Louis Getzenbergermann is a name which will live on in the hearts of those who remember him. That would be two. His mother, who draws some fancy numbers on royalty checks sent to her from the other one, Martine Boca de la Vaca, agent to the stars. Punta de Lanza has seen its share of famous nutcases. Martine said it was because the continent was tipped East to West and everything loose rolls into California, but there was at least one downhill side stream that flowed to the lowest point in the great river valley, into the charming desert community of Lance Point. That was for the Anglo-Saxons who thought Punta de Lanza had too many syllables. The name changed on the city limit signs as often as the town changed mayors. One year it was the Shatzstaffels, then the De La Bocas, and one odd year when the earth ran through a comet's tail , Henry "Hank" McHenry received two votes which was a landslide because everyone in town was out with whatever optical equipment they could find to view the end of the world. The Earth kept rolling and Punta de Lanza woke to the news that the town drunk was in charge.
        "Really, it wasn't such a bad year," said ‘La Hormiga' Abeyja, council secretary. "Hank kept prying into the city books and found a whole lot of money which he spent on community parties and a fiesta that most will never be able to recall. You know what alcohol does to the memory centers."
        In November of the following year a De La Boca took the reins of power and the money disappeared. McHenry was blamed.
        Louis Getzenbergerman made his fortune during ‘the sixties'. His famous 1964 VW van is on display at the State Folk Art Museum and can be viewed during regular hours. The odometer reads three hundred fifty thousand miles and that was after an illegal rollback when he thought someone might buy it. It was also the reason for his undying fame.
        Lou had always wanted to be an artist. He had never known any other ambition except perhaps for his deconstructionist tendencies with all things mechanical. He had been told early in life that there was no money in breaking stuff and that it was the person who could put it back together who would survive. That and a few swift slaps on his pink buttocks changed his vocational direction. It was not known why that change took the left field turn it did toward the bright lights of the many art studios that graced the side streets of Punta de Lanza. He admired the clothing, the funny droopy hats and faces with geometrical designs shaved into the beards of the men. He was far too young to appreciate the semi-nudity of the women, most of whom owned the galleries, and saved his seed for a time when he would need inspiration. Louis grew to his majority among the avantgaard of the city, the hoypaloy of what passed for the creative community of the south-western desert valley. The art-world's movers and shakers. Mostly shakers from the trembling that went on when the grants were passed out at the University across the State line. And the moving of those who were left out of the money patch. They came back eventually having seen the world and what it did not contain for them. Basically most of their work was crap and in the big cities the critics were not loath to expatiate on the smell. Louis vowed that when he left it would not hope of return.
        In high school Louis was maximum oddball. He belonged to the Choral group but was dismissed when he insisted on syncopation in the works of Handel. It was also brought forth that he could not read music and that was the reason for the rape of the Alleluia Chorus. "No one reads music anymore," he said. "Music is heard and felt. Those little blobs on a page say nothing of the passion of the intertwining of the audience and the performer. Shakespeare can be read but better see it done by an Olivier or Burton. Same with music. What do you think they invented cassettes for? Ok, give me the sound for the low string on the guitar? Whazzit?"
        "E".
        "Whatever."
        His musical career in music ended one afternoon in Bakersfield, California. Louis had shown up as a studio musician, an emergency employment, and had tried to push his own compositions instead of the Willie and Waylan ripoffs that were planned. When asked to give a sample of his work he asked how a C cord is made at the second position.
        "I don't know what this jerk was thinking," said Arty Jarvis, owner and producer. "He couldn't play a note and we just didn't think ‘I Got Those Downtown Burbank Supermall Blues' would catch on."
        It was a month to the day later that Louis hit on his true vocation. Sculpture! Everyone said his little soap carvings of feet supporting an eyeball wearing a sailor's hat were innovative and amusing. He had been six when he did the first ones. When the applause was at its height he was turning out five, six, sometimes seven a day. Quality began to sag with that constant volume and people began accepting the little gifts as one would from an idiot savant. When he found some of them in the trash in the alley he stopped. No one mentioned the loss. Louis then took a chisel and hammer to a rock face in a national park set aside for the preservation of some thousand year old graffiti. He was to the point of adding nostrils to a portrait of his mother when the park rangers came onto him. It was a thousand dollar fine and public service. Money became an irritant for the artist, especially that he did not have any, so he took a job at the local twenty five acre department and grocery store. His job was to roam the aisles of the food department and give little plastic eggs to the customers. There were ‘prizes' inside to be redeemed at the checkout stand, mostly coupons for some cents off a product or two. Louis found this to be meaningless and decided to expand on his work, to serve the public through his sculpture. He began rolling the eggs in shit and molding them so they looked like human turds. With it was one sheet of toilet paper. The manager came charging onto Louis demanding to be told what the hell he was doing.
