the palms at 6:02, 6:07, and 6:11 a.m. on may 18, 2012

it’s possible that i’m lying.

we all do. everyday we embellish and expand, omit and conveniently forget the truth.

even these photographs are lies for they tell not the actual truth of the moments in which they were captured (time being the first fact to evaporate into the ether of “it doesn’t matter”).

they’ve been manipulated and saturated, the contrast has been swung to the right while the brightness has been toned down/up, but they come close to the way i saw them for the briefest moment yesterday morning sometime after 6 and before 6:30 while taking the dogs for their morning walk (the dogs on a morning walk is true.)

six views of three roses

i think you’re a well-regarded writer hiding behind a pseudonym.

i think you’re afraid of social interaction, in spite of the people you surround yourself with.

i think you are over-dramatic. (as we all are at times, sympathy being the balm of the emotionally impoverished.)

i think you have a hard time seeing the real you.

i think it doesn’t matter what i think.

i think you think i’m presumptuous for even thinking these things of you and you and you and you.

i think i’ll stop now.

disappointing dad

if, as freud believes, that only in our minds can the past and the present coexist, that there is no true forgetting, that every experience leaves a discoverable trace, that every memory of another person is partly a self-portrait (shredded as it may be by time, trauma, love), then this is how i want to remember my father: smelling of gasoline, cut grass and the sweat of a humid summer afternoon in springfield; happy, proud, and with a  loving smile, maybe even a little goofy as he is, having conquered the lawn, his army-booted foot atop the spoils of the grass wars, triumphant, a souvenir of his prowess, skill, masculinity.  (even the lawnmower is in on the fantasy, grinning as it is with its grill of metal teeth from rubber-tired ear to rubber-tired ear.)

this memory is wish-fulfillment at its worst and an outright lie at its best.   the few memories of my father that i have been able to dredge up from my childhood that are not based on photographs or what other people have told me over the years (at least the few years when i was interested enough to ask about him) are pleasing, warm, loving.  but there is always the undercurrent of anger, abandonment, violence (supplied as it is by the adults refusal to discuss his goodness, the goodness that you can see for yourself in the photo.  it is the image of man who loves someone, is it not?  as a child, life is not seen in the grays that adults do, it is always black & white, good or bad.)

would his nurturing, such as it might have been, changed my nature?  it’s not easy to imagine the difference his presence in my life may have had on the person that i am or that i was.  i have to believe that there would have been friction as my nature exerted itself even as my desire to emulate him smothered my instincts, my sense of identity, my not being his idea of what a son should be.

his father loved me.   as gentle a soul, as patient as job, generous, understanding, complicit in the life of the grandchildren around him, and from the photographic memories left for me to divine, the same with his own son.  why then, i have to ask, was my own father’s influence denied me?  what about him went wrong?  and here, now, it comes to mind: could my mother have been wrong?  although that seems doubtful based on the reports from the field…particularly after his return from vietnam…but even before then, he exhibited a dark side — discussed here — that seems to indicate she was not.

of course, it’s all “what if?”  what if we had had a relationship, in spite of the divorce?  what if summers had been spent with dad?  what if he had sent me a card congratulating me on good grades or some other achievement?  what if we had gone fishing, hunting or he had taught me car maintenance/repair (although mary was a fine substitute for some of these steps on the ladder to manhood)?

is it my failure as a writer that i cannot even imagine how his influence may have affected my life?  men were such foreign objects to me when i was growing up (inclusive of uncles and grandfathers, they were all too removed, either emotionally or geographically to have had any measurable impact) that trying to fathom their contribution to the life learning education of a child seems too fantastical to consider.  i look now at friends and co-workers who are fathers and i can clearly see the what and the how, the character stamp, the moral guidance, the humor, the sadness, the triumph and the failure of their influence on their children.  (some more successful than others, some got it right sooner, no need to practice on the first child and succeed with second where they failed with the first.)

and then there’s this:  i know no father of a gay child.   how easy would it be to accept that difference as a man, a father?  does having a gay child kill your dreams of a legacy, a future, a future where you exist as part of another human being?  your quest for immortality snuffed out by a chromosome.   oh yes, i know you’re reading this, you liberals, you enlightened ones, and thinking, “it would matter not, hetero- or homo-sexual, i would love them equally the same.”  but i challenge you to dig deep and not find that little bit of regret that is hanging around like a cough that you just can’t squelch.  (“ahem,” he interjected.)

