Letter

When I was little I drew animals off the TV. An old man in a captain’s cap showed me how. He lived in a shanty by the harbor and made it look easy. But it wasn’t easy for me. I ripped through the typing paper my mother gave me every week. I hated what I came up with. My bear looked mangled, the ram lame, the eagle lacked sufficient plumage to soar. But my mother loved each one as if she’d given birth to them. They lived on our refrigerator before being sent to the framer’s. These misformed animals form the beginning of an art collection that now covers every available surface of my childhood home.

I would’ve had an easier time of it those early mornings in front of the TV if I knew what I know now. That the old man had those sketches all worked out beforehand. It was a step-by-step process refined over years, lifted, then customized, from the TV artists who came before him.  Jon Gnagy was the first. He looked like a beatnik, with a worried cast to his glance. He was a self-taught veteran just back from the war. He worked out a way to render flora and fauna quickly and easily within his allotted forty-four minutes, stepping away from the easel to live-read copy the sponsors supplied him with. He never got the hang of drawing people. After he met and married his wife, he’d have her put in the rare figure required in his creations. He’d draw a western vista with a couple horses idling on a clearing in the foreground, then call off-camera and summon her to put a couple cowboys straddling the steeds. It was a rare symbiotic personal/professional partnership. They kept on that way until his show lost audience share and the network canceled it. He took to sleeping in the workshed/studio in back of their property. With the Rockies as a background below an endless sky, all Gnagy cared about was that his tumbler of Old Crow was never empty. His wife let him mope a few months, but when he started hitting her, she packed her suitcase.

Gnagy was long forgotten when Bob Ross hit screens across the nation. Ross was also a veteran, but Vietnam rather than WWII. He didn’t Brylcreem his hair, preferring a natural poof of red that would make Bozo think him a relation. His program was in color, the better to accentuate the garish tints he slathered onto canvas to make bucolic scenes appear beneath his palette knife. He never seemed nervous like Gnagy. Either he wasn’t worried about it, or, more likely, just stoned enough not to care. His branded painting kits sold in the millions. Magic White and Happy Clouds decorated living rooms across the nation.

But by the time I found out about Ross, I was through drawing off the TV. I’d graduated to reckoning with reality. Now I cursed the ugly marks in my sketchbook after looking down from the busker playing at the downtown subway stop. He doesn’t acknowledge me because I haven’t left a cent in his open guitar case, though I’ve been standing here half an hour. I keep tearing the pages out, throwing them down on the floor, then starting over. I want it to be right, to show how his music makes me feel, but I never can.

The horn player grew up in a dying industrial town. His father, an amateur piano player in the hot-jazz vernacular, worked at their town’s last unshuttered factory to put food on the table. The old man was bitter about his dead dreams and took it out on his sensitive little boy. If he couldn’t have what he wanted, had to go to a job he hated because he forgot to wear a rubber the wrong time, the little fucker had to share some of the pain. Never too early for a life lesson. It fucks you and fucks you and fucks you so you have to learn to fuck it back, or, at the very least, to make others regret, to pay for it, not to get off scot-free.

His mother, a frustrated painter, put all her unfulfilled dreams into him. He was her precocious golden boy. He could do no wrong. Any turn of his immature imagination she celebrated as genius. He grew up never to doubt himself and his abilities. She told him every night before bed that he would grow up to everyone knowing and admiring him.

And he knew it had to be so.

He always believed what his mother told him.

——Let’s get the awkwardness out of the way. I’m transitioning.

…is what follows hello and an outstretched hand, fingers beringed, nails polished bright crimson.

This lunch in a small Hudson River Valley town is the last social stop of my trip east. The invitation was extended a few weeks ago. I was excited for the visit because the owner of the house is my favorite living writer. I’ve been reading their pieces about cities, movies, art, etc since high school. Few write clearer sentences or have such a graceful way to wed the personal to the universal to the political.

We don’t know each other well, but over the past few years there have been regular postcards, texts, and the occasional hang. When you admire what someone does, then meet them and strike up a friendship, the nature of the bond is rarely easy to define, much less be sure of. A fan always has in back of his mind that he’s being humored or merely tolerated.

We sit in the breakfast nook and talk over coffee. She tells me about a thing called FaceApp. You feed a photo in and it spits an older, thinner, or alternately-gendered version of your face. She discovered it some time back and, gradually, fed photos of herself from every age in. They formed an alternate album going back over sixty years. The album helped give her the courage to make manifest what she’d felt inside but hidden from everyone her whole life.

