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only come around when he needed something from Rose), and the three of them criticizing what they’d read in Art in Our Time that month.  
    Donnie was Mick’s studio assistant. His first. Donnie could handle the large canvases Mick painted, the twenty-by-twenty-foot behemoths his patrons and collectors loved to put in their big Miami manses. Mick could no longer stretch and manage them on his own. Everyone told Mick to work with the local colleges to get an intern to do it for free, but Mick didn’t believe in slave labor.  
    Donnie reminded Mick of himself twenty years prior: an artist with amazing work ethic and experience who hadn’t ever hit it big. So Mick hired him and paid him, even gave him health insurance through the Miami Artists’ Guild. And when Donnie’s escalating rent had forced him out of his apartment, and Mick found out Donnie had no savings whatsoever for “retirement,” whatever that was to an artist, or anyone anymore for that matter, Mick let Donnie move into Mick’s own tremendous studio space.
    Mick’s cortadito arrived, but then he added a guava pastry. Cat’s sandwich had already burned up in his stomach, which hadn’t been fueled in forty-eight hours. The waitress was Cuban and either knew no English or refused to use it. So Mick was forced to tap into his Cuban-styled Spanish, still accented by his Midwestern roots despite his long stint in Miami. “Pour fahvor, dee gamey una pasteleez con hwava.”
    While he waited, he swirled the sugary coffee in his cup and contemplated the target of his anger, and that was whatever piece of excrement coated in five layers of vomit and snot had come into his studio and set fire to his works-in-progress, killing his friend in the process. His sister was right; clearly the intended target had been Mick himself. Outside of Rose and some of the other live-work tenants, nobody knew Donnie had been sleeping in Mick’s studio. But before he’d let Donnie have it, Mick often slept there, when he worked late at night and didn’t want to drive back to his beach house in South Dade.
    Mick had already been killed a million times by other artists’ jealousy. This had begun to happen even before he’d had any success.  
    As early as junior high, it had set him apart. In the small town where he and Priscilla, aka “Amazing Grace,” grew up, it had already started. In his junior high class, no less, which was made up of Mick and eleven other kids. They didn’t have locks on their lockers, which were stacked against one wall of their homeroom. In art class, Mick painted Johnny Cash performing on The Ed Sullivan Show . His teacher, who was a Cash fan and encouraged Mick’s talent besides, held it up for the whole class to see. Later, when Mick went into his unlocked locker to take the picture home to show his parents, it was no longer there. Someone had stolen it.
    In graduate school, his talent quickly became known, and one of his professors declared, “We have a real artist in our midst.” But that professor’s rival was a man who’d recently been granted tenure without the level of artistic success the others in the department enjoyed. He had made it his personal mission to destroy Mick not only as an artist but as a human being. Chester Canon, or “Chester the Molester,” as Mick liked to call him, screamed and threw things at Mick during crits, described him as a “no-talent hack” to anyone within hearing, and ridiculed his work with insatiable glee. Canon enlisted into his campaign several of Mick’s fellows, students who couldn’t find the perspective in a painting if it were diagramed into the canvas like a paint-by-numbers kit.
    Canon got his comeuppance, though, when he refused to enter Mick’s painting in a national contest of MFA art students’ work. Several of the professors wanted to enter Mick’s Pink Splash. To create Pink Splash , Mick had taken an old advertisement for facial bleaching cream, decoupaged it onto a canvas,