Letter

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.

When I sell six or seven more copies of Old Style, it will break even; meaning that sales will have covered expenses. In the old publishing world I have little interaction with, this moment is called ‘earning out’. It means that sales have covered the expenses of manufacturing the physical book, advertising budget, and whatever advance the author received. The publisher then is obligated to send the writer royalties at some agreed-upon intervals.

My first publisher pays out once a year, my second never does because they’re crooks, and my third has received far more money from me than the other way around because I’m an idiot with no business sense. But what, if anything, does earning out mean if you do all the work yourself?

Old Style is the first of the three books I’ve put out entirely on my own that will have attained this distinction. I don’t know why sales have been better for it than the previous two. In addition to being a lousy businessman, I have no interest in gauging audience interest or catering toward this or that crowd. I just blunder forward following my own interests and instincts and hope that a few people respond now and then.

Even though Old Style has covered monetary expenses, it will be many years, if ever, when I can comfortably say that I’ve gotten back what I put into it. I wonder whether successful artists/writers feel the same after getting a big advance or making a major sale? This is where valuing art gets nebulous. It’s always right between priceless and worthless. But on the practical level, the price is whatever you can get on a given day.

How many copies of my books would I need to sell to feel satisfied? I have many boxes left in my house right now that I’d like to be rid of. But if a truck came and carted them away this afternoon, would I be truly happy? I’d still be primarily concerned with whatever I’m working on at the time that truck is pulling up. And I’d still be chewing on what I need to work on next after it drives away.

The project I’ve been engaged in most of my life can’t be measured in money. Fame is at least as slippery as money, but I doubt it would scratch the itch so it no longer itches either. Satisfaction of any kind is elusive and rarely last longer than moments. All that said, I’m very grateful to everyone who’s spent their hard-earned funds on my work and hope to keep taking advantage of that generosity to fund whatever work I’ve got left to do.

Skyler asks if I’m going to see Brokeback at Thalia Hall and I tell him I am. Alicia and Sam are going too. We decide on Skylark for dinner beforehand. Another in a series of “back-to-normal” exercises that everyone seems to be doing, or talking about doing, so often nowadays.

Most gatherings begin with a few minutes’ throat-clearing, almost prayer-like acknowledgment of plague time. It’s become exhausting and kind of rote. Maybe there’s no other way it could be, but it’s beginning to feel like we’re all going through the motions.

I get to the bar first and Jacob is there. We haven’t seen each other since before lockdown. In fact, last time was right here. He was on a date with the woman he now lives with. Jacob was the acquiring editor on my doomed second book. We talk a bit about it, but not too much. He’s out of the book racket for the moment. It’s good to see people I know from harrowing situations land on their feet. If we don’t move on, we sink.

Sam, Alicia, and Skyler show up and we eat, drink, and laugh. It’s kind of normal. Or, what we thought normal used to be. We’re trying our best.

Bill shows up at Thalia and sits with us in the front row. I love that he shows up to support guys that he plays with in other bands. There’s not as big a crowd as there should be, but the show is great. I always say Brokeback sounds like spaghetti western music. That’s a compliment. There’s a world-weary melancholy road feeling to a lot of their music. A screen plays loops of atmospheric landscape and nature footage going behind them. Bill and I whisper occasionally about how the images sometimes link up with the sounds, other times suggest something totally different. Minutes of cornfields remind us both of Children of the Corn, though Brokeback isn’t a horror movie soundtrack.

Towards the end, Doug comes up to the mic and says this is the first live gig for a lot of them in a long time. ——but we won’t get into that… then goes back to playing.

We’re all trying to do the old stuff but it feels slightly off. Bartending the next night, Emma and I talk about it. Feels like we’re ghosts or something. Like we’re dead already but haven’t been told, so we go on living, not knowing any better.

p.s. Adam, who runs Hello America Stereo Cassette, wrote some very flattering things about my book.