i would never have looked as eager to be camping with a bunch of strange boys as my father does in this photo.  my social awkwardness with heterosexual men at that age (let’s say he’s 12 or 13) was a disability and immediately hung a big fat sign around my neck that read, “not like you”.

oh, i know you’re out there, the gay boys and men who fit as naturally into the hetero world as if there were no difference (or you’ve convinced yourself that you do), but there are many of us who never felt that way growing up.   adult life experience does change you, obviously.   i do believe i can hold my own in a group of straight men, but i still lack the knowledge of the secret handshake, the code words, the key that opens the door to “hey buddy, wassup?” said in all earnestness, care and brotherly love.

the disappointment then.  there is plenty of it.  i never called him ‘dad’.  if i called him anything as a child, it was probably some derivative of poppa.  the only opportunity that i had to address him as an adult, we settled on lee, his christian name and that only came haltingly from my lips; i avoided calling him by name, if i needed his attention i waited until he was looking at me.  we spoke hardly at all, the uncomfortableness of being in each other’s company a shroud, a winding sheet.  he tried then, during that short period of time, to exert his influence over me, but i ignored it and did as i pleased without a comment from him.  and then i left and he left and we left it at that.

it makes me cry.  i don’t feel cheated, i’m not angry,  i received a huge gift of love from my mother, my grandmothers, from mary and from my mother’s last husband, roy.  i am not advocating for the traditional family; i think children can be raised to be loving, caring, contributing members of society by single mothers, fathers, gay couples and any other permutation of ‘family’ as long as there is love in their hearts,  but i do feel the loss of the “what if i’d had a dad?” for good or for bad, however it may have played out.

how to spoil an 8 year old’s christmas (but just in case i was wrong, coordinates provided)

30°  this morning, saturday, december 24, 2011, as i was facing south at 6:49 a.m. pst, the sun came up and spread a pink blanket of light across the ocean

-117°  when i turned to the east at 6:52 a.m. pst, its fiery heat lit up the sky in oranges licked with red which, for some reason, reminded me of…

…i don’t recall taking pleasure in spoiling my cousin’s christmas in 196_, at least not at first, although after his tears had subsided, no doubt assuaged by the mountain of gifts set before him by his doting parents, it may have come to me that speaking the truth may have unintended consequences — some that you can control and others that you cannot; you just need to remember to assess the risk/benefit factors before opening your mouth which is not always easy at any age (i speak from experience.)

banished by grown-ups to the rec room in the basement (or bored by the grown-ups we retreated to the rec room on our own) on christmas eve, he and i, never close to begin with, stood facing each other across the pool/ping-pong/foosball/game table and not knowing what else to say, but feeling pressure to say something, i blurted out, “you know, there is no santa claus.”

i stood there and watched as his face crumpled, his eyes welled up with tears, and a wail of disbelief left his lips, but by this time, just seconds after speaking the truth, my ears were burning and humming with blood, drowning out any sounds–watching him in pantomime then as he ran up the short flight of stairs from basement to foyer and up again to the living room (split-levels, you do remember them, don’t you?), the deep pile of sculpted carpeting like quicksand, all of this in slow motion, me following to see what would happen.

if only there were more to tell.  all i know for sure is that evening a shift in our relationship occurred and although we were cousins born the same year just two days apart, living in the same small town, we never really ever were friends.

aspiration expiration date (10/8/2011)

mother, son, and dog walk toward their future

there is nothing i can tell you about this photograph other than the truth of what you see–a mother, her son and their dog are walking toward a waterfall;  it is more than likely somewhere in the black hills of south dakota and i have no idea who stood behind us and thought “that would make a nice picture” and pushed the button on a kodak instamatic camera, although i could hazard a guess that it was a grandmother or one of my mother’s ex-mother-in-laws (she collected them like trophies), but it is possible that that is fiction–judging from the back of my neck (and my height), it is probably 1968 or 1969; my mother is wearing brown stretch stirrup pants (which i always thought lent her a certain sophisticated air), with a pair of tan suede half-boots and a black light-weight quilted coat and as you can see i am in a red-hooded sweatshirt with gray jeans–i will make the call that it is early fall, the dog has a collar, but no leash–in fact, i cannot recall now whether we ever had him on a leash, regardless of where we might find ourselves, he always stayed next to us or would run ahead, but always stay in sight and would return at the slightest call or gesture, exactly as you would wish all dogs behaved.  now you know only what i have gathered from looking at it based on my familiarity with the subjects.  you may see something entirely different (it was not my intent to take away from your vision or to inhibit your imaginative powers, but only to share with you what i could that might enhance your viewing and understanding of the scene before you.)

