Introduction
The Letter to Jane
Jane,
Fucking hell, here I go. The first slice into the bloated cadaver of my story. I am shrinking already, shrinking into the small world of myself. I am embarrassed. There is a vileness in the history of my life that I try to hide even as it spews out of me every in every conversation I have. A vileness that I am repeating again here. It shames me. Damn it! Such tricks, fooled by the slight of the mind. I should have paid more attention but to who? “Imitating my father’s death”. A pronouncement by a board certified psychiatrist. A pronouncement I mythologized as having saved me years, decades ago, relieving me of all this agony. Yet, here I am, forty years later, bed bound and skewered with pain that is mystifying my primary care doctors. Laying alone in my apartment for days into weeks stitching together the clues of my past. My aliments were remarkably similar to those that drove me in desperation to seek mental help in the first place. I have to consider the idea that I am once again my mind is decaying my body, the magic chant, "Imitating my father's death," having lost its potency. So, I don’t what the truth is or how the story is going to unfold now. It would be quite natural not to continue on, just end it now rather than be vulnerable again to that self destructive beast that had tortured me for years. It is tiring, the bluff game, the hope game, the this time will be different game, the never bad enough to consider ending it all even though it would make sense game. Don't have that luxury anyway. After that psychological slight of hand or trick of mind, I became normal enough to start a family. Better to stew in the pot of electric eels than betray the family. Better to just melt into the future that is waiting for my aged body a few years away at best. Suicide by birth without all the decision making. Christ, I am so pathetic! |
The vile poison is oozing out of me as I write. Might as well puncture the beast and let the noxious gases fill the page. A week after the World Trade Center went down I took my son down to the site. We got even closer that I thought we would be able to, just up the block. As we approached we entered the cloud of stench coming from the dead bodies. The smell gagged us. It was horrifying. My father did not smell like that as he shrunk. He was not horrifying to look at although he had a scar where the his lung was removed that went from his sternum, underneath his arm and up his back. It looked like a rope glued to him and smeared with a black and yellow jell. My heart raced when I saw it but I was not horrified, or I was horrified but not repulsed. I did not look away At twelve years old the severe and permanent consequences of such a brutal invasion did not occur to me since the assumption was he was going heal. For maximum drama I tell myself I watched him decay, but in reality he was merely shrinking. His graying skin sagged around his emerging skeleton but he was always my beautiful father. I felt no torture or pain carrying for him, did not dread the duties. I was happy to be there to help where I could, a labor of love, almost proud, almost a warrior. His death was not vile, the vileness was what I became.
The darkness bothered me. Summer to fall to winter took away the light, filling the house with a gloomy fog. It had been bright summer when Dad had come home to recover from his operation, glowing from the miracle of prayer and modern medicine The cancer had been removed, exorcised along with his lung and he was finally free, “clear” the word is now. The prestigious Mayo Clinic, who my father had been sent to for a thorough medical exam, missed a spot on his lung the size of a golf ball and caused months agony while my Dad tried to convince himself it was all in his head. So confidently had Mayo missed the spot that they happily sent the X-rays to our local Doctor, who had requested them after Dad’s visits to him became more desperate. The doctor was shocked to see the spot, the size of a golf ball, displaying itself so prominently. That news felt cold, as if God had finally noticed us and decided to play a foul trick. The cancer had been happy so far colonizing just the one lung and was cut off at the pass; touché God. The early fall was happy because we believed soon Dad would be up, walking and laughing like his old self and I would be going back to school, like sewing up a tear in my jeans. That was the plan. The labored breathing bothered me the most. It started out heavy and slow from the morphine and slowly became more irregular before breaking out into moans as the medicine wore off. I sat quietly by to monitor his progress. As the groans of pain sharpened I would go to the store where my mother was working and she would go back to the house and give him a morphine shot. To a twelve year old a hypodermic needle was an enchanting instrument. I loved the vials the morphine came in. Small bottles of clear glass narrowing at the top like a neck supporting a nob above it, like a tiny statue of the pope. The clear nob was to be broken off and the needle inserted into the neck to draw up the fluid. I hid the used and discarded needles, filled them with water and administered shots to my pillow and most of the furniture, soaking them during my unstoppable obsession. It was such great fun. Fun and desperation are partners. The idea that perhaps God did not exist was not a question in my world. He was the one in control, the one who, if my prayers were desperate and loud enough, might tell death to back off, whoever he was. It was a two pronged