Running Out of Room
| Date: | c. 1962
|
| Medium: | Ink wash on paper |
| Size inches: | 22 1/4 x 15 1/4 |
| Size cm: | 56.5 x 38.7
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| Signature: | Signature uncertain
|
| |
| Location: | Allan Stone Collection, courtesy: Allan Stone Projects, New York |
Allan Stone Collection, courtesy: Allan Stone Projects, New York. Inventory Number GD 54. Probably signed on the reverse. Titled by Ronald Vance, 2015.
Aunt Esther is Mom’s sister and married Uncle Al, whom she called Albert. She is very tall and thin, with a great humpback, like Grandpa Bobe and has big bones in her legs and feet. I’ve never seen such big bones that shape into feet, and she always wears high heels, she must, she says. She wore high heels since she was sixteen. She also said that after she was married she wore silk high-heeled house slippers to bed, with socks over them. She had a daughter named Erma Mae, who was one point this side of being an albino. Erma Mae did not develop mentally and when she was twenty, she had the mentality of a six-year-old. Some people tried to be kind and said it was a ten-year-old, but I know it was six and thinking her six is really kinder than thinking anyone ten. Erma Mae and I got along very well. They came over to see us one Sunday, after I was out of the Army. I took Erma Mae into the kitchen and put make-up on her and we pretended she was grown up. After they had left, Erma Mae’s chair was wet with pee. I guess people who pee their pants in public get some kind of interest in that cold wet horror of pee in their pants and there is nothing that can explain the smell of dry pee better than dry pee, everyone has his own bubble of thoughts when smelling dry pee. Erma Mae smelled of dry pee. She was even taller than her mother and had the same large bones in her legs. I have the same thing and it works on a man. It’s the only reason I’m glad that I’m half Bobe, because I got the Bobe legs and they are gorgeous on me.
A year later Erma Mae died. She had been taken to many different doctors and mental hospitals during her life, but the latest had been, naturally, Indianapolis. If you are serious enough about illness in Indiana, you finally go to Indianapolis. Erma Mae's doctor was Dr. Miracle. He was giving her electric shock treatments and she died one day coming out of shock. I never knew why she had been given shock treatments because she had nothing to be shocked into nor out of. I received many letters from Erma Mae and she could not write a straight line, but tended to go up at the right of the paper. One of her last letters had such a powerful series of lines that were diagonal that half the paper was not used. The last line said, “it looks like I’m running out of room.” I’ve done three or four paintings like Erma Mae’s letters. When I first met May Wilson I was frightened her name was spelled Mae and thought she could be like Erma Mae.
(George Deem, There's a Cow in Manhattan, Part Five, Date uncertain).
