Johnny’s little studio was the place to be on a Sunday night. Johnny loved being a celebrity—the world’s first successful genetically engineered manual artist, the boy who had designed the Fury logo.
Johnny was like, “If Mother could only see me now!”
Yukio went, “She does! The dead see everything!”
From Johnny Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
My Self-Portrait with Knife Blades for Teeth (Plate 10) is the real me.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, September 22, 2056:
Johnny Baker’s Self-Portrait with Knife Blades for Teeth will become another Gaian icon. It’s a pictorial allegory of his conflicting impulses—her paradoxical inclinations. Self-Portrait with Knife Blades for Teeth portrays Baker’s divided self. It is a portrait of a soul ripe to resolve its division by gaining Gaian Consciousness.
Nat Glogow
Johnny told me that Billy Lee’s Gaian interpretation of Self-Portrait with Knife Blades for Teeth was bullshit.
But next Sunday night at his open house, Johnny publicly praised what Billy Lee wrote, saying to him, “I sure hope I gain Gaian Consciousness soon!”
What a smart move! Billy Lee bought the picture on the spot for $7500—Johnny’s biggest sale yet!
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, September 23, 2056:
Dearest Mother,
Happy birthday. Please accept my insignificant gift of $500. I’m hard up.
I live here on Johnny’s sufferance. It’s humbling for me to play second fiddle to him. The gods have not dealt fairly with me. I can’t accept my fate. Why won’t father’s spirit forgive me?
I went to a Buddhist priest in the Bronx and told him I was relieved at my father’s death. The priest said, “In another life, you were a parricide.”
I have a hangover. My head aches. I miss your soothing hand on my forehead.
Johnny Baker to Alex Thomas jr., September 25, 2056:
I greatly enjoyed the premiere of True Believer. Your music speaks to me. I heard the sounds of slavery in it—the clinking of chains in the second part was very powerful. The climax brought tears to my eyes. You say my grief over Mother’s death inspired you to use “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” as your main theme. Well, your music gave me an idea for a picture!
The party after the performance was imperial. I went home with that hunky tenor in the chorus named Charlie Lee. Did you know that his twin sister, Freya, has a crush on you? Look her up—she’s cute.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
I listened to True Believer again and again while walking in the heat along the midtown canals. Alex’s anguished music made me think of certain African masks.
Near home I noticed a workbot caulking the crumbling redbrick wall of a building that overlooks the Grand Central Canal. I suddenly itched to get my hands on a caulking gun and draw the picture that the music put in my mind.
I bought a caulking gun that afternoon for $168 and drew Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child (Plate 11) in three hours. Like my little sketch Clorene Sleeping and my portrait of Irene Winter, Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child is based on African masks. I learned it’s easier to draw a work of art than a live model—the artist has already plotted the essential lines.
Alex Thomas jr.
Johnny gave me Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child as a gift. His work transposes the emotion expressed in my music, composed in an African-American idiom, to a visual medium. It opened for us the possibility of a unique collaboration between composer and manual artist. We were sure we had a great future together.
From Keepsake Magazine, October 3, 2056:
In Memoriam.
Baker, Jeanette (July 3, 2009–October 3, 2055)
Wish you were here.
Johnny
Clorene Welles to Johnny Baker, October 4, 2056:
Your sad face about your mother Sunday night; buck up. A rich, long life stretches ahead of you; & remember there’s lots & lots of time coming after that. Endless generations, behind and before us.
What are we? So little. But we know—we feel. We’re part of it. Even to die is part of it. Dead or alive, we’re in the making of it. Come visit me. The roses are blooming on my terrace.
Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, October 5, 2056:
How are you?
Emma Torchlight to Johnny Baker, October 5, 2056:
Sleepy. I’m sleepy all the time and pee a lot. Twice today, Jenny kicked me in the bladder.