battle, prayer and supplication to God and battling death with some invisible force field fueled by gathering every part of my entire being and focusing it into a laser beam of pure desire for life straight into the heart of the gathering darkness. It is possible to exist on the razor sharp pentacle of desperation for days, weeks, months without stopping until the end comes. The end came, a phone call whose ring announced the verdict even before being picked up. The first child to befriend me after I reentered the world was a boy named David Bunnell. We remained friends for life. Last year he asked me to come live with him and help battle the pancreatic cancer. I thought it to be very ironic that I was given the opportunity to repeat the same process over again, be a much taller caregiver. I was to meet my nemesis again. This time I would take notes. However, there was no nemesis, no secrets were reveled, no sense of hooded death or benign and forgiving God, Just the diminishing presence of a loved and loving man. Time to plunge the knife into the bloated beast and let the noxious gases out. Not death, not God, not the images of a dying man who looked like he had almost been cut in half by a broad sword and sewn up again, not the flood of tears over a waxy preservation of a fathers image in a coffin or the cruelness of fate were the vile poison. The vileness is the person I became in later years and then infected all those around me with my confused desperation, an unrelenting begging to be coaxed out of my prison, propped upright and pushed forward. Shrunk inside myself, I forced my friends to expend the strength they could have used for themselves. That was the vile poison, an evil that looks innocent but saps the life out everyone it touches. |
Having just eaten, I am sitting here typing waiting for the numbness to overtake me. Where is my blood going that feeds my thoughts and actions? Is every bit of it needed just to churn my stomach? If I was at work I would just plow through the rationing of blood between digestion and labor until I made it home to my bed. As I told you, I am fairly sure I just went through a nervous breakdown. It was precipitated by two events, one a story I am not going to tell and two: being alone without a pressing obligation or schedule that allowed me absolute freedom to do whatever I desired. Apparently, what I wanted most was a nervous breakdown.
My fingernails have grown. I love the ivory colored crescents crowning the tips of my fingers. I used to let them grow long and felt comforted just looking at them, as if my fingers were singing a lullaby to me. A friend told me that it looked wrong for a man to have such long nails. Apparently, I was stretching the visual boundaries of my gender too far. I began trimming them and am going to trim them today, with some regret, but I am happy to see my that in my present condition fingernails could actually be grown. Being bed bound, wallowing in misery and full of self hatred is a condition that used to happen to me all the time when I was in my twenties and thirties, but it is has been years since suffering an episode like this. It is nutty how awful this is, I had forgotten, but here it is again right down to the stomach pains churning all the way up to my throat. There have been plenty of close calls before, a panic so thick I can feel it on my tongue and crawling on my skin, the unstoppable worst screaming in my ear. But have I learned to recognize it, a solid mass of emotion inside me saying, "death is coming,". I have learned to step away off to the side and say its not real. At least until now. This time I could feel it coming and I could feel it get me, a thousand needles piercing my skin. It could not be deterred. It would not listen. I will do what I always did in the past, hide away and wait for it to just go away--empty handed. It is almost pleasant surrendering myself to the mattress and avoiding the dizzy weaving back and forth. Count my breaths, tap on my skull, think positive thoughts. Ridiculous time consuming and worthless efforts. What a demented brain, half burying me and half trying to dig me out. My poor confused shrunken brain. Can you believe it, trauma makes brains shrink like a frightened little rabbits, actually shrink in size. MRI's have demonstrated that. Across the world millions are walking around with shrunken brains. The electrical signals get rerouted too. What a thing to learn at seventy years old, that I have shrunken, short circuited brain that seems to think part of its job is to kill me. |
So what has to happen now is that I have to rise up from the dead like Lazarus. What a fabulous story that is, Jesus raising Lazarus up from the dead. That is a story that everyone can relate to. I am Lazarus, we are all Lazaruses. Right? True enough? I am also my own Jesus, don't we all have to be or own Jesus? I say to myself, "rise up and "come forth!", that is what I need to do, come forth. Jesus Christ what a pain!
|
Complete Happiness
|
Back when ninety five percent of the U.S. population had not been born yet, my first grade teacher had us fold a piece of paper in half and then in half again. Opened up the folds made four rectangles in which we were to draw a story. A joke came to mind and I drew the stick figures. When I was done it felt like a needle full of endorphins had been shot straight into my veins. A five year old probably feels that same kind of joy from all kinds of activities, new and old, repeated day after day but what is unusual is that one moment dictated what I would do for the rest of my life.
