Letter

When I visit my parents in Brookline I always spend some time in the basement. Like all good parents they keep their children’s old crap with the thought that those children might want it some day. It took decades but I’ve now become the kid that wants to root through his past.

On my last visit I came upon an envelope marked Kickoff Receipts. I didn’t recognize the handwriting—it doesn’t belong to my father, my mother, or myself. But the contents were familiar. They were loose pages from a small spiral-bound sketchbook I kept from around 1993 to 1996. Much of my work prior to late 2003 when I launched my website is spottily documented and archived. I didn’t photograph two-thirds of what I made and never kept a list of buyers, so a lot of it is hard to trace.

Finding these pages was a nice surprise and sparked some memories.

I drew this on a Greyhound bus ride from Boston to Los Angeles in 1994. The bus had to’ve been stopped because I don’t have enough visual recall to’ve done this from memory.

A self portrait done in the darkened window on the same trip. Made myself a dead ringer for Michael Myers from Halloween. I was really into this all-over cross-hatching thing. Probably trying for the effect Seurat got in his drawings. A world made of hairy marks with forms barely visible in the murk.

One of the frustrations for a sketcher on a bus or plane is that you’re stuck with the backs of people’s heads for the most part. The guys with bald spots are a welcome respite from all that boring hair. Also, drawing bus and plane seats is sleep-inducing. Not necessarily a bad thing if you happen to be on a three-day transcontinental ride.

Sleepers make great models. This old man must’ve been motionless for miles.

Anyone who’s spent time on Greyhounds will be familiar with the Mennonites and Amish. I wonder why having someone else drive them in a motorized vehicle is kosher, whereas personal cars are not. What section of the bible legislates such particulars? They’re ahead of the curve in a way. The world would be better off if more of us took public transportation.

This is the last of the bus drawings. There are four more in a frame in my parents’ hallway. Until finding the Kickoff envelope I thought that they were the only ones which survived. Three days to LA, then three days back. It was quite a trip.

I didn’t have a regular coffeeshop/third place/hangout until I moved back to Chicago in 1997 and started logging regular time at Urbus Orbis and the Rainbo Club. But this is definitely a coffeeshop drawing. Maybe the Other Side Cafe on Newbury Street in Boston. I had an art show. First time I had a painting stolen off the wall. It was flattering.

A Greyhound bus station is a great place to get depressed about the state of society. You can’t help looking like a displaced person there. Someone not wanted where you came from with uncertain prospects for a destination. But purgatory places are perfect for someone with a sketchbook and hours to kill.

This has to be Fenway Park, looking over the Green Monster. I used to go pretty regularly. Back then the Red Sox were frustrated losers. Once they won in 2004 they released whatever sentimental hold they had on me.

A man resting his elbows on the lip of an opened hood of a late-80s/early-90s Chevy Caprice places this sketch at the Checker Taxi Garage on St. Botolph Street in Boston. No way the guy who drew this could imagine driving cab twelve years or writing books about it. I’d only learned to drive a year or two earlier.

Could be the South Street Diner. If so, it was as close to a regular dinner spot as I had as a Boston hack. I was hung up on a waitress there and everything. Just like a generic country song. Can’t even remember her name now.

This was the door separating the box office from the concession stand at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. I worked there in high school, then here and there afterwards. But this isn’t the “real” box office which faced Harvard Street. The theater was saved by a non-profit foundation a year or two into my tenure. One of the costs of salvation was that the original entrance became an Au Bon Pain and the holdovers from the old days like me never missed an opportunity to bitch about it.

This might’ve been the porch of a group house on Farrington Ave in Allston. One of those decrepit post-college/pre-grownup life places where aspiring artsy types and burnouts fashion makeshift utopias which quickly devolve to way stations for bad behavior and disillusionment. I didn’t live there but my best friend did. It was the center for what passed for my social life for a few years.

Because of the violin player I’m tempted to guess this is from the Dirty Three/Pavement/Come triple-bill in Providence in 1995 or 1996 or so. But I’m not sure. Proof in any case that I used drawing to listen better even twenty-five years ago.

These pages are both familiar and foreign. I see a lot I still do in them, but also a lot I’ve moved away from. They’re a valuable time-capsule to consult as I keep going.

