Basel Social Club 2023

How Louis Quit Smoking

Louis called to ask if I’d write something for a project he was working on. He said he was making some paintings of the great outdoors that were going to be shown in a big windowless room in Basel. I thought it sounded fab so I asked if he had any pictures of the work he was planning on showing. In a !ash the pictures were on my phone and I thumbed them over while we talked. The paintings were beautiful spectral things. I told Louis they gave me the same feeling I got from looking at Corot, a feeling of being in the landscape, only I’m dead, but I don’t know I’m dead, until the little milkmaid coming up the road walks right through me.
Louis laughed. I’d reminded him of a story he’d heard when he was a kid. He oered to tell me the story and we agreed that if
I couldn’t come up with anything better I could just write his up. I sunk down into my studio sofa with some pretzels and a selzer and told him to go ahead.

When I was a kid, he began, I used to summer in this town in New Hampshire called Littleton. There was this guy there that we idolized. His name was Matlin and he ran the Episcopal Church’s charity shop. He was twenty. We were thirteen. The age dierence between us was the dierence between the sacred and the profane. We were little lumps who ate fruit rollups and spit tears of impotent rage at our parents. He smoked, drove his own truck, and had every other quality you’d expect in a blue-ribbon golden calf.
One evening, as I was on my way home, I came upon Matlin by the church as he was #nishing up some handiwork. He was shir-less, with white dried spackle all over his chiseled arms and angular torso. It was probably seven, the sun was almost set, and for a second it seemed entirely possible that this guy actually turned into a statue at night.
Matlin saw me ogling him and explained that he’d been sealing up a hole in the building’s foundation. When I asked why there was a hole, he just smiled and said he couldn’t say. When I asked why he couldn’t say, he said maybe he could say, but he was too parched to talk, seeing as he’d run out of Cherry Coke.
He was smoking a cigarette when I got back from the 7 Eleven. I begged him to tell me what he’d been up to, and after a long sip of his soda he said he’d been hiding a relic, a genuine piece of Christ’s body. What piece, was the next logical question, and according to him he’d just interred our lord’s footbone, the third metatarsal to be exact, in the wall between the last parking space and the Yew bush. How did he know it was genuine? Well, it had a chip where the legionary’s nail had nicked it, and if I only knew the story of how he’d acquired it, I wouldn’t doubt its authenticity either.

— Sebastian Black

Louis Eisner
Mrs. Yubaba, 2023
Oil on canvas
45.7 x 61 cm
18 x 24 in

Louis Eisner
The Bride and the Bard, 2023
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 101.6 cm
30 x 40 in

Louis Eisner
Wrath of God, 2023
Oil on canvas
61 x 45.7 cm
24 x 18 in