Utter Misery Drawn Out
In 2004 my book, "Drawn Out" was published. It is a visual vomiting of emotions emerging from times of peak distress, often coarsely drawn and visually disjointed. The book was greeted with surprise and, in some cases, worry about my state of mind. I was even told by a friend, who dared to tell me, that they thought it was a cry for help. Actually it was a victory yell. I had felt emotions, I drew about them, corralled the whole bunch into a book and someone lost their mind enough to publish it, "Yippie-ki-yay"!
Suddenly, after all those years tucked away in corners or in my car anonymously churning out scratchy little notebook sized drawings, I was legitimate and felt respected. It was so much easier to breath when I could finally stand up straight. The book did not sell, got no critical acclaim or even a review in normal newspaper. However, among the people I knew and worked with I felt much more relaxed and happy. A delusional obsession had become undeniably real and I could clap the dust off my hands from that labor and walk proudly on in the world as the real me. |
The book would not exist at all if not for Gordon Lish, a well known and notorious editor at Knopf publishing. Meeting him was pure dumb luck, another unsought, undeserved and fortuitous occurrence. It was my first year in Manhattan working in a small advertising agency housed in a six flight walk up apartment on East 59th street. I was doing paste up, which is cutting out sections of printed type and gluing them into the proper position on the artwork--a common job for artist's in the eighties. On the subway to and from work I drew little drawings in a small sketch book, basically mindless doodles to amuse myself. A friend of the owner saw the book, flipped through it and asked if she could show it to an editor she knew at Knopf where she worked as a cover designer. The next day she told me that Gordon Lish wanted to see me so the following day I walked to the Random House Tower and took the elevator up to an office overlooking the city. Gordon Lish, a handsome man with silver gray hair flowing back from his face and over his ears in a graceful wave, was dressed stylishly in dark kaki pants and loose fitting light kaki shirt. He waved me in enthusiastically and proceeded to tell me I was going to be star. I was stunned by his enthusiasm .
|
Gordon Lish, in his magnificent office towering above the streets below, had lit up fire inside me that swirled like a tornado. He was offering me every thing I could want and that thought made me too dizzy to stand. Recognizing what to him, considering his position, was a familiar response to his offerings he told me to sit before I fell and I did. He told me he that the my drawings should be a book. He gave me names of people to see. He told me he would be in contact. I left his office barely able to feel my feet. On the way out of the Random House Tower I turned the wrong direction and came to a marble wall instead of the front doors. I stood there a long time unable to understand why there was no door.
The book took twenty years to put together from its inception to publication. The fire Gordon ignited died down, reignited, retreated to a smolder and flared up again. I did shop the drawings around but quickly retreated after the first tepid response in order to avoid further stress. I sold a drawing in an early show and immediately regretted the loss so I stopped showing. Instead I hid away and cranked out the drawings. Gordon Lish published four drawings in each issue of his book, The Quarterly, which, naturally, was published four times a year. Each quarter I would bring drawings to the tower and Gordon would bath me in praise before dictating what he liked. He wanted honesty, raw emotions, nuance and detail. Over time his directives freed me up, helped me strip away the implied nobility of visual art and get at the core of how I felt about all things, grand or trivial. He made me brave. His influence shaped the way I drew from then on. There is a lot of Gordon Lish in Drawn Out. Rob McQuilken, a young agent saw a draft I given to a friend. At a time I had made a mock up printed on my computer and bound together by round head brass metal paper fasteners. I was showing to people I worked with when a woman asked if she could borrow it to show to her son whose drug addicted father had frozen to death in his car. She thought it might help him to see my drawings. She showed my mock up to her neighbor, the poet Nora Pollard, who then showed it to Rob. He just happened to be in the market for new book ideas and sought me out and then signed me up. He promoted the book to every publishing house in New York. After multiple rejects, Soft Skull Press, run by Richard Nash, took a chance on me. I did not realize that until after the book was published what a long shot the possibility was and how delusional I must have been all that time. Only by devine providence, predestination or blind good luck could the book like that ever have existed. "Drawn Out" consisted of five hundred individual drawings, with no direct relationship to each other, no story line and created by an artist who was completely unknown. However, all the puzzle peaces were luckily assembled for me by unknowable forces for unknown reasons to make its publication happen. Another gift on a platter. I don't know who or what that thank for that connection but I am very grateful for Rob and Richard. The designer Mark Friedberg had been hired to design the movie, Across the Universe, directed by Julie Taymor. Having worked with me on movie sets before, Mark showed my book to her and she hired me to do all the art work for the character, Jude. Suddenly I was a star. Everyone