Nat Glogow
Johnny, Yukio, and I went to visit Clorene Welles on Wednesday afternoon, October 7. It was pouring. We sat among the potted rose bushes under her terrace awning. Clorene reminisced about her days as a dental hygienist for a well-read Philadelphia dentist who encouraged her with her poetry. “He initialed his gold inlays: M.R. for Marvin Rapaport. His name sticks with me after fifty-five years.”
Clorene said that if she could do it all over again, she would write her poetry in the African-American vernacular, like Sistah Sally, rather than in a white, “literary” style. She said, “I was ruined as a kid by the poems of Adelaide Crapsey. Her spare wasp voice ravished me; thereafter I wrote white.” She and Johnny talked about Irene. Clorene predicted Life on Mars would one day become an icon for Martian terraformers—she was right about that!
Clorene then turned to Yukio and Johnny and said that Irene believed that humin metamorphs are the future of our species; that we’re destined to enhance our genomes and for better or worse assume responsibility for our own evolution.
Clorene had trouble getting up to go to the bathroom. She said, “If I knew I’d live this long, I would’ve taken better care of myself.”
Afterwards she sat with her bony hands in her lap and watched it rain on her roses.
Clorene Welles to Johnny Baker, October 7, 2056:
Clorene Welles’ Obit, Written by Herself
A minor poet died today.
The echo of her voice in verse
will fade away.
But failure fanned
her desire to write poetry,
& the work taught her
to see.
The day before her death
at ninety-three,
she warmed her chilly brain
over a rose she saw on fire
in the rain.37
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 11, 2056:
I don’t grieve much for Clorene. She got her wish and wrote her death poem.
To tell the truth, I’m glad to be young and alive. It’s 4:15 P.M. I just looked out my fifth-story window. A seagull was bobbing in the canal. It drifted up and down on the green water into the violet shadow of the bridge on the corner. Right below me, a bunch of Chinese tourists got off an uptown bus. They were wearing different-colored shirts: white, rose, purple, and yellow. The one in yellow knelt on the quay.
I spend my days looking at oil paintings. Only this morning, I realized that Rubens almost always paints the edge of a gray half-tint shadow next to a flesh tone. Oil painting technique intimidates me. I have so much to learn. Maybe I’ll make something worthwhile by the time I’m forty.
Teddy Petrakis to Johnny Baker, October 16, 2056:
Happy birthday, dear boy! Nineteen! Congratulations!!
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 16, 2056:
What’s the big deal? At my age Van Dyck was already a Master in Antwerp’s Guild of St. Luke. And Picasso, at fifteen, drew as well as Raphael, who painted his St. Mary Magdalene at fourteen! To tell the truth, I got second-rate arsogenes.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, November 16, 2056:
This evening I made a little oil sketch from memory of the Chinese tourist in a bright yellow shirt kneeling on the white stone quay below my window. The sketch didn’t work out, and I wiped it off the canvas, but I learned that you need very little yellow paint to make it look very yellow if you lay
that color next to a violet or lilac tone.
Yukio called me to bed.
It’s time he went back to Japan, but I haven’t got the heart to kick him out. Tonight, with tears in his eyes, he told me, “To be packed off from here back to Tokyo would be an unbearable insult!”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, November 8, 2056:
Billy Lee brought Ishtar Teratol to my open house tonight. She’s accompanied everywhere by a guardbot because of threats to her life from the International Organization of the Naturally Talented.
I sketched her in pencil as the White Queen. She’s training for a rematch with Chess Maven next September.
Ishtar still lives with her mother in Beit Tiamat under the Med. The six-hundred-odd Gynarchists there have split into two ideological camps over the Father’s Day Bombing. Ishtar is against gynoterrorism. Her mother is for it. The two no longer speak.
Ishtar Teratol
I mislaid Johnny’s drawing somewhere when I moved to New York in the fall of sixty-one.