“mother,” (it’s true, i called her ‘mother’ and sometimes ‘mom’, but never ‘mommy’ even when i was much younger), “mother, have your dreams come true?”, is the question i wish now that i had had the selflessness to have asked her then or even later, before she died.  how simple a question, how important an answer would have been, reassuring even if the answer had been “they have and they haven’t.”  i believe she would have said “i have you and that is my fondest dream,” but as sweet as that it is, it is a soporific used to deflect my probing question and dull my senses; if you think about it, parents are good at turning away their children’s truth-seeking questions using compliments and love to shield them from the sadness of the truth (of course, there may be parents out there who never use love to stop their children from entering the box canyons of adulthood.)

just as i’m sure there are those parents whose children truly are their dreams, that is something i’ll never fully understand as i’m not a parent, but something tells me that for many their children are but part of more complicated dreams and aspirations they had in their youth, their young adulthood, their maturity, just as those of us who have no children have had/do have.

recently we came into a cache of back issues of architectural digest.  it’s been a few years since i’ve had the leisure of paging through paige rense’s bible (isn’t she about as old as abraham now?) of all things decorative (she would insist that they are but the essentials of living a proper life.)  it used to be, when i was in my 20s and 30s that i could look through this magazine of home décor and architecture and think to myself “i could have that,” or “someday…”, but the last few nights as i’ve turned one heavy page after another (they seem to be using 80lb weight paper for every page–it’s nearly impossible to turn just one page they’re so thick), and in light of the recent economic situation so many of us find ourselves in, i wonder who’s looking at this and having those same dreams i did so many years ago.

it’s true that my life is nowhere near as impossible as many people’s (for instance, three of our neighbors have lost or are losing their homes due to the mortgage crisis/economic downturn, a disturbingly high percentage for our neighborhood.)  i have a beautiful home, a loving life partner, two sweet, wonderful pet companions (so PC!), a job that i love and a small, but close circle of friends.  i am challenged to excel creatively and intellectually by much of what i do which i believe are two luxuries many do without.  yet i find myself dreaming less hopefully of what could be and more despairingly of what will be.    when i read about interior designer mario buatta (also ancient) and look at the luxuriously overwrought interiors he’s designed for a 5th avenue maisonette (oh jeesh, wtf maisonette?) alongside the quotes from he and the homeowner that are so fraught with the importance of the correct tassel or proper use of chintz i have to laugh and shed a tear for the inanity of it all as well as despair at the realization that not only is that no longer aspirational, but also it is no longer inspirational.

for alongside the increased joblessness, homelessness, the disaster that is the middle class of america, we are in jeopardy of losing the one thing you’d never thought could be taken from you: your dreams.    i imagine that there will be pockets of resistance–i am resisting–but the fact remains that dreaming of what could be appears to have become a fool’s errand for anyone of a certain economic bracket–say you and your neighbors.    what i believe, should my mother have said to me, “you are my dream come true”, is that she truly believed that what lay ahead of me would fulfill her dreams, that my future was her dream, that she had left me with the hope that my dreams could come true.  i fear that is no longer true and hope that i will be proven wrong (so says a putative optimist who recently refilled his prescription for wellbutrin.)

visitations (lives of the saints)

“o, the sisters of mercy they are not departed or gone.  they were waiting for me when i thought that i could not go on.  and they brought me their comfort, and later they brought me this song.  o, i hope you run into them, you who have been traveling so long.” –leonard cohen

part 1

they always drove into town in the pickup with the camper shell from their home in south dakota or missouri, making the journey seem like a vacation, taking their time, stopping (as we always did when i was young) at roadside attractions, deciding on the spur of the moment to take this two-lane road or that one instead of the interstate, just to say they had done it, “it looked interesting,” she would tell me later, going into the details of this farm or that small town they had ‘discovered’ on their way to somewhere else, her fourth husband a willing participant in her explorations and whims.

