Letter

The email comes out of nowhere. The man who sent it is one of the last people I’d expect to contact me. He’s the owner of a mushrooming network of music venues, cocktail bars, and vaguely chic eateries. It’s an invitation to meet. He says he might have some work for me. He asks, as an afterthought, whether we’ve met before.

It’s too left field not to follow up on. Also, a day or two before, a commission blew up in my face, so it would be unwise to turn up my nose at money. No matter the source.

I write back and we set a time.

The restaurant sits below a concert hall. It’s an old building that’s been tastefully semi-restored. There are intentionally unfinished walls and repurposed this and retro/vintage that. You know this place. If you live in an American city right now, you can visit at least a half dozen of these per zip code.

The man’s design director meets me before her boss shows up. We have an easy rapport. The job is to replace five shitty figure drawings in gilded custom frames. She and I brainstorm until he shows up. We’d both hoped the frames could be jettisoned, but no dice; he spent too much on them. My paintings will have to fit their long narrow dimensions.

He asks if we’ve met before. I remind him when and where. It was back when his empire consisted of just one corner bar. I don’t tell him about how I knew for sure back then that I could never work for him. Look at me now.

We agree on terms and I set to work. The job is a lot more fulfilling than many I’ve done for much nicer people. It makes me feel connected to all those painters, stretching centuries back, doing their best for truly horrible people. Maybe this is the way it has to be.

I don’t feel bad afterwards and I won’t feel bad cashing the man’s check. No matter what I think of him.

They’ve been hammering, sawing, hauling, banging away at the house for months. And they will continue to for months to come. I knew this was coming when I moved in a year and a half ago. In fact, my moving in was delayed many months because plans for this gut rehab were in place and thought to be imminent when I first saw the apartment on an impossibly humid July day in 2019.

The first crew are masons. They peck and chisel at the brickwork above and to the periphery of my head for a week or two. The reverberations feel not unlike a dentist’s drill——insistent and ongoing, but dulled by anaesthetic. The walls of the house serve as novocaine to buffer me from the direct pain of their instuments. Also like at the dentist’s, their methodical attack becomes habitual and increasingly bearable as it continues and continues.

Scaffolding is erected, then moved along the southern and northern walls. One morning, I open my front door and face two-by-fours and metal armature blocking my egress. Good thing there’s a back door.

The wreckers come. A port-o-potty appears in the back yard. They haul out beams that likely date to the 1875 original construction. These are stacked along the neighbor’s fence. Will they use them for the new interior? Who knows. They’ve been waiting out there for weeks now.

After the walls and ceilings, they start tearing the roof off bit by bit. I go upstairs and look once they’re done. It’s so strange. All that remains are the brick walls and the sky above. The foreman points up in the air where the new second floor will be.

The hammering and sawing resumes. Now, at the end of every work day, they fasten a giant blue tarp over the open wound they’ve been assaulting. Late some nights the window blows the tarp loose and I hear someone up there trying to secure it. After a big rain, there’s a leak in my bathroom. The landlord asks me to take pictures so he can show them to the crew, and, presumably, shame them into making the tarp more water-tight.

When I stand in the back yard now, I can see the beginnings of the new extra storey. Once finished, it will allow the parents to have a separate room from their five-year-old. But before that, the workers will have to make a new roof, then all that goes below it.

I wonder what it will be like when the little girl and the dog are running back and forth the length of the house again. Will I miss the workers and their violent noise? Then again, they may never finish.

[Wrote about some movies I saw at the Black Harvest Film Festival.]

A woman calls about a job. To be more precise, she calls after trying to email me at an address I haven’t used in years. I don’t answer the phone because 99% of calls are from bots these days and I don’t recognize the number. Many fill up my voicemail with warnings about expiring insurance for cars I don’t own and prizes I could win, if I’d only call back. This woman leaves her message as well.

She got my contact info from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. I make posters and such for them and she wants to hire me to do the same. I call her and we have a pleasant enough talk. She’s working on a documentary about Ida B. Wells and wonders whether I could make some illustrations to stand in for photos and footage that don’t exist.

I tell her I’ll give it a shot.

I paint a scene of a train car with a woman being accosted by a conductor. The documentarian is very happy with it and asks if I’ll make thirteen more images to illustrate her narration of a sequence in which Wells boards a Memphis train and is eventually thrown off by force.

I’m not that enthused about this, but, having just quit bartending, can’t be turning up my nose at work. So I quote her a price I doubt she’ll meet. To my surprise, she quickly agrees. I write back requesting a deposit, then set to work.

I don’t hear from her with either funds or words for several days. I should put the work aside until I get paid, but am afraid that I’ll lose whatever faint enthusiasm and weak momentum I’ve got for the job. So I trudge on.

I complete the thirteen pictures, scan and send them, then wait. Days pass without a peep. It’s not a good sign. Then I prod the woman with a follow up email. She answers that she’s unhappy with what I’ve made. Can’t I make the woman more recognizably Ida B. Wells?

I stop myself from writing what I actually want to say and suggest that we should just forget the whole thing. I guess she agrees because she doesn’t even dignify my suggestion with a response.

Is there no limit to my stupidity? Maybe I’ll find out one day. For now, the mystery persists.