Don Quixote’s in the air. It started with Cervantes, the old man at the polling place Tuesday and has hovered around the edges ever since. The layer upon layer of self-delusion in news accounts of the monster’s reaction to the results of the election have more than a whiff of the old knight-errant’s spirit. It’s clear that he will hold onto whatever shred of hope he can before being dragged from office. The difference is that there isn’t even a pretense of nobility.

A couple days after Election Day I drop off Rae and Khadi’s portraits. It turns out Don Quixote is Rae’s favorite book. She wants to get a tattoo of her hero and I volunteer to make a design. There are many illustrations already but she prefers something new. I mention Terry Gilliam’s star-crossed and much-delayed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and it turns out she’s a fan like I am. I use stills from it for reference. 

I download the audiobook of Quixote for my drive east. I doubt I’ve read the entire thing but whatever parts I have was long ago. Probably read to me by my father or mother at bedtime. So maybe it’s appropriate that this is the soundtrack for my visit with them now. I may not have the patience for the endless throat-clearing and embellishment of Cervantes on my own time, but trapped in the non-place of a car speeding down toll road after toll road his long-windedness is entirely appropriate. My adventure is far less fanciful but no less well-meaning. 

Listening on as the daylight disappears past the hills somewhere in New York I wonder whether Quixote is supposed to be sympathetic. Are we to identify with him because few people’s lives approach their dreams? He torments everyone who cares about him, never listens to anyone who tries to reason with him, and insists on doing it his way when everything in the world screams for him to do the opposite. He’s the butt of most jokes yet he rarely realizes it and plows on undaunted. Is he just a selfish asshole? 

The image of the lone man on the horse is burned so deep into the collective psyche of this country. No amount of evidence to the contrary can convince a sizable chunk of the population that the man on the horse may not be the hero. Quixote keeps trying to make his far-flung fantasies into reality. It’s not surprising given the last few years that people believe similarly that whatever words escape their mouths become fact by virtue of their wishing them to be so. I turn the audiobook off when I’m within a few miles of my parents’ house. I try to remember what dreams I had when I was growing up. Nothing specific comes to mind. I never had much imagination. It’s why I never got very far in this world. I’ll listen to the book some more on my drive back to Chicago. Maybe I’ll learn something.

p.s. I illustrated a story from Ghana.

The day before the election I bike down to the museum. I want to try for about the thousandth time to understand Joseph Cornell’s boxes. I try, lingering in the darkened gallery where they’re displayed in a vitrine which, unfortunately, reflects so much of the room that the art within is hopelessly half-obscured in a kind of hall of mirrors. It doesn’t help me to understand these impregnable little mystery objects at all. Besides, the day before this election is no time to learn something new. I give up and go a few rooms away to perhaps my favorite painting in the whole museum.

I sit by Matisse’s Woman before an Aquarium and stare into the distance like she does.

The alarm rings a little past 4am the next morning. I put on some clothes in the dark, get on the bike and peddle to Dunkin’ Donuts. I walk the bike east on 31st, eating a greasy sausage/egg croissant and sipping coffee. I turn north on Parnell and park the bike by the south entrance of Robert Healy Elementary School. There’s no one around. I walk north to the next door and see a few young people waiting there. No one acknowledges the others’ presence. A few minutes later a security guard pokes her head out and tells us to walk to the north entrance in the parking lot. We’re joined there by a couple women and an older man. The guard opens the door to the gym and we file in.

The following hour and a half is free-for-all chaos. It is clear that none of us has set a polling place up for an election before. The online training we all presumably passed in order to do this work is of little use with no practical experience and no one in charge. The coordinator for the 18th Precinct is a Chinese woman with marginal English and a wheedling manner which inspires little confidence. She spends a lot of time studying her heavily marked up handbook, then running over to one or another of us with pleading, hectoring requests/demands. In the fifteen hours I spend in the same room with her I’m never sure whether she’s asking or telling.

At 6:30am—half an hour late—we open the doors to voters. There aren’t many but they’re not pleased with us. I overhear several of my fellow workers explain that we’ve never done any of this before, pleading for patience. By and by roles among the five or six of us—there are two precincts sharing this gym and it’s never entirely clear where a few of the younger kids are actually assigned—become more or less defined. I station myself by the ballot box to help voters feed their ballots in, give them an I VOTED sticker, and thank them for voting. In the training it is suggested that election judges learn each of the work stations and periodically switch jobs, but in practice, once we get the hang of one task no one is eager to change it up.

