Letter

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.

One of the artists Osna——my high school art teacher——introduced me to was Alice Neel. I count her as the best portrait painter of the 20th century. When I read that the Met was putting up a retrospective, I knew I couldn’t miss it.

When I told people about the show, I was surprised how few had heard of Neel. Not even the fact that Susan Sarandon played her in a movie rang many bells. This was hardly the first time something I hold dear turns out to be unknown or forgotten, but I’m never not surprised. It’s like pointing out the Eiffel Tower and getting blank stares. Then I say she was the best portrait painter of the 20th century and they nod, humoring me, like you do with a crazy person, hoping he gets whayever he’s hung up on out of his system quickly.

I don’t care though. I’ll stick to my guns. Granted, the 20th century wasn’t a banner one for portraiture, but I can think of few painters who came close to Neel. Lucien Freud, maybe, but Neel had more range and her subjects rarely look half-dead from exhaustion. Matisse made some great ones, but it wasn’t his strongsuit. All the true greats were in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Photography likely usurped the importance of the painted portrait. What I love about Neel’s sitters is that they look like photography never existed. They’re not frozen in time. They look like they’re about to get up and walk out into the street.

I wake up super early Sunday morning in New York City, so I decide to go to the Met early. I eat breakfast, then sit on a park bench just north of the museum on 5th Avenue and read a book about skateboarding, sneaking occasional looks at the passing dogs, as well as a few of the humans tethered to them. This is the last full day of my trip east and I can’t imagine a better way to cap it.

Around 9:30, I drift toward the entrance where about a dozen people are milling about. I take a place behind a nervous-seeming older woman and sip the last of my coffee, then put my mask back on, which seems to make her less flitty. The guy behind me insists I move six inches closer to the woman to allow him the precise social distance he requires.

The central part of the staircase is chained off as workers finish hosing down the steps. By 9:45, the line stretches to the northern tip of the building. It’s one of the rare cases where being pathologically early breaks in my favor.

Despite the self-evident nature of queues, which everyone should now be extra-familiar with, many new arrivals approach the guards to ask whether the line is for ticket-holders or for members or, what is it for anyway? There will always be a segment of our species that fervently believes there’s a special entrance designated only for them. That the rest of us are either not here for the same thing as they are, or are less deserving, or just not in the know.

I break into a trot after my ticket is scanned and find the Neel show in minutes. I’m only the second or third one into its galleries aside from the guards. I spend the next hour going back and forth, from start to finish, then back again. I spend a few minutes doodling a couple of her paintings in the one room with a bench. These sketches are just to make myself stop and look closer, rather than an end in themselves.

There are multiple instances during this hour when I’m on the verge of tears. That rarely happens to me looking at art. But most of the art I see isn’t by Alice Neel.

At some point a woman asks to take my picture as I’m sketching. She promises not to include my face, to which I say that she can’t see it anyways, as we’re all masked. She laughs, then takes her picture and leaves. I follow a minute later. I look for her for a few seconds, but she’s indistinguishable from anyone else in what is now a substantial crowd. It is the polar opposite of the people in the paintings on the walls. They seem many more times alive than most of the people looking at them.

As I leave the show, I’m doubly glad to’ve come early, as the line to get in now stretches through several other rooms. I’m sure it will remain at capacity, so I decide not to try to come back after abreak, as I’d intended. I’ve seen plenty enough to know this is one of the best art shows I’ve ever seen. I walk out into the sunshine and drive west.

p.s. Looks like my plans to take over the NYC pet portrait market have hit a snag…but I’ll still be happy to oblige, should you have the need.

I’ve shit on Boston most of my life. The reasons are many and mostly tiresome from having been repeated so often. Suffice it to say that I’m not a fan. Yet, because my parents live there, I keep having to return.

Before leaving for my current drive east, I found these drawings. They date from the mid-90s, when I was first a cab driver. I made them in the Logan Airport taxi lot, while waiting to be dispatched to the terminals. Nearly fifteen years later, I would make a similar, but more extensive series of drawings and paintings at the two airports in Chicago.

I’m sitting in one of my brothers’ old rooms, trying to come up with something nice to say about this town. Tomorrrow I will have coffee with my high school art teacher. I haven’t seen her in nearly thirty years. Another former student contacted me about a scholarship being set up in Osna’s name at my high school. They want a donation. I keep going back and forth about it, because I hated might time at that school so much, yet this one teacher was one of its few saving graces.

I make up my mind to make the donation, but realize that I left my checkbook in Chicago. It’s due in a couple days and is only accepted by mail. I go to the post office for a money order and watch the clerk, who has a tremor, struggle inputting the amount into the form on her screen. She’s new, but not young. The guy in line ahead of me is off to the side, waiting for her more experienced colleague to return, to handle the registration of a certified letter. I make the process even lengthier by also requesting a stamp. She freezes before recovering and asking if she can take my payment for the money order first. I toy with hand-delivering my donation to the school, which is a couple blocks away, but decide I don’t want to revisit the place.

On the drive back to my parents’, the car ahead drifts left before making a sudden right turn into a driveway. No signal or warning of any kind. It was a selfish, mean-spirited maneuver. It brought a flood of related memories, reminding me of where I am.