All the walls were furnished and there was no floor, just a combination of rugs on top of rugs and shags on Orientals. The Orientals didn't seem to mind. Everything was dubiously placed yet collectively they all seemed to be part of a strange alliance.
The room was quiet. The heater clicked in and blew its hot air from an overhead duct into my face. I stood there for a time; my eyes absorbed everything as if for the first time.
Directly in front of me was the couch. No one could overlook its presence. A leather couch cut in sections with boxes drunkenly stacked on its cushions. The center section had barely a sliver of space for someone to sit if they were inclined to. What little energy I had, I pushed my butt into the space. The couch moved a bit at first, the cushions took different sides leaving my ass hanging in the middle.
I was beginning to feel one with the clutter: a balance of disproportion. My thoughts fell over each other and whined heavily in my lap. There was no place to rest the day, to forget. As it was, the day just stood there in front of my face.
God must have had something up his sleeve because everything looked too bad to be permanent.
I unclipped one earring, held it out in front of my slumped body and looked inside the hoop's circle with one eye. The hoop scanned the room until the earring's hole was filled with a suitable visual distraction that would take me someplace other than where I was sitting at the moment.
With my index finger and thumb I moved the earring around as if I were focusing the lens of the camera. At one point I found an interesting collage of colors. Inside the hoop was a thick textured color of green like foliage and through it a sweep of blue as in a sky but unlike God's sky. The image grew into a massive circle containing what seemed to be an endless curving gallery; the walls filled with great paintings. Groups of people stood appreciating and examining the art.
My eye stayed in the hoop's circle and noticed a tiny part of color that when I squinted, resembled a painting that looked much like my Adam and Eve. The painting I left in my studio...
My dear, dear Adam and Eve.
10.
THE FIRST ADAM AND EVE I remember I had bought that canvas several months ago at the Salvation Army. It had been a good buy. The painting was 36 by 48 inches. It had appeared to be layered with a number of paintings that the previous artist had abandoned. That's what made it so appealing. I was familiar with this layered concept. Most of my own paintings had been painted over a number of times primarily for economic reasons but nevertheless they could be considered part of a noteworthy movement that I often refer to as layer'ism.
L A Y E R I S M
[ Every painting has the tormented soul of the artist embedded in its canvas even after it’s been re-painted, primed or cut up to patch the holes in a roof. It never goes away. It is part of the canvased painting forever.]
The painting had many lives in its layers. I felt it had traveled through mountainous landscapes and laid in gardens where young buds were pushing their way into their bloom. I am sure it had caressed many breasts lying on rich velvet couches and stood in deserts where wildebeest and zebras walked slowly in the jellied heat of a hot orange afternoon. indeed.
First, the top surface primer. It was an ungodly mess to cover. A crowd of women's heads, maybe forty, had been stacked in rows on top of each other like mangos at a market. The women were made up in oranges and yellows that they had taken from the desert's hot summer; they outlined themselves in black. Their over-sized almond shaped eyes followed me around my studio as if they were begging me to shroud them in Zinsser's BullsEye primer, possibly for religious purposes. I really didn’t know. This was a good purchase
needed to be painted with My mentor had once told me, "Artists must paint an Adam and Eve before they die and a Crucifixion before they see the truth. It is part of the journey.”
He was a Jewish man, a painter and writer, a photographer and an intellectual. He was an extremely serious fellow who would read books about the holocaust on beautiful sunny afternoons to clear his mind of paint and prose and red grapes. He was my mentor, my delicious polar counterpart. We were an item in the artist community and very seldom were seen apart from each other.
"Artists stand on the edge focused on the fear of falling but also with a terrified impulse to throw themselves off the cliff. Man has a choice. An artist sees the vulgarity and authenticity inside those choices in the face of his canvas. It is a horrifying depth of responsibility." I tried to turn away at first, tightened my smile away from his seriousness, but truth be said, I openly fell into the arms of his every word. My temperature warmed looking up into his dark black eyes, his lips moistened every message as if it were intended only for me to hear.