About an hour in the screen on the ballot box scanner flashes an error message and no longer accepts ballots. The coordinator calls tech support but in the meantime I’m forced to tell voters to put their ballots in a slot in the side of the supply cabinet. Every third or fourth person gives me a suspicious look but I assure them their vote will be counted. An obese woman arrives to check on the malfunction but leaves a few minutes later, saying our scanner has to be replaced. Another even more overweight woman comes an hour later, messes around with the chords and connections and announces the scanner operational. After she leaves, per handbook instructions, I ask a Republican judge—a Chinese high-schooler—to help me feed in the ballots which have piled up in the supply cabinet. It feels like a sloppy, borderline wrong procedure. Several ballots are rejected for overvoting or ambiguous marks but we can’t fix them as the voters are long gone. The coordinator puts in another call to higher ups but this issue isn’t addressed again until just before 7pm when we’re closing shop.

Throughout the day my sense of time and reality warp and slow. It’s that purgatory bureaucratic feeling. A lot of clock-watching and daydreaming. When you’re trapped in a room the mind goes to all the places you’d rather be, all the things you’d rather do if you didn’t have to be here. The truth is that if I wasn’t in this gym at Healy Elementary I wouldn’t be doing anything worthwhile. One of the reasons I signed up to be an election judge, aside from wanting to have a front-row seat to the messy process of American-style democracy, is that I wanted to be occupied with a task on a day I knew would be fraught and likely unproductive otherwise. The creeping dread of the past year leading up to this day demanded some higher level of participation. This is the best thing I could think to do.

In the fourteen hours we’re open less than two hundred peopIe cast ballots. The vast majority of the electorate has already voted. This antiquated in-person ritual feels completely out of touch with contemporary life, especially in the middle of a plague. It’s absurd that we still do it this way. Still, there is a sense of urgency and mission among those who I talk to. Many are voting for their very first time. Not just eighteen year olds but also middle- and pension-aged citizens. That’s encouraging. But I can’t help but notice that a few people have voted for the monster as they feed their sheets into the machine. It’s depressing but I thank them for voting anyway and don’t let on what I think of them.

The oldest member of our group is an elderly Hispanic man named Cervantes. After helping set up the portable voting booths he’s relegated to sitting by the door to hand out I VOTED stickers. Throughout the day he periodically approaches me and says some words, half of which I don’t catch. I nod because I can tell he just wants a moment of communion or commiseration. Then he stands silently for a few seconds before moving on to someone else and repeating the ritual. In the non-time of this day it feels like this and many other mostly pointless gestures are repeated dozens of times. I can’t help think of the old man’s namesake who wrote about a fool who wanted to be a hero. Is that all of us in this room? In this country? 

At closing time I concentrate on disassembling the ballot scanner and transmitting the votes to be tabulated via wireless. The coordinator keeps running up and saying things, I do my best not to be rude, but tell her to go away so I can get this one job done. Sometime early in the day an election worker asked for a volunteer to deliver the completed ballots and gear to a central drop-off point and, unthinkingly, I raised my hand. It was good for an extra $25. Now a rolling case and knapsack filled with forms, memory cards, etc which we’ve done our best to pack is in my possession. We disperse with barely a goodbye. It’s been a long day and I didn’t learn anyone’s name. Because we’re all masked I haven’t seen most of their faces and wouldn’t recognize them on the street.

One coworker sees me wheeling the travel cases toward my bike and asks how far I have to take them. It’s about five blocks away. That’s not so far, she decides, gets in her car and drives away. I pull the case behind me awkwardly while walking the bike, then fasten the handle to the back rack and slowly ride south. The long line of waiting pollworkers see me pull up and laughs and applauds. I must make a funny sight with my trailer hitched cargo. I take my place at the end of the queue. It’s nearly 10pm when I’m free to go home.

I buy a breaded steak sandwich and onion rings and shovel them in my mouth at the kitchen table while refreshing the New York Times election page. It doesn’t look good. I throw away the food half-eaten and go to sleep. I wake three times throughout the night and open the laptop to look, then fall back asleep. In the morning things look slightly better but there won’t be a definitive result for awhile. I’ve voted in every election since I was eighteen but this is the first I’ve felt part of. I have no idea if what I did served any purpose or whether it was an elaborate distraction designed to occupy people needing tasks to do while actual decisions are made elsewhere.

I probably will never do it again but I’m glad to say I’ve now seen how it works.

p.s. I reviewed Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga.