The Tracey Museum

 

 

"SIMPATICO TO THE END"

 

"I never really thought of him as rich-rich. I knew he was rich, ordinary rich, but never rich-rich. I remember him as the friend I had when I was eight, when I peed on his head from a dock when he was swimming in a lake," said Steve Callighen laughing as he lit another cigarette and took a swallow. We were in St. Thomas Park, Boise, not a mile away from the Tracey Museum. Callighen was telling me about his suburban childhood, about his fears of everything, and about his precocious gang of pals known as the Diamonds.

"Leadership. There was no permanent leader of the group. Drifted from one to the other. Whoever had the better idea at the time. Go into a farmer's field, play baseball, sleepovers where permitted‑Sandy and June being girls were out of the picture on that score‑chewing-gum, baseball cards. Today I talk to kids that are how old we were then, and I'm surprised at how stupid they are. Maybe we were stupid back then, I don't know. But we felt special."

I asked if Sandy Nickels (née Maddix) and June Tompson were anyone's girlfriends.

"There was some action there, some doctor playing, you know. I had something for ... one of them. But it never got messy. We were all simpatico to the end ... to the end of high school. Then the drift-away happened slowly, you know. I moved, Sandy and Pete who had gotten serious in high school got married, and stayed living there, in that suburbia; Dan moved to Chicago for economics; I think June went off too, you can ask her about that. Mike stayed in town for a while, drifting around."

I wanted to know how Dan Tracey had contacted him five years ago. Did it come as a surprise?

"Started on Facebook, of course. Well, I knew about him before then. His name would show up in the news every once in a while, how he'd bought this company, how he was at Davos, always getting richer and richer. And I friended him, and as it turned out he'd already contacted Sandy and Pete. That's how it began, at least for me. We were all forty I think."

St. Thomas Park got its name from St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century patron saint of academics and philosophers. The park's land was given to the city by Mary Magdalene College, a seminary that still occupies one corner of its seventy-five acres. In the distance we could see the monks reading, praying, and arguing. I wondered what they would have to say about what had happened to the museum a mile distant four years ago. Did they cheer it on?

I asked Callighen about the parents of the sextet known as the Diamonds. Was this the something that drew them together?

"I can't say. Our parents were like all the other parents. You know, our fathers would get drunk only on weekends usually. Sometimes they'd beat us, and we hated them. But we had to love them of course. It wasn't until much later that we realized what a rotten lot they all were. We all agreed to that, much later. Four yeats, I mean years ago."

Callighen remembers the invitation he'd received, for a special party at the Tracey Museum. He'd been living three states away at the time, but Dan Tracey offered to pay for the whole shebang. It was a group email, sent to Sandy Nickels, June Tompson, Pete Nickels, Mike Ouros, and himself. The email read, "I want you to come to a kind of a party I'm hosting at my new museum, now called (since last week) The Tracey Museum, in Boise, Idaho. I'll pay for everything. Please come! in the next two weeks. I want to have the party on Friday the eighteenth."

"I had nothing to do. Plus: getting the gang together again? Why not."

 

 

THE BANNER

 

Callighen remembers vividly his flight to Boise. "I'd never been on a plane before. Dan had insisted that I fly even though I would have just taken a Greyhound. This was early June, and he wanted us all to get there are quickly as we could. So the plane, on the plane.... I looked around me at all the passengers and I loathed them, one and all. If I hadn't been on it, I would have wished it would crash. They didn't have enough booze for me there. I knew the history of flight, and I knew exactly how they'd all come to be able to be on an airplane. I knew what airplanes do. I'd ground them all if I could: that's what I thought at the time. Fuckin' airplanes."

Dan Tracey had sent a car to the Boise Airport and Callighen found the driver in the terminal, with a whiteboard with STEVE CALLIGHEN held up high. The driver drove him up into the Boise foothills, to Tracey's mansion. He'd never seen anything like it before. The mansion had seventeen rooms and twelve bathrooms. Two saunas (indoors and out), two swimming pools (indoors and out), a bowling alley, a grand ballroom and a grand diningroom, and much more that Callighen was to discover over the following weeks, including the banner in the lower level.