"And of course, the Crucifixion is the battle in our minds. Crucifying the ego. The balance of losing oneself and at the same time staying connected with one's presence. Very important for a serious artist as yourself." He gave me everything he had and everything I needed.
I left my life in Chicago years ago and moved to California to live with my mentor in his hut; originally a small bathhouse built in the 1900‘s. The bathhouse, a tiny box that I respectfully referred to as 'the hut' was loosely constructed with thin wood planks and glue. If a strong gale cared to, it could have blown our hut across the world like matchsticks in the wind. To our great fortune, the winds paid us little attention. The only door was a red worn wool blanket nailed to the top of its conventional framed opening. Loose bricks kept its hem to the ground. It worked quite well keeping the hut's insides from pouring out.
The living space inside was modest and small in its size - a bit under 250 square feet and furnished little beyond a bed, a small desk with a typewriter and an armed chair. Attached somehow to the walls were bookcases whose crowded shelves indicated that my mentor denied it nothing. A sink and motel-sized refrigerator topped with two stove burners hugged the corner. We had hardly an option but to paint outside under an overhang that lipped the building. Wisteria, clematis, canary eyes and trumpet creepers tightly walled in our working space. Long sheets of clear plastic seamed together with clothespins were added for protection from the cold nights and culturally starved raccoons.
We painted intensely and passionately far into the night. On one side, my mentor painted on canvases with thick, palette knife strokes that were complicated, esoteric and beautiful; part of a series he called RockWater-Sky. On the other side, just feet away, I painted a magical world brimming with color, alive and fanciful. The space was small for creating such diverse masterpieces. Stepping back from our canvases, we often bumped and became absorbed into the parts of each other.
Local philosophers, inventors and dreamers, disheveled looking characters, visited the hut often late into the nights. For hours our visitors circled around theories over wine and cheese and refuted published philosophies found in professor'ed books. They brought their inventions and tested their applications with only one small fire that I can remember. They talked over each other, argued passionately and laughed loudly late into the night. The Marlboros and Camels, the Newports and cannabis paid no mind and simply absorbed the air collectively enjoying the flavors of each other.
I was living in eternal happiness, that an everlasting unbridled security, a blessedness or blindness of sorts.
I was at home until my mentor's death - his heart just stopped.
My hair still rises all over my body when I think of him.
[ I moved away from the hut to a cinder block warehouse with no vines. The new studio was stronger. I took the crowded shelved books with me.]
*
The phone rang. I clipped the earring back on my ear and stumbled to the phone quickly. Its ring hurt my ears. "Suzka, this is your mother. Where have you been? I'd been calling the house."
"I... I just got in mom."
"How's the house? Is everything ok? How'd you get in? I hope you didn't use the front door. You know I spent a lot of time duck-taping it shut. Tell me you didn’t use that door." Her words were sharp and clear.
"Everything is ok mom. It's terribly late. You're in the hospital for God’s sake. Why are you calling me?"
"It's your father. You need to talk to him. He's making me crazy. You need to give him a piece of my mind."
"Father?"
"Yes, your father... he's in the bathroom. Don't put him on the phone 'cause he won't talk to me but he’ll talk to you. Just go and talk to him."
I didn't know what to say. My father was not in the bathroom. He died seven years ago.
Willem deKooning died that same year.
11.
THE A.O.P.
(Aged Oaks Pavilion)
I returned to the hospital the next morning. "Day took her an hour ago, justa after lunch... spaghetti anda one meataball da size of a pea. Didn't day tell you ada nurses’ desk?" Josephine reported.
She caught me off-guard. "Wwwwhat...?" I stood there motionless and pressed my eyes hard toward the yellow drawn curtains that veiled my mother absence.
"What did you say?"
"You mother... she slept good last night. All doze bad drugs left her to sleep alone." My legs took me across the room carefully as if they were walking me through minefields of ignited chatter. The curtains that divided my mother from Josephine were short for the overgrown room and respectfully offered only a veiled sense of privacy. But Josephine bent her voice and slid it under the curtains' hem.
"Just a lil' while ago, two mens put your mother's body on a gurney, covered her up with two flimsy blankets and wheeled her out."
Josephine believed there were only two choices when one is ‘gurney'd’ out of a room. You were either sent to a nursing home like The Aged Oaks Pavilion or you were sent to the morgue two floors below ground level.
I didn't care to answer.
"Are you closa to your mother? It's good when a mother has girl childrens. I have only boy childrens. They live far away... except for Albert. He lives closa. He's a policeman. He saves many peoples and digs out bodies from da rivers. Da Des Plaines River is a good one for that. My son's a good boy he is. His wife is much more lucky getting him than he is for sure."
I looked out the window and squinted through the hard light. The sun was flat against my eyes. I just stood there with my arms loosely folded against my chest looking at nothing. I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to take in any additional information. Maybe it was a curious numbness that had overcome me. I kept my thoughts to a whisper afraid Josephine might hear. With no response coming from my side of the curtain, Josephine returned to the subject of my mother.
"Are you taking your mother home? She's..."
Josephine knew my mother wasn't going home.
I really didn't care to answer but I knew the only way to stop Josephine's reckless chatter was to sacrifice a quick answer.
"She's going to The Aged Oaks Pavilion." ...period!
"Ohhhh..." she timidly replied with conversationstopping disappointment even though she was fully aware of what the answer would be before she asked the question.
I started to look for any possessions my mother might have left behind; clues perhaps confirming my mother was here minutes before they took her to The Aged Oaks nursing home.
My legs bent, my body slowly rested on the edge of her bed.
On the bed tray a yellow sheet of paper, folded four times and hand pressed to deepen its folds. On top read "To Suzka – My Daughter."
The scribbled lettering underlined daughter eight times. It had all the makings of a testimony, a final request just lying there for me to execute. Not that I didn’t hear all her requests for as long as I can remember. This folded paper was obvious and unavoidable. My life was about to change.
My brain was processing all the possible scenarios with screwed-up endings. It was already a long day. My head was bursting; my mouth was like a dirty shoe. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to get back to work. I missed my life. I missed my studio, Picasso and color, wet glorious color. And my hands, my hands were shamefully clean. They had no color, no paint under the nail parts and stuck in the corners of their moons. I tucked them deep in my pockets to hide my shame.
Flashing before my eyes were all those unpainted, controversially inspired masterpieces that I would have created if I were home. And what would come of my paints and my canvases waiting to be great pieces of art? I slaughtered myself with exasperation. I'm too old to start over, I'm too young to end it all and too damn poor not to worry.
This was not going to be good but who was to blame? To accuse my mother, the gods, the circumstances would be selfish, blind, deaf and simply stupid. My life's legs and hands were pulling me in the all sorts of disjointed directions.
I set myself down on the bed and dug into my purse for my glasses. My hand ran away from me - fingers frantically formed a search party looking for an old lost pack of cigarettes at the bottom, in the corners or maybe in one of the side pockets. I needed a friend more than eyeglasses. But it had been over five years since smoking and I broke-up. I can't say it was mutual. We had one of those tragic endings. I walked out with no warning, no sign but a promise to my friend, my cigs that I would return. We would meet again on my ninety-fifth birthday. The promise made me feel better.
Final goodbyes are so devastating and cruel. I'm not cruel.
The paper was filled with writing, underlining, stars, crosses and instructional doodles. Each item coded in its importance.
----> to Suzka my daughter bring these items to me.
I need everything on this list!
#1 -> A six pack of Ensure, the butter pecan #2. My RED crystal rosary (in the blue kimono pocket) #3. A black suit and my Italian sling-back high heels. #4. Bring my peach blouse hanging in the laundry room, a slip, a fresh garment, pantyhose and a brassiere #5. And the HALL's cough drops + four rain bonnets. Bring me the small Sacred Heart statue between the Mary and Joseph
salt-n-pepper shakers on the
kitchen counter next to the toaster.
