Letter

I’m no fun. I drove three hundred miles to Cleveland for Tracy’s birthday party, then was one of the first to leave. Don’t get me wrong, when her boyfriend told me he was planning a surprise party for her fortieth, I said I’d be there, without hesitation. And I was happy to see her happy to see friends from different parts of her life all gathered together to celebrate. But after a couple hours, I was done.

Dinner was downtown at a pizza place. I got there an hour early, just in time to see Justin walk through the doors with Tracy’s Devo-themed cake. We sat around for about half an hour before people started trickling in. I recognized a couple women from Chicago. They’d been to the Skylark a month or two back, but it was their last stop after a long night of drinking, so they had no memory of meeting me. We all compared notes about when we met Tracy. Turns out I was her oldest Chicago friend there. But she doesn’t live in Chicago anymore.

Tracy’s sister and mom led her to our table around 7:15 and she looked genuinely shocked to see this group of people assembled all in one place. I wondered how I’d respond in her place. It will never happen, but I doubt I’d have enjoyed it. Who thought up surprise parties? And does anybody actually like being surprised? Seems like unnecessary, low-level emotional trauma to me. But what do I know?

After too much pizza and cake, somebody decided we should go to a bar. Downtown Cleveland right after a Cavs game is not a great place for ten aging people covered in tattoos to find a friendly drinking spot. We ended up at a sprawling generic Irish bar. I’d had a couple drinks at the pizza place so I didn’t want anymore. I watched the World Series on one of the place’s seven hundred-fifty flatscreens for a bit, then looked out the window where Cavs fans were battling sleet and wind in search of shelter. Behind me, a band was setting up to play.

Nobody in our group wanted to be trapped next to three middle-aged men belting out country and pop hits to a roomful of people paying them no mind. A few of the others did shots. I scanned the room and wondered why anyone would come to a place like this voluntarily. Tracy came over and asked if I wanted to go home. She knows me well and could tell I was done. Justin was done as well. He doesn’t drink, so hanging out at a bar is not his idea of a good time. I drove him to his truck, then followed him to their house, where I’d be crashing.

The next morning, a few of us met for brunch before hitting the road. Tracy and a few of the others had closed the Irish bar the night before, so they were a little wobbly. It was a smaller group and there was no din over which to battle to hear conversation, so it was a much better time, even if a few of us were a little worse for the wear.

I stopped after about an hour of driving west to use the bathroom at a rest stop and the Chicago women from the party were there. It was funny to see them out of context. We talked about the Irish bar and it turned out they hated it too. But they stayed and I left. Maybe they’re just more generous than me or thought that since they’d come all that way, they might as well get their money’s worth. But I was in bed by 11:30pm with a book and no regrets. I asked them what old people are supposed to do for fun and they had no good answer. Maybe they didn’t think of themselves as old. We said our goodbyes again and headed our separate ways.

I’m glad I was there for my friend but don’t know that I’ll ever learn how to enjoy a party. I never know who I’m supposed to pay attention to. The thing I know how to do best is leave. But the French Exit isn’t an option when you’re crashing in the host’s spare bedroom. It’s a conundrum. I’m rarely invited, so it’s not a big problem.

Still, it would be nice to have a good time for once.

Last year I had a show of CTA drawings at Stan Klein’s Firecat Projects. It was without doubt the best gallery experience I’ve ever had. Not that it had much competition. Most galleries I’ve dealt with have been run by incompetent narcissists in need of a therapeutic hobby. They don’t know much about art, much less how to sell it. I’m often no help either. I figure that if they’re taking a 50% cut, they should actually do some of the work. I’ve been proven wrong almost every time.

Firecat depends on sponsorship and donations to keep the doors open. Meaning that Stan doesn’t take a cut of the sales. It means the artist is largely responsible for making those sales, but that’s a lot easier to accept knowing you’ll make any profit. The place is obviously a labor of love. I doubt very much that Stan’s making much. His mission is to give artists a place to do their thing. It’s a rare situation in a business which is mostly about self-aggrandizement.

I texted Stan a couple months to ask if he had any slots open in 2020 and he told me to come over to talk it out. That night I had trouble going to sleep, thinking of what would be in the show. I got up and started looking through my flatfiles. Without trying very hard, I picked out a hundred portraits. Some were famous people done as illustrations, others portraits of friends. A lot of self-portraits too. I got a vision of Firecat hung floor to ceiling, salon-style with faces.

Stan was into it. We agreed on August 28th for the opening. Now I’ve got a show to put together. I expect to draw on work from as far back as thirty-five to forty years ago, but also hope to crank out a bunch of new ones. The total I have in mind is two hundred pictures. Each will be titled by first name only. That way they’ll all just be people, rather than known and unknown, dead or living. We’ll see how I do. If you wanna help by posing for a portrait, drop me a line.

Yvette wrote to ask about Rachel. Yvette lives in Texas and knows Rachel’s brother. He showed her some of Rachel’s artwork and Yvette was hooked. Now she wants to write something about it. That’s why she reached out to me. It caused me to think about someone I don’t like thinking about.

When her brother wrote me about her death seven years ago, I’d been out of touch with Rachel for a long time. I had to cut her out of my life. She’d caused a lot of damage. My connection to her had contributed to the end of two marriages, dozens of failed friendships, and more hurt feelings, confusion, and drama than I could account for. Now a bright-eyed new person has appeared to dredge up what I thought was dead and buried. And yet, I tried to answer all the questions Yvette asked. In answering I realized how little I know about someone I thought I knew too well.

I met Rachel through her then-boyfriend/ex-husband-to-be, Albert, at Jinx Coffee in 1998. They’d recently moved to Chicago from California and he was concerned that she didn’t have any friends in their new town. He knew I made art so Rachel and I would have something to talk about. She waited tables at Leo’s Lunchroom down the street, but apart from bumming cigarettes off me, she rarely said a word. Soon she was making covert dinner plans with me. I didn’t understand why the fact we were going for pasta at Club Lucky had to be kept secret from Albert, but soon learned that if Rachel wasn’t scheming or setting people in her life against each other, she didn’t feel alive. I played along because I realized it was the price of admission. It was fascinating watching her gears turn. She never stopped spinning fantasies.

She told coworkers at Leo’s she had cancer when she didn’t, told me and others her oldest brother was dead when he wasn’t. Even when caught in a bald-faced lie she rarely acknowledged it. She’d massage and massage her explanation until we either gave up or forgot about it. We knew she couldn’t live without her lies. I took any childhood story she told as a fairy tale, so it was a surprise when I eventually met her parents and one of her brothers; I’d just assumed she’d made them all up. Some of the things she said about them were even true.

Rachel and Albert broke up for a time and she moved in with me. She immediately took up with one of Albert’s coworkers at the coffee shop. Kevin was a blackout drunk. I remember carrying him up the stairs with my next door neighbor Liam after Kevin had passed out on his porch. I had to throw out a loveseat because he’d soaked it with his urine and Rachel had to get rubber sheets for her bed because he pissed himself so regularly. Then Rachel reconciled with Albert and they got married. I wasn’t invited.

We kept in touch though. She was a fascinating character. I watched her invent and reinvent herself so often. She knew she could count on me, but that meant that I inevitably got tangled up in her drama. I got married during this time and my ex-wife-to-be used my relationship with Rachel as one of her reasons for leaving me. Albert hated me. The day I drove a car full of my ex’s belongings down to Texas where she’d moved, Albert chased the car down the street threatening to beat me up. I just laughed and kept driving. When I crossed the Texas border it was raining sideways, so hard the wipers couldn’t keep up and the skies were black. Every rest stop was full of stopped vehicles. I found out the next day I was within a few miles of a tornado. 

Back in Chicago, Rachel started cooking for the Archdiocese of Chicago and we resumed our weird friendship. Through the church, she met an old rich man who became fixated on her. He’d eventually moved her into his downtown condo. But she was never happy with just one man’s attention. She posed for me one afternoon and on a break from working we started messing around. If her roommate hadn’t walked in, who knows what might’ve been, but afterwords Rachel got shy and said it had been a mistake. We never finished the painting, but another older man bought it as is for $500 in order to curry favor with her. i was happy to be rid of it and to take his money.

Rachel always drank like a fish. Red wine was her poison and she’d drink bottles, rarely eating much aside from dry toast or popcorn. I’d insist we go out for dinner because that was the only way she’d eat properly. Eventually, her doctors told her she was on the brink of liver failure. Eventually she stopped working, letting the old men take care of her. Then she moved back to California. But by then I’d stopped answering her phone calls. My mother called her an emotional vampire, and maybe that’s what she was.

So, Yvette’s questions stirred up all kinds of thoughts. There was music that I’d reclaimed as my own in the years after my involvement with Rachel ended. I could listen to Cat Power, Smog, and Silver Jews, and not immediately remember her playing them on repeat behind a closed bedroom door. Now when I put one of them on, she’s there again. I tell Yvette that I didn’t care much for Rachel’s art. It was always a sore point for her. She knew I didn’t like her dramatic birds beneath cracking varnish or her tormented self-portraits. I found them as phony as so many of her stories.

But Yvette is convinced Rachel’s art is worth celebrating. She’s coming to Chicago this weekend to try to dig up some research. I’ll meet her and show her some of the places Rachel lived and worked. In a recent email, Yvette tells me Rachel’s brother is no longer cooperating with her. Seems his new fiancée is uncomfortable with their friendship. So Rachel’s legacy of ruining relationships survives her. I doubt Yvette will come up with enough for a substantive biographical document. Most of the people who knew Rachel are long gone, the places she worked are changed or no longer exist.

Maybe Yvette can write a fairy tale about a scary-thin girl with long blond hair who liked to tell tall tales.

That would be a fitting tribute.