There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 05
There's a Cow in Manhattan
Part Five
When I got back to the United States everyone was smoking filtered cigarettes. I tried them and they all tasted like Kleenex. Finally Pall Malls became more and more difficult to find, so I learned how to smoke a filter.
America looked so drab and dirty when I got off the boat in New Jersey. It seemed that nobody had their space like Europeans did, even the men in the Army in Germany learned to have a certain space. When I drive I sometimes must remember that I should be on the right side of the road, but I thought that was my own strange way of not learning something like not remembering numbers, but I’ve met many drivers who have told me they must think to remember they should stay on the right side of the road when they drive.
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 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.
Aunt Esther said she could not wear low shoes, and she took off one of her shoes to show me why. I had never seen such gnarled feet: bunions, wrinkles, and dead toe nails all pushed into a strange foot shape that was formed for high heels. There and then she tried to straighten her foot, but it would not straighten, the heel could not go down to the floor. She stood on it and I saw that if she tried walking she would fall over backwards, the Achilles tendons had stopped growing, and indeed she had to wear high heels if she wanted to stand up.
The only thing I remember about Uncle Al was that he had three-cornered nostrils, other than that he was rather faceless. He had dead raw-umber hair that just lay there after it was combed back. Dad once asked him how many horses he had and he scratched his head and said, “Oh, eight or eleven, maybe.” That winter, after I had gone back to Chicago Uncle Al was found sitting on his tractor which was in a shed, the motor was running but he was dead. Aunt Esther moved to Vincennes soon after this happened. She had found $40,000 worth of bonds in the pickup truck glove compartment and had no idea if there were others to be found, and it made her so angry.
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.
I went to see Aunt Esther after Erma Mae had died and she showed me her room. It was clean, the closets held Erma Mae’s clothes and on the bed was a clean dress waiting for Erma Mae. When they lived on the farm, Uncle Al would sit in the main living room alone, while Aunt Esther and Erma Mae entertained us in the parlor. They had a late Victorian house with a bay window in front and a long porch running along in front of the window and a great length to the side of the house. After the bay window there was the front door which had a diamond-shaped window which was very lovely. In the parlor was a piano. Aunt Esther played by ear and Erma would sing or whistle, but she couldn’t whistle, although she thought she could. Instead she forced some falsetto sound from her voice, puckered her lips as though she were whistling and there she would stand, six feet tall, with those big-boned legs. It got so I took both Buck and Bill to see this performance. When Erma Mae sang, Aunt Esther would play louder and louder on the piano. Erma Mae played a bit by ear too, but always turned off the light because she could play better in the dark.
If I were married, my children could be albino, insane harelipped twins. There is a harelip strain in the Bobes too. Uncle Ed Bobe, Aunt Esther and Mom's brother, has a daughter who has a son with a harelip, but I was the only recent twin. Selma was always concerned about twins and harelip.
The other couple I knew who were as German as Aunt Esther and Uncle Al were the Baers: Mr. Herbert Baer and his wife Helma. I got a job at night while in Chicago the year after I got out of the army. I was to design a hardware catalogue. I worked right in the home of the Baers. They were German Jews who fled Germany before trouble really began. Mr. Baer was the strangest looking man I had ever seen. He had a pie-face, incredibly thick horn rimmed glasses and a body all buttoned up in yards of clothes. He spoke with such an accent, that when he spoke of his child Ellen, I expected a little girl to come in to meet me, but it was a little boy and he was saying Allan. Helma, his wife looked like Aunt Esther, although she didn’t have a hump on her back, she did have those huge boned German legs, like mine, Erma Mae’s and Aunt Esthers. She cooked very good meals and the two nights out of the week that I worked there, they always fed me, and paid me for the hour I ate. Helma was a strange name for me. I knew Selma, Wilma, Vilma and when Mr. Baer said his wife’s name I didn’t know how to translate it. The job lasted off and on for two winters and I loved the Baers so much, when I left, I asked for a copy of the catalogue. Mr. Herbert Baer was so tickled he began squeaking and asking me again and again if I really did want one. I don’t know why he was so surprised, I had drawn one machine part and wanted to have the reproduction. It was my first reproduction.
When I was in Germany I never met nor saw any Germans that looked or acted like Mr. Herbert Baer or Aunt Esther and Uncle Al. I saw legs like Helma’s and Aunt Esther’s on many German girls, although I never thought it in any way attractive. I did like seeing them, however. There were some mole-like men in Germany, but none so mole-like as Mr. Herbert Baer, the kindest most lovable and ugliest man I ever met. I wonder if German people grow lumps and strange growths when they live in America, then the second generation starts developing harelip, albino, twins and insanity.
Selma wanted me to stay in Vincennes the autumn after I had got out of the Army because she was pregnant with her third child. I could have stayed until she had her third girl Jean, but the New York City Ballet Company was in Chicago and Maria Tallchief was dancing the Black Swan pas de deux on Sunday. I left for Chicago on Saturday, went to the Sunday matinee and evening performances.
It is summer in Manhattan at last. I’ve taken all the plastic off my windows and they are open all the time. Mary Alice O’Neal can go and come as she pleases. She goes downstairs by the fire escape, and Jean Rigg’s cat Dietrich spits and attacks with such violence that Lee had to put a screen in front of her fire escape door. Mary Alice goes over and visits David and Deborah Lee when she gets by Dietrich. In the summer I sleep nude and one day, very early in the morning, there was a terrible pounding at my door. I grabbed a quilt and ran to the door to get it open before it was ripped off. The door fell off its hinges once. I just nailed the hinges back on with the largest nails I could find. The wood is so rotten at the door jamb that wood screws would never hold. On the way to the door I realized that if I had the quilt over my shoulders, I would not be covered, the quilt is not big enough to make a Grecian drape, so by the time I got to the door I had decided to put it in front of me and hold it with my left hand in the back. I can't imagine what I looked like when I opened the door, but there stood three huge men who were obviously garbage collectors. One held a postcard and I could see it was from Aunt Renie. One asked if I were George Deem. I was so busy thinking what I was going to do about these three loud men who did not seem to be in any good humor. Once in a while I get telephone calls from truck drivers whom I've known from the farm. Aunt Renie doesn't give my address to just anyone, but Jim Wintereed telephoned once because he looked my name up in the phone book. I'm the only Deem in Manhattan. I did not recognize any of these men as any familiar truck driver no matter how remote and unexpected they were. Finally I answered a thin yes and all three began talking very loudly about how I had been throwing garbarge in garbage cans that were not mine. One said the city had been looking for me for two years and at last they found my postcard with my name and address and now what was I to say. All my dealings with unreasonable army drunks or angry types filed through my mind but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally I said something about their not knowing I was looking for them to register with them and get a decent way of having my garbage taken care of. I've never seen such relief come over faces so quickly. They were very willing to take my garbage for three dollars per month and all began laughing and found it such a relief to know who this garbage criminal was. I paid them the first three dollars and they were very happy and all left. They've never come back for their payments and this was at least two months ago. I never have trouble with people like this, nor with drunks or bums. For some reason any bum will hit me up. I must look like an easy touch. I never give anybody any money and no one gives me any money. It’s like hitchhiking. I would never pick up a hitchhiker, but that doesn’t mean someone should not pick me up when I am hitchhiking. Bill Updike was visiting me and we walked to the west end of Fulton Street and I bought some tomatoes. There is a lovely fruit and vegetable stand there that is open twenty-four hours. A bum came up to us while we were coming back and he asked me for some change. Bill Updike quickly said we had spent all our money on tomatoes. The bum said oh and left right away and since then I’ve always told bums that I’ve spent all my money on tomatoes. They all understand this very well and leave me without question.
I got over feeling sorry for bums in Chicago. When I was walking at night and would see a drunk lying along the street, I always stopped and woke him up to tell him to go home or to a flop house and I would give him some money and feel very cleansed. One time I did this and the drunk got up briskly, brushed himself off and asked me where I was going to take him. I explained I wasn’t planning to take him anywhere, I just wanted to help him. He asked me if he could go home with me so I could take care of him until he died. I thought he was joking, but he was serious and repeated that if I wanted to help him I should take complete care of him in my house. I tried to explain again, but the bum told me I should mind my own business, not worry about bums and drunks, they want to be this way or they wouldn’t be around to find. He said it took him a long time to get this far and wants his life to be this way, unless I was willing to take complete care of him, if not, “mind your own business!” Bums are not very interesting anymore.
In Chicago, when I went back to school after my Army term, Dick Lee and I rented a furnished apartment on Dearborn Street, on the corner of Chestnut and Dearborn. It was a huge brownstone. Our quarters had a huge room, a bath and kitchen. Another room was there, furnished with a big double bed, but the door was closed and we were told not to go into it. Once I found a big pan in the unrented room and used it to boil water for spaghetti, but when I got back from school the next day, the pan had been returned to its original place. When I paid rent that Saturday, Mrs. Runte, the landlady, smiled and reminded me not to use the unrented room.
Dick Lee was a dress design major at the Art Institute. He and I met the first year. Now I was out of the Army, I was two years behind the class I had started with. When I looked around my new situation I saw that the students in my class were very young. I had started my first year there in Chicago two years after High School, even then I was two years older than my class and now I was four years older. The first thing a student said to me was, “Are you a veteran?”
School was a delight. I drew and painted all that year. No one worried about my using color or not and by Christmas I was offered a scholarship. With that, with my G.I. Bill and working for Mr. Baer, I made it very easily.
In the apartment things got more and more complicated. McKay arrived to be my roommate and go to Business College. He did, and with him around I suddenly realized how very different my school life was from the Army. Dick Lee could not understand McKay, who was from Varnville, South Carolina, but had he been from Ponca City, Oklahoma, like Dick Lee, neither of them could understand one another. It just did not work. The only delight was being able to rent the unrented room, and Mrs. Runte was very pleased.
