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At the end of a street in Clinton Hill there is a dilapidated, jutting, churchlike building.   (It’s not dilapidated, Arthur says, don’t call it dilapidated.)  The words “Broken Angel” are spray-painted in wild cursive on the building’s door.  It is the sort of structure that building codes were designed to prevent: multi-colored, schizophrenic, and composed of a hodgepodge of inexpensive building materials.  It seems to be the collaboration of one hundred minds or the work of one very, very flighty one.  (I am a genius, Arthur says, I really am.  You are looking at an architectural masterpiece.) 

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“There’s someone inside there,” said a passerby, “you should pull the rope by the door.  He’ll come out.”
“Someone lives here?” I asked.
“Just pull the rope,” he said.  I walked up to the front door.  There was no door knob.  Only a thin yellow rope emerging from a small hole in the wall.  Next to the rope was a sign:

Pull for at least one minute.  Arthur will appear somewhere.
Beneath that sign, another: This building is under 24-7 surveillance.

I pulled the rope, and a bell began to ring inside the house.  Though I intended to pull for the required minute, after ten seconds I began to feel stupid so I stopped and waited.  Then a high-pitched voice: “Hello?”  It was coming from above me.  I took a few steps back, looked up, and saw a face peering at me through a small square window.  It was the face of Andy Warhol.

“What do you want?” asked the face.
“Hi there!” I shouted.  “Is there any way you could come down and talk to me?”
“I’ll be right down,” he said, and then the face disappeared.  Soon I heard a rummaging behind the door.  There was the sound of clinking keys and turning locks.  Then the door opened.

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Arthur Wood and his Broken Angel House have been a favored subject of filmmakers, photographers, and newspaper reporters.  Some of the results have been less than flattering, and Arthur has been stung several times by the unfriendly perspective of an outsider.  (What’s your agenda, asks Arthur, you must have an agenda).  According to an architecture teacher at nearby Pratt College, “Broken Angel isn’t architecture — it’s outsider art.”  A New York Times article cuts even further, describing the house as “a jumble of structures cobbled together seemingly without reason.”  (I can tell you one thing, says Arthur, that man will never write for the Times again.  He lied to me.)  Later in the same article, Arthur is described as “a crazy old man” and “the closest thing to a mad scientist around.”  (That lying bastard.)

When Arthur bought Broken Angel in 1971 for $2,000, it was little more than a rundown tenement.  But Arthur had big plans.  He wasn’t officially trained in architecture.  Or construction.  But he began to build, adding layer upon layer to his new house.  Though his renovations were extensive, he spent very little money.  He just found stuff.  And when he found stuff that he liked, he added it to his house.  (My wife and I used to push wheelbarrows all through Brooklyn, hunting for sheet rock.  During the winter we’d wear Viking hats.  That used to really freak people out.)  As the years passed, Broken Angel grew higher, and higher, and higher.  Eventually it reached ten stories high, though, according to one reporter: “some of the stories [were] no more than crow’s-nest-size outcroppings perched on wooden beams.”

In a neighborhood consisting of two-story brownstones, Broken Angel began to really stick out.  As it climbed unsteadily into the sky, the City began to express concern.  Though a self-proclaimed genius, Arthur did not have any official qualifications in the field of architecture.  Yet he was building a house 100 feet into the air– using stuff he found on the street.  (You can’t argue with my calculations.  Everything is extremely precise.  I know exactly what I’m doing.)   The City tried to stop Arthur’s skyward climb.  They sent letters.  They issued orders.  They threatened.  But Arthur managed to hold them at bay.  (I’m damn good in court, says Arthur, damn good.)

But then, five years ago, disaster struck.  A fire broke out on one of Broken Angel’s highest perches– 96 feet in the air.  (Arson, says Arthur, there’s no other explanation.  That roof was built with fireproof materials.  The fire was started with lasers, I think.)  Though the fire was extinguished rather quickly, it provided the City with all the proof it needed–Broken Angel was dangerous. Determined to bring the building “up to code,” officials forced Arthur to tear down the top six stories of his building.  (That’s what killed my wife.  She couldn’t handle it.  I’m filing a wrongful death suit.)  Last year, Arthur’s wife Cynthia passed away, following a long battle with cancer.  Arthur currently owes millions of dollars to the bank.  (That money was swindled by my sociopathic ex-partner.  I’ll prove that in court.)  Unless Arthur can come up with the money, Broken Angel is scheduled to be foreclosed.

