Single mother

On the street there’s one of many small houses, the front door close to the street, the front yard a little plot of green, the house has a screen door, a cluttered porch, windows with grey curtains. A pregnant woman with thick eyeglasses and two children and a yellow shopping bag trudges towards the door, needing a drink but having to cook dinner. It’s not the boy with the speech impediment, the one spewing words as if trying on new clothes, singing the words that she can’t understand, it’s the older boy, the quiet boy, the good boy, the one who looks like his father, the one who’s good with numbers and keeps her grounded, the first boy who watches over his brother and patiently teaches him the pronunciation of words, he’s the one keeping her awake in the night.

Spud

Obituary in today’s Times, the headline called him, “a Philosopher of Art”.  His life, he had been quoted, had changed in 1964 upon encountering Andy Warhol’s sculpture, “Brillo Box.” Not unlike a philosopher, some of the world’s view of the artist’s work is, “what the hell is it for, what’s the function.” The Brillo box’s function is to hold the Brillo pads, and sometimes it functions well, and sometimes it gets wet on the kitchen counter and becomes useless. The sculpture, more permanently made of silkscreened plywood, functioned as art because an art gallery in New York presented it as such, and you had to be smart enough, educated enough, to know what art is. Who the hell cared? In my small city there is a well-thought-of collection of abstract-expressionist paintings and sculpture lining the halls of government that my gym teacher in freshman year, an assistant baseball coach with a substantial neck and white crew-cut named Spud, referred to as “crud” that “any shitass could have made in his garage," suggesting that  baseball would give our young lives meaning and Mark Rothko was an idle and shiftless troublemaker without a decent curveball. The Philosopher of Art, said the obit writer, struggled with meaning and purpose, with “the relationship between knowledge and belief, photography and truth…” Art, Philosophy, the reasons that we live, think, struggle to stay alive, to hold on to something memorable and value it.  It is true there are baseball games I will never forget, burned in my memory. What use a sculpture, a drawing, of a Box of Brillo? It may simply be worth what somebody, a philosopher or a gym teacher, says it is.

Sidewalk drawing

I used to draw on the sidewalks in front of my house, using the same expensive oil pastels I now put to paper. Perhaps money was less of an object then, but even then I knew how I needed to spend my time: while other husbands might use their warm-weather weekends to paint the porch or hang shades in the dining room or put in a patio or pound posts for a fence, I knelt on a cart in old jeans and a t-shirt, copying drawings out of art folios or children’s books, which lay open on the lawn beside me with a brick holding the page against the wind. Over the years I drew Aladdin and Batman, a unicorn, and an American Indian boy, and Uncle Sam. On Halloween trick or treaters walked around a pastel black cat with yellow eyes or Lon Chaney as the Phantom, or Picasso’s Madonna and Child, a Modigliani woman, or a Van Gogh self-portrait. 

One summer a family from India rented the upstairs apartment of the brown two-family house across the street with an open porch where the grandmother would sit, dressed in layers of cloth on the hottest days, I could see her eyes and part of her nose but little else of her face. She watched her grandchildren playing down below, in the street with a ball, or standing over me making smart, nervy comments. I made a lot of neighbors nervous or distrustful for a while, until they knew I wasn’t going to take their children’s souls like a pied piper, and these two children, I made them nervous too, they were under 10 years old but their voices were too loud and their words too challenging as if conjuring up courage to overcome me and my oddness. My boys didn’t like them, the girl, the older, was a sneak, and the boy, only six or seven, was arrogant and hard with a brittle high voice of false cleverness. I suspected either of them capable of spilling juice or scuffing their feet over a new Superman or a Maurice Sendak monster when I wasn’t around, but they were afraid to challenge my sons who watched them with distrust or their grandmother’s placid observation from her perch. 

One early Sunday morning, out alone lost in the peculiarities of the pock-marked cement and the wonders of Picasso’s drawing skill as I tried to replicate his Portrait of Jacinto Salvado as Harlequin-1923, our city street perfectly quiet like from another century or a primitive country, no cars or sirens or children, just trees and lawns and old houses and rough gardens and the sidewalk, I looked up at the early sun over the two-story house across the street. The grandmother was standing, swathed in colored cloth, staring down at me and our eyes met and she lifted the layers of cloth to remove her arm and wave at me, and she nodded, her eyes so big and black that even from a distance I could see she was smiling.

