?
No, no they didn’t.
And yet, as it turned out, his intentions behind the project didn't matter at all. It was a fraud, so they said, a quick crash grab. Another empty soul trying to reach stardom - a scam. As though the paintings weren't the same as they were, as though it wasn't his hand that traced the lines, his disdain for the corrupt world of art-trade that fueled the stories behind it. As though his face alone was enough to strip an art piece of its value. Sure, he was the first to claim the paintings held no meaning in the first place, but that's beside the point. Nobody cared about the real value of art anyway, he felt like a fool for having believed anyone would stop and take the time to listen to his message at all.
Truthfully, he’s never felt heard before, and he wasn’t sure whether that stood as the cause or the result of his struggle to express himself. One of the very reasons he fell in love with art was just that, its ability to transcend words, deliver a message through color, shape and atmosphere, fill the air with a feeling, rather than a saying. Ironically, he found himself utterly useless at that as well, countless unfinished poems, smashed figurines and torn-up sketches ridiculing the incoherent strings of thoughts whirling in his mind. He never thought to put them aside and revisit them after the heat of the moment had passed - no, if it wasn't perfect the first time round, it would never be perfect at all.
If it couldn't make the family proud, it was time to chuck it aside, pop out a new one, and make that the sole recipient of all the cultivated love and support. The old one had already been deemed a lost cause anyway.
Anyway. Another shot of whiskey and all was well again. Another one, and the distant cries for help echoing within no longer reached his ears.
What exactly did they want him to do? Pick up a phone? Call a friend? What friend? The only friend he has just might be well on his way towards becoming the only friend he had - just as it usually went. Even those who stuck around after the first signs of trouble had to admit defeat sooner or later, forced to realize there’s no honor in fighting somebody else’s demons when they won’t even put up a fight themselves.
He was one of the most popular kids in high school, but hey, fuck it, with a big-shot football scholarship and an off-campus apartment at UCLA, he didn’t need those high school losers anyway. A semester into the first school year, alcohol convinced him he didn’t need the scholarship either. Well - it wasn’t the alcohol that drove his decisions, not at first, it was merely a distraction from the deep-rooted issues he wasn’t quite ready to deal with yet, a convenient scapegoat to unload all of his problems onto. Until it became the very center of his battleground, leaving him without a family, without a girlfriend, without a scholarship, and, after his friends had realized weekend-long parties were only holding them back, without his status of a party god as well.
He went from living in a Manhattan mansion to crashing on strangers couches within the span of four years, burning every bridge along the way. Who did he have to call? That guy whose bathroom he threw up in four months ago, and was then allowed to spend the day on his couch out of sheer pity? That girl who, bless her heart, recognized him at one of the parties as ‘that guy she used to take a business class with’, wanted to help him get home safely, only to realize he had no home to get to? He managed to spend the better part of two weeks in her bed - it’s crazy what all people will do for a pretty smile and a touch. At one point in time, he even got involved with a group of local artists and convinced them to let him drag an old mattress into their art studio, and so he lived somewhere between a sketch and a masterpiece, paint fumes helping him color in the edges of reality.
Long drags of flavored cigarettes, his nude body draped across the bed, sprawled all over the floor a moment after, his trembling fingers drowning in buckets of paint, indulging in the sensation, just to splatter a bright colorful mess all over the big white sheet hung across the wall, first yellow, then orange, then green, topped off with a flood of black.
The moment he realized art wasn’t real.
The story behind it didn’t matter, no title deserved its praise of a cathartic cleaning - there was no cathartic cleaning. There were empty buckets of paint on the ground, holes in the canvas, and tension within.
A day before mother’s day, he plastered the word HYP OCR ITE onto a blank canvas and sent it off to his parents' house. As his friend had later described it, the last thing they did was open google translate, typed in ‘buffoon’, and chose a random language to translate the word into - and so Banksy’s newest rival was born.
Oh, the days when people cared enough to stick around and fill him in on parts of the night he didn’t remember. Back when getting kicked out of his apartment seemed like the start of an adventure, albeit a solo one.
He used to think people intentionally tied his feet down onto the pier, chaining him in place while boats came and went, mocking him with the wind in their sails; he used to think everybody wanted to slow him down, just so they could soar. He was never able to see the ropes around his feet for what they were; safety nets, keeping him from going adrift and losing himself out on the open sea, alone. He still couldn't.
With great haste, he swung at anyone who tried to tie him down, failing to realize time and time again it didn't have to be just him against the world.
But it was. And if it took a secret of his getting exposed to remind him of that, then so be it.
Caught up in the whirlwind of asperity, he almost thought to force out a tear, even if just for the theatrics of it, even if just to prove the cold-hearted man walking the halls of Masters remained nothing but a mask - Instead, his body was as lifeless amidst the dirty sheets, the joint in his hands having burned out a long time ago, his face as unhinged as ever.