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At first, Arthur was quite hesitant to speak with me.  He never fully emerged from his doorway.  He looked at me through squinted eyes.  I tried to ask skimming, non-intrusive questions.  But his answers were clipped and halting.  But eventually the conversation steered to the subject of Arthur’s enemies, and he suddenly became filled with animation.  Arthur told me about his thieving ex-partner, that sociopath, who embezzled one million dollars that was intended for Broken Angel.  Then there was the former Deputy Building Commissioner, that self-serving liar, who led the court battle against the property.  There were the courts themselves, illogical, corrupt, who ruled against Arthur in case after case.  And, of course, there was a special pocket of contempt reserved for that two-faced freelance writer, he’ll never write for the Times again, who misrepresented his intentions, and called Broken Angel the house of a mad scientist.

After ripping on his antagonists, Arthur transferred his enthusiasm into a discussion of his future plans.  Wild, multi-tiered, extravagant plans.  He wanted to take Broken Angel’s case to the Supreme Court.  (Not New York, the United States.  I’ve already sent a request.)  After he won, and he had every intention of winning, he planned to build a Broken Angel in every major city in America.  Once erected, these replicas would serve as museums of avante-garde art and architecture.  As a side project, Arthur wanted to start his own college, where artists could pay $25,000 for studio space and complete intellectual freedom.  (I’ll give them one criticism per week.)  Arthur intended to fund these projects through the sale of a single painting– a painting unlike any other, which he is offering for $600 million.  (It’s inside the house.)  And if there was any time left, he planned to build the world’s tallest building.  Over a mile-high.  It was completely possible, and he had a scaled model to prove it.  (It’s too tall for elevators, wait until you see how I solved that problem.  Its absolutely genius.)

All of this dreaming animated Arthur.  He began to enjoy my company.  He was laughing freely now, mainly at my expense.  (You seem to have a very primitive brain.  You remind me of my dogs.)  He had left the security of his doorway and was stepping out into the world, in large steps, streaming ideas.  His glasses were off now.  The thoughts were coming one after another, whim upon whim, like the layers of his house.  ”I’m thinking about turning this entire block into a theater,” he said.  ”The acoustics are unbelievable.  You could stand at the end of the block, speak in a normal voice, and I would hear you perfectly.  You know what kind of plays I would show?”
“What kind?”
“Shakespeare.  In Black English.”

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That night we spoke for a couple hours, eventually migrating to a curb across the street.  Arthur’s claims and theories were coming too fast for me to gauge their correctness.  But I was fascinated by the speed at which his mind jumped from topic to topic.  Every tangent of our conversation eventually curved around to support Arthur’s main argument:

“I really am a genius,” he said.  “All Einstein’s life he sought a unifying theory for the universe.  I figured it out in half a day.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand.  Your brain is not developed enough.”
“Try me.”
“Ok, but I need something to write with.”  Arthur scoured the ground until he found a small pebble.  Picking it up, he returned to the wall we were leaning against, and scratched the following series of symbols:

“I had to invent a new symbol to depict the interaction of matter and antimatter,” he said.  “And here’s the kicker: I squared time!  Nobody had ever thought to square time before.  That’s why I’m a genius.”  Arthur was right, I didn’t understand.  But if Albert Einstein explained the theory of relativity, while sitting on the doorstep of Broken Angel, I’d write him off too.   “Every theory needs a reality to prove it,” continued Arthur, “When the atomic bomb exploded, E=MC2 was proved.  That was one reality.  Well, I’m going to have ten realities.”  Arthur seemed to have more of everything.
“Nobody has a better memory than me,” he  said.
“I don’t know about that.  Mine’s pretty good.”
“Do you have prenatal memories?  I have prenatal memories.”
“Prenatal memories?”
“I remember the womb.  Of course I couldn’t see– not in the conventional sense anyway.  But I remember sitting in the middle of a very large space.  I could see maybe 250 miles in front of me.  All around me were these bright green LED lights.  I remember it all in very vivid detail.”  After hearing Arthur’s description, I realized that I did have some prenatal memories.  But they were all from college.
“You know why everyone else forgets these things?” asked Arthur.
“Why?”
“Because the real world sucks.”

