Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  Soon after my arrest, I met Prudence, who was a fellow student at the London School of Economics. She was studying statistics. We went out a few times, and decided to try living together. We found a basement apartment off Portabello Road. It was sparsely furnished, but it had a bed that was ours, and we would lie in it together and make love. In the midst of our lovemaking I told myself that I did not really love her, that she was somewhat ordinary in appearance with her round face, glasses, and straight brown hair; but after all I was no great catch, and I liked playing house with her. The sounds of the street floated in through our window. Side-by-side, we purchased provisions at an outdoor market two blocks away. Old men peered nearsightedly at the produce, mothers with children in tow shouted reprimands as they searched in their purses for change, and couples like ourselves strolled from stall to stall with their arms around each other. The market was always loud and rowdy with life. We would return, resupplied, to our basement lair, cook, wash dishes, read the newspaper, and go to bed. It felt finally as if I had crossed that magical threshold that separates children from adults. Prudence was not a masturbatory fantasy. She was a real flesh and blood woman. And playing house with her, I was becoming a little more real, a little more flesh and blood, instead of a gray cloud of thought above and an urge below that twanged unceremoniously whenever it would.

  A few months before I was to return to the United States, Prudence discovered she was pregnant. She cried. I was not ready for a child. Neither, really was she. She agreed to have an abortion. Getting one was not so easy. Abortion was still illegal. We rode on red buses to secret appointments with a kindly Jamaican doctor who performed the operation. There were no complications. Prudence recuperated in our bed. She was sad. She said she wanted to come back to the United States with me. I could not imagine it. We took a last trip together through the Netherlands and I flew back home without her.

  I returned to Swarthmore for an uneventful senior year, during which I shared my alienation with a small circle of friends, who rivaled each other in ostentatious displays of disaffection.

  Mine was the last apolitical class at Swarthmore, the last to wallow in its alienation. In 1962, the year after I graduated, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most important organization of radical students to emerge during the Sixties, held its founding convention in Ann Arbor. Later that same year, the first Swarthmore SDS chapter was founded. The student movement transformed campus life. The tranquil botanical garden became a hotbed of agitation. Eight years after I graduated, African-American students occupied the admissions office to demand changes in admission policies and the creation of a Black Cultural Center. Seven days later, Courtney Smith, the president of the college, collapsed and died of a heart attack. The New York Times blamed his death on the Black students.5

  The waves of protest, pounding the shores of academia with such force, hit just as I stepped off the beach. I didn’t even get my feet wet. It was time to graduate. I felt condemned to be a college professor like my fathers before me. I didn’t even consider another path. Seeing no alternative, I enrolled in the graduate history program at Yale.

  Yale was an arrogant gray fortress in the center of a sullen resentful working class town. I rented an attic room within biking distance of the campus. I still felt like the underground man, perverse and obsessive. Why was I studying the peculiarities of Reformation theology? In my attic apartment I’d sit in front of my typewriter, unable to write three sentences. I’d doodle and stare out the window for hours, then undress, stick a finger up my ass, and masturbate. I fantasized about women stripping me naked and beating me on the ass.

  I spent more time masturbating and doodling than studying. My doodles turned into elaborate drawings. I hung them on the walls of my apartment. When spring came I trudged to the library like a man returning to prison. Along the way I passed art students, stretched out on the lawn, sketching trees, buildings, and each other. Their bodies pressed lazily into the grass. My body carried my mind like a porter bearing luggage. My flesh was a diseased appendage of a corrupted mind. Their flesh was a doorway through which the world entered.

  Among the art students was a woman I knew from Swarthmore. She had a boyfriend, a hearty Greek who painted large juicy oil paintings of raw meat. I finally worked up the courage to invite them over to look at my drawings. They complimented me, told me my work was as good as any art student’s, and urged me to continue.

  I had first begun to draw under the tutelage of my aunt Susan. She lived alone in a lovely little two-room apartment on the top floor of an old brick town house in Greenwich Village. Susan worked in the garment industry, expediting the shipment of shirts from factory to outlet. Deeply lonely and constantly annoyed by the pettiness of her fellow workers, she lavished affection on me, and quietly sought to instill in me her love of art. She took me on painting expeditions to the sites of abandoned factories and rusting railroad tracks where we would set up our little easels and paint for a few hours till I got cold or hungry. She let me leaf through her voluminous collection of art books and took me to the Metropolitan Museum where her favorites were the El Grecos.

  I had never thought of our painting expeditions as anything but a pleasant diversion, an escape from the rigorous discipline required to master the intricacies of ideas. I was born to the craft of intellectual production. I had to keep my hands clean. And yet I loved to smear the colors on my palette, to dab them on my brush and mark, in what felt like almost perfect freedom, the white surface of the canvas boards on which we painted. Art was silent. It did not participate in arguments. But its silence was not the silence of a student who does not know the answer. Art was not tongue-tied. In the making of art, the material world almost rose to the dignity of the disembodied world of concepts.

  At the end of my first year at Yale, I told my mother that I intended to drop out, move to the Lower East Side of New York, and become a painter. She asked me a few practical questions—where was I going to live, how was I going to make a living—and accepted my perfunctory answers without argument. I was making a foolish choice. What could she do? She was happy now with Herbert. I could go on with my life. She would go on with hers. My failure to row towards some professorial safe harbor was no longer her responsibility. My boat was drifting rudderless towards dangerous turbulence. It was not the heroic example of the civil rights movement in the South that led me to drop out of college. It was the insistent pressure of private misery.

  I could be a painter!

  THE LOWER EAST SIDE

  In the Sixties, the Lower East Side was a predominantly Puerto Rican ghetto. Floating in the broad stream of Puerto Rican life were remnants of previous immigrant migrations. The Jews, who had worked in the shirt factories and cigar manufacturing establishments on Cooper Union Square, had mostly moved on to better things, leaving behind a few good delicatessens. Old Ukrainians dozed on the benches of Tompkins Square Park, spat occasionally into the dirt, and worried about the neighborhood. At the Odessa Restaurant on Avenue A, they ate beet soup with two slices of dark bread for 35 cents, next to poets, jazz musicians, and painters driven from Greenwich Village by rising rents.

  For me, the Lower East Side was the anti-suburb, the polar opposite of Riverdale, Newton, and Swarthmore. People here could not afford the manicured distances favored by the middle class. They brushed up against each other, breathed in each other’s faces, and woke each other up at night playing the radio too loud or fighting with the window open. The streets were all stains and clutter. They smelled of piss, mildew, roach powder, and rotting garbage. Refuse and filth blanketed the empty lots. Weeds sprouted between middens of mattress springs, rusting car parts, old clothes and beer cans. Nothing was new, nothing clean, nothing reflected pride of possession. The floors in the railroad apartments groaned beneath layers of cheap linoleum. The ceilings were heavy with peeling paint. Roaches overran kitchens. You could hear the rats scurrying at night in the walls. Everything material threatened to collapse into gray
anonymous wretchedness. But life continued like a fever in a failing body.

  In the midst of it all, Tompkins Square Park was a leafy refuge. On the east side was a little playground where women watched toddlers clambering onto swings and sliding down the slide into the dirt. At the south end was an empty band-stand. Throughout the remainder of the park, circular paths wound between iron fences, behind which the grass grew like an exotic animal, caged in for its own protection. In the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s the park had been the scene of many demonstrations. On January 13, 1874, thousands of unemployed workers who had rallied here to demand government relief were beaten out of the park by a mob of club wielding mounted police. Now the iron fences prevented large assemblies, and at least for the time being tranquility prevailed.

  My first Lower East Side apartment was a railroad flat on 7th Street between Avenues C and D. A row of four rooms ran from the front to the back of the building. Only the rooms at either end had windows. Holes cut in the interior walls let a little light into the ones in the middle. In typical Lower East Side fashion, the bathtub was in the kitchen. It had a metal cover so it could double as a dinner table.

  I set up my easel in the kitchen and began to paint. Empty tubes of acrylic piled up next to dishes crusted with old spaghetti sauce. Roaches ran across my pallet. Paint smeared on my sheets, on the doorknobs, on the phone receiver, on the faucets in the sink. Canvases hung in every available space, and leaned up against each other in the corners. I began a meticulous study of the plumbing. Over and over again I painted the bathtub with its baked enamel cover. I painted the kitchen sink. I painted the porcelain bowl of the toilet peeking out from the open door of its closet. I would spend hours carefully studying the perspective of these objects, exploring the relation between lines vanishing in space and lines converging in two dimensions on a canvas. I was fascinated by the tension between surface design and illusion of depth. The laws of perspective were neat and clean. They imposed an implacable order on the chaos of visual experience. They tamed the savage beast of sensation. In my paintings there was never any clutter, no dirty dishes, no soiled socks, no trash on the floor, no stains on the linoleum. I painted serene interiors in ironic homage to my obsession with dirt and excrement.

  Like a child playing dress up who tries on the grownup’s clothing and examines the effect in the mirror, I tried on the role of artist, and checked for signs that it suited me. I knew the odds were not good. Setting out to be an artist was like setting out to win the lottery. But what fun! Playing in the brightly colored mud, I lost and found myself. I curved with the curve of the sink. I aligned myself with the edge of the bathtub. Out of disorder and untrammeled possibility, an order grew on the canvas and in my life. Out of the perfect freedom emerged necessity, not imposed from outside, not stifling and repressive, not the antithesis of freedom, but its fulfillment.