A voice called as if through time: Dan Tracey's voice echoing off the Italian marble of the rounded staircase: "Steve Callighen! Well, I'll be!"

Callighen turned and looked up. Someone stood there who bore some resemblance to Dan Tracey's father, and Callighen told me, "I flinched at that moment. It was like the whole horribleness of childhood had come back to me. Dan Tracey's father was a brutal guy. He beat Dan and he hated the rest of us for liking him, really. So we all hated him, and there he was, on the stairs kinda. That's what I thought, looking up those stairs. I'm not at all expressing this right, I'm a bit stream-of-consciousness here. Then I came back to myself, saw that it was Dan up there, and I wondered, just for a moment, if I looked like my father, and if I scared Dan too in the same way. What is it, colloquially like."

Callighen told me that Tracey came down the stairs. He was dressed in a light blue summer suit, all clean cotton and silk, with a purple cravat at his throat and blindingly white tennis shoes down below. Callighen felt out-of-place, dressed as he was in blue jeans and t-shirt, and carrying a duffel bag with his few real possessions in it.

Tracey said to him, "I'm glad to see you," or words to that effect. "Sandy and Pete are already here, they're in the back swimming, you can see them in a bit, I want to show you to your room, come on."

He was led up the stairs as Tracey chattered on vaguely about what the party at the museum would be like. "We'll all be there, like old times, the Diamonds, shining like we couldn't do back then. And we'll have a purpose. Not that we didn't have a purpose back then, but now we can act on it."

Callighen's room was a well-lit room under the roof, not big but bigger than he'd lived in in quite some time. He put down his bag; "I hadn't said much;" and Tracey said, "I have to show you our motto. It's on a banner on the lower level, come see, come see."

They went to the lower level, below ground, and there, cut into crystal, each letter five inches tall, was what Tracey called his motto, and his banner.

The banner read, It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

 

 

GET-RICH-QUICK

 

After he'd graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics, Dan Tracey took a position at an investment firm located in one of seedier buildings on North Magnolia Avenue, not far from Wrigley Field. On summer days he could have undoubtedly heard the sound of ash striking leather and cork, and the roar of the crowd as another Cub made an all-bases-loaded run. The office manager of the company took him under his wing and taught him some of the counterintuitive fundamentals of making a killing in the stock market‑advice which the office manager was afraid to take himself, being as he had several dependents and that the get-rich-quick programme would require a person to go bankrupt precisely three times; it was a young man's gambit, and he thought Tracey could do with a youthful adventure. Tracey put the programme to effect, even cutting in the office manager for one percent. That office manager, so they say, is now living in the Bahamas, in great comfort, so it seems.

I have found it impossible to untangle all the machinations of the fifteen years that followed; safe to say that, yes, Tracey went bankrupt three times over, but every time he emerged from bankruptcy, strangely enough, he had more capital than before. By the time he was thirty-five he was the seventh-richest man in America, and the first-most eligible bachelor in same country. Yet it appears he stayed in a probable state of celibacy: in all my researches I could find no-one with whom he had formed any intimate relationship.

In the crash of '02 he managed to apparently play short all the fungible assets of Denmark and Austria, and emerged stronger than ever. How had he done it? The analysts and experts were stumped. But they were not too stumped to see he had become the richest man in America through hard work and raw cunning.

He never did anything but work, all sources say. He never took a holiday; he rarely left the continent. Everyone wondered what was the source of the flame that made him run; it seemed impossible that anyone could be so greedy as to amass wealth simply for the sake of amassing wealth. And yet that's exactly what Tracey did: he used his capital to create more capital, again and again and again.

Where was it all to go, and to what purpose? No-one knew; and when he bought Boise's Prickett Museum of Ancient and Modern Artefacts and Antiquities, noöne from Business Daily to the Idaho Statesman batted an eye. It should have looked unusual, in retrospect, since the rated capital gain on his net worth (available for estimation to all) was well below the purchase price of the museum, meaning his assets were taking a significant charge to the belly in purchasing it. Callighen, for example, was completely ignorant of the significance of his childhood friend's purchase.

"What did I know about buying museums? I didn't know he'd even done anything of the sort until I got there. Even when I understood that the guy I pissed on once upon a time had bought a whole friggin museum I didn't think it was anything. All along the way I thought everything he was doing made sense, mainly because everything a Diamond ever did made perfect sense."

