Letter

A guy I used to know writes about a weird idea he has. He wants me to paint one painting for every month him and his lady have been together.

In order to meet him to talk about it, I have to travel to a neighborhood full of memories. I don’t go there often. I have my reasons. Now I have to act like a tourist where I used to live if I want to get out unscathed.

The bike ride takes about an hour. Plenty of time to ruminate. Is it a good idea what this guy has in mind? Will she see it as a grand romantic gesture or a creepy/obsessive token of his neediness? I’m glad I’m not on either the giving or receiving end of this transaction.

When I was in art school we all sneered at Matisse’s wanting his art to be like an easy chair, but now, who the fuck knows? Even the most steadfast purist gets tired of the bed of nails after a time. When someone likes something I make, I don’t question why or how they like it. What it means to them. If it feels the same as their favorite furniture, so be it.

With commissions, this is doubly true. I hardly have any idea why people ask what they ask for. They have their reasons. It’s none of my business. I’m just the implement selected to carry out the operation. A scalpel doesn’t ask what it’s cutting and neither should I.

The meeting is short. He sends me a series of reference photos with short descriptions/instructions. We settle on a price. This is a Christmas present but it’s still early October. Because the timeframe for his monthly memories is this year, he will have to send me November’s and December’s as they happen. I pedal away from there, back to my own neighborhood.

When I get home, I scroll through his photos. It’s all vacation. The Boundary Waters, South Carolina, Michigan, Florida. These are the moments people live for. They toil away month after month for the highlight reprieve. Places that aren’t their home, not the dull old everyday, are what they look forward to all the time.

I can’t remember a single vacation. Not since childhood. And those aren’t very happy recollections. Like the time I didn’t tell my parents I was burning up with fever as we drove from Boston to Disneyworld. I’d looked forward to it so hard I made myself sick. I was damned if I’d spoil it after all that horrible waiting.

When my father turned 70 and a family cruise to Alaska was planned, I wished them a pleasant journey. As an adult, I see vacation as a distraction from my life that I neither appreciate or want. Almost like a punishment. The best part to me about leaving my little corner is coming back.

But here are dozens of snaps of a smiling couple in various environments. Golf courses, beaches, woods, Christmas. I have to withhold judgment, can’t editorialize, otherwise these paintings will be total crap.

I choose ten photos for January to October and get to it. It’s months later now when I write this, so I can’t reproduce my thought process as I painted. This is one of the great saving graces of painting. There’s no retrieving where the mind goes. At it’s best its a relief from thinking of any kind. I’m thankful for the guy and his vacation highlights for letting me check out this way.

With ten paintings done, I frame them up, put them away in a closet and forget them. I have to wait for the last two months’ memories to happen and be frozen in pixels and sent my way so I can complete the cycle.

The big difference between commissions and my “real” work is that the commissions rarely keep me up at night. I don’t think about them when I’m not doing them. The only time I do is when they aren’t going well. Of course, it’s tough to say how they’re going until the buyer sees them. The only metric of success is their reaction.

I do occasionally ponder the guy’s grand gesture. Christmas morning when she spends half an hour unwrapping the twelve flat boxes. Will he wrap them separately or in one giant package? Will she love it or run away screaming?

Back when I used have relationships with women, I was pretty good at giving presents. But I never did anything on the scale of this. The best I could manage was a nice piece of jewelry or a fancy dinner. Maybe I could learn something from him.

The November and December photos arrive and I set to putting this thing to bed.

I rent a Zipcar for a couple hours so I can be in and out of the cursed neighborhood lickety split. I unpack the twelve paintings and he has a big smile on his face. Mission accomplished. The work was worth it. He gets out his checkbook and shakes my hand.

I’m home an hour later. The studio wall is empty. I can start over as if I never knew a thing about that year of someone else’s vacations. I’m happy he’s happy with what I made him, but have no clue what to actually feel about it. Maybe I’m meant not to feel anything about it. Or maybe I’m just not smart enough to know.

After all, I’m just a dumb painter.

I look up the route and see I won’t need to write any of it down. It’s a straight shot. I-80 West all the way. I drive out of Chicago at 5am. It’s still dark. Dawn doesn’t come till I’m near the Iowa border.

My last in-person bookstore event was at the Green Arcade in February 2020. Feels right to start again at the same place. I pitch them on hosting me and they agree. That’s my second reason to drive west.