        "It's like a performance piece with sculpture." Lou waved his hands at the rows of packaged foods. "What is all this about, right? What does it mean?" He waited expecting an answer. What he got was spluttering. "Ok, see, it's all shit. Everything in here is destined to be or was grown in or came from shit. I was trying to remind the people of their own mortality, the very short duration of their lives and then they are shit too. You see?" The store did not press charges and several dozen people went home with free groceries. Louis was on probation at the time and it was told him that one more stupid incident would cost him his freedom for eighteen months. He bowed his head in understanding of the pain and persecution of the artist. He would find another way.
        Louis disappeared for nine months in April of that year. Later the public, which had never noticed that he was gone, was to learn of his sojourn in India studying under the great Raji Singhsungsang.
        This great unknown artist was a master of plastics. As a boy his uncle had taken him to see his first motion picture, The Graduate and the one word line therein uttered by an acquaintance of the main character, "Plastics" had found a deep seat in his soul. From that time on he had scrounged for plastic cups and bowls in the garbage cans of the wealthy. He begged for plastic soda bottles. Raji became an expert pickpocket but only to steal the plastic card and photo holders in western wallets. By the end of his fifteenth year he had amassed a ton and a quarter of plastic object. His next step was the lesson in melting it down into huge blocks. His first and most famous piece was a sixteen foot replica of a pornographic temple carving in the most garish colors ever seen which now graces the entrance to Playboy Bombay. When Louis went to learn the Raji was seventy six. His interest in pornography had not abated. Louis became immersed in that cluttered ocean for the length of time a mother holds her baby in her belly. His arrival back in Punta de Lanza caused no stir whatever but the drawings and rubbings from certain sacred sites dedicated to the tantric arts of love that he began showing art classes in the school system, did. All the work it had taken Louis nearly a year to gather was taken as evidence and he was thrown in Smiley Jack John's jail. There was a city council meeting to discuss whether this confiscation was illegal. After all, this was ancient art wrought by a wonderful, but dead, civilization and should be afforded the respect we would give nudes by Modigliani or Rembrandt. The meeting ran very late due to the sudden needs of several of the male members to use the men's room. More than once. Louis got off with a warning and three requests for information about where other Indian art could be obtained
        Lou was back on the streets again. He would have continued living with his parents but they ragged him unmercifully about his future. He preferred living in his van but he had no art supplies, no way to ply his trade and craft with plastics and acrylics. The young man was forced to read books, watch videos at a friend's house, and hang out at a coffee shop near the computer science college. Through it all he never lost the hope or the will to be an artist. He only lacked opportunity. Then fate had one of her strange paroxysms and twitched opened the door for Louis to squeeze through into the bright lights of big cities.
        It began with an article in a New York City underground literary magazine, exquisite taste and wide readership among the illuminati. It described a year in the life of a performance artist, Jean Lou de Pittsburg. His escapades were well known even in the conservative mainstream media. The time in Bangladesh handing out energy bars while dressed as a Borneo Bushman, stark naked except for a bright red three foot Borneo penis sheath. He had died his skin bright yellow and had applied some very scary theatrical makeup, wore a bunch of turkey feathers in a bundle on the back of his head moving to a ritual rhythm, and sang gibberish sotto voce. His aura and attitude were so strong that the police just stood back and watched for over two hours. Then he was a King of Fools in Paris, High Druid Master in England, shriveled streetbum throwing toilet paper at passersby while screaming Shakespearian love sonnets. Dozens of performances with as many personas, all covered by the press. There was even an hour documentary for A&E cable network of Jean Lou dressed in classic mime drapery standing at the door of New York's finest, oldest and most prestigious Mens club and mimicking each patron as they entered and left. He was truly the master of his art. Unique. Fearless. Rich. Really stupid. Louis saw the similarity in their names and became implacably determined to learn this amazing art form and become recognized as a master in his own right. The first thought he had was of the large square tin of Hess and Clark Udder Ointment that his mother had used for everything in his youth. Asthma? Udder ointment. Stiff sore back? Udder ointment. Headache? Udder ointment. So far that is a common rather boring list but it gets better. At the age of seven Louis discovered that his penis got hard when he washed it in the shower. He became more deliberate and, eventually, quite good at it. All his friends were doing it. They gathered on the sixteenth hole of the golf course, at the side in the tall weeds among the eucalyptus trees. Methods were exchanged, information of what could happen if a girl swallowed some of it...instant pregnancy...or what really does happen to make a baby. All his buddies came with something to add, some piece of vital information that made the puzzle clearer. Louis brought the udder ointment.
