Letter

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.

I don’t remember much about when I first read Don DeLillo’s Underworld. At dinner the other day my friend Frank, who was my roommate back then, said I read it just before reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand. That puts it sometime in 2001. While rereading Underworld these past couple months I thought it was earlier. The book came out in 1997.

Pinning it down precisely isn’t that important. This year I’ve been trying to track changes over the decades of my life. A simple way to do that is to reread books that made an impact to see how they hit me now. Tropic of Cancer was a revelation and Suttree was a hoot but I really disappeared into Underworld. It was the perfect book for my project because one of its big themes is how the characters “talk” to all the versions of themselves as they age. It’s a fluid conversation which time-travels and crisscrosses over fifty years. That’s just the span I’ve been investigating myself.

The relationship between personal and world history is the main theme of the book. Tracking a baseball which may or may not have been Bobby Thomson’s shot heard ‘round the world is less about solving a mystery or proving authenticity than about the desperate need to have tangible evidence that our lives matter. As in fairy tales, every hand the ball passes through is transformed for good or ill. For its last owner, Nick Shay, the hero of this whole epic book, the ball is a symbol of failure. He was a Dodgers fan after all. Not long after that fateful home run his team left Brooklyn for LA. Nick leaves New York as well. Decades later he’s at a ballgame with coworkers and it’s revealed that he owns the famous ball. He can’t or won’t articulate why he bought it, nor how much he paid.

I moved a couple months into lockdown. Packing makes you reconsider all your possessions. I threw away a lot. It was a time to think about why I keep what I keep since it was literally about to weigh me down. Did I want to keep carrying it into in my new place? I didn’t throw away everything but I’ve become committed since May not to hold onto things once I’ve gotten what I need out of them.

This means mailing books out as soon as I’ve read or abandoned them. They’re of no use gathering dust on my shelves. I pick a friend who I think might get something out of it and bike to the post office.

I trashed over half of my artwork before moving but still have hundreds of drawings and paintings which need to be dealt with. This is another motif of Underworld—waste and the problem of how to dispose of it. One of DeLillo’s great images is a ghostly garbage barge which can’t find a port. No one knows what it’s carrying nor wants to find out. A pretty good snapshot of Western civilization.

I work from life so this year has narrowed the vista. Loitering in public was a sizable part of where work work was generated. Enforced isolation has made me burrow inward. I might have gotten to collage eventually by natural evolution but staying in has made it into a kind of refuge. I need new things in front of my eyes and old scraps from the past have provided that. It helps that my memory is so lousy. It all looks new to me—whether I made it, saw it, or read it.

That’s the thing about the rereading I’ve been doing this year. I wanted to learn something about how I’ve changed but I can barely summon anything from the past if it’s not manifested physically. Like a book or a drawing or a high school homework assignment. There’s a trace or ghost image of something connected to me in these things but for the most part I take them in as if for the first time. They must have left a mark but I can’t track it.

When I finished Underworld it was equal parts relief and regret. I’d scaled this mountain of a book and come down the other side. It was sometimes a slog but mostly entrancing. Reading it made everything else disappear but also revealed connections which made me put the doorstop of a book down and look this or that up. Other times it made me start a new picture. Now that I’m done with it where will I go?

Maybe next year will be about looking forward. We have so much to forget.

—I made a third collage book. Thanks to Rocktober for the nice review of my cab book. Thought Eureka was a mesmerizing movie.

My Russian is a fragmented work in progress. I read my first book in my mother tongue since childhood last year. I seek out Russian movies with no subtitles. But I miss whole chunks of dialogue and reference. I can’t spell. It’s not quite a vestigial tail but close.

My father often sends me links to Russian poetry. Poems are easier for me than stories or books. He can recite many from memory. I can’t recite anything in any language. Rote learning was on its way out by the time I got to school. I envy my father this sometimes.

Boris Ryzhy’s life looked like it was coming up aces but he killed himself at twenty-six. Ryzhy means red in Russian. Like redhead rather than traffic light or Communist or Republican. Tumblr is a pretty outmoded site but I keep my account for a couple Brutalist architecture blogs and a few devoted to Russian memes and Soviet ephemera. It had to be one of the latter which posted one of his poems. I went into the rabbithole pretty hard. For a week or two this summer it was all Boris Ryzhy all the time around here.

I took a book of his poems to read on the patio of a restaurant down the street. It’s a place I know well. Back when I was a bartender the staff came in to see me after closing their place every Sunday. But now I didn’t know every server and bartender. Half didn’t return after lockdown so they had to hire new ones.

I didn’t even know what Lizzy’s face looked like since she was always masked. She asked what I was reading. I told her about Ryzhy. We’d talk books every time I came in. She was working on a play but was stuck. I offered to give it a read.

We met at a coffeeshop a few days later and I got to see her face. She liked what I had to say and the conversation was easy. I asked her over to sit for a portrait.

She’d never sat for a drawing before and said she enjoyed it. We made plans for her to come back. She’d been couch-surfing after a recent breakup so pinning her down to a day and time was a problem. Everything in her life sounded up in the air.

I didn’t hear from her a few weeks. Then she wrote to say she was in the Bay Area. Maybe she’ll pick up a little Russian out there and we can talk about Ryzhy when she returns to Chicago.