Monday morning, I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee when I got a call from the superintendent.  Without even a hello or good morning, he said, “Change of plans.”

“I haven’t finished cleaning up the tags at the middle school on Jackson.”

“Let it go.  This is a priority one.  The mayor’s office called.  His phone is exploding.  The old Tasty Bread factory near the exit to the Interstate.  The north wall.”

“What, a wall of “fuck you?”

“Worse, you’ll see.  It’s a two-person job.”

“I’ll take Lopez.”

“Take someone else.”

“She’s a good worker, and two of the guys are on vacation.”

“Take one of the college kids.  You’ll see why when you get there.”

Jordan Howell was sitting on a bench drinking tea, waiting for an assignment.  He was a tall gangly white guy who could use a haircut and some Clearasil.  He went to one of those expensive schools back East.  He got a summer job because his father was a friend of the mayor, but the kid was a good worker.  A bit on the shy side, but you only needed to tell him once how to do things.  He helped me load the pressure washer onto the bed of the truck.  I wasn’t sure what kind of surface we would be dealing with – brick, concrete, or masonry – so I took several kinds of solvents and removers, more than we would probably need.

When we got to the factory, there was at least a dozen people there, mostly young guys but a few women, and I couldn’t believe it an old guy, seventy if he was a day, in a tweed suit and tie, like a professor or something.  They were smiling, laughing, especially the guys.  All of them taking pictures on their cell phones.  They stood close to the wall to get details and moved back to get a picture of the whole thing.  It was big, at least six feet by five feet – I didn’t measure it, but the old man did with a tape measure he pulled from his coat pocket.  In eighteen years on the job I’d never seen anything like it.  We got out of the truck, and a few guys who knew right away what we were going to do started to boo and tell us where we could stick our equipment.

Jordan looked at the wall. “Wow.”  I was thinking more like “Oh shit,” but I didn’t say anything, trying to be professional as if I saw something like this every day.  “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“Of course I do.  I got two kids.”

“This is a famous painting.”

“Are you kidding me.”  I wanted to say it was just a big pussy, but there were women around. 

“No, I’m not kidding.  It’s one of the most famous paintings in the world.”  Jordan took out his phone and showed me a picture of a painting, the same one we were looking at.  “The Origin of the World by Courbet, a nineteenth century French painter.  He was a famous realist painter,” Jordan said.   

“It’s real all right.  Real porn.”  

The original on Jordan’s phone wasn’t even two feet by two feet, but the Frenchman didn’t leave anything to the imagination.  Neither did the guy who copied it.  Butt crack, a dark, thick bush, boobs, nipple.  I had to admit whoever did this knew how to paint.  He was as good as the Frenchman.  It was a perfect copy, hair for hair.  I called him a guy.  I couldn’t imagine a woman would have painted this.  This was no teenager’s bomb or slapdash tag.  If it was one guy, it was hard to believe that he did this all on Sunday night.  Maybe he worked Friday and Saturday night and covered it with a tarp during the day. 

It was an easy job.  Three coats of brick graffiti remover, a few strong blasts of the pressure washer, and we were back to bare brick.  We loaded our equipment into the truck and headed back to the depot.  “I feel bad we got rid of it.  It was a work of art,” Jordan said.

“A work of art?  Jordan, it’s straight up porn. You studied this crap at school?”

“I took a course on the history of modernism.  We talked about it.” 

“Your father paid money for you to look at porno?”  Jordan smiled shyly.  There are a lot of educated fools in this world I thought.  “I’ll give you that our guy has some talent, but why would he paint this on a wall where everyone getting on the Interstate could see it.  He could have caused a fucking pile up.”

“Maybe he painted it to show that he could,” he said.

“So show it to your buddies in your man cave.”

“Well, at least it isn’t on the entrance to the public library.”

Back at the depot, everyone wanted to see our phones.  My fingers got tired forwarding pictures, details and all, to everyone.  I swear I never heard so many pussy jokes in my life.  Owens said I should have taken D.J., he hadn’t got any since Bush.  First or second, Franklin yelled.  That started everyone off again on a round of bush jokes.  You would have thought we were a bunch of teenagers who just discovered a Playboy hidden away in our father’s underwear drawer.

My wife was quite a follower of graffiti.  She has her own favorites.  She’s even printed a few photos, framed them, and put them on a shelf in the living room.  She calls it street art.  To me it’s just vandals with a spray can.  She tells me that some of these guys have had shows in art galleries downtown.  I can’t believe people pay good money for stuff they can see for free on the walls of a dozen abandoned buildings.  After a year of community college it was either graffiti removal or going to work at the sanitation department.  I figured I’d rather look at garbage than smell like it.

