Letter

Carey sends message after message rapid-fire. He was reticent at first. But I gained his trust, so the flood gates have opened. Text exchanges, email, articles, along with his own caustic commentaries come at me all day. It’s a little much, but I’m flattered my hero is trusting me with his story.

It started on Twitter. Carey popped up there out of the blue. No one had heard much out of him for many years. Just rumors. That he’d lost his mind. Got cancer. Become a hermit. To me, he was a legend. A genius of music and movies. But, as with most legends, he was basically dead. Not of this world. Certainly not in any way part of my reality as a person. But now, here he is on Twitter. I hit the ‘follow’ button.

He spends most of his time on the platform making jokes. Occasional political commentary. A lot of attention paid to basketball scores. Funny routines, but repetitive. Scroll through the timeline and you’ll catch him recycling bits that hit. I can’t begrudge him this because to me he’s still the guy who wore that hat that way in that one movie.

The paintings are another matter. He says in interviews that the mystery sickness he’s battled now for decades has made him unable to pick up his horn. He had to pivot to painting. Claims he’s always been a painter. Mentions how his mother encouraged him when he was little. Says his pictures are as profound as his tunes used to be.

I can understand why Carey insists his awful pictures are good. He’s saying it out loud to will it to be true. His self-worth is tied to being a great artist so he thinks whatever he lays his hands on must be great simply because he was great once, doing something entirely different.

Look, medium doesn’t really matter. You either have something to say or you don’t. Whether by brush, horn, camera, or throat, if you have a story to tell you tell with whatever means are available. But just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t guarantee you’ll be even passable at another. With apologies to the Gagosian Gallery, et al, Bob Dylan is no painter. You sell those things on name-recognition and nothing but. It’s very rare for anyone to excel at more than one thing. I’ll watch Carey blow his horn all day. I’ll watch his old movies and shows for hours on a loop. But, please, for the love of god, put down the brushes, my friend. You’re hurting yourself and others.

Of course I don’t tell him any of that. Once he starts responding to me on Twitter, I rarely question any of the absurd things he does or says. In a matter of days, he’s confiding about the long list of eminent figures who’ve wronged or abandoned him. He shares his fears about an admirer who he says has been stalking him. Forcing Carey to move out of the city to an undisclosed location. Only his lawyer and a couple assistants know his whereabouts. It’s all very cloak-and-dagger. There’s a paranoid pall over most of these communications.

But I lap it all up.

LaMarr Hoyt, 66, won a Cy Young Award in 1983 for the White Sox. But I wasn’t a White Sox fan yet in 1983. I know Hoyt because he was on a few of my Strat-o-matic Baseball teams a year or two after his best year in the majors. Don’t remember his record with me; my friend Dan kept all the stats.

Dean Stockwell, 85, will always be Ben from Blue Velvet to me. I remember seeing that movie at the Harvard Square Theatre in 1986. The middle-aged woman next to me was having a coronary from anxiety. Sometime in the late 90s, I dressed as Ben for a David Lynch-themed Halloween party. There are photos of that somewhere, but I don’t have any.

Jehan Sadat, 87, was a passenger in my cab in Boston in the mid-90s. I think her daughter had a job in town. A very polite, distinguished lady. I can’t recall how or why she told me she was the widow of the assassinated president of Egypt. Whenever people asked what famous people I’d had in the cab, I’d mention her name. It was rare that a passenger had even heard of her husband.

Monte Hellman, 91, directed Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter, two of the best American films of their time or, maybe, any time. Yet during the annual Academy Awards death scroll, his name wasn’t mentioned, proving for about the millionth time that Hollywood doesn’t give a flying fuck about the movies.

Bertrand Tavernier, 79, directed many many films, most of which I didn’t see. But he made Round Midnight starring Dexter Gordon as a semi-fictionalized sort of Lester Young type American jazzman fucking up his life in Paris. For this, Tavernier deserves entry into Valhalla, the pearly gates, or wherever it is we go, after.