 

 

FROZEN IN TIME

 

Callighen, as he told me, didn't know what to make of the engraved-in-glass motto. He told me that he said to his host Tracey, "That's interesting. Can we go outside?"

Tracey smiled, struck his friend on his shoulder, and said, "Sure thing. Nothing's going to happen till Mike and June gets here anyway. What do you think of June?"

Callighen asked, "What, what do you mean?"

Tracey said, "I mean do you have the hots for her?"

"What are you in, suspended animation, man? I don't even know what she looks like anymore."

As Tracey walked ahead to lead Callighen up and out he was saying, "You must have thought she was beautiful, right? She was back then, and now she'll be here soon. You could get together with her if you wanted to. It wouldn't matter to me in the least."

"I think you're the one who's got the obsession," said Callighen reportedly. "You have it bad?"

Tracey closed his eyes like he was deeply smelling something. "I've worked so hard for what's coming. My goal, my goal. Maybe." He changed track then, Callighen told me; like he was shifting into another register. Tracey said, "I've got to tell you about the prison we're all in. You probably don't know you're in a prison, but you are. We're all trapped by everything, especially by our own histories. Pasts, I should say. All that junk‑you remember‑is killing us. It's killing us. You pissed on me not because of anything other than your history.

"I haven't seen her for so long. I don't think she will have changed."

Tracey took Callighen out to the back, to where Sandy and Pete were. He hadn't seen them in fifteen years and he was relieved to see they looked very much the same. However that relief wore off slowly and by the time they were sitting down to dinner he was disappointed they were the same. "It was like they'd been frozen in time, just the same as they had been in high school. Shouldn't they have developed somehow? But nope, they hadn't matured. They had no kids, and I didn't ask why."

Callighen told me the other two‑Mike and June‑arrived the next day, and finally the Diamonds were all together again. After some time going over old stuff, Tracey clapped his hands and said, "Okay, let's go downstairs. There's some matters I have to tell you about."

They all went downstairs where he showed them the motto once again. "See? Does anyone disagree with what's written there? 'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' Does everyone understand this?"

Nods were general, and June said, "I've heard it before."

Tracey said, "It's one of the most famous quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was a very wise man who rejected our conventional views of reality. Are we agreed that we are in a sick society?"

Nods were general.

"Well, let me tell you, we're going to do something very soon that will start a revolution. We, here, are going to change and heal the world. Us six.

"We have to start with breathing exercises. Everyone sit down, in a lotus position."

Callighen says he shrugged, willing to go along. "I was in a house of a very rich man, and I had nothing. I knew I could give him time to reveal what he was up to. We all sat down, and there was music, or more like sound effects playing, of the sounds of the sea. Maybe there was something else in it too. I thought I could hear someone whispering."

 

 

DUSTY BONES

 

Callighen gave me descriptions of the Diamonds (and I'll provide a description of Callighen); he told me,

"Sandy Nickels, or as I called her and as I think of her Sandy Maddix, had short-cropped yellow hair, very yellow hair. She hated it. She acted like a boy for the longest time, up till the twelfth grade, which is when she took Pete for a boyfriend. Then she became the most female thing in the world.

"But that maybe had something to do with Pete. Pete was big, hewas strong. He hadn't fatted out like me. As I said, we didn't have a leader really, but he might have been slightly more of a leader than the rest of us.

"Mike Ouros got good grades, probably because of the glasses he wore in school. His father beat him up all the time it seemed. Short and thin. He became an engineer, don't you know. Got married, had a couple kids he was afraid of.

"Now June, June Tompson, she was always hot. Aloof though. Even when she was, like, eleven, she was sexy. We all wanted her, but she was fragile. Bad home life of course.

"Then there was Tracey. I guess you've got an idea of him already. I wonder a lot about where he ended up."

(Steve Callighen is so scruffy you're surprised he's so literate. He looks like he just got off a boxcar. He smokes too much and says he drinks too much.)

"So it was us six, the Diamonds as we called ourselves, there at Tracey's mansion, doing what Tracey called preparations."

The preparations as they were called consisted of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions.

In the mornings, they'd meditate on cushions out at the pool, with the strange 'music' playing.

In the afternoons, Tracey would tell them about the nature of the world, about how everything was terrible and that only a revolution could solve it. "It's rotten to the core," he'd gently say (reportedly), "and there's nothing worth saving of it. Look at us, just look at us. What do we have to hope for in this world? A slow and steady decay, and the winds will wash our bones. Just another brick in the wall, just another number and name on a stone or an urn. This is not some metaphysical trick I'm going on about because what we're talking about here is about the real world here, not some kind of Utopia we've got to create. Leave the utopias for another time because you can't build them on the past, you can't build them on the present, but you can build them on the future but the problem is we're not in the future now are we?" Everyone was listening intently, nodding, and taking it in. "A church built on sand cannot last. That's scripture for you, and it may sound wise and everything, but we don't know if it's part of the problem, now do we? What if it's wrong? What if a church can be built upon sand? However, these aren't questions we have to concern ourselves about; the question can be answered tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It's not up to us because we're, as we've agreed, just dusty bones. We've got to have a sale, an Everything Must Go sale, to clear out our dusty tabulas and let other writings, new unforeseen writings, be inscribed there. This is the programme!"

In the evenings, they would play drinking games. Callighen always won.

 

 

IN THE MUSEUM

 

All this time, during our discussion, Callighen and I were walking, slowly, towards the museum itself, and as it came into view he said, "There it is."

I could not see that had very much altered. It was still the same squat square I had come across in photographs in my research, in all the newspaper and magazine articles that had been published five years ago, under sensational headlines that might as well have been printed in purple ink. Callighen said again, with something of a sigh, "There it is."

"Should we go in?" I queried.

"I don't see what the point would be. It's not the same any more. It can never be the same."

After their two weeks of psychological preparation, the Diamonds (reconstituted) set out for the museum. Tracey made sure none of them needed anything; "I've prepared the place. Everything we need is already there."

Callighen walked alongside a calm Tracey at the approach. Everyone was calm, at least on the surface. No-one said, "Party!" No-one was thinking of getting 'real drunk.' They felt like they had a job to do.

In the Etruscan room they took their sledgehammers and methodically, calmly, smashed all the terra cotta sculptures to bits....

There is no need to recount here the so-called 'blow-by-blow' of the complete destruction of the museum's artefacts. Other reports, I find, have covered it completely, and to them I direct the interested reader's attention, in the appendix. Suffice it to say that the destruction was a lengthy affair lasting until noon the day after the next day when they lay down their sledges one by one and surveyed the damage, looking for anything that escaped their methodical wrath. After a few more clashes and batterings, Tracey called a halt and made the group whole once again.

Tracey told them they had done as much as one group could hope to do, and that the next step was to promulgate their deeds to all and sundry. Each of them could contact whomever they thought fit to blazon their revolutionary acts to the skies, using print, Internet, television, radio, whatever it took. That was next.

They left the museum, filthy as they'd never been before, like they'd been little kids again but filthier this time for they cared not about any parental beating to come. Callighen told me, "Yes, we felt freer than we'd been in our lives. At least I did. It was an orgy of destruction, and we were all exhausted. We went back to Tracey's place to get some rest, clean ourselves up if we wanted to. Three days later we assisted Tracey at a press conference. The press was at his beck and call."

This reporter was at that conference when Tracey and his Diamonds explained what they had done and why they had done it.

It didn't go over well.

Tracey harangued away, and we were all puzzled about how it could have taken place. "The museum is simply ... gone," and the reporters gasped. "How could you destroy priceless works?" "Perhaps that they had no prices was part of the problem."

Clearly he was insane.

The Diamonds went back to his house, expecting at least some sympathy, but none came. They were condemned from all sides. Tracey explained it was all as Krishnamurti had argued, that no-one is a prophet in his home town.

"But," he reportedly said, "Maybe there's still something we can do."

Callighen tells that somewhere around that point he decided to leave. "I couldn't see anything else. Plus I wanted to get drunk."

Later, when the bodies of the five were found, Callighen was far away, on the other side of town, lying in a gutter, seeing nothing and hearing nothing; not even the sounds of the sirens.