they would visit friends, a collection of people she gathered wherever she went, a true talent and one i cannot say i fully understood at the time, the making of friends wherever, whenever.  i try now to remember if that ability was because she was a good listener or if it was her simple, pleasant manner, maybe it was an undefinable trait, or maybe it was just her nature that led people to her.  however she managed it, she had friends scattered around the midwest;  columbine and lilac, peony and rose.  when did she find time to maintain such a flower garden?

when i was growing up i didn’t pay attention to the subtleties of my mother’s maturity, her adult abilities and worldly navigational devices and tools, but perhaps i have been most influenced by them or by the lack of them and have only come to realize what they were when i reached a certain cognizant age (somewhere between 2_ and death, or perhaps in the never world of my subconscious) and when i find myself employing a skill set i had no idea i possessed.  i wish i could spell out for you what those subtleties are (other than the obvious petty lying one engages to keep the social wheels greased), their details, their lattice work on which your friendships flourish.

the first time they came to chicago to visit me, was it 1975 or ’76?, i can’t recall, and there is no mention of it in my journal from the time; i do know it was summer and chicago was a-shimmer with heat and humidity, but somehow perfect while they were there (or maybe it was its awful hot, sticky self, the weather is unimportant to this story, i was just hoping i could set a mood for you in order that you might appreciate more of what i’m about to share with you.)

have i mentioned that my mother would cast her spell over my friends so that they would also become her friends?  o yes, months later after they had been introduced, this one or that one would casually say something to this effect (and to my horror), “i was speaking with evelyn the other day and we were talking about you.  o, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything negative, but you know how she is…”  and i, on the other end of this particular telephone conversation, blushing, my pulse racing.   i would try to figure out how and when they found the quiet moment of their, most likely, one and only meeting, to secretly exchange phone numbers, neither of them so much as breaking a sweat in their collusion.   this habit of acquiring my closest friends as hers was one she began when i left for college and kept until she died, not unlike her pack of marlboros on the telephone table next to her chair in the living room, taking one out and carefully lighting it with a decorative flame and then that exhalation; i can hear it now, they must have too.

part 2

so.  plans are made, destination and arrival time plotted and soon (too quickly) here they are, standing in the lobby of 2___ n. pine grove, pushing the buzzer for r. patrick, apt. 1114, suitcases in hand, a bit of american gothic done up in polyester (“it travels better”) and smelling of the road, my mother a bit wind-tossed and my step-father solicitous as always of her every need, although her independence might have put off a less secure man, he seemed not to pay any attention to it and i think that may have been part of his appeal to her, this final love of her life (after me.)

this is the summer that i was sporting a collection of straw borsalinos accompanied by fringed silk scarves tossed gaily, yes you read that right, tossed gaily (in case you thought your eyes were deceiving you the first time) over one or the other of my bony shoulders.   you might ask the author at this point how open he was about his sexuality with his mother and step-father and he would say, “it’s none of your business.”  that is how it was handled in our family.  (if you’ve been following any of these family history jaunts i’ve been indulging myself in this past days/weeks/months/years, you may have discovered that at one point in my life i had two mommies, that too was never discussed.)

they settled comfortably in my studio apartment, sleeping in the bedroom alcove with me on the little off-white curved boudoir sofa i’d rescued from a second-hand store in uptown (lawrence & clark-ish) where it was wilting from disuse, hiding in a corner.  i’d swathed it in watered georgette, patterned in blue and green hues from a sari shop in the same neighborhood, covering the blemishes it had been wearing for years before i came to own it.   at least i’d start out on it, but it was so small and kidney-shaped that i ended up sleeping on the floor instead (he shrugged).

we took the 151 bus down to the near north and walked over to arnie’s for lunch one day and ate spinach salad and steak tartare (“why would you eat spinach raw,” asked my stepfather, my mother delighting in the alfalfa sprouts crowning hers, possibly making a little mooing noise under her breath to my horror–and secret delight.)

that evening we dined with my dearest friend (bff before there was such a thing), jimmy, in his apartment in the same building.    he had a 100 candles lit, reflecting the shimmering lights of the city below, the warmth of the light magnified by one mirrored wall, his palm trees and exotic plants making it a tropical night in the middle of chicago.  jimmy was an adept.  adept as in magical-thinking, fantasy-producing, another world/universe-living, brilliant human consumed by the darkest undercurrent (the river styx) and for a few years my off- and on-again gay mentor and guide to the world.  under his tutelage my culture quotient shot way up, i shed some of the country ‘gosh’ ness and instead acquired a big city ‘fuck’ ness.  what i chose to take with me has stood me well these many years.