I look up the distance and it adds up to two Boston trips in the opposite direction. Sounds doable, but when I mention it to people they think I’m crazy. But sitting masked on a plane for six hours is not my idea of fun. I’ve never liked air travel. Always felt wrong to skip time zones in hours. I want to feel the distance I travel. It’s what I appreciate so much about bicycling. Driving’s still a cheat, but it’s a lot closer to human proportions than the flying tin cans of disease.

I burn through a few podcasts across Iowa. The last is an interview with Stephen Malkmus who mentions Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. I’d downloaded the audio book a week before, so I take it as a sign it should be my next listen. A story about unthinking conformity seems right for traversing two-thirds the span of the country.

Just before I turn it on, I cross into Nebraska and get immediately pulled over by a state trooper. He asks if I’ve been driving awhile and I tell him I have. He asks me to come sit in his vehicle while he runs my license. He calls it in, then types something into the onboard computer. Soon he’s quizzing me about the purpose of my trip, then my writing career. Apparently he’s just googled me. After my license comes back clean, he explains he stopped me because of an improper lane change. He’s not issuing me a ticket. I thank him, then pop the trunk and come back with a copy of my cab book. I figure since he drives all day he might relate.

I keep seeing signs for Runza across the Cornhusker State. Anything that’s not McDonald’s or the like will catch the attention of the weary traveler. I dimly recall reading about this regional delicacy, so at dinnertime I take a chance and pull off. Inside a sad, half-abandoned gas station/convenience store, I order an Original Runza from an unmasked fifteen-year-old behind a plexi shield. A runza turns out to be a ground beef and cheese hot-pocket type thing. I look online for a place to stop for the night and decide on the 1st Choice Inn 300 miles west in Rawlins, Wyoming.

Nothing but the head and tail lights of 18-wheelers on the road now. I have no sense of landscape or topography, aside from the cold glow of occasional industrial sites. It’s mostly unvariegated darkness. The last hundred miles are stressful because of some serious winds. Ominous flashing signs warn of 60+ MPH crosswind gusts and extreme threat of blowovers. Tall and light vehicles are repeatedly urged to exit and wait it out. I keep driving.

At a service station around 5am the following morning, I see a sign referring to the Wyoming Breeze. That’s some poker-faced local humor. I stop at a 24-hr diner, hoping for a sit-down meal, but am told they have no cook on duty. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to come in to a dead-end job in plague time, but it means the McDonald’s drive-thru and back on the interstate for me.

Trucks and trucks and trucks the whole way. Have to weave carefully around these lumbering links of our faltering supply chain. I keep thinking while driving through mountains and salt flats that this was all once the ocean floor. So much empty space where water used to be and all life began.

That blowhard Babbitt keeps me company through Wyoming, Utah, and most of Nevada. His story’s over around Reno. I listen to music the rest of the way. Bill Callahan, Arkady Severny, and Tindersticks. Longtime go-to’s for the tail end of a long-ass ride.

I reach the end of I-80 around 7:30pm PDT.

TOTALS: 4300 miles within 6 days; Tuesday: 17 hours; Wednesday: 15 hours. Two days on foot in San Francisco. Then I do the same drive in reverse.

I listen to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, then Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio going east.

The email comes out of nowhere. The man who sent it is one of the last people I’d expect to contact me. He’s the owner of a mushrooming network of music venues, cocktail bars, and vaguely chic eateries. It’s an invitation to meet. He says he might have some work for me. He asks, as an afterthought, whether we’ve met before.

It’s too left field not to follow up on. Also, a day or two before, a commission blew up in my face, so it would be unwise to turn up my nose at money. No matter the source.

I write back and we set a time.

The restaurant sits below a concert hall. It’s an old building that’s been tastefully semi-restored. There are intentionally unfinished walls and repurposed this and retro/vintage that. You know this place. If you live in an American city right now, you can visit at least a half dozen of these per zip code.

The man’s design director meets me before her boss shows up. We have an easy rapport. The job is to replace five shitty figure drawings in gilded custom frames. She and I brainstorm until he shows up. We’d both hoped the frames could be jettisoned, but no dice; he spent too much on them. My paintings will have to fit their long narrow dimensions.

He asks if we’ve met before. I remind him when and where. It was back when his empire consisted of just one corner bar. I don’t tell him about how I knew for sure back then that I could never work for him. Look at me now.

We agree on terms and I set to work. The job is a lot more fulfilling than many I’ve done for much nicer people. It makes me feel connected to all those painters, stretching centuries back, doing their best for truly horrible people. Maybe this is the way it has to be.

I don’t feel bad afterwards and I won’t feel bad cashing the man’s check. No matter what I think of him.