Letter

Chicago ills, indeed.

An old photo of an imposing long-gone building caught my eye while scrolling some site the other day. I look closer whenever Chicago is mentioned. It was the caption that stopped me cold: The Chicago Home for the Friendless. What could that be? I looked it up and it turned out to be a social services organization for women and children. They ran orphanages and the like from the mid-19th well into the 20th century. Then I stopped reading because this wasn’t what I imagined when I read the caption under the old photo.

I looked at the photo of the building and saw empty corridors. Many rooms uninhabited. The few residents rarely meeting, spending their days in silence, alone. I pictured my own room in there, maybe on one of the upper floors so I could have a good view out the window.

What passes for friendship these days is largely mediated. This last year’s plague has exacerbated our reliance on connection through screens and other technology rather than face to face. I’ve avoided it more than most. I’m deeply disturbed by the video-talk services. Using them I feel further removed from the person on the other end than if I was just thinking about them.

I quit social media six years ago but it’s impossible to avoid all contact with it no matter how hard I try. My ears burn when someone mentions me like anyone else’s do.

The other day I delivered a dog portrait to Beverly. I’d assumed the woman who ordered the portrait knew somebody from my time in that neighborhood but it turned out she heard my name on Instagram. She said Marc Maron mentioned me. I raced home and opened an Instagram account so I could see what she was talking about.

About twelve minutes into the video Maron picks up my music book, calls me some kind of genius, and puts it in a small pile of things to bring home. Then he talks about the painting I’d sent him months ago. Says he needs to get it framed. It’s of his old garage where he used to record his podcast. I’ve been a faithful listener for years. Maron is sort of the Johnny Carson of today. His interviews have been constant companions. They introduce me to people I’ve never heard of and give new insight to ones I know.

I scrolled through Maron’s Instagram timeline and found where he’d posted the painting. There were thousands of likes and many many comments. I read all of them. Then I searched for other people I knew had Instagram accounts. I started feeling that old itchiness. I logged off, then logged back on minutes later. I was dazed. Unable to concentrate on my work. I deleted the account and gradually came down off the false high. The video was jarring. But then I wrote an email to thank him, got no response, and things are back to normal.

You can’t expect friendship from the faces on the screen. I’m fine with that. I have this amazing view out the window of my haunted house and that’s all I need.

p.s. I made seven pictures for this interesting project. They pair an artist and writer and give each two hours a day over seven days to produce something. We made this awhile ago, sometime in the summer, I think. It was a unique challenge to come up with a quick response under strict time constraints with little forethought aside from each previous page.

I’ve used a portable Smith-Corona from the 50s since the late 90s. I bought it at a store way west on Fullerton Avenue. It was full of electric typewriters which I had no interest in. Apparently many city institutions were still using them then. The store is long gone.

The typewriter wasn’t entirely an affectation. I didn’t own a computer but wanted to write something about my adventures driving a taxi in Boston. I made ink drawings from memory, then cut-and-pasted sentences, paragraphs, sometimes single words, underneath. It was a laborious, often frustrating process. But I didn’t know any better. I’d never taken a writing class, knew nothing about how it was done aside from schoolwork or my own reading.

I’m into my third decade with this old machine now. It’s been a faithful and trusted tool. When I designed my website seventeen years ago I used the Smith-Corona for all the text. I scanned typed pages, then made hotspots for hyperlinks. I do it the same way to this day. A friend asked recently what platform I use for my site. I had to tell her the “platform” is just a bunch of html pages my ex-wife made that I’ve been copying and readjusting for nearly twenty years. My method is nearly as outmoded as a manual typewriter at this point.

But the Smith-Corona retains its attraction and maintains a few mysteries. One is why there is no exclamation point key. There’s a question mark but no exclamation point. Maybe the makers didn’t want its users to get over-excited. I typed a question about this into a search engine just now and learned how to fake it: Type an apostrophe, do a backspace, then type a period. Why I’ve never bothered to look into it before will give you some clue into the strange workings of my psyche.

I typed out the first forty pages of my book in progress. I’m such a poor typist that it took almost two weeks. But slowing down the rereading process is the whole point. The old typewriter keeps giving and giving.

