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The older two crack smiles. The young one might be smart enough to know better.
“Have you ever heard the other one? ‘If you can’t make her come, expect she’s gonna run.’”
The three look at me dumbfounded.
“Look, lady? You have to move. We have orders. Haven’t you seen the news? This … thing—”
“Clit-OR-iss,” I hiss the last syllable. “You can say it, can’t you boys? I’m sure you say cock all the time. Balls?Clitoris. Say the dang word.”
The young one shakes his head. “All I know is that, thatthingis illegal and my boss told us to destroy it. So, move or you’ll get hurt.”
I’ve come here prepared to protect my art installation. I step back and stroke the smooth, pink fiberglass with my whole hand. It’s cool to touch in the pre-dawn air. I know—orhope—that as long as I’m in the way, I can buy time. That they won’t kill me to fulfill a work order.
Two months ago, I would have been more confident in that belief. But since my sculpture has been declared obscene, and a half-dozen public protests have made the state news, I’m not so sure about my safety.
I am, however, optimistic that it will not be demolished. The city has it on loan. Not one single, tax-payer dollar was used to make it.
“I own this piece of art,” I say. “And I’ll arrange to move it. But I need a few days.”
“Tell it to the judge,” the old guy says. He gets into his weapon of artistic destruction and turns the key. It roars to life.
“If you clowns move that excavator one foot closer,” I yell over the rumbling engine, “the mayor will have lawyers clamping his testicles so hard he’ll wish he’d been born with a clitoris.”
The other two flank me and try to grab my elbows.
“Back off!” I thrust my arms up out and knock their hands away.
“Ma’am, I don’t wanna hurt you,” the smallest of the guys says.
“And you won’t.”
I pull a small container of Krazy Glue from my right pocket. The cap is already off since I expected this. I squeeze a generous amount onto my left palm and fingers then press my hand against the sculpture at my shoulder height. “I’m not going anywhere.”
It’s only ten past seven. By nine A.M., at least one news crew will be here. And protestors. City staff announced that my piece would be destroyed at ten. A friend on the inside told me the actual time would be seven since the governor wanted this story buried and if the installation was already gone when news crews arrived it would be a non-story. Exactly what he wanted—for me and my clitoris to quietly disappear, back into the darkness where we both belong.
As the three men discuss their next steps, I pull out my phone and hit send on a prepared text message with fourteen recipients—four national media outlets with local offices, seven social media influencers with millions of followers between them, the mayor’s office, the governor’s office, and Sammy, my twenty-one-year-old, to let them know when they see my name in the news today, it’s not an April Fool’s prank.
Catherine Clay, world-renowned installation artist and creator of the controversial Touch Me sculpture super glues herself to the ten-foot-tall clitoris as a city crew attempts to demolish it.
Short, sweet and, I hope, effective.
It’s time for me to make some noise.
And then, to start a new adventure in a new country. Canada. A place where I have no friends or family, but do have a reputation for creating noteworthy art pieces that challenge status quo thinking and beliefs about what is and is not appropriate for dinnertime conversation and school education.
In three weeks, I’ll be meeting the board of directors of Will Power & Brothers to present my concept for a piece I’m callingNestrogen—a bird’s nest the size of a small New York City apartment—to be installed in the foyer of Vancouver’s most prestigious office tower. Which also happens to be the home of the Power family business and where they all live.
The contract has been signed and the deposit already made, but the matriarch wants to give her all-male board of directors—her four sons and the three old guys, as she calls them—the opportunity to show their true intentions about putting serious corporate dollars behind the public relations campaigns that are infused with images of happy female business women.
She’s already warned me that I’ll have dissenters. Nothing I haven’t been dealing with for almost two decades, since my final college art piece was exhibited. The multimedia piece used a photograph of the trustees and tenured professors of the college as the base layer. The heads and faces of the people were cut out and replaced with 3D sculptures of historically important women in each of the relevant fields of study.The Genderfication of Educationstood displayed for twenty-three minutes before it was covered with a white sheet because it offended the suits.
My very existence offends more people than I care to think about. And here I stand, as one with an art piece that represents something else those in power are offended by and wished they could silence: open conversations about female pleasure.
2
ERIC
“This is a joke, right?”
