Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Read online

  It was while cleaning out the garage after his mother’s death that Rick found the paint-by-numbers set. Sandwiched between two board games–Parcheesi and Monopoly–the box was nearly flattened, the right flap torn off, and from it he withdrew a single balsawood rectangle slightly larger than a sheet of typing paper. Printed onto the wood were wavy black lines that partitioned the board into segments, each of which contained a number. It was impossible to tell from the tangled jumble of outlined shapes what exactly the finished painting was meant to portray, although three sections of the upper right corner had been painted in, and the varying shades of blue appeared to represent a roiling sky.

  There was nothing on the cover, neither words nor picture, that indicated what the finished painting was supposed to depict, only white letters on a background of orange, describing the joy of painting-by-numbers.

  He could feel from the unbalanced heft that there was still something in the box, and turning it open end down, he shook out a hardened brush and a series of small plastic paint containers, round receptacles scarcely bigger than a stack of six quarters, connected together by little tabs.

  Rick put everything back into the box and hesitated before deciding whether to add it to the donation pile. This had been his mother’s. She was the one who had started the picture, and he found himself wondering when and why. He could not recall her ever showing an interest in art, which explained why she had abandoned the effort, but the fact that she had bought the set and attempted to paint in the first place, even if she hadn’t gotten very far, meant that at one point this had held an attraction for her. In a way, that made it more personal and intimate than most of the other objects in the garage, and after brief reflection, he decided to keep the kit.

  He continued sorting through the items in the garage and thought no more about it until he was loading up the car an hour later. He had shoved all of the donation items into three Hefty bags that he’d stuffed inside the trunk of his car, intending to drop them off at Goodwill on his way home, and was packing up the things he had decided to save, when the flat orange box caught his eye. Intrigued once again by the art kit, he separated it from the rest, putting it on the passenger seat next to him instead of on the floor in the back.

  At his apartment, he opened the box and laid out its contents on the kitchen table, examining that small section of gradated blues his mother had painted. It occurred to him that he could finish the picture, and the thought of collaborating with his mom in this way gave him a warm comforting feeling. When finished, he could even have the picture framed.

  He examined the board and the row of plastic paint holders. There were only eight colors, though there were sixteen numbers on the board. An entire spectrum of paints was missing. The reds and oranges and yellows, it seemed to him.

  Were the ones he had even usable?

  The paints were so old, they were probably all dried out and hard as a rock. He opened the lid of one, dipping in his finger, and was surprised to find it still wet and tacky. The others, too, were still in good shape.

  He just needed to find the other paints, ones that would match the numbers. Which meant that he needed to find another kit like this one.

  Rick wasn’t sure if there were any hobby shops left, or if they had gone the way of the record store, but he looked in the Yellow Pages and actually found two hobby shops in Orange County, one in Huntington Beach and one in Anaheim. Since Anaheim was closer, and he passed through the city on his way to and from work, he decided to stop off the next day and see if someone there could help him out.

  He brought the entire kit with him. The dark store, filled with aisles of model train sets and remote-controlled vehicles of every stripe, was empty save for an obese bearded man seated behind the counter. Rick explained his situation and showed the man the paint-by-numbers set.

  “No, we don’t sell these,” he said, examining the box. “I don’t know who does anymore. You might try eBay. “Or…” He thought for a moment. “You know, there’s a couple of antique malls over on Lincoln, about two blocks up. One of them has a lot of vintage toys and things. They might have something there. Or at least might know where to find what you need.”

  “Thanks,” Rick told him. “I appreciate it.”

  There were two antique stores across the street from each other. In the first one, he found nothing, but in the second, to the right of the door, was a booth filled with old toys and games: Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, Lionel trains, Twister, Password, Ker-Plunk. Looking through the packed shelves, he found several paint-by-numbers sets, one with a cowboy in a western scene, one with a rocket, one a simplified reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

  Rick walked over to the cash register. “Excuse me,” he said to the middle-aged woman behind it. “I was looking at that stall over there–” He gestured. “–and I have some questions about the paint-by-numbers sets. Who do I talk to about that? You?”

  The woman smiled at him. “That’s Bob Lambert’s booth. He’s usually only here on weekends, but I can call him for you–”

  “Did someone call my name?” A hippie-ish looking guy emerged from the nearest aisle.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here, Bob.”

  “Yeah, I had some work to do. What’s up?”

  “This young man has a question for you.”

  Rick explained that he had found an old paint-by-numbers set while cleaning out his mom’s garage and that he was looking for missing paints for a picture that he wanted to finish. “I saw all the ones in your stall there and thought you might be able to help me.”

  “Well, it depends what brand you have,” the antique dealer said. “Those out on display right now are Petersens, but I also have some Rollos for sale that I haven’t put out yet.”

  “It’s in my car if you’d like to look at it.” He had not brought his kit into the store, in case someone might think he had stolen it, and Bob accompanied him outside. Rick unlocked and opened the passenger door, taking out the orange box.

