Letter

I can tell the woman is preoccupied by the amount of time it takes her to decide what to drink. She looks familiar, but in a general sort of way. It’s likely her appearance. Short fedora, conceptual/geometric tattoos, abstract asymmetrical hairdo, men’s button-down shirt and chinos. It’s a personal style very common these days. Call it hipster-nonbinary. I wouldn’t be using feminine pronouns if we hadn’t spoken.

The bar’s not too busy tonight, but there are enough others that I can legitimately avoid lingering near her. I can feel her gaze even when I turn my back. She’s looking for something or someone, and, in the absence of any acquaintances in the room, she focuses on the bartender.

She sips at her shot and beer, mutters to herself, and looks up and down the length of the bar. For a few seconds she engages the couple seated next to her, but they soon get up and leave. As do several others. Now there’s just a cluster of my coworkers, whose shift has ended, and her. She beckons me over.

——So what are you into? What are your passions?

I give her the Cliff’s Notes version of my biography, regretting sharing each innocuous detail as it spills from my mouth. Because I can see her gears turning. She’s sizing me up in order to gauge how much to unburden herself of the weight that’s been crushing her ever since she walked in.

She says she was a performer but had a crack-up. She gives no details, nor shares much else personal. Instead, she wants to talk about a trans weightlifter at the Olympics. How they bested the previous world-record by a hundred pounds. That this is a symptom of a world gone crazy. She says something about young people transitioning being the same as forced sterilization, the destruction of traditional family structures and roles. She insists that we have to admit there’s a clear difference between men and women and that every other gender designation is left-wing delusion.

It’s every bartender’s burden to be amateur therapist, but some cases presented can’t be joked or free-drinked away. The things she talks about are clearly a deflection from what’s truly bothering her. But the heaviness of it is crushing.

She tries to hold my gaze as I walk away without agreeing or contradicting her statements. It’s last call. I start my end of the night clean-up.

——I’m making you uncomfortable, right?

No, I answer, it’s just the end of the night and we will not resolve the entire issue of gender identity in the next ten minutes. She wants agreement or argument, but I refuse to engage and this frustrates her. I tell her to come back next Sunday to continue the conversation, but hope to god she doesn’t.

After the locks are on the doors, I ask Eber and Emma if they know the woman. They don’t, except for seeing her in the bar in the company of a cop who’s a regular. They ask if she was hitting on me. If only. I tell them I feel like I got hit by a ton of bricks.

What’s it called to rage against the thing that’s clearly your own personal conflict? Self-loathing, irony, just the human condition?

——Come by the studio!

Orso’s Honeypot sits on a busy stretch of Robey Ave. There used to be artists in boarded-up storefronts around here, but Orso’s the last man standing. There’s a whiskey bar/farm-to-table bistro to the left and an artisanal eyeglass emporium to the right. Orso’s work table faces the street so he can ogle the young mothers in yoga pants who’ve overrun the neighborhood. Truth is he doesn’t make much art here anymore. In fact, he doesn’t personally make much of anything. He has a crew of young acolytes to take care of the grunt work.

A visitor to the Honeypot couldn’t be blamed for thinking Orso a real art machine. Dick Blick can keep the doors open on all the supplies he’s sold to Orso. But stay an hour or two and you see that the Arches paper, Old Holland paint, rare sable brushes, and fine Belgian linen canvases——stretched to every size——are just stage props. When not regaling admirers with wild war stories, Orso whiles away his work days scrolling through Facebook, Pornhub, and Instagram. Sucking every last fractal of ego boost the algorithms will dole out.

Beyond the “studio” part of his storefront is a gallery. Orso has decided he will now promote the work of others, having himself attained heights of artistic accomplishment accessible to a rare few. He will mentor the younger generation and shine his mighty light on forgotten and neglected masters of the past.