Nat Glogow
Johnny was like a little kid—thrilled to vote for the first time in the presidential elections of forty-eight. Of course, we voted for “Granny” Smith, and we celebrated her landslide victory over Koyle with a dim sum feast at the Forbidden City in Chinatown. Johnny said he had feared Koyle would be elected as a reaction to the Father’s Day bombing. He was like, “‘Granny’ Smith’s election restored my faith in America. I love this country.’”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, December 1, 2056:
I want to make a brightly painted three-dimensional construction. But I can’t come up with a subject. Feel dead inside. Trying to stimulate my imagination by studying the colors in nature. All around me I see contrasts of red and green, blue and orange, sulphur and lilac.
For three hours this afternoon by the lake in Central Park, I tried painting a little oil of a bare towering bower. Finally, I gave up and went off in the Rambles with a guy in his eighties, who paid me $450. Wrinklies have very big balls.
Yukio and I had a nasty row about my coming home an hour late for the Katsura willow rice garnished with pine weed he’d prepared for our supper.
“You don’t appreciate me,” yelled Yukio, storming out for the second time in two days.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, December 12, 2056:
I’m blocked, scared to work. I’m scared about not living up to my mother’s expectations. My mind’s a blank.
Emma Torchlight to Johnny Baker, December 15, 2056:
Name: Jeanette Baker Torchlight
Date and time of birth: December 15, 2056, 1:12 P.M.
Weight and length: 7 lbs. 3 oz; 20 inches.
Apgar score: 9
Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, December 15, 2056:
Congratulations to us both! Your news made me happy for the first time since Mother died.
Feeling good, I went to bed about midnight. Next thing I know, I’m walking through a graveyard. The graves are all overgrown with ivy. One has a blank tombstone. That grave bursts open and a skeleton’s forearm shoots out and, with its index finger, cuts one word into the granite. I won’t say what the word is—I’m gonna show you in a painted construction called A Message for the Living from the Dead.
I feel alive again!
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
I re-created my dream in A Message for the Living from the Dead with a real skeleton’s right forearm arm and hand, which I bought, hinged together, for $650 from an anatomical supply house that supplies specimens to various city teaching hospitals. I wondered, Who was this person whose body parts I’m using in my work?
So I borrowed $550 from Billy Lee and had a DNA analysis done on the bones. Back came a portrait of a thirty-five-year-old alcoholic man, prone to violence, who’d been five-foot-seven, with blond hair and brown eyes and an MMIQ of about 80. Booze had probably killed him. He was straight and allergic to bee stings. He also had the genetic potential to become a good tenor. I named him Andy—after Andy Lynn, the main singer in my favorite group, Hot Ice.
At first, I thought about my Andy a lot. Where was the rest of him? I asked him to forgive me for disturbing his bones. Then I regarded them as elements in my composition, along with the painted cardboard, pieces of wood, plastic ivy, and artificial earth.
A Message for the Living from the Dead (Plate 12) took me a month. The work brings together a text and an image. I need to integrate them. I got this need as a kid from looking at the paintings of Charlotte Salomon. We’re both narrative artists.
Emma Torchlight to Johnny Baker, January 18, 2057:
Thanks for showing me A Message for the Living from the Dead. To think you dreamed it up! I like your message: “Rejoice!” Come rejoice with me in our daughter, Jenny. Come see us in Anchorage as soon as you can.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, January 20, 2057:
Yesterday I visited Johnny Baker’s studio. Johnny was putting the finishing touches on a painted construction entitled A Message for the Living from the Dead. The message, written on a tombstone by a skeletal hand, is “Rejoice!”
Johnny’s construction communicates a Gaian sentiment. As Srimaati Andrews puts it: “Gaianism takes life’s transience as a call to embrace earthly joy.”
Johnny’s unique combination of artistic and spiritual gifts marks him as someone special. We Gaians are proud to claim her as one of our own. Last August, Johnny said to me, “I sure hope I gain Gaian Consciousness soon!”
Hang on, Johnny. It’s coming!