When my wife asked me at dinner about my day, I said nothing out of the ordinary, nothing worth taking photos of.  Later when the kids were asleep, and we were about to get into bed, I showed her the photos.  After fifteen years of marriage, two kids, and both of us working, we’re down to sex on birthdays and anniversaries and Saturday nights every once and awhile. She scrolled through all the photos and gave me back my phone.  “Do you want to see the real thing,” she laughed, “or are you too bushed.”  A Monday night, God is good.  

It was a busy rest of the week.  Summertime, school was out, the weather was warm, and teenagers had time on their hands.  We had plenty of walls and sidewalks to clean up.  I thought Monday was a one off, a good story to tell my pals over beers at Jimmy’s Taproom.

Next Monday, I was stirring some milk into my coffee when the superintendent called.  “Again.”

“Again what?  Not another pussy painting?”

“The Clairmont warehouse on Airport Drive.”

“Another one,” I yelled over to Jordan.  “Put the stuff in the truck.” 

There were a good two dozen people out there snapping away on their cell phones. The old man was there again with his phone and tape measure. There was a crew from Channel 7.  I told the reporter I was too busy to be on camera.  The last thing I wanted was my twelve-year-old daughter and my six-year-old son to see their father standing in front of a giant pussy.  That night I made it home in time to catch the six o’clock news.  All they showed was a clean concrete wall and a bunch of folks laughing and booing.

Before we started the clean-up, Jordan stood staring at the painting.  “It’s different,” he said.  To my eyes it was the same: the same tits, the same ass, the same everything.  “It’s not as big.  It’s at least twenty percent smaller.”  I looked again.  Jordan was right.  

 “Jordan, you said maybe the guy did it the first time to show that he could.  He passed the test over at Tasty Bread so why do it again here and smaller.  He had plenty of wall.”  

Jordan never said pussy.  Genitalia but never pussy, or he simply called it “the painting.” Every time he said “art”, I corrected him, “porno,” I said.  “Jordan, I only had one year of community college, and maybe I can’t give you a definition of pornography.  But I know it when I see it.”

The next Monday I finished my coffee without the superintendent calling.  Jordan and I went out to clean a tagged public restroom in Horizon Park.  We were eating our lunch at a picnic table, when I got the call.  A mother of an eleven-year-old skateboarder had called the mayor’s office fuming.  “I don’t want my boy seeing this shit,” she yelled.  It was on a concrete ramp in the skateboarding park on Elm and Taylor.  It was about the size of a 36-inch television screen.  The skateboarders hanging out at the park were posing by the painting.  They didn’t want us to get rid of it.  But it wasn’t safe where it was.  A kid looking at it and not paying attention might break his arm or crack his head open.  Forget about porno, we were saving a kid’s life.  ‘Maybe, we will get a medal,” I told Jordan.

The next Monday came a mid-morning call to the mayor from the owner of Pepino’s restaurant on Monroe.  He said it was the size of a sheet of printing paper, 8 ½ by 11, painted on the concrete trash receptacle on the corner.  He didn’t want his customers coming and going past “this thing.”  It was small enough I could have done it by myself, but I owed it to Jordan who would be going back to school in another week.  The owner, a middle-aged guy in a white apron, watched us do our job.  “If it had been the Mona Lisa, I wouldn’t have called,” he said.  

“What if it was Michelangelo’s statue of David?” Jordan asked.  

“We’re a family restaurant. I would have painted a fig leaf over it,” he laughed.

The owner invited us into the restaurant for a pizza on the house.  “What’s next,” I asked Jordan. “It’s getting smaller and smaller.”

“We may never find the next one.  Might be no bigger than a 3 by 5 note card.  Maybe even the size of a postage stamp,” Jordan said.  “That would really be a challenge. That would take a lot of talent.”  Jordan took a bite of pizza. “Maybe this is what he had in mind from the beginning.  The whole thing, a work of art.  A work of art that disappears.”

It’s been over a year and if it’s out there, no one has called.  Jordan texts me once and awhile to ask if anyone has reported finding it.  I tell him he will be the first to know.  Maybe Jordan was right, it really was a work of art.  It took up a whole factory wall, and now it’s out there somewhere so small you’d need a magnifying glass to make out what it is.  I will be long retired, and it will still be out there.  Maybe it’s on the statue of the World War I dough boy in Veterans’ Park.  Permanent pussy in the folds of his uniform or eternal genitalia on the stock of his rifle.  It will be too small for anyone to make a fuss about it.  If I find it, I won’t call the mayor.  It will be my own secret private painting.  My own work of art.