my mother was fascinated by him and he by her and they soon had their heads together on his living room couch while step-father and i fiddled and twirled our wine glasses and idly watched them.  she would parry and he would feint; he would joust and she would side-step as elegantly as a show horse, so subtle was their mutual admiration and interest in each other that, to the untrained eye, you would have thought they had known each other for years.  at some point in the evening they exchanged phone numbers (see paragraph 5 above.)

wisely, jimmy continued to pour wine into their glasses, so that when it came time to lead them back to my apartment after dinner there was no objection to his and my heading out to the bars for a little late night revelry.

part 3

i’ve always been partial to the hindu concept of life:  a spiraling thread of history through which your life dissects, your past may be someone else’s future, their now your long ago.    but it is that spiraling (do you always think of the word ‘spiraling’ as a downward movement?  i think most of us do, but i often like to contemplate it laying on its side or moving up instead of down.   it is the same with its shape, a funnel your first thought with its wide top and narrow bottom, but i see it as particularly regular in shape, as wide at the top as it is at the bottom–or equal from side to side), that will now come into play.  we have moved from that idyllic summer of ’7_ and it is now close to the end of a decade and i have called out to them.

j.w. had a country girl’s charm with a big city woman’s body, all legs, ass and breasts cooing sweet nothings to men twice her age ’til they’d be wiping the drool off their chins with a paper cocktail napkin already wet with their sloppy beer.   she and i worked together at arnie’s, she in the bar, me on the floor, and we had an immediate connection.  as with most of us there, the restaurant job was ‘temporary’ until our real job came along.  she a potter, me a _________ (the blank is intentional, i had no idea what i wanted to be.  all i knew is that i did not want to be working in a restaurant another day.)  she lived in the pilsen east artist community at 18th street and halsted and after my first visit to her loft i was ready to move down there and lead la vie bohème, she mimi, me rodolphe (beats his chest).

instead of this [imagined] love affair (whether it was with her or not) it fast became a downward spiral of drugs, drink and wantonness (not because of her, or maybe it was) and when i finally pulled myself up out of the <insert your favorite word here to describe the depths of despair i was feeling at the time> i made up my mind to make something happen (even if it did not come true, as it didn’t, and as is often the case with the irresolute–you know who you are–there were more hard days ahead), i set out to change my life.

there was a party.   a going-away party where everything in the house was for sale. we (i had a roommate, more on that at another time, it is too hard to write about the living right now.  i’ve started to address this time in some written form or the other over the last several months and have failed each time –failed as far as i am the judge of what works and what doesn’t when speaking of the living–we shall see if i am able to move past that in the future as it is an important part, a key actually, to this story, both before this tale and afterward, and yet it does not matter now as i relate to you these visitations), sold everything including the refrigerator that belonged to the landlord (we replaced it) during this night of manic revelry; hundreds of people came through and by morning, the place was stripped bare (bare-ish, i ended up staying on by myself for several months afterward, not everyone took with them what they bought and never mentioned that they hadn’t gotten what they paid for.  it still makes me giggle with elfin delight that the party was so good that paying for something was like the fee for enjoying yourself, whether you took home your purchase or not.  there was never an ounce of recrimination from any attendee.  another “oh, well,” he sighed.)

part 4

and finally.  it’s not the final ‘final’ just so you know.  i don’t want to get your hopes up that this will be the end of it, you’re just going to have to soldier on here for a bit more as i dredge this pond bottom for all of the memory that’s been laying there gathering algae and scum (and the occasional dead frog).   focus, rp, focus.  i called them and said, “i’ve got a job lined up in phoenix and i’m going to move in few weeks, don’t want to take a lot with me, will you come and get the important stuff?” and she, “why, honey, of course, we will.”  and being the deus ex machina that they were, days later the pick-up with the camper shell (why were they always silver-y blue?) is parked in front of 7__ w. 18th st.

it is summer again in chicago and this time i’m not living on the lake.  instead i’m down in a neighborhood that has seen many better days, the streets are dusty, two doors down from me live a pair of hookers (as sweet as pie, btw) and the neighborhood abuts little mexico city, so named, well, you figure it out.   the artist inhabitants are a motley crew, a little wild-eyed, gypsy fortune-telling, handsome and beautiful, exotic birds really and i loved each of them, but that’s definitely an aside.  it’s not that my mother didn’t know where i was living, i shared as much as i thought necessary and i’d been down to see them several times over the intervening years–the important thing is that they had seen me, they had to know that it was not good, but they looked past it, not wanting to bring up something that they had no control over.  is that the mark of a good parent of an adult child or the telling point of one who was not?  i only ask the question now as i am writing this as it did not cross my mind that they were there with anything but love in their caring hearts.