  “That’s a Tyrese,” the dealer said, impressed. “Very rare. Very hard to find. It was a company out of St. Paul, and they only made these sets for three years, 1964 through 1967. Didn’t sell well then, but they’ve built up a serious cult following since. I’ll give you sixty dollars for it.”

  “No.” Rick shook his head.

  “Seventy-five. That’s a good price, especially since you said half of your paints are missing.”

  “It’s not for sale. I told you, I’m just looking for the rest of the paints. I have numbers one through eight, but I need nine through sixteen. Do you know where I can get them?”

  “That’s part of what makes these Tyrese sets so rare. You have to have exactly the right color, or the painting won’t turn out. At all. They’re very elaborate, and it’s not just green–blue–red–yellow, like most of the other brands. If your orange is half a shade lighter or darker than it’s supposed to be, the painting’ll turn out like crap, pardon my French.” He smiled. “I’ll bet you can’t even tell what your picture’s supposed to be, can you?”

  “No,” Rick admitted.

  “That’s why these Tyrese sets are so genius. May I?”

  Rick nodded, and the dealer carefully tilted the box and withdrew the piece of wood inside. “Nice,” he said, examining it. “Is this the only one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tyrese sets always included three pictures. Is this the only one?”

  “I guess so.”

  “An incomplete set,” Bob said sadly. “That brings down the value quite a bit.”

  “I told you. It’s not for sale.” Three? Rick thought. If there’d been two other pieces in the box and they were no longer here, that meant his mom must have painted them. He couldn’t recall ever seeing any wooden pictures, and he wondered what had happened to them. The fact that she’d been interested enough in the project to complete two paintings, even if she hadn’t finished the third, suddenly made this one even more valuabl
e to him.

  The antique dealer carefully put everything back in the box, handing the set back to Rick. “Sorry I can’t help you. My suggestion? Go online. There’s a whole community of Tyrese painters who swap advice and trade panels and help each other look for missing set elements. They’ll be glad to welcome a fellow traveler.”

  “Thanks,” Rick said. “I appreciate it.”

  He did go online when he got home, and there was indeed a very active Tyrese hobbyist club with an elaborate website containing multiple message boards. Strangely, for such a fansite, there were no pictures of any of the paintings, although there were photos of the boxes containing the kits. He wondered why, assuming it probably had something to do with copyright restrictions.

  Within a half-hour of posting a description of his situation and his needs, he’d received over forty replies from Tyrese aficionados all over the country. Fortunately for him, two of them were here in Orange County, a husband and wife who lived in Mission Viejo. They wanted to see what he had, and offered to Skype with him, so he responded via the email address they had posted, and ten minutes later, the three of them were video chatting.

  He was not sure what he had expected. Old hippies like the guy at the antique store? A retired couple? Johnny and Prallix Lee were neither. They were a pair of young goths, dressed in black and festooned with tattoos, not the sort he would have guessed were devotees of painting-by-numbers. But the two of them were excited to hear of his find and asked him to hold up the board to the webcam so they could see it.

  “Awesome,” Prallix said.

  Johnny was nodding. “Show us the paints.”

  Rick did.

  “Okay, first of all, guard those with your life. Original Tyrese paints are very rare.”

  “I guess that means it’ll be hard to find the other ones.”

  “Probably impossible.”

  Rick sighed. “So, are there any substitutions I can use? Paints from other sets or something?”

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “Here’s the deal. I can tell you how to fake the paints, but there’s something I want you to do for me in return.”

  “What?” Rick said warily. If this was going where he thought it was going, he was out of here.

  “Take a photo of your picture. A good photo. Upload it and send it to us.”

  “So you can paint your own version?”

  Prallix nodded happily. “Exactly.”

  “Sure,” he told them. “No problem.”

  “All right,” Johnny said. “What’s the model number on the side of the box? The number right below the price, in that little white square.”

  Rick read it off to him.

  “Hold on a sec.” Johnny bent to the right to look at something, moving off screen for a moment. “Okay. If you mix in a little cat piss with that number three blue you have there, it’ll make the number ten you need.”

  Rick stared blankly at the faces of the couple. Was this a joke?

  Apparently not.

  “If you get the number six red from a new Petersen set, you can add six drops of blood, and it’ll pretty much be exactly the same as an old Tyrese number twelve.”

  “But it has to be dog’s blood,” Prallix specified.

  “Bullshit. I’ve pricked my finger and used my own blood, and it’s turned out fine. You know that. Any blood’ll work.”

  “Are you getting this down?” Prallix asked.

  “I’m sorry. I think I’ll just keep looking. Thanks.” Rick logged off quickly and shut down his laptop. What the hell was that? He slumped back in his chair, staring at the darkened screen. He wanted to think that he’d just run into a pair of loonies, but he was filled with the unsettling suspicion that they were not that atypical. There’d been not just dedication but a hint of fanaticism in nearly all of the emails he’d received, and he decided that pursuing this avenue was just not worth it.

  So he wouldn’t be completing his mom’s painting. At least he had it. That should be good enough.

  But it wasn’t.

