Letter

An email arrived from a man in Maine. He’d seen an article online about my pet portraits—likely this self-serving one, which is looking like my last meaningful contribution to the Chicago Reader. The man wrote about his rescued cat, Johnny Depp, who’d passed away some time back. It was only now that he could bring himself to look at photos. I wrote back with a price and heard nothing back for a few days.

It was no surprise. I’ve lost count of commissions and sales which sounded like done deals before evaporating into thin air. Buying art is mostly an emotional thing, so when the excitement of the moment passes, the rational mind wrests controls back, and what seemed like a great idea now seems foolish. I used to get mad about but don’t anymore. Now, until I get the check, cash, or notice of payment it’s just a pleasant thought to me. This is a mental health measure. Art is crazy-making enough without others getting my hopes up for no reason.

So when Johnny Depp’s old owner wrote back it was a nice surprise. He sent several shots of the cat, then some of the yard he wanted for a background, then that he’d like some forget-me-nots at Johnny’s feet. The next day brought several photos of puffy clouds in a blue sky. I wrote back I’d do my best and send him a photo before sending the painting out. He wrote back that he’d been looking at my website and that my work reminded him of his favorite artist, LeRoy Neiman, but also Edward Hopper. One out of two ain’t bad. I wrote him that Hopper’s one of my favorites.

A story popped up in the news about the non-feline Depp fighting in court with his ex-wife. Domestic violence, drug-abuse, the whole shebang. I wondered why my friend in Maine named his recently-departed friend after that clown. I have to believe from the way he wrote about this cat that he had a much better disposition than his namesake. Do pets ever have to fight in public for relevance? Do they fear becoming grotesque has-beens? I hope not.

I finished the portrait and sent a snapshot East. I got an ecstatic response a couple hours later. My friend in Maine wrote that he felt like he’d taken a chance which paid off. He invited me for a lobster dinner if I ever found myself in his state. I wrote back that one of my brothers has a place there, so I might take him up on his offer.

No need to tell him I don’t eat seafood, right?

This book came together quickly, though its gestation period was long. I’d been unsatisfied with my second cabbie book ever since it came out in 2014. The publisher turned out to be a crook and he hired an incompetent designer who butchered the book to such an extent it took three people to reconstruct the thing into some semblance of coherence. There was also the second book/sequel problem; it was difficult to explain why there should even be a second cabbie book. I was never able to successfully explain that it wasn’t a continuation of the first book.

Cut to the end of 2019. I’d just self-published Soviet Stamps and was thinking about what to write next. I wrote to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint the material in the first book in a new limited edition. They gave their okay and I got to work.

The virus lockdown provided the necessary block of isolated concentration to put this book together in a compressed amount of time. I wound up rewriting a lot of the old material. I also cut chunks that I just couldn’t fix. I’d never taken a writing class prior to working on my first book, so it was basically a crash course in the process. I integrated vignettes from the two books into as coherent a flow as I could, then added essays I wrote after I quit driving cab in 2012 and reprinted the zines which started the whole project twenty years ago. The result is my final word on cabdriving and a kind of obituary for a job that’s all but extinct in 2020. I drove to Michigan, packed the rental with forty boxes of books, then drove right back to Chicago. Carrying them into the new place was almost a pleasure compared to the three flight ordeal I survived for the last two books. I spent a chunk of the week signing and numbering. Get yours here.

My mother called to say her mother had died. Tsylia hadn’t recognized anyone in about a decade, so I’d said my own goodbye to her long ago, but with the plague my mother wouldn’t be able to travel to Israel to bury her, so I rented a car and drove to Boston the next morning. All I could offer was to be there. I don’t know if that did any good, but I tried. You only get one mother. Even if she was 95 and in deep dementia there’s no way around the deep loss now that she’s gone. My relationship with Tsylia was complicated. This is what I wrote about her in my book: 

When I was born, my grandmother was forty-five. She had badly wanted a third child just a few years before. It didn’t happen, so she transferred all that ardor and attention to her first grandchild. Whatever difficulties one has in their other familial relationships, a new child is a chance to start over. To present oneself anew. I think that’s what I represented to my grandmother: a chance to put her best self forward. I was always my grandmother’s favorite and rarely knew what to do with it. Love is rarely about equality, especially when it’s between grandmother and grandson. There’s just no way of reciprocating such gushing waves of feeling.

Tsylia worked as a physicist but her real occupation was connecting people and getting things that couldn’t be gotten in the Soviet Union’s controlled economy. She used the force of her personality, her charm, and her powers of persuasion to broker deals of various kinds in the black market. For many people in the Soviet Union, but particularly for the urban Jewish intelligentsia my grandmother belonged to, there was one’s official public life and then there was the covert private life where the real action was. Amongst her various dealings, she took a great interest in artists, often having whole collections of this or that forgotten or mistreated painter squirreled away in closets and under beds in her apartment. Perhaps the fact that so many paintings and drawings were around in my first years had some influence on what I ended up doing with my life.

My grandmother treated me to my first stick of gum as well as my first video game——both treats unheard of for the average Muscovite in their daily life. She made it seem that she could get just about any- thing I asked for. When we left the Soviet Union, much of her attention, love, and gifts stayed behind. There were letters and phone calls, but they paled in comparison to our connection back in Mos- cow. Many of the phone calls and letters consist- ed of her attempts to remind me of the way things used to be. But it’s hard to keep an emotional bond strong and stable at thousands of miles’ remove, especially with a seven-year-old boy who’s changing all the time.

All along I felt overwhelmed and slightly embarrassed by her unreserved love for me and rarely knew how to reciprocate. Over the crackly, long-distance connection between Brookline and Moscow, I felt like I was talking to a stranger from the past. I had to humor her if for no other reason than my mother’s guilt-giving glare as I held the receiver to my ear in our kitchen on Babcock Street. But with each passing year, I knew my grandmother less and less while her image of me remained as if frozen in amber. I would always be that little boy in Moscow whom she showered with gifts and attention. The one she took everywhere and told everything.

My brother, Boris, remembers my grandmother very differently. He was only four when we left, so he didn’t form the same bond with her back in Moscow. He got to know her in Jerusalem after my grandparents were finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the late ’80s. He describes an old woman prone to fantasy and exaggeration, having a hard time finding her place and a way to be useful in her new country. Everything my grandmother had been back in Moscow was gone once she got to Jerusalem. She was used to being the center of her social circle, of having people come to her for favors and to make introductions. But in Israel she was just another elderly, newly-arrived refugee. Her younger daughter, my aunt Galia, had been in the country for some fifteen years by the time my grandparents arrived, so she made most of the important decisions. Without enough to do, my grandmother fell into depression and stopped taking care of herself. Always prone to take comfort in food, she let her diabetes get out of control and eventually began to suffer from dementia.

I did a few portraits of her over the years. She would praise them in my presence but loathed them in private. She’d tell my mother she didn’t recognize herself in them, that they were pictures of an old lady. I could never see her the way she saw herself.

No one could have.