James Ridgeway, 84, made a documentary called Blood in the Face about neo-Nazis in the 80s. It left a profound impression on me. Especially one of White Power guys saying to Ridgeway that he knows he’s using them, but that they’re using him as well. Meaning, no matter how much he damned them, the camera was free publicity. That guy knew what many of us have been reminded of in neon-blaring relief in recent years. That no matter how horrible and inhuman the message, there will be people that proudly believe in it.

Neal Conan, 71, once interviewed me about my first cabbie book on Talk of the Nation. It was stressful because the Chicago NPR affiliate couldn’t establish a connection with the Washington studio for several minutes. I could hear Conan stretching on air to buy the engineers time. I wound up talking to him on an ordinary office phone. I have no memory of what I said, but there’s probably a recording of it somewhere in the NPR archives. I wouldn’t look for it, though. Not a shining moment for anyone involved.

Gene Friedman, 50, the “Taxi King” of New York, was perhaps the worst apple in a rotten orchard. The cab industry attracted some of the most reprehensible characters in American grift, our forty-fifth president among them. The way Friedman flaunted his awfulness, taking delight in how he cheated poor immigrants out of their life savings by artificially inflating taxi medallion prices, earns him a special circle in Hell. Too bad Hell doesn’t exist, so Friedman gets to be worm food like the rest of us.

Wayne Thiebaud, 101, painted the world as if it was made of fiberglass. I don’t love any of his pictures, but respect the rigor with which he plowed away at his rigid vision. Reading his obit, it’s clear the man lived a full, satisfying life. Rare for a painter, especially this late into his art form’s history.

Joan Didion, 87, wrote some great books that I didn’t read until only a couple years ago. I don’t know why I waited. I don’t know much writing that describes life in this country in the 60s and 70s better. She rode the line between fiction and memoir more nimbly than most. She died a few days ago, which made me remember that I’d drawn her portrait once for some lit mag. That prompted me to check the obit list to see if I’d drawn any other recently-deceased notable.

I hadn’t. But I recognized a few of them.

The day doesn’t start well. The cab I’d ordered the night before doesn’t show, so I schlep a folding table, rolling suitcase, shopping bag, and courier bag onto the Orange, then Green Line, out to Oak Park.

I get there with fifteen minutes to spare before the holiday sale opens. I unfold the table, cover it with a striped bedsheet, then pile up books, bookmarks, and the rest. I lean jazz portraits against the window sill behind me, and tape a couple prints to the glass. Open for business.

My fellow vendors are all women. They sell scarves, sweaters (human and canine), quilts, beads, cheese boards, sconies (cookie/scone hybrid), hand-bound books, vases, and other items I’m sure to’ve missed.

I sell most of the bookmarks the first day. I should’ve made more. Otherwise, a few books go, and couple portraits——Fred Anderson and Boris Ryzhy. I never have numbers goals for these things, so it’s hard to say when they’re a success rather than a failure. One more day to go.

The CTA ride sans gear is easier. Also, because one day is done, I know what to expect. It’s not unlike the drive to San Francisco, or any other new experience; once it’s under way, it becomes my reality until it ends. I know to go to the grocery store across the street for coffee before going in.

I’d hoped to make more bookmarks the night before, but was exhausted when I got home and just watched a dumb, over-long docuseries about some cult church, before drifting off to sleep. I wonder aloud to my neighbor why it’s so tiring to just sit there and smile at people walking by. We repeat our spiel ad nauseum, like worn answering machines. Maybe the shopper picks something up, maybe they don’t; a few part with a few dollars. Whichever way it goes, a bit of energy is sapped. We work at not slumping in our chairs. Maybe go outside for a smoke (or whatever us ex-smokers do for a break.)

I’ve been selling my crap to people a long time, so I don’t get upset with strangers’ commentary often. I know to thank people when they offer compliments and to ignore “suggestions” or criticism. If I wanted input into my working process, I’d have solicited it. Yet there’s a certain type of person who lives to offer their opinions and advice. I thankfully only got one of these in my two days’ tabling. A guy from the book industry who insisted on debating the merits of his racket with me. After ten minutes of it, I stopped responding, put my head down, and pretended to read a book until he mercifully drifted away.

Had he stayed another minute, I would have said something ugly and I didn’t want that roomful of ladies to think less of me. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. I suppose that counts as success of a sort.