        They tried it together, an adolescent circle-jerk with veterinary medicinal help. The sensation was so intense that no one heard the footsteps in the grass. In fact they were oblivious to everything until the deep rumble from Sheriff ‘Smiley' Jack John shattered their fantasy.
        "I'll just wait until you girls are through."
        The whole town seemed to know about it in a bare four hours. School became nearly impossible for the rest of that term. The loose association still met together but the venue was changed to a game parlor in the mall.

***

        Louis rummaged through the hall closet where so many of the family things found a home. Piles of old wash cloths that would come in handy one day, never know when you might need a rag. Jumbled boxes of outdated medicines, some quite poisonous if taken past the expiration date. In the back of the top shelf behind the dusty knickknacks from the County Fair the year momma's throwing arm was so splendid with three baseballs into the buckets at the carny, was an entire row of square tins of Hess and Clark Udder Ointment. Momma bought it by the case. He threw two of the tins into a pillow case, tucked an old lumpy pillow under his arm and made his smokey VW way to the mall.
        Behind the massive Albertson's there were throw-away bins specially designed to thwart the homeless, the poor and the just plain cheap from harvesting perfectly good fruits and vegetables discarded because government regulations insisted on it. Louis and his pals had a single genius between them and found the way into the bins without much trouble. He scrambled into one of them and retrieved a plastic bag of turnips, a bundle of corn husks packaged for the cooks to make tamales, and a carton of chocolate eggs left from a less than profitable Easter sale, nearly a full pallet of rotting vegetables and five supermarket cakes of the kind that have the least actual organic content and therefore do not spoil in the way more wholesome foods do. He exited the fetid mess pleased with himself. This was going to be great! he mused. Louis was given to musing a lot for lack of a better activity. His best ideas came while musing but most of them went out the way they came in because the poor boy would not get off his butt and act on them. This time it was different. He had even taken notes. In an open dumpster he scrounged some eyebrow pencils, cream that turned into a rubbery blue mask and a torn pillow with half the feathers gone. Very pleased with his discoveries, Louis retired to his van for further musing. He had to have a theme. Why did his refined artistry lead him to these filthy items? Why garbage? He spread the things before him in a halfmoon. He pushed a few of them around, switched one for another, made a little smiley face. Nothing. Then he thought, why does it have to look like anything identifiable? This brightened the day. And why not let gravity choose the way of it? Louis had read a book on Complexity Theory and understood none of it which he figured was the object. How could any human mind understand chaos? Never mind that we live in it, eat it, breath it. Or that we are one of the only creations that crap in our own nest. That was it! Eukia! He spread the raggedy army blanket and distributed the items on it, the vegies descending toward a liquid state, with closed eyes and a twist of the wrist. With a half used purple lipstick he carefully printed YOU ARE THE PEPSI GENERATION AND I AM A PIMPLY FREAK! in tiny letters on the side window and gently pressed his back to the glass. He had no way of checking the transfer but what the hey, anything for the sake of art. He spread airplane glue in stripes across his chest and down the front of his legs, up the sides of his body into the armpits. The pillow stuffing he dumped in random pattern on the blanket, tossed in the corn husks and a tomato. There was a lot of refuse with a big stink. He rolled in it, crawled through the mushy land mines of chocolate cherry bombs and liquefying fiber delivery systems. He thrashed and rolled. Nothing was ordered. Everything random. But, he thought, what if I direct this? What if what I or anyone would call random or chaos or complexity, whatever, what if that is unconscious order? And if I do that then does that make me God? A god, maybe? Something lower without doubt. Louis sat up straight and adjusted the corn husks in strategically artistic places. From a long mahogany box he took a three foot Borneo penis sheath, a peon to his dead hero. This one had taken months to obtain and verify it's authenticity and when he had it was only the right thing to do to paint it like an old fashioned barber's pole. He could twirl it and make the stripes seem to go up. The young man tied the precious symbol to his loins, glued white turkey feathers between his butt-cheeks, and, with a milk souring cry, exited the van just as a bus load of catholic school athletes pulled into the DQ.