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I returned to Broken Angel the next evening and pulled on the rope.  Soon Arthur’s face appeared in the same square window.  “You again!” he said, in a tone of mock annoyance, “I’ll be right down.”  I’d brought my dog Susie with me this time, and she was the first thing that Arthur noticed when he opened the door.  ”That looks like the kind of dog a serial killer would have,” he said.  Then he laughed.  His laugh came from his throat and didn’t require moving his lips.  It was somewhere between a snicker and a cackle.  A snickercackle.  I looked at Susie a little protectively.  Nothing seemed sinister about her.  Then I looked at Arthur’s house.
“When can I go inside?” I asked.
“Look at that pink cloud!” answered Arthur, pointing at the sky.  “It’s the same color as your dog’s hair.  Can you get a picture of that?”
“You’ll have to hold her up there,” I said.

“How’d it turn out?” he asked.  I showed Arthur the picture on the camera.  “Would you look at that!” he exclaimed.  As always Arthur was pleased with his handiwork.  “Her hair matches the clouds perfectly.  Not even you could screw that picture up!”  An invisible line of rapport had been passed.  “Grab your stuff,” said Arthur.  “And no photographs!”

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The first thing I noticed was the emptiness.  It was a very wooden kind of emptiness: exposed wooden support beams, wood floors covered in wood dust, heaps of ply wood piled in corners.  Broken Angel had the feel of an abandoned construction project where teenagers go to smoke weed.  There were paint buckets, work tools, flapping pieces of plastic hanging from windows.  (That’s not plastic!  It’s vinyl!  That will last me 40 years.)  It was very quiet.  And very, very dark.  The only light came from solitary bulbs placed in crucial places: over doorways, above stairs.  It felt very medieval, as if the place were lit by candles.

We began climbing a set of wooden stairs.  Then another.  Then another.  Arthur wasn’t allowing me much time to investigate.  But from what I could see, all the rooms seemed the same: huge, empty, dark, silent, wooden.  A few of the windows had stained glass.  Others were covered with iron security gates.   The rest were plastic.  (Vinyl!)  In one room there was a stainless steel bathtub in the middle of the floor.  It was the only thing in the room.  It was filled to the top with motionless water.  Something about the steel, the darkness, the stillness of the water.  It felt creepy.  “I can fit two or three women in there,” Arthur snickeredcackled, “it’s better than having a Ferarri!”

Arthur was having a good time.    He was happy to have a visitor.   “I almost forgot,” he said, “come look at this!”  He led me into another dark room, high-stepping to avoid the tools and supplies littered all over the ground.  I heard a crash ahead of me.  “Damn it!” screamed Arthur.  “You’ll have to excuse me, I am really stoned right now.”  Another snickercackle.  He picked himself up and resumed his course and soon we arrived at a blank wall.  “Would you look at that!” said Arthur.
“What?”
“The shadows on that wall!”  It was the shadow of a tree, coming in through the window.  It seemed so insignificant that I hadn’t noticed it at first.  But it was one of Arthur’s treasures:  “Look how crisp those lines are!  It’s like having a living forest in your house!”
“That’s really cool,” I said, but I was only mildly impressed.  It seemed that Arthur was seeing something completely different than me.
“I forgot how stupid you are,” he said.  ”Let’s go to the roof!”  We left the room and climbed the last two flights of stairs.   “Watch that last step,” said Arthur.  “You have to be careful with that one.”   We reached the roof just as the sun was disappearing behind the horizon.  The sky was filling with color.  The lights from the city began to grow bright.  “I like it up here,” said Arthur.  “You look down—and everything seems so small.  I feel in control.  Nobody bothers me.”  (Before I was born — I was sitting alone in a very large space, surrounded by lights.)

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While we stood on the roof, Arthur described some of his inventions to me.  They seemed very complex, with names like the invisible telescope and the camera obscura.  All of them seemed to require high-technology.  I imagined fiberglass, stainless steel, and sleek black plastic.  But when we went back inside, Arthur took me to his workroom and what I saw fell far short of my imagination.  All of Arthur’s inventions seemed to be composed of plywood, bicycle wheels, and PVC pipes.  I began to notice a pattern in Arthur’s creations: though theoretically brilliant, they were materially primitive. Arthur’s sparkling ideas were built with other people’s trash.   The concepts were towering and glistening.  The realities were made of plywood.  Arthur was eighty-one years old.  I began to think the gulf between his mind and reality would never be bridged.