“does this make me look like an artist or a kook?” she asked me as she sported the lamp shade on her head, standing on the sidewalk just down from my space (it’s the tan one in the light with the two big windows) and so the photo above, the one that i had been searching so desperately for so many weeks and it turned up on the shelf in the closet in the 2nd bedroom in an album, “yeah, didn’t you know that’s where it was?” said m. with the nonchalance of an olympic slalom skier or a secret agent.

the night before the photo, i’d taken them on the halsted bus up to greek town for a night out.  we ate at roditys where i was a regular and the staff poured on the charm and the wine and by the time we left a couple of hours later, she and my step-dad were as lit as i was.  we  stopped at the belly dancing place a few doors down for a night cap and somewhere between there and here (the tinkling of the silver jewelry adorning the dancer and the buzz of the crowd) i realized that my mother could pretty much handle anything that life threw at her.    no matter where she was she fit in.  instead of kilroy was here, it was evelyn was here, and don’t forget it; but do remember to call me, okay?  you’ve got the number.

milestones (leaving your past in the past)

that’s me, not looking back (a two-page photo spread in my senior year high school yearbook the day before graduation.  i do have clothes on underneath, but the thought did cross my mind the day we took the photo that being naked under my gown might be an option.  i leapt off a brick wall just outside one of the buildings of the high school campus & if i remember correctly, we took two photos; one to frame the shot & the second to do it.  i like that kind of work; neat, thought out, get in & get out.)

the not looking back part:  it’s not that i haven’t looked back at my high school years & plumbed them for the markers that made me who i am today, but, & to be fair there are many people that i should thank, particularly the teachers, but the other students, well, they’ve fallen behind (except for one & one teacher who i am still in contact with,) the rest are consigned to the very untidy dustbin (robert, really, a dustbin is by its very nature ‘untidy’) of those memories.

if i make myself think about it (which i am right now) i wonder if those memories are untidy & dusty on purpose.  i had one meltdown my junior year, when my ego & my puberty & my stubbornness collided with the implacable drama coach during the rehearsals for “a thurber carnival,” but other than that i’ve always looked back at those three years with pleasure.

would it have been different if i had stayed in the area?  i don’t know.  i do know that it would have become increasingly difficult for me to be who i was, even though i breezed through high school without any dire bullying (junior high was a whole other story); i’m not sure the gay revolution of the ’70s made its way to the black hills of south dakota & if it did, did it make life there any easier for those who were gay & had stayed.

i can conjure up images of m.s. & c.r. who for some reason always seemed to be there when i needed to be pulled out of sticky situations (of my own making, what with the smart mouth i carried around — a defense if ever there were one,) but i wonder if my memory of their assistance is apocryphal, more wish fulfillment than truth.

when i read some of the ‘good lucks’ & ‘bright futures’ & ‘you were so funny’ & ‘loved taking french with you!’ written sideways & on angles & i’s dotted with hearts & open circles in the back pages of this yearbook, i am a little stunned at the distance they put between me & the writer.  nothing like ‘we should stay in touch’ or ‘i so enjoyed your company we’ll be best friends forever’ (way before bffs, you know.)  & of course, it’s mostly girls who have written in my yearbook & the boys who have are the ones who, like me, lived on the edges of popularity.

it’s not that students (all 1100 of them) didn’t know who i was.  it didn’t take me too long to figure out that being an editor of the school newspaper or on the yearbook staff (features editor my senior year!) was a sure way to wield some power.  & i was in the drama club & we brought home some serious trophies my senior year & of course, we performed in front of the student body, well, you would have had to be a complete stoner not to know who i was & that was important to me.  that being known.

perhaps that notoriety made up for the lack of close friends or for the lack of enduring friends.  it was only when i finally got to chicago and the goodman that i started to really connect with people & i still have friends from then.  the difference of course, is that we were able to share our true lives with each other without cadging; i am who i am & you are like me & we are open about who we are (safely.)  that wasn’t there in rapid city, or possibly it was but i didn’t know where to look for it because i had not put it in words yet–that part about being who i am & being true to that person.

