Letter

I hadn’t gotten on a CTA bus or train from the middle of March to the beginning of July. Being stuck inside a public vehicle didn’t seem like a good idea. Fortunately, I do most work at home alone. I can walk or ride a bike almost anywhere I need to go. 

I got used to the new routine easily, though I became a lot more aware of the weather. Biking in a deluge or merciless heat is no picnic. Overall though, it was as if motorized vehicles were no longer part of my reality. But I have a stack of framed drawings which prove that riding buses and trains used to be a big part of my life.

The sixty or seventy marker drawings I did on the CTA a couple years ago have since become a block of pictures which I think of sometimes as a starting point for something. Using markers for the first time since I was a kid has changed the way I paint, but those drawings themselves also hint at other possibilities.

Like cab drawings and music sketches, the CTA pictures seem to want to be a book. So I made this first attempt at it. Drawings and very short stories. It’s a zine in an edition of fourteen. It was supposed to be twenty but I fucked up some pages; getting my brain to keep page sequences consistent is a challenge.

—Read an excerpt from All Hack and about some of the worst Chicago movies I ever saw .

—Marc Orleans took his own life over a month ago but I only found out a couple days ago. Marc was a few years ahead of me in art school. He was always covered in paint and looked perpetually on the verge of meltdown. With his big nose and red hair he bore a resemblance to the most famous tormented painter of all. A few of us called him Van Gogh behind his back. I ran into him in Boston a few years later. He’d quit painting after what he said was a nervous breakdown. He was now concentrating on music. He’d go on to play across many genres and to collaborate with many, many great players. Yet every time I ran into him he’d get an apologetic look, as if I reminded him of his failure to stick with art. 

After I found out about his death I went into a rabbithole of online tributes. I was happy to read how appreciated and admired he was, no matter what he thought of himself. For some of us it’s not so easy to live with ourselves. He hung on as long as he could. From what I read in his loved ones’ accounts the isolation of the current plague must have gotten to him.

We weren’t close but I always thought of Marc as a peer to look up to in his utter commitment to his art. I’ll miss wondering what he’s obsessed with from moment to moment.

Stan called a few weeks ago and said painting and remodeling on his new gallery space was done early. He didn’t want the room to sit empty so we put up my show early. It’s the first show since he was forced to move because of a greedy, unreasonable landlord who wanted to double his rent in the middle of a plague. Starting early will help us gauge what hosting an art show means at this point. 

Drawing a face is one of the first things a child does. They draw their mother, their father, their brothers, their sisters, their friends. Some find a mirror and try to draw themselves.

I’ve been drawing faces a long time. This show gathers drawings and paintings from the last four decades of my life. Whether done from observation, imagination, memory, or photograph, each is a reckoning with a person’s face—the aspect which sets one apart from every other person, yet also reminds the viewer, to a greater or lesser extent, of everyone else they’ve ever seen. It’s the most particular and universal image we have.

—A part of my painting graces the cover of this new cabbie book.

At the end of my block, where my street meets Archer Avenue, sits a boarded-up shack. It used to be Hamburger Heaven Express until a grease fire shuttered it last year, or was it the year before? Time, as we all know, has gone haywire in the last four months. In any case, I used to stop by for a cheeseburger and onion rings—which were a lot better than they needed to be for a place open all night—back when I drove cab. I never used the drive-thru window awkwardly positioned in such a way that most vehicles would need to back in to use it. If I had, I’d miss the banter between the white counter woman and Latino cook. She was older, with homemade tattoos and a few missing teeth. Very friendly, the kind to call you sweetheart. But after taking my order she’d holler it out as if the cook was miles rather than inches away. He’d mutter something in response, then I’d hear the meat hit the flattop. I’d take my food and eat it in the lot, leaning against the back bumper of the cab.

A few weeks after the plywood boards went up, somebody spray-painted CLOSED DO TO FIRE on both the Archer and Lock sides of the building. It’s still there. I pass by nearly every day and always think the message describes our current situation well, bad grammar and all. If anything, the lack of literacy feels just right to the moment.

I’ve been reading a pretty amazing book called The Yellow House. It’s a lot about the author looking back to her younger self, which, of course made me think back to my own. One night after putting the book down but unable to fall asleep I typed the name of a girl I went on a summer art trip to France with in 1988 into a search engine. A few minutes later I was looking at the fifty-year-old version of her smiling in a spotless kitchen somewhere in Georgia. She has a business offering a Southern version of Martha Stewart/Marie Kondo living-your-best-life coaching services. She’s married. There are likely children. But I recognized the smile of the girl I had a crush on thirty-two years ago. I find a sketchbook from that trip and scan in a drawing of her asleep on the bus on the shoulder of the guy she chose to be her boyfriend for those two weeks. I think we exchanged some letters after, then lost touch.

I debated sending the email a minute or two, but it was the middle of the night when all kinds of nonsense feels like a good idea, so I sent it. She wrote back the next day. It was good that she remembered me but I didn’t write back. What would I even say?