How could I introduce my art school friends to my Army friends? I tried, but it just did not work. I saw McKay’s southern eyes turn into slits when I introduced fellow art students, and the fellow art students curled up their lip ever so slightly at the sight of McKay. Richard Smith was visiting a lot too. He was from Chicago. He was one of my roommates in the Army, the one with false teeth, both sets. Frank Donahue came in from South Carolina too. He was McKay’s friend from college there. I was in the middle of Army friends and art student friends. One night there was a knock at the door. Not at the house door, but at the apartment door. It was a soft knock. I woke up and listened, for a while I thought it was for the front apartment, but there it was again, very soft, hardly audible. Then I heard, “It’s OK, it’s Helen.” I hadn’t met my bum yet, so got up and peeked out the door into the hallway and there stood a thin urchin of a woman about thirty years old, and what a story she had. Her husband worked nights and slept all day, when he did come home. She was lonely and when she hears us laughing and having such a nice time, she just wants to visit and see what it’s like being in such a happy apartment. She didn’t mean anything, but could she come down and visit us once in a while and enjoy being in a happy apartment. “But, Helen, it is three o’clock in the morning and although we have such a happy apartment, we do all work during the day.” I gave her some magazines and pushed her out and went back to bed. From then on, each time we left the apartment in the early evening to go to a movie or the local bar, we looked up the staircase and there sat Helen. She didn’t talk to any of us after that, but always sat at the top of the stairs listening to our laughing voices in our happy apartment.
One of my art student friends was Joe Bush. He visited me at the apartment often, but chose the times when both McKay and Dick Lee were away working their part time night jobs. Joe brought me a copy of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" and “Come, Ye Sons of Art,” a recording with music written by Henry Purcell. He said all art students should know this recording, but the book is something I think you would enjoy. Joe was a veteran too. I never got to understand him very well he dressed like he had just flown in from an art school in Paris. He painted nouveau figures in orange black and green, which was the arty fad at school during that time. Some terms he wouldn’t be there and some terms he world. I don’t think he ever finished and always looked at me with big wise eyes which said, “Go on farm boy.” Josef Bush is now writing plays here in Manhattan. I met him on the subway once and he told me he built a boat, a sail boat, and it was in his apartment and he didn’t know how he was going to get it out when summer came.
It was interesting enough juggling Army buddies with art students. When summer came I got a job as a soda jerk at Walgreens. I couldn’t go home and pick watermelons anymore. There was nothing at home that added to my being an art student nor a veteran. I enjoyed working at Walgreens. I worked from five in the afternoon until midnight. I had always wondered what it was like behind those counters and found out: it’s the view of seeing all those people walking and sitting on the other side. I got so good that a big representative came to the drugstore and offered me a considerable raise, plus a store in which to manage a counter on my own. In ten years I would get a pin that had a “W” on it.
I met Virginia Atkins at the drugstore. I waited on her, saw she was a student too, and when she had finished eating, I charged her for a glass of milk. She became a regular customer and one night after work I went to her apartment. It was very near the drugstore and was in a different section of the Near North Side. It was on Superior, East of Michigan and the whole world seemed to be much fresher there. I guess it’s because it’s so close to the lake.
The visit caused me to move. I didn’t move in with Virginia, but upstairs from her in a one room, furnished, with a shared bathroom upstairs, but I did pee in the little hand sink that was in my room, once or twice.
McKay, Richard Smith, and Frank Donahue moved farther north to Belmont and Dick Lee just disappeared.
That year on Dearborn taught me my Chicago. When I lived on Blackstone Avenue at Fred Rogers' house I was in Aunt Renie’s Chicago. I got to know all about Rush Street, Division Street, all the haunts of the young student making his way in his own arrangement. Now that I think about it, there were no schools around that area, but there were many students.
Once when we were living there at Dearborn, McKay received a package from his dear friend, Ruth, in Varnville, South Carolina. The package contained a black dress and a pair of very high-heeled black pumps. McKay did not find the dress very interesting, but wore the pumps all the time when he was in the apartment. Dick Lee didn’t notice it for a week or so and was very upset one day when he saw McKay in his levis and black pumps.
Frank Donohue was eating meals with us, but sleeping in a room upstairs. I visited him there once or twice and found out why Helen was in such trouble. Our apartment was on the first floor. The entrance hall and stairway were decent enough, but upstairs the place turned into a flophouse. There were torn plastic curtains at the window, they were maroon. Frank’s room was a dive. It had a bed and a white shag rug that had been burned, a chest that had been painted public green enamel like the walls. There was a chair too, and more plastic curtains. Frank wanted to sing, but could not carry a tune. He was tall and thin and shook when he laughed and made no sound. We got along well enough, but never needed one another. He worked at Delta Airlines and dated a French-Canadian girl named Rosemary whom we called Oh La La. He found another apartment soon but was always visiting and eating at our place. He paid his way, and with four of us paying we had an abundance of food.
I think Frank got Rosemary pregnant and soon there was no more Oh La La, instead, a new girl started coming with Frank. She worked at Delta too and her name was Nancy Barnes. She had a very gorgeous nose that moved slightly when she talked. I liked Nancy Barnes from the beginning. McKay was so intrigued with her, that by the end of her first visit, he had tried on all her clothes.
Ethel Preston, my French teacher, visited me at school, then came by the apartment. McKay was still in Varnville, South Carolina. Miss Preston introduced her friend Dorothy Mendelsohn who, with Ethel Preston, took piano lessons from Wanda Landowska once a year in Lakeville, Connecticut. Joe Bush came by to meet Miss Preston and we went to the south side, to a theater there and saw Nichols and May do a take-off on “The Christmas Carol." After we got back to the apartment Ethel had me dance for her. I did something to the Bach French Suites, then she told me she had taught Leopold and Loeb French, when she was teaching at the University of Chicago, she said she was always tracking down French books about the perfect crime for those boys. I asked her why she went to Vincennes and she said she knew it had to be French there, and it was. She also knew she could get an easy teaching job at the University there, so she could retire.
Dad visited me there at Dearborn. We had a lovely time. Dick Lee was, as usual, humorless and Dad didn’t care for him. I took him to Aunt Hootie’s once for Thanksgiving and they certainly loved one another. He ate three pieces of Aunt Hootie’s pumpkin pie. Dad was so fond of McKay, and the three of us had a wonderful time, mostly walking around and acting silly. Dad understood all of McKay’s humor and subtle ways. McKay hid his pumps all while Dad was there, but insisted on calling Dad Mamie, but Dad didn’t seem to notice.
Buck visited and for some reason got locked out of the front door. He didn’t know how to ring the doorbell so just stood there until I went out and found him. Buck is interested in collecting antiques and naturally I took him along Clark Street to see some shops.There was one charming shop that we decided to venture into. The bell on the door tinkled as we opened it and a charming old lady asked if she could be of help. Buck did his strange bow from the waist and told her with an over-polite formality that he was just looking. The lady replied, “Just looking, huh, just looking! All you goddamned people are just looking. Ain’t there no son of a bitch to buy any of these antiques? You’re the twelfth bastard what’s been in today and all of youse are just looking. Well, get out!” Buck turned white, I laughed, we left and Buck has never visited me anywhere since that incident.
Marty Levy came to our apartment many times. He and McKay had met in a bar and when Marty met me he giggled. Much later he told me I was a strange boy whom he would see walking down Michigan Avenue each morning past a coffee shop, where he was having coffee. I had a slight bend in my back and wore a hooded tan loden coat with the hood up and had my hands up the sleeves of my coat. He knew I was an art student but never thought he would meet me, specially since I was such a character. He was studying interior design in Chicago, he had gone to Chicago from Detroit but didn’t know Sheldon Dorf. Since that meeting he and I have been such good friends. In Chicago we became very close. I painted my first portrait of Marty Levy and when my apartment was robbed on Superior, he got me a new radio because he had friends who stole. During my most trying days of being an artist here in my loft, Marty brought designers to see my work and they always bought something. Marty Levy will always be around because he has a way of telling me what I am doing.
I met Jim Falconer, who was a friend of Dick Lee’s. Jims, as I said, are very strange people. Jim Falconer should be famous for something, but he is always too busy to be famous. Famous people have times when they don’t do anything at all, because that is what famous is about. Jim Falconer will always be doing something. I like Jim Falconer and gave him one of my best paintings from my school days.
If meeting a Jim is strange to me, I wonder what I looked like when Jim Falconer came to the apartment with Jim Zver. I don’t think a Jim can abide another Jim, but that's how I met Jim Zver. He was a student at the Art Institute whom I had seen but never had met. Jim Zver always dressed as though his mother bought the clothes. We got to be very close friends. Now Jim is here in Manhattan in a loft, painting, but still dresses like his mother bought his clothes. He does carry on a great deal about how his mother is his life’s major torment. She lives in Chicago, they seldom see one another and I can’t figure out how she buys his clothes.
All these memories came to me after I had moved to my own one-room apartment. It was so nice to be alone. It was even nice to think about the times I wasn’t alone. I was so proud of my apartment. I painted it all white, but rubbed the carvings on the door jamb with raw umber to bring out the forms. The floor was linoleum which I painted brick red and bought a brown shag rug from the dime store. It is still a good idea having a red floor with a brown rug. Life was easier and I began to paint in my apartment. I worked on a series of paintings called fugue. These I never showed to teachers at school, because these were paintings I thought would be my reason for becoming famous. I didn’t know then that famous had nothing to do with anything.
At the Dearborn Street apartment, McKay did all the cooking, where everything was with rice and tasted like grits. He made cornbread once a week, to every guest’s surprise, but McKay had no idea how to do it any other way. My first meal was an attempt at spaghetti where I opened a can of tomato paste, heated it and poured it over my spaghetti. It was terrible because I didn't know tomato paste was so dangerous. I ate it anyway because I concluded that discomfort had greatly to do with association with people. No one could know how dreadful my spaghetti was, so how could it be so terrible. Even though I ate it and continued thinking that living alone could not have anything to do with discomfort, I never made spaghetti alone again.
I had not stopped seeing McKay, Richard Smith and Frank Donahue. Frank was from Florence, South Carolina. Richard was from Chicago, and I was adopted by Marge Smith who no longer lived with her husband. While we were in the Army together, Bill Moss, our Negro platoon leader, dubbed Richard Smith “Purgatory” because of all the suffering Richard was going through. He was obviously Italian and was at the age when just everything was a crisis. McKay loved nicknames and shortened Purgatory to Perg, and from then on Richard Smith was Perg. Somehow Frank Donahue and McKay had a discussion on some quotation in the Bible. All southern people know the Bible in such a literary way. It must be like a calendar or an almanac to them. They quote it correctly and know all the references but never seem to use it according to the example it's giving. Somehow Frank was insisting a certain quotation was from a book of the Bible and McKay just knew it was from Ecclesiastes. McKay, of course, had his Bible and looked it up and of course was correct , so that began a nickname for Frank: "Ecclesiastes," which became shortened to Eclie. So, now there was Perg, Eclie, and McKay being visited by the Cow. The parties that began at their apartment were wonderful but very strange. Nancy Barnes became friendly with girls from Goodman Theater School, a drama school which joined the Art Institute, but I never had much to do with it. Sheila and Monica were the usual guests. Sheila had white eyelashes but was very pretty. Monica was a bleached Negress whom I found very special. Tracy Lyons was introduced to the circle, but she wasn’t a regular. Tracy never was one to be regular. For entertainment, Eclie would sing, a bit, McKay would borrow someone’s dress and dance, Perg would take his teeth out and do a plea for “Save the Children” and I would mock Sarah Vaughan, if they would turn the lights out. I could sing in the dark like Erma Mae could play the piano better in the dark. After a while Nancy Barnes became a close friend of Virginia McManus and they rented a very special and beautiful apartment on Chestnut Street between State and Dearborn, very close to where we had all lived. The parties alternated between Belmont and Chestnut. I visited Virginia McManus and Nancy Barnes frequently and grew to know them well. Nancy had begun night courses at the downtown branch of the University of Chicago, I was taking a required course there too, so we met once a week at the least. Virginia was teaching at a private High School called the Bateman School and from what she reported it was very rough going. It was a special school for wealthy students who had been thrown out of all the good private schools and Virginia was teaching a collection of wealthy rejects.
At this time Tommy Johnson came in. He was a friend of McKay and Eclie, from Columbia, South Carolina and looked like Jonathan Watts of the New York City Ballet Company. I first met him when I lived on Dearborn, when he visited there. The first thing he said to me was, “Who owns that Landowska album?” I told him it was mine and he said anyone who has such recordings is bound to be my lifelong friend, and he was correct. Tommy has been my closest friend from that time on. We spent most of our weekends together while I was living on Superior. Either I would visit him on the South Side, where he was living and working at a hotel, or he would visit me at Superior Street, and together we often visited McKay, Perg and Eclie. McKay insisted on calling Tommy T. Eller of the Limberlost, but it was shortened to T. Eller.
McKay was the most unpredictable person I’ve ever known. Not only was he clever and delightful to be with, but also had a very fast and sharp mind. He began his Business College one year, and taught at the same college the following.. He taught typing and shorthand while studying the stenotype machine, which he mastered with such skill, the stenotype machine company planned a tour for him. He was interested and traveled around Chicago demonstrating the technique. When the company introduced his going on a national tour McKay was no longer interested and got a job with a very high salary at the Schenley Whiskey Company. His mother didn’t quite approve of that, but she was in Varnville, South Carolina. Her name is Lilly Rose. I’ve always collected my friends’ mothers’ names. Perg’s mother was named Marge. Perg insisted on how much he loved her while we were in the Army. She sounded like an Aunt Renie. I knew she had gray hair a trim shape and a deep voice. From her letters in the Army she wrote and sounded like I would like to meet her. Perg had McKay and me to his mother’s house one Sunday evening for dinner. It was a terrible trip by elevated and bus and we got there at least a half hour after we were expected. I rang the doorbell and the door was pulled open violently and there stood a short skinny gray-haired woman with a suntan and a cigarette dangling from her mouth who said, “You sons-a-bitches is late!” It was Marge. She worked in a factory.
Tommy Johnson’s mother is named Janette.
Dick Lee’s mother is named Marion.
Bruce Mailman’s mother is named Ruth.
Bill Updike’s mother is named Fleeta.
Ronald Vance’s mother is named Madlyn.
Jim Zver’s mother is named Grace.
As time went on my apartment on Superior Street became known and friends no longer associated me with Dearborn Street but with my own address. It was my first address.
Virginia Atkins and I remained being friends. She was studying piano and her close friend Carl Kaufman was studying ballet, but he was very uninteresting. They were both from Butler University in Indianapolis. She often spoke of Joe Bush, my friend who introduced me to the writings of Gertrude Stein. I must have been living on Superior for two months, and then found Joe Bush was living on the top floor of the same building. That was a delight, but he had a roommate whom I did not know very well, and didn’t really care for because he was so young, and this summer Joe had given him a permanent. Now he had blond curly hair and looked like he was ready for some school play in some basement. When school began again, I quit Walgreens and did a bit of work for Mr. Baer. On the first day of school, Joe Bush’s roommate knocked at my door and asked me if he could walk to school with me. I was in the third year and Paul Berne was in his second. We began walking to school each day together and became very close friends, better friends than Joe Bush and I had ever been. Joe Bush was still capturing, however. His apartment was all white, large and airy with transparent colored papers pasted on the windows. He had a very good hi-fi system and access to a rooftop from one of his colorful windows. Once when I was walking home though the alley he spotted me and put on the recording of “Come Ye Sons of Art” at top blast. It blared throughout Chicago and I knew it was all being played for me from up on the fifth floor roof. It was the most dazzling experience and my first feeling of anyone really knowing I was living in Chicago.
Virginia Atkins got angry at the landlady and moved out. She didn’t tell her about it for a week, then wrote her a note. She also unplugged the refrigerator and left a pound of hamburger to rot, so she would really get to the landlady. She certainly did get to the landlady. I met Virginia on the street soon after and she told me she was preparing to perform Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto. She invited me to go to her apartment and she would play it for me. I was very impressed. We got to her apartment, there was the piano waiting and I sat down. She went to the record player and put on a record and said, “Now listen to how great this concerto is.” That was the last time I ever saw Virginia Atkins.
I had one friend whom nobody knew but me. His name was John Day. I met him at a party on Belmont, but when I asked Perg about John Day he and his roommates did not remember him. John Day was extremely well tailored, always had a fresh short and brushed haircut. He had black hair and blue eyes. He would visit me each Friday at around six o’clock. He only would come to tell me of the new chapter in his book “Forsaking All Others,” which was the autobiography of Bette Davis. John Day would come in as Bette Davis, quote the chapter and never get out of his Bette Davis character. It was wonderful entertainment. One day I met him on the street and greeted him but he whispered to me that I must not talk to him. He was all dressed in black and told me that everybody that day was talking about the handsome and mysterious stranger in black. He had started the afternoon dressed this way and had already shocked the neighborhood. If I should see him in a bar that I should not speak because his plan was going so well. John lived in the Drake Hotel, but sold papers in the lower lobby of the Sheridan on weekends. I don’t know what his weekday job was.
At school, both Dick Lee and Jim Zver were graduating and leaving me there alone. All the painting majors I knew besides Jim Zver were so serious I really had no friends. I just couldn’t be so serious about being a student. I had learned that one just does not paint his masterpiece in school. I also knew I was not painting for others to thrill over. This year I took etching one term and lithography the next. Both are very dull and over-rated processes. I decided to be like Virginia Atkins and one day show a reproduction that was commercially printed, if I were to show anything. I did get to have a painting that hung in the front office, which was a frightened farm boy’s dream that first day we went into that office, me and Aunt Renie. Dad had asked me to take some work in commercial art, so I took one course. I spent one term designing a record cover, a round box decoration and mock-up orange juice ads. It was all very uninspiring, however Mr. Verdren was special. The next term he offered a course in design research, which would still be labeled advertising, for Dad’s record. In this course I found Coptic calligraphy and began using calligraphy in my painting. I don’t really know how good the course was. I only know how much I learned.
I was also studying calligraphy in a course taught by Mr. Cowen. He had palsy and shook just right so that the ink would flow from his pen in such a uniform flow. He told me I could be a calligrapher without having palsy, but I think all great calligraphers must shake.
When I wasn’t etching or doing lithography or advertising I was painting. At last I was in the figure painting class, which was taught by Mr. Wieghardt. I had this class five afternoons a week and Mr. Wieghardt put me in his special small room before the first term was finished. All during the army I dreamed of this very special class. To my eyes some of the most beautiful paintings came out of Paul Wieghardt’s classes. I never expected to be put into his little room, I had another year to go yet. I guess these are the moments when I learned to paint Chicago paintings. Wieghardt had a way of seeing to it we all painted the same result, and he hardly talked. He was a real teacher who got the results which he wanted to get. Jim Zver and I grew closer and closer as the year went on. It was his influence that got me into the Art Students League, the honor society at the Art Institute. I don’t know what it means now, but it surely meant something then. It meant that I could show a painting in a gallery outside the Art Institute, but what I was really interested in was the private painting I was doing alone in my apartment. One was made from seamed canvas glued to some wooden board. It was a cityscape, and the seams were filled with orange paint, to show the steel beams of construction. I sent in my entry blank as was instructed, but it got lost in the mail and I was not available to have my cityscape in the big Chicago show, if it would have been accepted by the jury.
Jim Zver painted in a strange crude way, using all types of textures and weird color combinations. I couldn’t understand what he was doing. It was not my way at all, but ever so slowly I began to find it very inventive and it was looking very Chicago. To look Chicago was the broadest and most precise gesture I could see. Jim was born and raised in Chicago and he had this come to him naturally. I often thought that it would have been ideal if I had grown up in Chicago. I could go home each night and not worry so much about clothes and where to launder them. I would never need to worry about food and Aunt Renie and Dad would always have been there, so there would be no farm worry. I went home with Jim for supper one evening and met his parents and saw his room and never worried about these things again. It was much more difficult for Jim to become an artist in Chicago than it was for me. I could live it all the time. I painted in my private one-room apartment and never worried about even putting it away. Jim had a basement, but he also had an organized home all controlled by his parents. I could be crazy and all alone all I wanted and Jim Zver could never be crazy and alone in his own apartment.
There was a fellowship grant given to three or four or five of the best selected painters at the Art Institute each year. I thought Jim Zver would certainly get one. Naturally, one doesn’t really know unless they go through the hope and trial like I did the following year. Now I know why Jim didn’t win a fellowship, but then I could not know. Jim is not a winner and that is why we were such close friends, neither of us are winners. We don’t even know how to stand or walk like winners. I should have known it all the day I was in the graduation ceremonies at High School. Selma was mentioned during her graduation program, Bill Updike was mentioned, I sat there hoping some surprise mention was coming my way, but naturally I was not mentioned. The people I know who are winners know they are winners. They live their lives being winners. One can see even the most timid player of Bingo win, somehow they are able to tell everyone “Bingo!” and collect. I’ve never won at Bingo, let alone winning at something not serious. No matter who it is that gets Miss America, when the television camera does a close-up, you can see they are merely winners. I took a course in genetics at the University of Chicago and this course covered all kinds of categories of types of human beings, but no study has been made of winners. They are not very interesting and it looks as though there would be a lengthy study of winning. Winners just are. They don’t do it, they are it. I know few winners, naturally, because I’m not a winner. One who is not a winner is not a loser, they are merely not winners. Losers are just like winners, however, in that they can’t do anything about it just like winners can't. McKay is a winner, so is Bill Updike, but neither Jim Zver nor I are winners. He who pushes hard to be a winner is only a loser, they are that close to one another. Perhaps they are the same because I don’t know what it’s like being either, but do know that I’m not one to ever know.
Jim Zver graduated and found a job at an advertising agency. This allowed him to find his own apartment. After a trial or two, he found a very charming coach house behind a more formal house, the only disadvantage was that he had to go through the formal house in order to get to his private apartment.
At an art school there are a great number of strange students. Some are strange on purpose, others are strange and don’t know it, like Marty Levy said of me when he saw me walking to school all hunched up in my loden coat. The ones who are strange on purpose are really strange, that’s what is interesting about eccentrics. At the Chicago Art Institute there was a category of girls that were strange. They were mostly involved with craft, such as ceramics or silk-screen, some were painting majors. These girls had no style. They wore no make-up, chopped their hair off, concentrated on their work to such an extreme that the work suffered because it was over-kneaded. They were dull, homely, and generally personality-less, and were not even lesbians. Rosemary Fudhala was one of these. She painted badly and would not let herself breathe. She and I became friendly because it seemed she was the only reasonable student I could associate with and continue working from my insides. Now I see that I must have been very similar to Rosemary Fudhala. Through Rosemary I found this category and began seeing more of these type girls. Lee Guilliatt was one.
There are boys who are like this but they don’t bother the world so much because a boy has a way of carrying his house on his back and doesn’t suffer like a girl. The only boy I remember who was like that at school was Richard Estes.
Lee Guilliatt lived at some girls' club and was a wild and frantic painter from Nebraska. She had some interest in being a winner, but, as I say, a real winner doesn’t even know about it. Lee was plain, always dressed in Pendleton plaid and very self-conscious, too serious, and over-stated. I met her and talked with her a few times, but feared her more than enjoyed her because her gusto was so much more forced than mine. No sooner had I met her than she flew off to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the University was performing the musical play she had written.
All this was going on at the end of my third year. I had applied for a scholarship to the Ox-Bow School of Painting in Saugatuck, Michigan and got it. It was a work scholarship. There are four colors. They are yellow red blue and green, but not in that order. They are not in order because there is no order for color. I can understand word association and form association but there is no understanding in color association.
I cannot understand yellow being cowardly and that idea is probably finished anyway. Yellow is used often as light, but yellow is not light. It is dangerous to use as light because it can reverse its promise. Rembrandt is yellow. White with yellow at its side makes me sick when it's used in design. Aunt Renie’s yellow curtains were certainly lovely and yellow is good to eat. Lemon yellow is used to paint lemons and primrose yellow is used to paint primroses. There is no other use for these colors.
Red is always coming and going. Guardi and Canaletto alike painted their involved cityscapes in order to put tones of red on their walking people to make them come and go. Oxide red is as interesting as cadmium. I always thought cadmium red was much more ritzy than oxide red, but both are ritzy for me now. Red is so exciting that paint manufacturers have named reds that sound like fiction. There is rose madder, geranium lake, scarlet lake, alizarin crimson, names like that. Though these colors are seldom used, there they are. Redheads explain red. Red is that careful and it always comes and goes.
Blue is there, it is always there. Even blue-haired ladies are there. Being blue is being there. Blue is like salt, just a little in most anything makes it better. There are serious blue names: cobalt blue, thalo blue, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, Prussian blue. Blue can even recede when it is told to. It is very friendly and cooperative.
Green is the most frightening and most unnatural color. Green grass and green trees and landscapes have nothing to do with green, they are something other than green. Paint a landscape and just see how little green you use. Landscapes are blue and yellow naturally. Green is for scary faces in the window and hospital rooms and public toilets. In Christian symbolism green means hope. Green means hope all the time. Green is supposed to be made of yellow and blue but it isn’t, it’s made from green, and that’s certainly hope. Green is good to eat, but not so delicious as necessary.
Colors are colors and have no association. It is difficult not to associate them, but when you do, you see colors and cannot understand how they were associated. Hospital rooms painted light green do not help the patient mentally, it’s just sensible to paint the public light green, it’s all light green anyway. You can’t use blue because blue is too certain.
While I was at the Art Institute of Chicago I was very interested in inventing a new color. Surely there is another color that hasn’t been isolated yet. When all the new chemical colors came to be popular I thought one would be found but they all end up being merely a higher frequency of the same colors. What color is merthiolate? The whole sense of color has little to do with its material. It’s almost impossible to remember color’s variation, it must be recorded as it’s done, it can’t be carried to another source like fire because it involves itself with itself. Most things have no color but are associated with color until they are known as that color and do become that color just like words become words, but pumpkins are orange. You just have to be where color is.
If you were to wake up one morning and there would be no numbers in the world, and no letters and no words, there would be no color either. Color has been invented just like music and numbers and alphabets and words, although that particular morning there still would be sound. Now hearing is hearing sound. Seeing is seeing value. Music came to be when tone was organized. Color came to be when value was organized. This was naturally followed by alphabets and words, or is it words and alphabets. So that until these things are completely reorganized everyone will be involved with this organization and I shall not invent a new color, but new colors will come. New organizations of sound are already here.
Dreams are black and white unless they are dreams about this organization of color. Dogs and cats see black and white because they cannot read nor write nor hum a tune.
So now it is necessary for me to use color all the time. Mathematicians don’t think in numbers when they become real mathematicians, musicians don’t think in musical notes when they become composers just like readers don’t think in words when they read and seers don’t think in color when they see. They become all solid blocks of already known information and the excitement of any artist is to break down all these solid blocks and reorganize them carefully and come up with a new variation.
In Manhattan at my age everyone is always ready to move from one place to another. Pat Smith moved three times in three months. I lost him because he moved. I’ve only lived in three places in the six years I’ve been here, but I know one day I will move from my loft and I dread even thinking about it. It will change everything I know. Mary Alice O’Neal said she would die if she had to move to an apartment and I believe her. When I do move, I will move to an apartment because lofts are all over. A man from city housing came here recently and told me in October I would be instructed to pay my rent to the City. I asked him about Mrs. Berman my landlady and he said that this building has been bought from Mrs. Berman. That means my loft days are already changing. I can’t imagine how long the City will allow me to continue living here.
Jenny Lou. Jenny Lou Park was the first girl I met when I got to my work scholarship at Saugatuck, Michigan. Saugatuck means sound in the sand in the Michigan Indian language and if you walk on the beach of Lake Michigan your feet slip in the sand and it squeaks although it doesn’t make a sound like Saugatuck. I got to Saugatuck in the night. I had dug Dick Lee out of some apartment that he was uncomfortable in and he was happy to take over my apartment on Superior Street. Dick Lee has always been the most reliable friend I’ve ever had. I don’t know where he was nor how he was able to move, but he was and he took the burden of having an apartment to worry about off my mind.
A big framed lady with gray hair and well-braced breasts met me at a large rambling house with a huge veranda all around it and this was in some enormous woods quite far from the bus station. I took a cab. This woman told me to say hello to Elsa. Elsa had broken her leg. Elsa was the Director of the Ox-Bow Summer School of Art and looked scalded with a ribbon in her hair. She was old and had rouge scars on her face and was very lovely right away. Jenny Lou kept carrying things like blankets and pitchers of water. I had seen her walking through one of the verandas when the cab drove up and she was leaving Elsa’s room when I walked in but no one introduced me to her.
This was in June and Chicago had got hot. Here at Saugatuck it was damp and cold. I was shown to a room right down the hall from Elsa who told me I would move into the White House the next day. There was no electricity in the cabins, so I would be better off staying here in the inn. I heard Jenny Lou saying good-night to Gussie and a screen door clap and got ready to go to bed. After I turned my light off I could not believe the darkness and the silence. After a time I could see a bit of light in the sky, and began hearing some voices. They were young voices giggling and running with flash lights through some limited territory I could not imagine a description for.
This inn smelled and felt like an old abandoned farmhouse in which no matter what you do to it, it continues to have a rotten foundation or some wall is still moldy even though it has been freshly whitewashed. The draperies in my room were moss green with a white silkscreen pattern over the green. Silk-screened fabric always looks like the cheap fabric that the dime store uses for Halloween costumes. On this fabric the white was a solid and looked as though it was merely glue that had dried in these given shapes. The rug was hand woven and was on this floor because it had been ruined with water, probably rain. Before I got up, I knew I was in a house piled up with crafts. Somehow craft making people never use their first-rate craft results to live with, instead they use their trial pieces or the pieces that students did that didn’t quite come off. The few completed objects which they decide are first-rate are always put away in case they are art.
Part of the veranda was a dining room and Jenny Lou served me breakfast from a big opening in the wall that had the kitchen behind. It was cafeteria style. Each time I saw Jenny Lou I thought she belonged to one of the old ladies that haunted the inn, but she was a scholarship student like me, but from the University of Iowa.
Martha Edwards and Bill Hopper were from the John Herron Art School in Indianapolis. Martha was very pretty, a real blonde with blue eyes and a complexion that was so delicate it turned red as though it suddenly chapped at a moment's notice and took a few days to turn its normal hue. She painted loosely, using lots of color and seemed to thrill when drips of thin color ran down her canvas. Bill Hopper was a thin nervous, bright-eyed boy who had a painting on a board that was framed. At the end of my stay at Saugatuck he gave me the painting. It was a still life and all it had in it was seeds, dark seeds on a darker ground. He told me that the John Herron Art School gave a class in framing, and all the students made frames for their paintings.
Ed Barquist and Jenny Lou Park were both from the University of Iowa and neither knew how to paint, and couldn’t paint anyway, but they were both so beautiful and very college. Jenny Lou’s hair was cut off as though someone had grabbed her with a scissors and just cut, like cutting down a bush and that’s what happened. Ed Barquist had chased her with a scissors, caught her and cut her hair off before I had got there. Ed wore torn-off white levis, white sneakers without socks and his legs were brown and thin. He had blond straight hair and blue-green frightened eyes and an understanding of things that was limited only to university courses. Each evening there was some type of party, or collection of young students and Ed never had anything to add in conversation that was what we hadn’t known when we left home. I spent as much time as I could with Ed Barquist because I was interested in seeing what I looked like in the presence of college students.
Jenny Lou was the winner of the summer, however. She was very comforting to look at even though she had thick butterfly glasses and a pock-marked complexion, after a while it was reasonable to see why she was the center of summer because of these marks, they would not allow her to be any other way than her way everyday. Her voice matched her glasses and rough complexion, it squeaked and came out in volume at one time and no sound at all at another time. Her wit and sharp abilities to improvise very quickly, doing mime on any subject was the most refreshing talent I had ever seen, and her body was perfect. A little sway in her back made her butt firm and well sculpted. She had lovely legs and a vigorous carriage. To me everything delightful was focused around Jenny Lou.
Wally Ugorski was from the Art Institute of Chicago and I had seen him there, but never thought I would know him and appreciate him. He was very Chicago, tall dark and very thin. He never went swimming and never took his clothes off. He was being an expressionist and was very devoted to the German Expressionist popularity that was of great fascination around the Art Institute at that time. Ugorski was mean and had great delight in fooling people into thinking he was very serious with his art work, but he wasn’t he was serious with himself getting this effect. He held séances and although everyone knew he was making it up as it went on, they got under his power and believed his magic, which is the whole point of a séance, and they were successful.
There were many other people there but I spent most of my time with these. We painted each day all day. My work was doing dishes after each meal with Wally, Ed Barquist and Bill Hopper. It was usually fun. Half the time we had been drinking mealtimes, so the work went fast and careless while we laughed.
Jim Zver visited for a weekend. I had moved to the White House, but Wally had an unoccupied bed in his cabin, which was upstairs from the lithography studio and it was named the Drake Hotel. The other cabin was called the Palmer House and the girls' residence was the Convent. These cabins sat on the edge of a lagoon and were so old and broken down that they shook whenever anyone walked up the stairs. During rain storms they leaked and there was great fear of them being blown down. They were so wonderful to live in. I never wore shoes and very few clothes and these dwellings went along with the frantic art-student life in the summer. We were even given credit for our classes that was transferred to our winter schoolwork.
In time my painting began being more and more free and some strange expressionism began creeping in on me. Any art student finally gets involved with the qualities of paint and color, so by the time I returned to Chicago, I was painting heavy and garish color with huge vulgar brush strokes and was beginning to have work that looked like Jim Zver and was understanding this Chicago form of painting. I had dreams of painting non-objectively one day like the grown-ups. There were teachers always with us but in such excitement one hardly listened to them. By the time I returned to Mr. Wieghardt’s little room he was appalled at my change. He said very little about it to me and although I remained in his small special room, I felt I had lost ground with him and could see he was not going to back me up for the big prize competition at the end of my last year.
I did not re-establish my apartment on Superior but instead moved to Evanston with a friend who had a lovely coach house behind some fraternity house at Northwestern University Campus. I was very thrilled to be invited to live there and commute on the elevated into Chicago. However Ken and I just did not get along after a while. It was very delightful while it lasted. He taught me to water ski on the river in Aurora, where his hometown was. Before school began we painted interiors of new houses and saved enough money to come to Manhattan for nine days. Of course from Chicago it is called New York. In Indiana they say New York. I visited home between my New York trip and school and had a six-week-old beard. Aunt Renie told me to shave before I went out to see Selma or I would frighten her babies to death. Aunt Renie had no interest in my beard. Dad thought it was funny but didn’t laugh long enough and suddenly I saw it was another phase like bleaching my hair.
In Manhattan we saw twelve plays in nine days. They were “A Visit to a Small Planet,” “My Fair Lady,” ‘West Side Story,” which we saw in Philadelphia, “Most Happy Fella,” “New Girl in Town,” “The Iceman Cometh,” “Carrousel” at the City Centre, “The Three Penny Opera,” “Jamaica,” also in Philadelphia, “A Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “L’il Abner,” “Happy Hunting.” I enjoyed all of them and got none mixed up. I met some male models and talked so seriously about painting that one told me to just paint my ass off, so I saw I would never be a male model. I got an introduction to meet one of the dancers from “Fair Lady” and was allowed backstage and saw Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison who was with Glynnis Johns and I was very excited.
Still I was thinking so much about painting my ass off that I became disenchanted with Ken Cornwall his great interest in seeing theatre and his coach house in Evanston. Ken was so interested in theatre because he was so involved with set design. He didn’t pay attention to the theatre piece, only the set design. He also told me he thought that nuns and priests have secret love affairs and I decided I was in the wrong section of Chicago and moved out of Evanston.
I was better off with my old friends McKay, Perg, Eclie and T. Eller of the Limber Lost. T. Eller, or Tommy Johnson, was interested in getting an apartment with me so Virginia McManus moved me one day to the University of Chicago area, not far from Blackstone Avenue and Fred Rogers. It hadn’t dawned on me until now that I spent my last year at the Art Institute in the same area as I spent my first year. The South Side of Chicago is my favorite part of Chicago. It’s Aunt Renie’s too. Once again I could ride the I.C. train. I even took my dry cleaning to Hazel Wald, who had moved away from Fred Rogers and now had her own apartment near there.
By this time Frank Donohue had moved back to South Carolina and on to Atlanta, Georgia, still working for Delta Airlines and no longer Ecclesiastes. Perg was making his own way, working as a secretary and going to Roosevelt University at night because he always dreamed of teaching literature. I finally lost him. McKay was now living alone, working for Schenley, then got a night job working as bartender at a bar called Shore Line 7. His nervous energy was beyond exhaust and when he decided to quit his job, the Syndicate would not allow him to quit, so they gave him a supply of up-pills and he was happy to continue bartending on Saturday and Sunday nights. Tommy Johnson and I often went there and McKay would not charge us for our drinks. It was soothing and comforting to return to my friends again and pass time doing nothing but talking and drinking. It was like Army days.
I needed this comfort because suddenly I was going to graduate from the Art Institute. I knew there was no chance of my winning the competition and of course I didn’t, Wally Ugorski did, and I was soon to be nowhere with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree. I had one more year of G.I. Bill schooling aid, so began thinking of going to New York University. It was a very good year at the Art Institute however. I had my artist friends and my Army friends and knew how to manage them and juggle them just right. Tommy Johnson, a wise bird, knew just what I was doing and accepted both sides of my interests. He enjoyed all my artist friends and of course came to know me through McKay. Naturally he didn’t approve of some of the artist friends who were a bit too dirty or too phony, so when Wally Ugorski came over either Tommy would spend all his time in the bathroom or sit with us in his bathing suit in the midst of winter and talk about swimming.
At school I transferred teachers finally, and signed up for painting class with a New York painter, Boris Margo. It was more interesting in his class, yet more dangerous. I was painting in the apartment too. I had started a portrait of Jim Faulkner and when he didn’t show up for two Saturdays in a row, I cut out the face and sent it to him. Privately I was doing copies of some Ingres women. They were such lovely subjects to copy and do interpretations from. Boris Margo assigned us to do take-offs of famous paintings and I already had three I had done, but I did another and he was quite surprised and pleased.
Lee Guilliatt was more available to me and I began smoking and talking with her, but most of the things I said didn’t make sense, when everything she said seemed so profound. There was a little blond girl whom I kept seeing. She had a round face, her hair was always pulled back and she looked like she had just been slapped; her lower lip was still pouting. Her name was Ann Grosvenor. Sometimes she was called Juanita and I fell in love with her slapped face and pouting lower lip. Ann had hyperextended knees and a lovely small belly that showed beautifully through her low waisted dresses. I painted a very successful portrait of her as a doll. I was painting lots of doll images suddenly. Ann was in my painting class and was a terrible painter. She was really very stupid and I could not understand how I was so attracted to her. I didn’t think to think that she was a real girl doing her real girl things and that I was merely being a boy. Ann had no artistic ideas she was only in school because she had nowhere else to go. Benny Andrews was also in this class, so was Jack Harris, Kerig Pope, and Elliott Lloyd. Benny Andrews had been walking with big steps and thick white tennis shoes around the Art Institute for as long as I had, but I didn’t get to know him until this last year. He was friendly with Ann Grosvenor, whom he always called Juanita, and Lee Guilliatt. He had been in Mr. Wieghardt’s classes but I never watched him much because he never did Wieghardt-type paintings. In Boris Margo’s class he did much better and Margo liked him. I grew to like him because he seemed to be a veteran type who was on his own and in no way influenced by the fad of school like I was. Suddenly Benny Andrews was everywhere I was. We never became buddies, but there he was and there I was at parties, at Juanita’s table during the coffee break or he would join Lee Guilliatt and me at another time. Benny was doing semi-abstract paintings that were heavy and overlapped with different techniques and I didn’t like them, yet they are the only paintings I really remember from school.
Life was a social quilt and Tommy was among all my goings and comings and we were having a delightful world. Dick Lee would visit once in a while, he had graduated and was working at Marshall Field’s. Marty Levy had completed his interior design course and returned to Detroit. Jim Zver and Tommy got on with one another very well, but Jim did not warm up to McKay, nor was McKay interested in Jim Zver. McKay had a new girl, a midget named Hazel who worked the thirty-six game at the Shore Line 7 bar where McKay worked. They became close friends and McKay was always proud to tell Hazel’s story. She talked with such a nasal texture in her voice that all I could understand was her saying, “Hello, honey, now who is going to lift me up on this bar stool?” and McKay would swing around the bar and carry Hazel to her spot, chatting about what seemed to be such important stories. Jim Faulkner was still going to the Art Institute for lunch, and I joined him often. He always appears with his followers and is never alone. One girl that he was often with was very fat. She wore eye makeup that would make the wildest ideas of Vogue reconsider. She wore a very large sweatshirt and tights, and that is all. Her name is Sally Dew and she is wonderful. Any fat person who is not angry fat is wonderful and there are as many who are happy fat as there are those who are angry fat. The shame about fat people are the angry fat ones, but the delight about fat people are the happy fat. Sally Dew had a girl friend named Mary Ellen Smith.
Nancy Barnes and Virginia McManus came to our apartment one evening for a party. McKay was there and a few other people like Perg. During the evening Virginia accused Nancy of poisoning her drink and we all knew Virginia was soon to go her own way and Nancy was going hers and their beautiful apartment on Chestnut was going to be left. McKay didn't have any interesting stories going at this time so he married Nancy. Nancy’s father was chief of police, so McKay quit his employment at the bar, after Nancy's father telephoned the syndicate.
I never had any thoughts about McKay being in any way involved with contemporary. I always was interested in the new, the latest ideas, and knowing about contemporary. I was so interested in seeing Becket’s play "Waiting for Godot,” which in those days was claimed as very contemporary. Jim Zver and I went where it was being done at the University of Chicago at the same time it was baffling Broadway. Jim became very discouraged with me because he said I was liking the play while we were on the way to see it. I was too. I can’t imagine not having liked it, and I still think that was contemporary of me. I’m not so much like that anymore since I’ve caught up with myself. McKay was contemporary enough that back in those days he and Nancy had picked up a couple who lived with them for a month. They were bright young people who were not married but lived together when they did and thought it very exciting staying with another couple. The boy’s name was Jimmy Brown. He was a hustler. The girl’s name was Misty and she was a stripper. They were both very attractive and not more than twenty years old. Jimmy continued his social life while he stayed at McKay’s, but Misty refused to leave and go to her job as a stripper all the while she stayed with McKay and Nancy. She had plucked all her eyebrows out and each time I visited there she was getting ready to go to work and re-designing new eyebrows. Finally either Nancy or McKay got rid of them, but it was fascinating how they got into that apartment and stayed so long. McKay was very interested in up-pills and Jimmy was a good connection for him. McKay continued working for Schenley and wearing tweed suits with gabardine gray overcoats and white silk scarves. He looked like a Southern transplant with no knowledge of what Chicago was all about and yet he was doing these contemporary things that I who was so interested in the contemporary would never have thought of. Nancy had quit her job at Delta and now was working for a doctor who was said to be the most successful abortionist in Chicago.
I wonder what I looked like then. I wonder what I look like. I can’t imagine a space being occupied by me. I’ve tried to think of leaving a place and think of what the place looked like with me in it and then what it looked like with me out of it. I am not so tall, average. I wore big dark-rimmed glasses with huge temples. Now I wear very thin tortoise-shell rimmed glasses. My hair is brown and curly, but I’ve always cut it short, even to the point of nearly shaving it. However I’m the type most people don’t see. I look very much like everybody else. I’ve tried to take that conclusion or leave it but it always ends up that I am not remembered very easily by people in general. I’m certain that both Benny Andrews and Lee Guilliatt got me mixed up with many other boys roaming around the Art Institute. The only unique feature I have is my forehead. It’s like Robert Alda’s, it protrudes right at the eyebrow and makes my somewhat flat profile so much more interesting. My nose is a bit too round and general, except I can flatten it with my fingers. There is very little gristle in it and sometimes I look like I’m a Negro. I don’t think Negroes think this, but people who are not Negro have thought it. I‘ve always had a good time with Negroes and find that when it’s time for a Negro to recede inside himself as Negroes do when they are associating with white people, the Negro waits for a little while longer with me, and that’s as far as I can feel like a Negro.
Graduation was here. I was receiving my Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was all to happen in the Goodman Theater, and Dad was there sitting with Ann Grosvenor. The chorus sang “This was a Real Nice Clambake” after the ceremonies and Ann went home and Dad and I met McKay, went to the local bar, where the students collected and Dad bought drinks for our table. Wally Ugorski was there and two of our nude models with clothes on were there and we all had a delightful time and one of the models kept asking me where I picked up this funny and delightful man. I told her it was my father and she kept saying she was my mother. Everyone finally left except McKay, Dad and me and we got rather drunk.
The next day Tommy Johnson graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts degree. His father was there whom we called Big Tom. I couldn’t understand him when he talked, but we were all there and making a great day of it. The graduation ceremonies were held in the big Gothic chapel on the University of Chicago campus and from high up in the ceiling a wonderful voice sang a familiar Mozart "Alleluia" and it was most impressive.
My school dropped many points after I had seen this ceremony. I also was wondering whether a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree sounded funny compared to a Bachelor of Arts. I liked my dad better than Tommy’s and so did Tommy, but he had a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Chicago. That would thrill anyone in New York but I doubt if New York had ever heard of the School of the Art Institute. I began to wonder where I was and what I was going to do.
Saugatuck had given me another scholarship. I hadn’t even applied but I got a letter asking me if I would consider going again for the summer and I said I would. That would put off my worries until summer was over.
In Chicago there is a South Side Art Fair and an Old Town Art Fair and I exhibited at both and sold a few things and made three hundred dollars. When Aunt Renie sent Fr. Hilary to the seminary she made three hundred dollars on chickens, eggs, selling calves and milk. She never made that much again and always thought that was a miracle. Indeed it was a miracle for her and it was a miracle for me when I made so much money at the Art Fairs. I’ve tried, but I've never made that much money again, not even at the Washington Square Art Fair in New York. I could not think of breaking up my apartment, such thoughts were not possible. It had to be done because school was over, Tommy was going his way and I surely was moving to New York at the end of the summer. I telephoned to Vincennes asking if anyone could pick up my paintings and belongings and take them back to Vincennes where they could be stored in the basement until I had a chance to see what I was doing. For every reason no one was available and from that time on, no one has ever done anything about my problems, and they have been frantic problems. When I fly home from New York no one sees to it that I'm picked up at the airport. I must always find a way of getting to Vincennes by hook or crook. Lately the spell has broken and Selma has done wonderful feats of energy getting me to and from airports. In sheer panic I rented a car, put all my belongings in it, said good-by to Tommy, and drove to Vincennes. Everyone was expecting me really, they were a bit surprised seeing I had rented a car and had all my paintings with me, but they knew I would manage it all somehow. Aunt Renie told me that I must remember that I’m on my own and that I did not live there anymore. They would be glad to take care of my belongings but I would have to see about getting them where I wanted them to be. This was when I began to notice that Aunt Renie said her words differently to me. She, like everyone, has a telephone voice and an everyday voice. Anyone answering the telephone when they are not expecting it to ring will say their greeting with an accent that makes them sound they are prepared for sudden information. The same thing happens when anyone speaks to a stranger, they straighten up and talk the way they imagine is the way they talk when they are serious about being heard or when they are presenting themselves in the fullest way they think they can. Aunt Renie’s way is like Aunt Stell’s: more crisp and bordering on efficiency. Selma and I are similar in our way in that we get more friendly and warm and have a tendency to talk too much and be too enthusiastic. I wish I were more like Aunt Renie, but don’t ever worry about it because I only think such thoughts after I’ve done my telephone voice performance anyway.
Aunt Renie got her telephone voice with Fr. Hilary the day he was ordained. She no longer claimed him, she had given him away to himself, and now it was my turn for the treatment. After all I had finished my school and got my degree and was new to everyone at home. I wonder how new I was, I was the first to have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Johnson Township and naturally everyone gave me their telephone voice.
I wonder how Hollywood got to be in California. Everyone said it was because of the weather, bright atmosphere and sun, yet everyone talks about the foggy and rainy climate there. The lobbying that got Hollywood to California could have chosen Indiana where there is weather, bright atmosphere and sun.
Another aspect of being an adult is being old enough to experience a repetition. If you are not adult, you become adult after repeating an experience. I became an adult when I repeated my return to Saugatuck. I thought it was a mistake until now that I am writing about it. It wasn’t a mistake because it made me begin to level with myself, besides, how can there be mistakes in a life, it’s all part of the life.
Jenny Lou was there again too. Her hair was longer and well cut and she looked like a regular girl with glasses; she was this season. She was involved with a teacher who taught ceramics and I didn't see much of her. Wally Ugorski was there again and we decided without really talking that we were going to be in the position to watch everyone become crazy with the summer and the frantic spirit of the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting. Elsa was not there. The organization had decided she was too old and she moved to a house in Saugatuck proper on Main Street and held little meetings with old patrons of Ox-Bow and complained or laughed at the years that had gone by. Rachel Faucett was staying with Elsa. Rachel was an English teacher in Detroit who drinks martinis, smokes and tells you her name is Faucett with two t's. I am very fond of Rachel. She was the scholarship student's counselor the year before, so naturally all the scholarship students went to see Rachel who would not go near Ox-Bow, and report on how this year was being handled and how the new counselor was a man hired from a counseling office in Grand Rapids. Rachel Faucett and I still correspond. She has short marvelously cropped hair that was designed to be brushed all one way and it just goes around her head like the design of a snail shell.
Edgar Rupprecht's wife and daughter were there, their presence being greatly to do with the new control of Ox-Bow and I liked them both. The mother is named Isobel and the daughter, Betsie. Isobel kept her unmarried name as a teacher and began teaching at the Art Institute after her husband died, it was MacKinnon and she taught space. She could lecture for hours on space, take any reproduction and analyze it for space. I took her for drawing and although it was called Life Drawing, she repeated her space theme. Sometimes when the model was on break she would teach how the chair where the model had sat, was all to do with space. At times the model would sit on the side all during class because Miss MacKinnon was so involved with the chair. At times she would take a drawing of mine and rave about it and show it to the class. Other times, when I really thought I had space really going, she would only pass me up and give no comment. She was a very good teacher, but her husband, Mr. Rupprecht was the greatest.
Art Deam was this year’s Director. He was an old man whom everyone feared, but we got along very well because I was a Deem. He told me I spelled it wrong but I was a Deem and that was fine. Art Deam was the first Deem I ever met outside the Indiana Deems. This year I was the Ox Bow darling. I rang the breakfast bell. I served the dinners behind that big opening in the dining room like Jenny Lou did the year before. I often wondered when I left that damp inn at night, saying good night to Gussie, if there was a timid boy just arriving who was going to sleep in that latecomer's extra room, after meeting Art Deam the Director. Gussie was Augusta Swaywhite an old lady with a crooked leg and a cane who summered at Ox-Bow and did one or two fat watercolors that showed tracks of W.P.A. instruction. She was a bit evil. She knew Miss Preston and obviously disliked her, and was always trying to re-groom Jenny Lou. We got along well.
Getting along well became my problem. Adults do not get along well, they get along. I was losing my skin and had grown into an adult but was still being a nice student. Loretta Grellner was a student from the Art Institute and we became friendly and when she asked me why I was so nice I didn’t know what she meant. I asked her what was so wrong with being nice and she said everything and I didn’t understand her.
There was a timid boy he did arrive late one night and slept in the extra room in the Inn to be moved out to the White House or the Drake or the Palmer House the next day. His name was Jim Shimmerhorn and he made no difference, just like George Deem made no difference the summer before.
Ra Chrapkowski was another student from Chicago and so was Vernon Lobb. Ra was really named Rosemary and she was a bright rather violent girl and frightened me. One day she had to return to Chicago because her mother was ill. I wrote her a letter while she was away. When she returned she told me that I should not feel so obligated to be so nice and to write these phony letters telling her what a great friend she is. I was not expecting this and felt very mixed up around Rosemary.
Angela Pipikios was another student from Chicago, so was Peter Passuntino and his new wife Margo. Angela was Greek and had enormous legs, and was a very good painter. Peter Passuntino drew excellently and painted well but was all mixed up with dirty colors. His wife was very beautiful, knew how to start paintings, but then became so conscious of her being in front of it all pretty there, that she usually left painting class and stayed away the rest of the day. She was from the Art Students League in New York and somehow was special for that.
One day Rosemary walked around a big bush singing about a surprise for George Deem. Then from behind the bush appeared Ann Grosvenor. I was so overjoyed to see her and she was staying for a week and had brought a yellow straw basket with a lunch in it with wine and Ann and I took off in a boat to spend that Sunday on Lake Michigan about a mile from the Ox-Bow lagoon. We did our things which was swimming and eating and playing and returned late in the night. The following day Ann or Juanita spent most of her time there with Vernon Lobb. The following morning neither Vernon nor Juanita showed up and did not appear for two days and two nights. It was the Ox-Bow scandal. During those nights of Vernon and Juanita's absence, from outside the Palmer House stairway I heard a scream and Margo appeared with blood all over her and crying and screaming about how Peter had caught her with somebody. She had slashed her wrists. The day Ann and Vernon returned I got a phone call from home asking me to get to Vincennes as soon as possible because Dad had had a heart attack in Fort Valley, Georgia.
Charlie Manson was an old man who worked for us on the farm in Indiana. He was a bum really and was never seen around the town of Vincennes very often, but when it was time to dig sweet potatoes in the late fall, Dad was always able to find him. He was deaf and one day he and Dad walked towards the house and I heard Dad say, "Isn't he an ugly old bastard?" We were all shocked until we remembered he was deaf and didn't know Dad had even said anything.
I only know farming in Indiana and only know about melon farming there and this includes a few other crops besides melons, naturally. There is corn and some kind of hay, but there is always a dreadful crop. Sweet potatoes is a dreadful crop, so is tomatoes and so is cucumbers. They are dreadful because there is something very difficult about the tending of them or the planting of them or the harvesting of them. Buck thought sweet corn was his family's dreadful crop because it had to be picked at times when everybody else was quite finished with the day's work, which is a good enough dreadful thought. Planting tomatoes or sweet potatoes is fun because there is a machine that is pulled by horses or a tractor and it digs a furrow and it drips water and one sits on either side of this activity and lays plants into the ground as they go along and the roots are covered by the moving process of the machine. The dreadful part of these crops is picking them. Oh yes, strawberries is another dreadful crop to pick because one must crawl all day on their hands and knees finding and picking these tender berries, and if you eat one you're a fool, because you want another and in despair you finally eat more than you pick. I know, I picked strawberries for Uncle Big Boy for a few seasons. However strawberries are picked in the early summer, at the end of May or the beginning of June and because they are the first of all imagined harvests, there is an enthusiasm about it that makes it less dreadful. It almost makes me realize why strawberries are an extra crop. It also makes me realize why have an extra crop like tomatoes or sweet potatoes because they are harvested late in the summer and you can't eat them while you pick them and you are tired of harvesting anyway. The other dreadful part is that there never are enough to make a major crop because they are so difficult to harvest, no one would work long enough to harvest it all.
A plow type of instrument goes under the sweet potatoes, then you must dig into the row on your knees, having no body leverage to get any strength to push into the soil to get to the potatoes so you can pull up what sweet potatoes you can find and lay them along the row. When that is done, there is the other chore of picking all those potatoes up and putting them in a wagon. With tomatoes at least you put them into baskets while you pick them, but you can't empty your basket by spilling it into a pile, you must handle each one again or they will squash. You are supposed to have all kinds of empty baskets to fill and then take a new basket, but no one ever has that many baskets. The position of picking tomatoes is also impossible, you must stoop a bit but not all the way, or bend your back some, but not very much, so you are stiff and sore and exhausted all the time while picking tomatoes, plus your hands are green for a month afterwards. German prisoners of war used to pick tomatoes at home during World War II. It is a prisoners' job. Picking up walnuts makes your fingers brown until Christmas.
My point is this. Be a tomato farmer and know you are doing this work as your main work, then it isn't dreadful, or be a sweet potato farmer and know that is what you do. But Indiana farmers must have their dreadful crops and find Charlie Manson to help them harvest. Charlie Manson always said "There's a hell of a lot-a things you don't know" whenever he found it fit any proper situation. He also said, "When I die, I want to die diggin' taters." Another Charlie, named Charlie Crews always said that anyone with hiccoughs should only think of his name, Charlie Crews, and the hiccoughs would go away.
It's not Indiana only that has dreadful crops, it's not only farmers who have dreadful things to do, which they could avoid if they decided to. Aunt Stell dreads paying her paper boy. She says it's a chore she would like to do without. She never has the change she wants and naturally the paper boy doesn't either. There is writing letters that can be a chore, but addressing the envelope to me is always the dreadful part. I always enjoy writing by hand, but never on a given form. The given form just won't allow me to do my best writing. I can't even make a check look like checks because of the certain spaces one must write in.
It may not be only in Indiana where dreadful jobs and crops are always arranged for, but Indiana certainly is one to have them. Dad always said these crops were for variety and most of the time they sold well, but no better than melons, had they been in that place. Dad always held onto sweet potatoes. Once or twice he tried an acre of bell peppers, which Aunt Hootie called mangoes, but that was too dreadful even for him. He tried sweet corn too, and that is where I learned with Dad that Buck was correct. You always pick sweet corn after the day's work is over.
This Indiana way of having a dreadful applies to many things and I was surprised when I got to Indiana from Saugatuck to hear everyone at home explain the way I was to get to Fort Valley, Georgia, to see Dad who was in the hospital there with a heart attack. He had hitched a ride on a truck to go to Fort Valley that summer to visit Florence and Rosemary, Uncle Cy's daughters who were his great friends. He wasn't doing anything now that he was living in town and thought a week in Georgia was a nice change. Rosemary had married Lou Horsting and they were raising melons in Georgia, so was Florence and her husband Bernie Hagaman. Dad was at Rosemary's the night the attack hit and was taken to the hospital in Fort Valley. Bud Ottensmeyer and Selma and Aunt Renie were already there by the time I was in Vincennes. Bud had driven Aunt Stell's car with Aunt Renie. I don't know how Selma got there. She always got to her needed places on her own. It was explained to me that I was to drive three old ladies who I didn't know down into Georgia near Fort Valley, and Bud Otts would pick me up. One of the old ladies had a daughter who had married a man from Decker who was in the Army and stationed with his wife in Georgia and they were all going down to visit them and they said they would gladly take me as close as they could to Fort Valley, if I would drive most of the way. Well, I would not have thought of these dreadful crop categories if I had merely taken a bus, I would have continued reading the novel "A Death in the Family" on the bus and got there in much better form. Instead, for two days I drove the ladies, trying to be responsible and careful and talk about Vincennes, while they all watched me. The mother of the daughter who owned the car drove some of the way and she was the most wholesome. Her husband owned the main jewelry store in Vincennes and I always thought she was as elegant as Maggie of Maggie and Jiggs, but she was really very ordinary. Her name was Sylvia. Sylvia Simon. I was proud to get to know her though because I had never known a jeweler's wife.
I kept thinking of dreadful crops all during the trip, but when I got to Fort Valley, the dreadful crop system really began. Bud picked me up as planned and we went to see Dad. He had had the heart attack and was doing alright, but no one had made any type of arrangement for me. Everyone was being in their dreadful crop. Aunt Renie begged a bed to be put into Dad's room, where she slept each night, then hid the bed during the day. Bud went back to Vincennes. I don't know how. There were no ladies wanting a driver to take them to Vincennes, and Selma left too. I spent the first night at Florence's with Aunt Renie, and although Florence and Rosemary were willing to alternate me between them as a night guest, Aunt Renie and Dad said it was too much trouble, I should be at the hospital. I was at the hospital every night for four weeks, sleeping in the back of Aunt Stell's two-door car in misery. I didn't know to complain, I too was a subject of dreadful crop and so was Aunt Renie. Now we both look at one another and wonder how we could have possibly endured those four weeks, eating in a drugstore and sitting our turns in Dad's room with Aunt Renie's cot hidden behind the door because it was against rules.
I read Dad "A Death in the Family." Aunt Renie thought it shocking that I brought such a book, but Dad thought it was lovely. I told Aunt Renie she should read it, but she was too pleased with the shocking title. Dad and I did some George things and he got a great enjoyment from it. I had learned all my Hospital Care and Treatment training, and took excellent care of him. I knew how to rub his back, to change, or at least make the bed right while he was still in it, and he was most amazed when I saw to it he used the bedpan and I would dump it and clean it and see to it he had no worry about those things at all, I knew he was the type to be concerned about calling a nurse for little favors like wanting to pee, those are patients' only worries after they have gone through their major operations or attacks, and it seemed to me Dad was doing fine.
Florence and Rosemary were a great help and I got to know them again. Florence, who is younger than Rosemary, was always dashing. She was a senior in high school when I was a freshman and was the only cheerleader who did back flips and splits. Now she had children and lived on a comfortable farm in Georgia not far from Rosemary and her young sister Dolores. Once while I was visiting Florence, her oldest boy came in and asked for something then left. Florence then told me he was being strange because he had just found out about sex and kept looking at her to see if it were really true and if so, if she were really a part of it. It was somehow reassuring for me to be on this side of the world with this Deem girl and being a part of everything.
When I did stay the night at Florence's she told me to sit and talk with her and her husband until the children were asleep, which I did. Then her husband took two boys out of their double bed, put them on a quilt on the floor in the living room and pointed to the double bed and said good night. I tried to suggest some other arrangement, Bernie, Florence's husband, just explained the boys would never know the difference, and would be very excited the next day finding they were somewhere else. Then he said, "Wouldn't you, when you were a kid? Well this is all part of remembering a childhood." I liked him for thinking that way.
Rosemary lived in a very lovely house that had a main hallway starting from the fan door entrance. There was a huge fireplace in this main hall and all rooms led off of it. She has a great ability to make a home comfortable and this was one of the most comfortable homes I had ever seen. Rosemary always sewed and while I visited her one day, she made a robe for Dad and even embroidered G. D. in fancy letters on the pocket. She has a deep slow voice that made you listen even if she wasn't saying much. After a year had passed Rosemary took a job in a quilting firm and became top designer of quilts and bedspreads.
These four weeks got more and more slow. It seemed it was always eleven o'clock in the morning and hospital days have no time measured unless you are the patient, so two o'clock was no different from eleven or three. I began climbing a fence near the hospital and walking acres through alfalfa going down to a hot little brook that had a few trees around it. Nothing could relieve the intense heat of Georgia in July. I could not let time stop. No matter how long it took here I would finally be left to go back to my unexplainable life in Chicago, but Chicago was gone, and New York had not begun. I kept remembering what Bernie had said about this is all part of remembering your childhood, but I could not find any way of wanting to ever use this memory. I was so anxious to go on with my life, no matter how lonely it was going to be. Late one night after having visited with Florence and Bernie, Aunt Renie and I drove along a hot red muddy road toward Fort Valley Hospital and Aunt Renie was talking sadly about the red earth of Georgia and how it was so important to Scarlett O'Hara's heart, but how it would never be but a nuisance to her, when suddenly we were stuck deeply in a red mud ditch. I've always loathed the idea of me being the stranger who knocks on a farm house door to ask for help because the car is in a ditch and I had to do it. During hated times like this I always project myself through time and think about when the chore is over and the relief of no longer being involved. I had to do it that night, so I thought of Aunt Renie sitting in the car somewhere in America, somewhere in Georgia, near Macon, all alone on a dirt road that no one would ever know about. The man was friendly and helpful and drove a huge and old John Deere tractor with steel lugs on the wheels to pull us out. I thought it was a bit too much, I thought his car could do it, but he said it wasn't possible on that muddy road. I stood on the back of the tractor and rode with him through his lane down to the road. There were no lights anywhere, but we were accustomed to the dark and finally we could see the tiny parking lights on Aunt Stell's little Ford. I noticed one parking light was not on and had a moment of fearing the headlight was no doubt not working either, but when we got to the car I could see the reason, Aunt Renie was sitting on the front fender of the Ford waiting for me to return, no doubt thinking the same process as I was, projecting her thoughts through the dreaded time of bother and looking forward to when it was all over. She pushed a ten-dollar bill in the man's hand and he drove behind us on his tractor until we got to a paved road. As I turned away we could see him wave and shake his head because he had seen it was a ten instead of a single dollar and we were suddenly very cheerful after having projected ourselves through another dreaded crop.
Careful arrangements were made, and we were to go to Atlanta and put Dad on the train in a private room and he and Aunt Renie were to ride the train back to Vincennes, while I drove home alone. No one would think of an ambulance taking Dad to Atlanta, so he could be carried to the train. It was all too expensive. I kept my mouth closed. No one was near hearing my conclusion. No one could hear anything because their ears were solidly filled with what they had learned all their lives with the dreaded crop. I wanted to tell them that this was the reason why they saved their money, there will never be a better reason to spend it than now. I could see they were dedicated still to their American hard task and I was the new generation who would not learn my lesson until I had my hard times. I drove Dad and Aunt Renie to the train station in Atlanta, Georgia. I had made reservations and drove as close to the train as I could. I could see Dad getting more and more tense just because he was in a strange situation. Aunt Renie said in her business voice that I was not allowed to park where I had parked. I told her that I would mind the business of paying if the car was towed away, because we were parking here and from here Dad was going to walk to the train. There was a long stairway that led to the train, or I would have driven up to the train. I made Dad lean on me and we began to walk. Aunt Renie looked more gray than he did by this time, but I asked her to walk ahead and find the exact car they were to get into because Dad was not going to walk sideways through coaches. She walked on and found the car with the private room. I talked to Dad as wholesomely as I could telling him to act as sick as he could so people would get out of his way and he began to laugh. He caught on to what I meant and even leaned on me more than necessary and I was relieved because at least I thought I was handling some of his weight. We got to the train, then into it and Aunt Renie saw to it that the bed was down. Dad had his pajamas under his trousers so he was put back to bed as soon as possible. Aunt Renie looked at me, then at the gray man lying there. She walked me to the door telling me to get to the car before it was towed away. When I got to the door she said, "Why didn't we have an ambulance do this." I walked away. Selma had an ambulance waiting the train at Vincennes and Dad was taken home and was quite alright. I came in the next day. I didn't have enough money to stay the night in a motel, so I slept on the road with the door locked. I did stop at the Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky, and buy the Audubon Wild Turkey print for Aunt Renie, it was the 28th of July, her birthday, and then I stayed a few more days and Uncle Big Boy arranged for me to hitchhike on a truck to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where someone picked me up and took me back to Saugatuck.
End of Part Five