& now, marking this milestone (40 years ago!) i look back & am surprised that it took so long.

romeo & juliet (the one act version)

just a slip of paper separated us from blood relation, but as happens we were more alike than blood would have it.  he, a few years older than i, left my life before we could have compared notes (& now, with the lens of memory bringing our times together in sharper focus, it is a wonder to me that our lives crossed in childhood & never again–just the distant communiqué from this relative or that one–& always cryptic, never filled with any substance, never the essence only the facade of truth, “oh he’s moved to _________” or “he died.”

my cousin bobby (my grandmother’s sister’s daughter’s son, what does that make him? two-, three-, four-times removed & even that may be incorrect; it was explained to me so long ago & mattered so little & that part of the family mythology is long-lost now, there is no one left that speaks the language,) but back to bobby, with his brenda vaccaro voice (all whiskey & cigarettes, even as a child, it might have been the brenda v. voice before there was a brenda v. voice to imitate.  & of course, we all wanted to sound just like him, his voice sophistication incarnate or so it seemed at the time.)

my first cousin, s., & i were his marionettes:  he would direct & we would act out his ‘plays.’  he seemed to have a knack for theatrical display (clue!) & his bedroom was a stage trunk of props & costumes which we would don & oftentimes with metal roller skates attached to our shoes (if you’re a certain age you’ll remember & with the ever present ‘brand new key’ strung on a shoelace around our neck) we would roll along the paved driveway of their home (the only paved driveway on the block) & play the parts he had written for us, most notably (meaning the one i remember) “romeo & juliet.”

for more elaborate productions, we would decamp to my grandmother’s back garden; a mammoth apricot tree with its sweet rotting fruit (more than could ever be jammed & jellied & preserved, so it returned to itself) the backstage wall from which we would make our grand entrances — the trunk large enough to hide one or two of us while we waited for our cue — & the rose arbor, scented as it was with its lighter-than-air blossoms, pink/white/red, a stage set for scene two; the picnic table a mountain/a balcony to scale & declaim our studied lines (most made up on the fly based on a script loosely defined by bobby’s story-telling abilities, “& then they would _____, followed by a sword fight, which leads to _____.”)

these memories are just the compilation of two summers (maybe 3) when i would visit my grandmother & next i knew he had moved away to a larger city to live out his life, but which city i do not know & whether he found love & friendship there i have to believe true.   he was generous & gregarious & didn’t seem beset by devils, although now & in retrospect, i have to imagine he hid a part of himself (much as i did) from his family & this close church-going community.   (a side note:  he alone of the local family did not attend church — which set him apart & outside what was accepted, but i don’t recall any adult ever admonishing him for his lack of faith, & i don’t recall a father, only his mother, a church member-in-good-standing.  what did he know that we didn’t?)

he was felled by that scourge that claimed so many in the 1980s & it is knowing this that makes me wish we had known each other when we were young adults, i believe it would have been a true friendship.  (there is another male cousin, also claimed by a.i.d.s., my grandfather’s sister’s son, a lifelong broadway chorus boy & minor choreographer.  our story is less pleasant & more complicated & not a subject i want to discuss, yet.)

how to end this then?  our time together so short & long ago, our adult lives so separate & yet there is still a connection & shared experiences (not only as children, but one must imagine as adults, too) that seem to stitch us together (perhaps a little play-worn, a dangling thread here, a minor tear there, a missing button, a frayed sleeve) but well-loved & when you look at the two of us standing there in front of the apricot tree, we are comrades.

baldessari, opie & eakins (not necessarily in that order) part 2

the baldessari retrospective pretty much put me over the moon.  i believe he is one of the few conceptual artists that most viewers of art can appreciate.  that is not to say his work is easily digestible, for it is & it isn’t (it’s sticky & haunting, in a good way).   your first impression of his work at this decade-by-decade retrospective is of his early ‘sign’ paintings; they are witty & irreverent & i believe that the comedy at the surface makes it easy to say, “i like this guy.”  what happens afterward is that his joke (like all good jokes) is based on the truth.

they’re also a little slippery (like a piece of fruit you’ve just bitten into); you think you’ve got a handle on his subtext & intent, & the meaning suddenly starts to drip down your chin & onto your hands & you grapple with it as if it might slip right out of your hands & land with a plop on the floor at your feet.