from actors, producers, production assistants to my coworkers heaped praise on me...constantly for the entire duration of the film. It was head spinning. Once the movie was finished I went right back to painting baseboards without a hitch. After that several directors used me to be the stand in artist for characters with emotional problems. The latest were drawings I did for Joaquin Phoenix's diary in the movie "Joker". Jennifer Todd, the producer of Across the Universe, very kindly bought multiple copies of my book and sent them to studio heads and directors. Somewhere out there are people who at one time became aware of me thanks to her. Jennifer also arranged a one man show for me in LA and I sold several drawings. She told me she wanted to represent and have another big show but a tornado of emotion erupted in my head and I panicked. I told her that I just could not handle the stress. Actors and producers are brave people. I am not. I always felt I owed her an apology for declining her offer. If it is any consolation to her, I have never been in a show since. I am true to my word I guess. After Across the Universe was over I continued on with my career as a scenic artist and was even put in charge of several movies, a position of responsibility so torturous I barely lived through it. Once the job was over, however, I was alway proud of myself. I am less proud for not promoting my art but, as Popeye the Sailor said, “I Yam What I Yam”. Looking back over my life is apparently my latest obsession so here goes nothing. "Here goes" dates back to 1829 but the source of "here goes nothing" is apparently lost to history. Mostly likely the same will happen to me, (I have to preserve the negative, it is my soul). |
Zen
After over two years of twice a week sessions of Freudian analysis I was sitting in the doctor's office, hair cut short and body skinny from recent weight loss complaining about the pain gripping my chest when the doctor leaned forward and said "You are imitating the death of your father".
With the speed of a snap of the fingers the pain was gone. We just sat quietly, the sensation of time stopping, as I waited for the barbed snake to coil around me again. But the crippling anxiety did not return and a wave of euphoria swept over me as I began to believe that a miracle had just true. Impossible to imagine that a single sentence so casually uttered could so dramatically change my life. What I do know is that day colors became brighter and my body lighter as I floated through the newly Disney painted Albuquerque streets to my candy cane apartment and sat calmly waiting for the curse to return. However, no amount of pessimistic negativity could conjure up the slightest stirring of its prior existence. To make sure I made the trip a thousand miles north to where my father was buried, dropped acid, to make myself vulnerable as possible and slept on his grave. The next more I was convinced the ghost was gone. I was truly free to dance away into the future energized enough to take on the risk of a relationship. Suddenly I had a story to tell. A story about how psychotherapy saved me and about how sudden and weird it was. A story I would eventually tell anyone I knew well enough to have a conversation with. A story of damnation and salvation inside the mystery of myself. I wish I knew what was really going on inside that tangle synapses or what scholarly magic released me from its grip. |
|
After "Drawn Out," was published I called Dr. Karp, the magic doctor with the magic phrase that released me from pain, to tell him that I was still alive and feeling good. I told him how much I appreciated that day and how wonderful it was to be, (no other way to put it), saved. He said I was lucky. That I was suffering from a thinking disorder, not a mental illness. He had patients who thought the year was 1928. "That," he said, "was mental illness,". These days, he told me, there is no time for Freudian Analysis. People are given behavior modification exercises and pills to stabilize them enough to function. The deep secrets inside just remain buried. The freedom given to me came out of the blue as a complete surprise. No methodical or understandable process achieved that reward. It was a gift from the same mind as the curse.
Oral Roberts, the healing evangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University, had a radio show broadcasting his revivals. After preaching his charismatic sermons he called sick to come to him where he would lay upon them his healing hands. The murmuring crowd's prayerful expressions mounting into a crescendo of joyful shouts as the crippled stood up and walked. During one of his broadcast revivals Roberts told the story of healing his car. He described his journey across the desert from Los Vegas to Phoenix when his car suddenly died. Concerned gasps came from the audience as he described his dilemma. Stranded in a desert with no phone, it was the 1970's, no water and no nearby town he began to pray. "Yes Lord" the crowd murmured with concern. Orval decided that through God he healed people so in his dire need perhaps God could heal his car. In a calm but powerful voice Orval acted out his prayers for the crowd. "I entreat you God," said Orval. "Yes Lord yes," chanted the crowd. "I laid my hands on the hood of the car and said 'Please God deliver me from this danger!'" Orval said in a pleading and demanding voice. "Yes, yes," pleaded the gentile crowd. God spoke to Orval. God healed his car. I imagined a cripple in the audience wondering if he was going to be able to make it the front of the crowd so Orval could heal him too. I am like that car, unaware of God or Orval but yet somehow was started up and driven away. |