AND... two bottles of Campho-Phonique ...and ** bring seven zip-lock bags of candies** (make three of them sugarless) v
x Violet, Your Mother
* It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when I walked into The Aged Oaks nursing home carrying two large bags containing her listed items and one succulent, a gift from my sister in California. It was a one-story square building, red brick with white trim. The entrance was under a canopy that extended two car lengths into a circled driveway. The lobby was carpeted wide in a cut looped pile with tiny oak leaves. The decor was outdated colonial - the walls were covered in flowering paper that looked as if it was personally brought here by one of those early traders voyages ago. The paper tragically held in a strange collection of odors. Straight across the lobby was an opened archway into the linoleumed side of the building.
An older lady sat at a wood table with Victorian shapely legs; the 'check-in' desk for all incoming visitors. Oddly, the table was sitting halfway into the opening to the corridor; an apparent precaution to block strays from wandering in off the street and running around willynilly in the halls. For whatever reason, it was impossible to walk past this little volunteer without being questioned.
Looking over her glasses, she caught my presence and stopped me from squeezing past her. "Hello dearie. Welcome to the Aged Oaks Nursing Pavilion. Is there someone here you would like to visit today?"
There was no guessing as to what this lady was up to. Under her pearls was a tight-lipped mama. She looked like the type who came to work early, when it was dark, before any staff workers arrived in order to push her desk half way into the archway without being detected; yes, pushing it into a position that would stop anyone from walking past her without verification. She looked relentless, checking for undocumented visitors as if this was Tijuana's port of entry. No one was going to cross on her watch - not without her confirmation. She had a sinister side for sure.
Her general appearance was her disguise. She had a smiling head, lacquered in purpose that bobbled out of a
turtleneck sweater as if it were spring-coiled to her body. She wore half glasses chained to hang that gave her a more qualified look of importance. Baby pearl earrings softened her czarist manner and added just enough Americana-n-apple-pie needed for this position.
I laid the one bag on the floor and set the succulent on the czar's desk. The air in the room gasped. I felt the oak leaves in the carpet flipped themselves over. A coldness hit my face. The little lady froze. Her eyes left her papers and jumped on the succulent. I swear that juicy plant looked up at me and winced. She raised the succulent carefully in the air and strategically positioned a notepad under its elevated bottom. Then slowly she lowered the plant. Its landing was deliberate and deadon.
"My mother Violet was brought here about an hour ago. Can you tell me her room number?"
From ear to ear, her denture’d smile loosely rested on her face. She appeared friendly enough but serious.
"Is she a new resident here at The Aged Oaks? I don't recognize the name." She said oh so cheerfully.
She looked down at a paper filled with columned names - residents' names apparently. "We do have a Frank Schavzak... but he's not a Violet. Hmmmm, could your mother be Vera? Here's a Vafi. Hmm, I know Vafi..." She pivoted her chin on her index finger. Her dentures clapped down on the corner of her lip. After a few seconds, she looked up at me and moved her head side to side. "But she's not your mother. She’s Chinese. Your mother is not a Chinese woman is she?”
I had to remind myself to stay calm, she's only doing her job, the best she can... to keep the handles moving on the sausage machine. Words my friend Gulley Jimson often told me: Everyone, at one time or another has to keep the handles moving on the sausage machine. And where would we all be without sausage. I swear, standing at the little blocker's desk, I smelled the tiny scent of salami.
"No, my mother's name is Violet, like the flower."
"I have a Lilly... Lilies are pretty flowers too."
My head's voice with no control on my part, was begging for some relief. Oh God, just give her the room number. And for God's sake, don't bring out the Home's floor plan or the pamphlets with the list of all your social activities. No, no, no. We're tired. I’m tired. My succulent is tired. We’ve been through a lot today. For God’s sake, have mercy on us both and just give me a number… ANY FRICKIN’ NUMBER!
Wonders In Dementialand: Dementialand Page 7