Letter

I made these drawings for a story set during the Iran-Iraq War in the 80s. I scrolled through pages and pages of wreckage and injury for reference photos.

They stop being specific after thirtieth bombed out street, the fiftieth bloody bandaged body. My mind goes to other wars in other times. I’ve never been to Abadan or seen the Karun River. The setting of these horrors is unknown to me.

So much of our current lives are this way. We’re bombarded with images that have no context. They may as well be backgrounds for video-games. They often are. The pain conveyed is blunted by becoming a speck among a million other specks.

I choose pictures set in the places mentioned in the story but because I’m not tied to the places like the writer is my mind wanders. I do what I can to illustrate his words but I rarely know whether I succeed.

Once his story leaves the immediate world of a child and his family amid a war zone, I’m completely lost. He moves on to a time-travel realm which I have no access to. I have little imagination on my best days. The day-to-day of another country in another decade is fantasy enough for me.

I know what crumbled buildings and injured people look like, more or less. But once characters start aging decades sentence to sentence I throw up my hands. I guess he had to wrap up his story some way and chose magic. Maybe the reality was best forgotten.

Lon’s a hat guy. It’s not because of the bald spot. Or, not only because of it. It’s his self-image. He sees himself as a doomed romantic hepcat. On open-mike nights at the Albatross he breaks out his harmonica and ukulele. “Innocent When You Dream” is his go-to. When he’s done singing he talks the nearest woman onto the dance floor and holds her too close as they turn to the music in the narrow space between the barstools and the stage. They don’t push him away but few stay for a second dance.

Lon once ran into Tom Waits. It was at Wise Fool’s Pub on the North Side. If he told me the year, I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. It’s become origin story and myth.

Lon was still drinking back then. It was late. Probably after Waits’ gig someplace in town. Lon sees him come in and battles with himself to keep cool. Doesn’t want to lose his shit in front of his hero. Asks the bartender to send Waits a shot. When it’s poured Waits looks Lon’s way, nods in appreciation, then waves him over. Waits says he’s off the hard stuff, sips a beer instead.

Lon gets a faraway look telling me this story. There’s no ending. But it’s as if he’s still there drinking with Waits as decades drag by.

Any guy in a fedora or porkpie hat and a vintage shirt is a Waits wannabe on first glance. He didn’t invent or patent the look but he’s the one I think of. Most women roll their eyes when they see one of them. It’s such a fallback affectation. It implies a longing for a white-bred yesterday. Not that every guy in throwback duds is a woman-hating racist, but that retro shit leaves a sour aftertaste.

In a neighborhood that used to be notorious for white hate, the Albatross is a beacon of welcome to all colors and creeds. But Lon can’t rid himself completely of the bigotry of his upbringing. His people battled for their place in the new land, sometimes stepping on others to do so. The fact they were treated badly when they got here doesn’t stop them from treating others the same way.

I love a lot of that old-timey shit too. Can’t help it. I just can’t commit to wearing period garb. Dressing like a noir extra is kind of funny. Lon doesn’t really pull it off. He doesn’t smoke and quit drinking years ago. It’s not period-correct if it doesn’t reek of Pall Malls and rye. So what does it mean to adopt some parts of the past and discard others?

I hear we’re past history now. The web makes everything from any time available at a keystroke. Is there a when anymore? If you can mix and match with no context do any of the parts retain any of their old meaning?

Waits always knew his look was a pose. He played with it, mutated and remixed it over the years. But like Jesus, his apostles spread his gospel to the letter. It became a lifestyle with its own strict rules. It doesn’t take much to start a religion. A new one’s hatched every other day. Lon’s saving grace is his inconsistency. He doesn’t have the discipline to be a true believer.

He just wants the dream to be real because his everyday is rarely enough.

Like most insomniacs he’s often half-asleep with his eyes wide open.

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p.s. Is a monster still a monster if it knows it’s a monster?

I didn’t grow up with Pinocchio. I had the Soviet knock-off, Buratino. I thought about him this week after seeing Matteo Garrone’s unsettling new Pinocchio movie. It reminded me of the illustrated children’s books I love. It was great to see a fairy tale with so little CGI. Pinocchio was a human boy in creepy wooden-looking makeup and prosthetics. All he had to do to become a “real” boy in the story is take off his disguise.

It was a good time to revisit the story of a boy whose nose grew from lying the same week we finally purged ourselves of one of the most prolific liars in human history. The newspapers ran out of Pinocchios daily tallying his untruths. I listened to the new administration’s press briefing in disbelief. I had forgotten that it used to be a way to convey information based in reality rather than a platform for spreading unfounded gossip and fomenting conflict.

I still have my childhood copy of Buratino. The binding is coming apart but as I flipped the pages bits of the Soviet version of the wooden boy’s story came back to me. There was something about a Golden Key, and the bad guy’s name was Karabas Barabas, and Buratino’s nose doesn’t grow, and he never becomes a real boy. The Soviet fairy tale was less moralizing, a lot less dark than the original. No Land of Toys where boys turn into donkeys for the future New Soviet Men and Women.

I looked up some of the earliest drawn versions of Collodi’s creation and was struck by how melancholy he looks. He was fashioned from a block of wood by an old man who needed a friend. That desire to slake loneliness is missing in the Soviet retelling. In both cases the story is one of striving to better oneself but the stakes feel a lot higher in the original.

I’d have to reread Buratino to see if the consequences of lying were as crucial a part of the point as they are in Pinocchio. It remains to be seen whether lying for a living will have any consequences for our former commander in chief either. If it does, he’ll always have a place to hide in Russia since that’s where so much of his gold is buried. But whether in Kamchatka or Palm Beach he’ll never ever become a real boy.