The current show is devoted to Rose Lee-Flecks. Three other galleries have devoted exhibits to the grim snapshots of the infamous recently deceased washer woman, but Orso insists he’s got the inside track on the real gold from the trove auctioned from her unpaid storage lockers. He’s got the stuff stashed in bank vaults and hotel safes about town. When an unknown artist is “discovered”, the vultures descend, then flap their mighty wings away with choice morsels vice-gripped to their beaks, furtively making their way to hidden aeries. They hunch together with fellow scavengers, carefully revealing a few details, obscuring others, in desperate, ever-shifting calculations to maximize return on their score.

Lee-Flecks’s is a sad story. But not to Orso and his ilk. Because they project their wish fulfillments on her and her work. They scrub clean the illness, sweep it under the rug. All they want the public to see is the raw genius. The wall labels with absurd price tags prove it. They want the buyer to feel she’s getting a fleeting miraculous thing. What’s a few grand for a glimmer of the eternal?

One time, Orso paid me $20 an hour to move a bunch of framed prints from one undisclosed location to another. He supervised by chainsmoking Marlboro Lights, leaning on the rented Hertz truck and casting weary glances at passersby. He confided that he’d met Rose once or twice when he was coming up.

——Ugly broad. Rude. Unpleasant. But, boy, it’s like printing money with those pictures of hers now…

I get to El Paseo around 5:30pm and there’s nobody there. Just some kids running around. No dancers, no musicians. I wonder whether I got the time wrong. I’m congenitally early all the time. I start brooding. It’s been a weird day.

A couple days before, I got a terse text from a restaurant owner to take down my painting from their establishment. I’ve had art up there continuously since they opened nearly twenty years ago. But the text just said they needed the wallspace. They might as well have thrown the painting out the door, onto the sidewalk, then yelled at me to come get it before it was trampled by passersby.

I try to book a Zipcar, as the painting is 4’x 5’, but for some reason, my account is locked as a “security precaution”. So I bungee-cord the surfboard rack I’d bought as an experimental art-transport to my bike and pedal north.

I manage to get the thing home without the canvas acting as a sail and sending me off course, then sit at home and stew on why things ended this way. Did I anger them in somehow? Or is it just poor communication skills? All they had to do was ask nicely. Instead, odds are that I won’t be taking up space within their restaurant anytime soon.

Just as I’m wondering whether my gig to draw Wendy’s flamenco class is off, I see Steve walking up with his violin and amp. Then Wendy and Avi. Soon we’ve got boards set up on the grass so the students can stomp away and I’ve got my lady’s purse of markers out.

The hour passes quickly and does a lot to dull the bad feelings from earlier. I hand Wendy the drawings and she writes me a check in return. I like drawing her dance classes and have done a lot of it over the last decade or so. We say our goodbyes and I pedal away to get dinner at the bar.

Then I head back north, to Ravenswood, to catch a movie being shown on the rooftop of a pizza joint. A local filmmaker has opened a VHS rental store in the back room. No website, no credit cards; pay $80 cash and rent as many tapes as you like for a year. I have no interest in revisiting video-store days; I’m old enough to recall how they helped kill the movie-going experience. But weekend screenings on the rooftop sound swell.

I get there a few minutes late, but thankfully the show hasn’t begun. I grab a drink from the bar and go upstairs and find a seat. Leor’s there. It’s good to see him. Haven’t since before lockdown.

A Three Stooges short is followed by a 1990 film from Zimbabwe called Jit. I hadn’t heard of until this morning, when I read a description in a newsletter recommending the screening. It’s a joyful, scrappy movie about a kid going overboard to win the woman of his dreams. A perfect capper to a long, weird day.

I stop for a nightcap at Rainbo on my way home. Eber’s working door; Skyler, Nate, and Mike are serving drinks. All friends. Skyler comes out for a cigarette as I’m leaving and mentions the business with the restaurant and my painting from the morning. It’s a small world. We all know each other. He’d talked to another of the place’s owners, who’d wondered whether I was upset.

I had been. But the rest of the day helped bury the hurt into the past.