"god nose" by john baldessari, oil on canvas 1965

baldessari makes you look at art in new ways & to re-consider how & what you believe is art.  two works from the 70s illustrated this; one a linear series of 41 color photographs of a red ball that had been thrown up against the blue, blue sky, each photograph connected by a ‘thread’ of graphite so that the balls all formed a straight line (some photos were higher/lower than others to achieve this effect).  each photo was spaced exactly the same distance from the following one in an open invitation to travel its entire length (possibly 20′ or 30′) as you bear witness to its trajectory in each photograph.  the revelation, for me, was that when you stood back from the work, it was a sinuous line of blue, a shallow wave coming ashore.  beautiful.

the 2nd: “wrong” from 1966-68, one of the sign paintings that also incorporated photographs features a photograph of the artist taken in front of a suburban tract house.  he is positioned so that a palm tree appears to grow directly out of his head (which is ‘wrong’), but it is also wrong that an artist (a successful one at least) would be living in a suburb, & in a suburb in southern california (not new york).   but yet, the viewer, although ‘in’ on the joke, is still forced to decide whether it is the truth or not.  (hint: it is.)

baldessari has stated that “a word can’t substitute for an image, but is equal to it.”  his heavily ironic appropriation of quotes from art critics (& theoretically art historians–shudder) confront the notions of art & aesthetics held sacrosanct by these writers.

but, because he lets us all in on the joke, that fresh approach is completely democratic & as i said at the beginning of this post, it is completely approachable by all viewers regardless of sophistication, education, knowledge.    the combination of the narrative power of images with their counterpart, the associative power of language make baldessari, i believe, a touchstone for post-modern art-making.

to tell the truth

“if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” –mark twain

he lurched forward & fell to the sidewalk, knees first followed by his outstretched palms, his head hitting the sidewalk & even though i was at least a 1/2 block away i thought i could hear the crack of his skull when it banged onto the concrete.   i ran toward him & as i got closer, he looked up at me with the pleading eyes of a child, “i’m hurt,” he cried, “where’s mary?”

this elderly man i saw almost every day, walking with his radio earphones jammed over a khaki bucket hat.  we had a nodding acquaintance.  i’d seen where he lived (the community in the valley below ours); sometimes coming out of his garage on his way for a walk, while i, likewise, was out walking, sometimes with the dogs, & sometimes alone.

“i’m hurt,” he said again, “help me.”  a childlike terror emanated from him, his voice may have squeaked, a young boy, hurt.

“don’t get up, just lay back down on the sidewalk until we can figure out what’s happened to you,” words from my mouth came out; i touched/rubbed/handled his arms looking for broken bones (only bloody scratches.)

“i’m hurt,” he cried, tears welling in the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, “where’s mary?” he asked again.

“is mary your wife?  tell me your name.”

“dick.”

“dick, do you know who the president is right now?” (too much t.v.)

“where’s mary?”  he cried again, sobbing now.  i put my arms around him & held him close.  a neighbor woman came out of her house, “call 911, please,” i asked & she dashed back inside to make the call.  when she came back out, i asked her to sit with dick while i ran down the hill to his house to get his wife.

their garage door was open (no car inside,) i ran in, the door to the kitchen was open & i tentatively called out “mary, mary, are you in here?”  no response.  i ran back out & there she was in their car making the corner, i ran waving to her “stop, stop!”

“dick has fallen up in our neighborhood, we’ve called 911, he’s hurt & disoriented.  i’ll take you there,” i pointed in the general direction of where he lay (as the emergency vehicle wailed past on the main street.)

“i couldn’t find him,” she said, “he knows he’s not to go any further than our community.  he has alzheimer’s.”  & she backed the car up, turned it around & took off toward where i’d pointed, leaving me standing there (i had thought she might ask me to get in for the ride back up the hill, but i understood her fear & turned to jog after her.)

i made it back up to where dick was, now with firemen standing all around, mary kneeling beside him, rocking him back & forth.  they walked him to her car, put him in it, shut the door & she drove off with her husband.

i never saw him again & once when i waved at mary, she ignored me.