Months later he crept from the birthing duct of a gang-banged muse, fully formed, suit and tie, cold sore, burning and corkscrewing shut the eyes of convention with the mad idiot sunlight of his own ape-shit grin. His first act was to hold out a thumb against a blank wall.

Squinting, he said, 'me voy a las mil maravillas!' and it was so.

He created a roguish impasto, sketching man's desire for nothingness and hope upon the wall, red on white, infinity with a horsehair brush and the rolled out life force drawn from the end of his own quivering umbilicus.

Then he ordered thirteen ham sandwiches and a bowl of absinthe, for dipping. He had a thing for the ham sandwich, or "puerco y pan" as he was wont to yell from his balcony through a used paper towell roll.

This was a vice he indulged throughout his life.

A few hours later, fortified by a complimentary cheese danish and the brilliant mustache he grunted into existence while in the waiting room at a Spanish bordello, he engaged in a slumgullion of improvised, non-euclidean sex, smooth curved Riemannian thigh tracing, experimenting with form, giving not a sheet's crust for whether it fit in with the plans of his trembling, olive teated medium.

This, his first documented sexual conquest at the age of eight hours, was the inspiration for one of his earliest works, "de la boca de los muertos a los ovarios de un mundo más allá", or "from the mouth of the dead to the ovaries of a world beyond".

He loved his mama and papa almost as much as ham sandwiches. He got on well with his sister and brother, too.

His art was the belching smokestack of a Belgian rendering plant; the imprudent braying of an insurgency of gelded sea lions, 'ork-orking' in the front pew of the church of good taste; his libido, the experienced beard of a frontier brigand; his stare, the morose dry-lipped catcall of a smooth antlered musk deer, tearing up sod in the foothills of Mt. Mazama.

Joan Miro was not a toreador of even modest talent; he wasn't a toreador. He was not fond of Adam Smith's invisible hand because hands creeped him out "mucho-mucho", particularly ones he couldn't see; he never wore white gloves outside of the occasional duel; he was not an aggregate of hardboiled eggs shoved into the sleeves and legs of his tweed suit; he never ate cereal sitting down; he wasn't Puerto Rican expatriate and half Jew, Julio Froberg; he was not a clammy, five-pump scoutmaster's handshake; he was not a blithe midget, always whistling; he was not any sort of midget--in fact he was rather tall; and he never ever smarted off to truckers.

He was a painter of things, things he caught lounging about his cortex late at night, sipping his best pear brandy, smoking his last cigarette, itching its ass on the corner of some cherished childhood memory. He would pull it out and fling it against either the refrigerator or a blank canvass and whatever stuck had bubble and pop of a jaunty bathtub electrocution.

Then he would sell it for sandwich scratch.

Joan Miro was fond of inviting conventional artists over to his studio in Rue Blomet just so he could frighten them with a scimitar. He'd take playful swipes at their heads and legs as they ran and bumped into each other like the mismanaged kites of starry-eyed carnival harlequins.

Sometimes he would sit cross-legged and smoke tobacco from a hookah that he built from the ramshackle remains of a old samovar. He would blow gigantic smoke rhombuses and bite at them like a mongrel hobo. Then he would paint what he tasted.

To dull the incessant technicolor wheezing of his own genius, Joan Miro sometimes laced his own ham sandwiches with "reds", "stumblers", or "goof balls". After one such sandwich, he set about fulfilling the useless yet lifelong desire of giving himself "Brazilian side-burns".

And he did it, too, but ended up dying of complications from an in-grown pubic hair.

He was ninety.

Between the time he crawled out of art's open manhole and ninety, there was painting, sex, regular sideburns, criticism, very few ascots, ham, bread, ladies, rabbit suits at Eastertime, pills, surrealistic shadow chasing, sleepless nights, days that passed with the ease of triangular turds, and mild fame.

*

Sean Ruane lives in Baltimore and is in the MA Creative Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published or has work forthcoming in many journals, such as Juked, Thieves Jargon (as E.F.Arnau and himself), Monkeybicycle, Eyeshot, elimae (as Julio Froberg), 3AM Magazine, Skive Magazine, Boston Literary Magazine (as Axel Finn ), Clockwise Cat, the Houston Literary Review, Octaves Magazine, and Art and Prose Magazine...He also is a shuffle footed basket of slurs. He likes coffee, beer, and Boolean algebra...