Now I’ve bought another Smith-Corona. It’s from the 70s and has a Cyrillic keyboard. The idea is to type out Russian poems in order to improve my comprehension and spelling. Above is my first effort. It’s a New Year’s Eve poem by Boris Ryzhy from 1995.

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Happy New Year!

I’ve had a fucked-up thought lodged in my head: This is the best year of my life.

It didn’t fade with the lockdown or the onslaught of daily tragedy delivered via news, email, phone, and text. If anything, the worse it got out there, the better it became in here. I’ve tried to beat back the feeling, reason and plead with it, point to the litany of horror that 2020 has been. But the heart knows what the heart knows.

The year began with a great weight lifted: Soviet Stamps came out. I’d been nursing it like a sickly infant for five years. Now it was well enough to hobble away under its own power. I drove to New York from my parents’ house after New Years’ and taped a talk about the book for the Virtual Memories Show.

Now the table was clear and I could work on my bar book and get ready for my portrait show in August. I had a move coming up as well. Things were looking good.

Then the lockdown came and I started packing. I lived in my old place over five years so there was a lot to do. It was surprising how quickly I adjusted to the new restrictions. In between trips to the dumpster I worked on the last paintings I’d make on Lituanica and texted friends to see how they were coping. The news wasn’t good. All my musician friends especially were losing their minds. I sympathized the best I could, then went back to what I was doing.

With everything ready to go but still a month’s wait till the movers came I decided to fill the time by pushing up a project I’d planned for 2021. I reedited, rewrote, and redesigned my two cab books into one new volume. While doing the often tedious tasks involved in book-making everything in the outside world disappeared.

I moved in May and hope never to leave this place. After a month of setting things up I started making collages. I hadn’t made one since high school but could see myself making them for years to come. It’s rearranged my head about what it is I do and how I do it. And it came as a complete surprise.

What friends, family, and news reports concentrated on in this plague time was how much everyone missed human contact. I wasn’t as completely isolated as some. I saw a couple friends from time to time but I didn’t miss crowds or casual contact with strangers at all. As Travis Bickle used to say, “Loneliness has followed me my whole life.” It’s an old and trusted friend. Left to my devices I was able to concentrate fully on my work. Since I couldn’t draw people in meatspace I started drawing them off my TV screen.

I don’t know what success would look like. If I had a retrospective at the Art Institute while winning the National Book Award, I’d figure out a way not to enjoy or appreciate it. But I made my best work this year and sold more of it than ever before. Would that have happened if it had been a “normal” year? Who knows?

I’m putting the finishing touches on the bar book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I may quit book-writing after it’s published. Who knows what comes next?

My mother likes to repeat the story of my being born with a hangnail. I take that to mean that there’s always something irritating, burrowing into me. Always something not quite right. In high school I let a hangnail get so infected it nearly gangrened. I still get them but they last only a few days. I can dig them out so they stop hurting me now. I never had fewer than the past year. This is as happy-go-likely as I will ever get.

My mother lost both her parents this year. Friends got sick, lost their jobs, their minds. I just kept working. The pain, suffering, and loss must be baked into some of what I’ve made this year but none of the misfortune paralyzed or slowed me. I didn’t ignore or block out the misery but neither was I engulfed by it. I don’t know how to explain it. Selfishness, myopia, monomania. Maybe this is just how I am.

Is my good year at the expense of others’ pain and suffering? That’s magical, grandiose thinking. We each bring the meaning with us; the larger world doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our personal concerns. The fact everything came together for me the same time the world was falling apart is just a cosmic joke. A coincidence with no deeper significance. I turned fifty this year, an age when many painters historically hit their stride. Plague or no plague there’s an arc to an artist’s career. I crested in the middle of a universal freefall.

Next year, when your life is on the upswing, maybe we’ll pass one another somewhere. Hopefully, we’re both maskless. I’ll be the one going downhill as you ascend. Don’t gloat. Try to say a comforting word if you can. I’ve tried to do that throughout this year. It’s all we can do.