Arthur moved to the other end of the room.  “I haven’t showed you my paintings yet,” he said.  He began to pull canvases from behind a mattress leaning against the wall.  My expectations were low. After all, the painting was housed behind a mattress.   I imagined something abstract, aesthetically incomplete, requiring an explanation.  Like the rest of Arthur’s work, I expected his art to be brilliant in conception but underwhelming in execution.  He turned one of the canvasses around.  “See what you think of this!”

It was a bright blast of light in a huge dark place.
“Jesus, Arthur.  You made this?”
“Of course I made it, you chimp.”

“Show me more,” I said.  He showed me another, then another.   These are unbelievable.   Each painting was covered in dust.  Each as beautiful as the last.  I’m no art scholar, but Arthur’s paintings were as good as I’d seen.  They belonged on a subway ad for the Metropolitan Museum.  Botticelli meets Dali meets Arthur Wood.  With each canvas Arthur flipped, my opinion of the man was evolving in great leaps.  His decrepit surroundings were melting away, and I stood in awe of his genius.  “These are so beautiful, Arthur.  How’d you learn to paint?”
“That’s a story in itself,” he said.  “Stay here.”  Arthur disappeared downstairs for several minutes and came back with a small painting.  “I once knew a great forger,” he said.  “A master.  He could duplicate anything created by the human hand.  But there was one thing he couldn’t duplicate.”  Arthur held a lens over the small painting.  “One day I approached the forger and I told him: if you show me how to paint, I’ll teach you how to do this:”

“What am I looking at?”
“A diagonal crack.  The only cracks that forgers can reproduce are lateral—they do this by rolling the canvas.  That’s how experts spot a forgery.  They look for lateral cracks.  When a canvas ages naturally, the paint cracks diagonally.  But diagonal cracks are impossible to forge.  Until, I figured it out of course.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Are you kidding me?” he said, “That information is worth billions.  I’m not telling a chimp like you.  You have absolutely nothing to offer me.”

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On one of Arthur’s worktables I discovered an old brass lamp.  I was examining it with a light on my cell phone.  It was sculpted like a flowering tree.  ”Hey Arthur!”  I shouted into the dark.
“What do you want?”
“Come over here. I’ve created a masterpiece.”
“Oh yeah, I bet.”
“Just come over here.”
“Well I’ll be damned.  You really do have something there.  I may have to paint that.”
“What can I say?  I’m a genius.  I consider you my star pupil, Arthur.”
“The only thing you’ve shown is that you aren’t absolutely worthless.”

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“Why do you think people call you a crazy old man Arthur?”
“What do you mean?  Who says that?”
“C’mon Arthur.  It was in a New York Times article.”
“That was just one article.”
“But look at this place Arthur.”  I didn’t want to hurt him.  All his braggadocio and insults served to protect a very gentle spirit.  But there was a huge gap between his reality and the perspective of the outside world.  He had to know this.
“What do you mean?” he asked.  There was no fight in his voice.
“This place is unlivable by most people’s standards.  There’s no lighting.  Most of the windows are covered in plastic.  What happened Arthur?  Why aren’t you rich?  Why aren’t you famous?  You’re a genius.  Why weren’t you able to show the world?”
“But I don’t care about money or fame.” he said.  But that’s easy to say when you’re old and don’t have much of either.  There was a long pause.  Arthur’s long pauses normally preceded subject-changing statements.  (Look at that cloud!)  But not this time.  ”And I don’t see this house like you do,” he said.  Still no fight in his voice.  ”I dont see it as unfinished.”  Another long pause.

“One time a man commissioned me to make him a painting.   He told me: make me a painting that only I can appreciate.  That nobody will see it like I see it.   So I made him a painting—genius, really– that required the observer to view it through a small hole.  And when you looked through that hole, there was a device that reflected your face into the painting.  And only that man’s face completed the painting perfectly.   So I did it–I created a perfect painting that only one man could see.”

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The Nature of Woman : $600,000,000