  Tyrese fans continued to try and contact him, the emails in his inbox piling up, and after several days he grew curious, spending an entire evening going through them. He enjoyed reading the messages from Tyrese painters, but there was not really any helpful advice for him, and he did not respond to any of the missives. He wanted to finish the painting, though, and when he mentioned it to his friend Josh at work, Josh said his uncle’s hobby was painting-by-numbers.

  “Has that shit up all over his house,” Josh said. “No offense.”

  “None taken. I know they’re tacky. But this one was my mom’s…”

  “You want me to call him and see if he has any ideas about where to get paint?”

  “Sure,” Rick said. “Thanks.”

  “Can I give him your number, have him call you?”

  There was a second’s hesitation. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Josh’s uncle called that night just after seven. Rick happened to be looking through the contents of the box again, and when he picked up the phone, a rough voice said. “Are you Rick? This is Bill, Josh’s uncle.”

  They spoke for several minutes. Rick had assumed, because Bill had not contacted him through the Tyrese website even though they both lived in Southern California, that he used newer paint-by-numbers kits made by other companies. But a short conversation proved that, while Bill did paint with a variety of sets–he had to, since he claimed to finish a picture a week–his preference was for those made by Tyrese.

  All serious painters, he said, preferred Tyrese, all the more so because they were so rare.

  “That’s my problem,” Rick said. “It’s impossible to find the right color paints.”

  “Hell, you can get what you need from a paint store,” Bill said. “Although most paint stores won’t help you if they know it’s for a Tyrese set.”

  That seemed a little paranoid, but Rick didn’t comment. These enthusiasts took their paint-by-numbers kits very seriously.

  “What I did, was I broke into a Sherwin-Williams. A friend of mine worked there and was about to quit, so he shut off the alarm one night, left the back door open, and I used their analyzer to match the paints I already had and mix them together. I got a pint of each.”

  Rick felt a faint stirring of hope. “Do you have any left?”

  “No. I used it and traded it. Besides, each set’s different.” Bill’s voice was filled with disdain. “You should know that.”

  “But it worked? Regular paint from a paint store?”

  “Yeah.” Bill hesitated. “Well, kind of. You could tell what the picture was supposed to be, but it wasn’t… quite right.” There was a pause. “That’s why those assholes kicked me out of their Tyrese club. It’s why I can’t trade with them anymore or get copies.”

  “But it was close enough, right?”

  “Right, right. As long as you have a little bit of the paint you need, or even a dried example, that machine can analyze it and copy it.”

  Rick’s heart sank. He had no samples of any of the paints from nine through sixteen. He was still assuming they were reds and oranges and yellows, but he had no idea which were which. Although… he might be able to contact Johnny and Prallix. They would probably know.

  “You can add six drops of blood”

  No.

  Again, he decided to give it up–all of this fanaticism was too much for him–and he said a curt goodbye to Josh’s uncle. He was out, he was through, this was it.

  But the next day, he was at the office, checking his email before work, when he came across a message with the heading “Tyrese Paints 4 Sale.” It turned out that a man in Delaware was offering multiple sets of Tyrese paints for sale. The list was categorized by model number, and when Rick arrived home that evening, he saw that a complete set of paints for his kit was available for $400.

  It was a lot of money, an outrageous amount of money, but it was better than using blood and piss to jerry-rig his own paints
, and even as he pretended to debate the pros and cons with himself, he knew he was going to do it.

  He needed to finish his mom’s picture.

  The paints arrived less than a week later.

  The act of painting turned out to be much harder than he thought it would be. Advice was coming in from Tyrese hobbyists, and while he didn’t respond to any of it, he read all of the messages, grateful for many of the tips he received. Although the paintbrush from the box was hard and useless, he ignored the fanatics who told him he had to search out an original Tyrese brush or go through unbelievable extremes in order to make his own an exact replica. Instead, he went back to the hobby store and just bought a regular brush, the kind used for painting models.

  But the numbered spaces on the board were often so small and so trickily proportioned that filling them in actually required a great deal of skill. He made several mistakes initially, and, panicked, he wiped off the paint with a wet paper towel before it dried (as more than one person had suggested), making sure the wood beneath was completely clean so his colors would not be compromised.

  He worked on it a little bit each evening, drawing out the process because he didn’t want it to end. The experience made him feel closer to his mother, and though he started his work on the lower right portion of the board, his focus was on that little swatch of blue on the upper right, the section of sky that his mom had painted. He simultaneously longed for and dreaded the day when he would paint the final transition that would connect his work to hers.

  That day came sooner than he would have liked. In fact, he had already dipped his brush back into the number two blue when he realized that there was no more open space on the wood, no other outline to fill in. He was done, and, wanting to prolong the moment, he washed off his brush, closed up his paints and washed his hands before picking up the picture to look at it.

  Somehow, though he’d been close to completion for days, his eyes or his brain or the combination of the two had been unable to make sense of the painting or view it in its totality. He’d seen only individual elements rather than the entire picture. Or perhaps that was all he’d wanted to see. But he saw it all now: a bleak barren landscape, a scene so devoid of hope and life that merely looking at it made him understand the pointlessness of existence, made him see suicide as not an entirely unattractive prospect.