Thugs

It was 1975 and an old high school friend was visiting from Boston, full of bluster and fear, rejected by graduate school and a girl named Michael. He slept on our couch and seemed to be counting on me for older brothering, even though we were the same age. I left him to go to work during the day and he holed up in our apartment, timidly stepping out for food or air. New York in the ‘70s was brittle, affordable, dirty, pre-Rudy and still a haven for starving artists and a winning group of grim Yankees, tough and unforgiving but willing to die for each other, Munson and Guidry, Jackson and Chambliss. The city was safe if you followed the rules. My friend came with tales of Boston, a city without rules. He had been mugged two weeks before, beaten badly near Harvard Square by a gang of roving thugs who simply wanted to rough up a college boy; he turned a corner, they surrounded him, mocked him, beat him with their fists, broke his glasses. Over the years our friendship cooled, as he had learned to be a thug himself of a kind, wealthy, smug, preachy, with a new bluster and a swagger of insecurity. And he never left Boston, married safe and unhappily so no one named Michael could hurt him again.

Agoraphobic

To outsiders the house seems like a prison, no locks but chains on ankles that make the walk from the dining room to the front door unnavigable. The cords to the window shades are beyond reach and if they could be grasped the stabbing, the burning, the charge of pain in the shoulder and the wrist and the hips would prevent their hoisting. There might be a small circle of white cloud above one shade across which dark birds migrate, the sky appearing cold and uninviting, and above it only the universe imagined as an endless descent. But for the inmate, the cell is warm, colors and flavors can be imagined, one is never too cold or too thirsty, too noisy or too naked, and if the phone isn’t answered, there’s no one sharing the news or asking questions. 

Spanish steps

Torremolinos Parade           

Young men on horses

shuffle into line behind

carts shackled to oxen

whose tails chasing heat-flies sway

like the aunts and girl-cousins

who dab their lacquered hair

and their glacé faces

move as if to dance

dismissing with their fans townsmen

who whistle and leer

while the pounding parade begins

on a year's worth of dust

drums on each moaning cart-bed

played by wild boys who

suckle flagons of wine

 tango with their abuelas

kitchen slaves and fishwives

riding the tide up the callalateral

behind the wooden Mary

 tottering on her cart

diamonds in her tiara

sapphires on her brown pocked brow

while a blue-gowned crinolined angel

waits her turn swirls her black fan

pouting at dark mustachioed uncles

whose white-brimmed hats shine up

off her new patent leather shoes

My friend, facebook

This is a test, touching on a bit of this and a bit of that that I don’t know, of all the things I should know, or could know, or are knowable. Every day I draw, do I know why, what do I know about my drawings, how can anybody like them, what do they know about drawing, what do I know about me? I do two drawings one day, seven another, and I put them someplace, in plastic, in a drawer, on facebook, in an e-mail, I don’t know if they’re good and don't even know how much I like them. I waver between being certain and being stupid. A few people, not many, buy one, or another, not many. I don’t know how smart the drawings are, or if they're art, art is a funny word, whether they make people laugh, or disgust them, or find them pathetic. There are people, my so-called friends, on facebook, who say they “like” them, and some write, “really like!” in the comments box, and I wait for those, I try to find something in those two words and it occupies me for a moment, but not much differently than drinking a glass of water slowly. There are thousands of these little tests that I put on my timeline, and for a few the comments in the comments box are abundant and Why is something else I don't know; I thought one would give pleasure but ah no it's another and the one I think I like no one else seems to notice. This morning’s drawing, cartoon-y and sloppy, and I don't think I like it, I don't think it's good, I don't think it's art, is of a long girl with no clothes but not grossly naughty standing like a traffic guard at a crossroads, it's called Proceed With Caution, and facebook, my friend in judgment, refuses it; each time I try to post it, an error message in red appears in the box when the drawing should resolve like a reverse image of Alka-Seltzer in water: Error. A kind of comment from my friend, facebook, who seems to know something that I don’t, about drawing, about art, about resolving images, about what my friends need to see. facebook knows something I don't, no surprise there. But is my own blog a friend, a critic, a judge, a resolver? This is the test.