She tells me this is her first day in men’s clothing in weeks as she prepares our lunch. I tell her about how I’ve watched over the past six years most of the employees of my neighborhood coffeeshop become emphatically nonbinary. She tells me that on trans message boards twenty-year-olds worry whether they’ve waited too long to change their pronouns. Try starting in your sixties, she tells them.

Aside from the myriad personal changes to come, my friend must grapple with what to do about her professional name. That name is a known quantity associated with fifty-some-odd years of work. She freely admits she’s flying into the unknown on all fronts.

We say goodbye and I start my drive west. I keep rolling it around in my mind. I recall the few photographs of my friend as a man. There aren’t many. But the expression on his face is often furtive, sometimes almost scared, never joyful. I wonder whether I’m retrofitting this impression after the afternoon’s news, but don’t think so. I always felt a disconnect between the elegant, sometimes hilarious, always thoughtful prose, and the timid, somewhat vague visage in those author photos. The new one is the first which hints that the sitter may think themselves beautiful.

I wonder what it’s like to look in a mirror all your life and not recognize the face as your own. I have the opposite problem. When I look, I recognize the face all too well.

I check into a nondescript motel somewhere in the endless Pennsylvania hills. At 9pm the only gustatory choices are McDonald’s and gas station microwave. I scarf down a lukewarm Quarter Pounder in my room and open the laptop to write a newsletter. It’s not this one, but the one about Alice Neel. I don’t know yet whether I’m allowed to write about this afternoon’s lunch. It’s not my story to tell and I have no interest in spreading gossip.

I texted her an hour after leaving to apologize for making her wear weird clothes and got a Ha back. But I need to know what she expects, so I write an email with my questions. Her response puts me at ease. I’m relieved not to have to keep secrets. I have to believe that by inviting me over she knows that her news will spread. Not widely, but beyond the bounds of her close acquaintances. She has to know I can’t not write about this.

Thinking about what Lucy told me over lunch has rearranged something elemental in my head. The idea that one can undertake a fundamental redirect at any time is a lot more hope and freedom than I would’ve allowed to be possible. I never had any unifying theory about what does and doesn’t constitute the essence of a person. But if you don’t like the flight you’re on and still possess the strength to get up and open the escape hatch and jump, why wouldn’t you?

I’m so happy for her. It’s not often a person can make a change that will go a ways towards making inside and outside match. That’s what Lucy is doing. I’m proud to know her and touched she let me in to witness the start of her transformation.

I book the hotel through Priceline because it has free parking. It’s in a zombie construction zone part of Manhattan in the West 30s. When I pull up, the doors are chained shut.

I peer inside and see some mattresses on the floor, but no other signs of life. No alternate entrance or notices to redirect the weary traveler. I call but it just rings and rings. I try Priceline, but keep getting put in virtual queues; when they call back, the connection gets severed. This goes on for six hours.

Meanwhile, I park at a meter near the old Whitney for $10/2 hrs to see the temporary install of the Frick Collection. It’s here while the old mansion gets a facelift. I hate it. The old paintings are so out of context within this Brutalist monstrosity. In my mind they are in lived rooms. These are examples of some of the best European painting ever done, but in this non-space it feels almost like I have VR goggles on or I’m scrolling through them on a life-sized computer screen. The fact I’m so irritated by the hotel fiasco doesn’t help either.

I pay another $10 for parking in the West Village to visit Zack at his bar. Feels good to catch up and I meet a couple of his friends, but I’m so scattered I leave without leaving a tip. I return and do so after getting hung up on by Priceline a couple more times. I open my laptop outside a closed Pain Quotidien and book a room for the night from a different website.

I go in the lobby and ask the clerk where to park. He says there’s no parking. I say the site said ‘parking available’. He repeats there’s no parking, then clarifies that the garage up the block will validate 24 hours for $30. But he advises looking for street parking, as it’s free over the weekend.

I get up at 6am Sunday morning and drive up to the Met. My timed ticket to see the Alice Neel show is for 1pm, but I decide to try to get in early since I’m up.

Afterwards, I drive out of NYC via the George Washington Bridge and, after a couple wrong turns, head north on I-87 to meet a friend for lunch. The road is littered with dead deer. Makes me think the New Jersey motto could be ‘the Dead Deer on the Highway state’, but later, west on I-80 in Pennsylvania, I see New Jersey was a mere piker at the roadkill game. At one point, I look in my rearview just as the car behind me sends the dead doe I’d just veered around in the passing lane spinning like a puck into the median ditch.

It’s raining and gloomy when I get off the highway, still somewhere in Pennsylvania, and check into a Quality Inn. It costs about the same as my room in Manhattan, but the bathroom isn’t down the hall and there’s no need to search for parking.

Grateful to be back in my own bed the following night.