        The jocks decided as quickly as any can that it was open season on geeks wearing pointy red and white whirling things on their cocks. There were many with their mouths open but no one would presume to say it was from surprise. Louis thought they looked mighty much like white whales breaching to strain krill and said so. He began a jerky dance he imagined a turkey would do when faced with twenty two mouth breathers. Flapping elbows smartly against chocolaty feathered sides, a mushy sschlapping, leaving marvelous trails of sewage, Louis circled round and round the bus, shaking his colorful phallus and taunting them saying they were born without necks. The highly muscled bunch screwed up foreheads that joined with their hair lines too soon anyway and began shouting slogans, things that propped up their brain challenged nervous systems on the field. One made a dive for the trash barrels and began spreading slick half eaten food on the van. It took a few moments until the others saw it as a wonderful trick. Who did this? Who had ever done this? No one! Cool! And the garbage flew. Louis produced a city phone directory, though it was never clear from where, and began singing the names and addresses as a monotone beatnik preachment without sense or reason. The crowd grew. The McD in the adjoining parking lot emptied onto the competitor's tarmac and urged on one side or the other. Sometimes both. The rumor circulated that it was all an act payed for by DQ to embarrass the world of fast foods in Punta de Lanza. When word reached the jocks they stopped all activity but scratching forehead and crotch and asked if it was true. Were they going to be recompensed for this display? Was it the street theater one or two had hear about but never could imagine? The crowd noise distracted Louis enough that he withdrew in disgust into his now garbage covered vehicle and putt-putted his smoking way home. His mother made no comment when he climbed stinking up the porch steps. She stopped him at the door until she could turn the hose on him and get him a towel. He thanked her and resumed his interrupted family life.

***

        Louis could not bring himself to wash the van. It was the visible evidence of a fantastic adventure that he would not be able to duplicate. The hamburger bits and fries soaked in grease melded in a moldy pattern among the globs of putrefying lettuce and tomatoes. He drove around town with pride, damn bitch that she is.
        He shaved and got a haircut. His aim was to find what was next but, like all youth coming back to their sipapu, he was hooked on home life. His job at the Glass And Frame Co. got him by, which condition has stopped many a budding artist is theirs or someone's tracks, glued to the necessities of food, roof, and bed. But his mind roiled about, coiling like a serpent around the groin of one idea after another. There was no action. Time was awastin'. Or frozen. His fantasies became more extreme and less doable. Then came the touring company from a big eastern city with their entire theater on the backs of several semis. They flitted around Punta de Lanza like gnats in the late afternoon sun, delighted with this clever quaint desert haven. So clean. So friendly. God, but it was good to get out of The City! Louis closed up shop one day and found a bunch of the actors gathered about his van, laughing and oohing. He stood in the doorway watching them.
        "This is so cool! It's a perfect ideation of the clumsy society that begs to differ with a balanced diet!"
        "What? Oh no! It's the view from the inside of the American stomach."
        "That's cool, yeah! Maybe we could do a piece on this. We could find the owner and see if we could borrow it. Maybe get them to come with us. This is great! Such texture and originality."
        "It's mine", said Louis and he went to the driver's door. "I used to do street theater and this is what a bunch of pumped up jocks did. I just never washed it because it reminds me to be more careful next time. If there is a next time."
        "Oh, man, don't wash it! Oh no! This is so perfect, so clear. You want to sell it? Can we borrow it?"
        "Maybe come with us? We all get along just fine and you are obviously our kind of people."
        Louis scratched his head and grinned. This was it. This was what he had waited for. He fairly flew home to gather some clothes and say goodbye to his mom.
        "I'm going, mom. I'm going off with the travelers and going to become famous. You'll see. I'll come home one day with a lot of money and you won't have to work so hard ever again."
        "She shook her head. "I hope you don't hurt yourself, dear."

***

        Bernie wrote a poetic performance piece for it, Sheryl wrote some music. They called it Garbage and everyone loved it. They made their dramatic way up to the Capital and played there for several months. The snows came and the troupe expressed a need to see Arizona. Louis stayed. He had found another extended project and was unwilling to abandon a good idea when it hit him. There were sad goodbyes and many expressions of goodwill. He gave them the van and they were gone.
        Today you can still find him following intricate paths around the neighborhoods of the Capital rearranging the trash on alternate Wednesdays and Fridays, diving deep into the plastic bags the city provides for the taxpayers to bundle their refuse. He makes funny faces. He paints landscapes with vegetables. His work is renown for its simplicity and taste. If you were to ask him what it is, what he calls it, he will answer, "It's nothing really. The city provides clear plastic bags, you see, and I just go Window-shopping."