Nat Glogow
Johnny parlayed Billy Lee’s home page about A Message from the Living to the Dead into another $7500 sale. He sold it to a rich Gaian who donated the work to Billy Lee’s church. Johnny bought himself a round-trip ticket to Anchorage. He had no warm clothing that fit. I lent him my old coat of many colors and a pair of gloves. He bought himself a pair of blue boots with high heels that showed off his legs. Johnny was vain about his legs.
Emma Torchlight
I’ve a good memory for dates. Johnny arrived in Anchorage on Wednesday morning, January 24th. I was nursing Jenny when he arrived.
“Here,” he went, “lemme me try that,” and stripped off his shirt and bra. Johnny had no milk, of course, but Jenny, who’d just drunk her fill, sucked herself to sleep on his right nipple. Thereafter Johnny neither drank nor smoked and, three times a day, was Jenny’s living pacifier. By the end of the week, his breasts leaked a little milk into her mouth. I saw tears in his eyes.
Johnny bathed Jenny and diapered her and took her for long walks in her stroller. He pushed her up and down Orchard Street, which is lined with cherry trees. The three of us became a family in a few short, warm winter days.
One evening while putting Jenny to bed, Johnny went, “I’ve never been so happy!” Next morning, after Jenny fell asleep at his breast, he said, “I had a sad childhood.”
“How come?”
“I was only happy when I made Mother happy, and I could make her happy only by making pictures. I resented being loved not for myself but for what I could do. For her, I was a means to an end. I’ll always love Jenny for herself alone—whatever she turns out to be. And just think, she’ll live a hundred and fifty years! Lucky Jenny!”
At the end of two weeks, on February 6th, Johnny said to me, “I gotta get back to work.”
Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, February 8, 2057:
What’s with Jenny?
Emma Torchlight to Johnny Baker, February 8, 2057:
Whenever I put her down on her back, she turns her head to the right and raises her right forearm. What’s with you?
Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, February 12, 2057:
I’m making a painted construction called Mother Earth. The image came to me Tuesday night while I was rereading my favorite poem, “The Song of the Earth.” Mother said it reconciles polarities. That’s my theme. To tell the truth, all my work nowadays has themes.
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Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, February 16, 2057:
Rereading Mother’s journal. I talked at six months! Alex and Yukio did, too. Arsogenic metamorphs are born old.
Nat Glogow
I was there when Johnny, Alex, and Yukio found out their mothers had proudly told each of them they spoke their first words at six months. Johnny said “Momma,” Alex went “cup,” and Yukio, “hana,” which is nose in Japanese.
The three looked at me. I could see them thinking, We’re far superior to you!
And for the first time, I hated them for being metamorphs.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
I made Mother Earth (Plate 13) to visually fuse opposites—femayle and male, life and death—into one image.
I cast my own torso and neck in plastifoam and topped it off with a humin skull. Setting a skull on my body in place of my head creeped me out.
Mother Earth is essentially composed of four roundish shapes: a pair of breasts and a skull that are set off by a solar halo. But the construction itself isn’t in the round. It can be viewed only from the front, which is a flaw in its conception. Mother Earth is incomplete because it’s not truly three-dimensional, which is the direction my work is now moving in.
Every month or so, I make something I couldn’t make before. It’s like being a little kid again.
Doris Peel
I first saw Mother Earth at Johnny’s open house on Sunday night, February 18, 2057. It was lit up on a bridge table in the corner. A bunch of us gawked at it while Srimaanji quietly recited the poem called “The Song of the Earth.” When he was done I gained Gaian Consciousness.
Nat Glogow
Peel’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she slowly sank to the floor at Mookerjee’s feet with a stupid grin on her face. A few minutes later when she came around, she hailed Johnny as “My giver of Gaian Consciousness.”
Johnny, who was stoned, laughed and said, “I give but don’t receive.”
Peel paid Johnny $8500, his biggest sale yet, for Mother Earth, which she then gave to Mookerjee.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
Doris’ gaining Gaian Consciousness took me completely by surprise, and I have to admit, I was jealous of Johnny’s spiritual gifts.
The Song of the Earth Page 20