  I enrolled in the Brooklyn Museum School of Fine Arts. Twice a week, I dutifully drew a still life of bottles, balls, cylinders, and cubes, which the teacher arranged at the beginning of the class on a stand in the center of the room. We ringed the still life with our easels like a besieging army and tried to “capture” it on our newsprint pads. The teacher walked behind us commenting on our degrees of success. It never surrendered. It was always there at the end of class. Mocking us. And boring. I soon lost interest in the exercise and managed to get myself expelled for being disruptive.

  I continued to paint my toilet bowl, my sink, and my beloved bathtub. When I finished one painting, I would move my easel a few feet to the left or right and begin another. The change altered the vanishing point of the perspective and transformed the geometry of the composition. Shadows and colors varied with the weather and the time of day. The material provided by my cramped kitchen seemed inexhaustible. But as bathtub succeeded bathtub, I experienced a growing fear. What if I abandoned my self-imposed limitations? Why bathtubs and sinks? Why not bedrooms and chairs? Or rooftops and chimneys? The choice was completely arbitrary, as was the choice to represent anything at all. Why bother to get the perspective right? Why not pure abstraction? I had no answers. All I knew was that within my narrow framework I could achieve a semblance of order. Outside it, the floodgates of chaotic expression could swallow me. There would be no reason to put a line one place rather than another, no boundaries, no limits. The shit would hit the fan.

  In the middle of my bathtub period, I got a part time job writing capsule reviews for Art News Magazine. The galleries I visited were inevitably empty, presided over by condescending, poorly paid attendants who made a point of looking bored as I walked around jotting down my notes. I quickly learned I was not alone in building my art on arbitrary foundations. There was not much rhyme or reason in what I saw. Artists strove for an identifiable trademark. Frank Stella did flat paintings of nesting rectangles; Roy Lichtenstein, enlarged cartoon images; Jasper Johns, scumbled, texturized American flags and maps.

  The only unpardonable sin was to be out of fashion, to be caught wearing the styles of the last century, the last year, the last month. Better to go naked. No one dared say that the avant-garde emperor had no clothes. Too much money was at stake. If you refused to accept the avant-garde on its own terms, you were stuck in the past and suspected of harboring a secret passion for Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.

  As I became increasingly disillusioned with the art I found in the uptown galleries, I could not help but question the arbitrary constraints I imposed on my own work. Almost overnight, I lost the compulsion to paint plumbing and abandoned my bathtub series. The problems I had been struggling with no longer mattered. I took to constructing huge grotesque collages of scabrous junk scavenged on nighttime strolls through the Lower East Side: pee-stained mattresses, discarded women’s undergarments, old shoes, cigarette butts, broken dolls, all glued together with melted wax. They covered entire walls of my apartment. It was as if all the plumbing of my bathtub series had backed up, and overflowed. A friend who hung one of my smaller works over his bed was horrified one evening to find an army of cockroaches crawling down towards his pillow from their hiding place in an old boot I’d retrieved from the garbage on one of my excursions.

  My last bathtub painting was the only one in which some of the characteristic clutter of my apartment made a cameo appearance: The plumbing appeared in flaming reds and greens. Beneath the bathtub was the boot that later provided shelter to the cockroaches. Next to it was a photograph torn from the newspaper. It showed the nearly naked corpse of a Vietnamese peasant dragged by a rope behind an American troop carrier. An American soldier looked back casually as if checking to see that the trailer was still properly hitched to the pick up. It was 1966. The war was in full swing. The Sixties was more than half over. I had yet to take the plunge into its boisterous rapids, a baptism that in due course would make the solitary preoccupations of the artist seem a curious anachronism.

  For Me, the Lower East Side Was the Anti-suburb.

  TAKING THE PLUNGE

  My arrival on the Lower East Side coincided with that of a new wave of immigrants. They were mostly white, long-haired, dropouts who at first had no collective name for themselves. The media, when it woke up to their existence, called them “hippies.” They set up crash pads in rundown tenements, dragged their mattresses onto the floor, and formed fragile, ever changing communities. They sent many hours hanging out on St. Marks Place, panhandling in front of Gem’s Spa, and getting stoned on the benches of Tompkins Square Park.

  They were like confetti blown from a party in some other part of town onto the Puerto Rican streets of the ghetto. By and large they were oblivious to their neighbors. They stayed because the rents were cheap and the Lower East Side didn’t seem to belong to anybody. They could do more or less what they wanted and dress as they pleased. No one was going to tell them to get a job. Their migration reversed the route of their predecessors. To prior generations of immigrants the Lower East Side had been the gateway to America. For the dropouts of the Sixti
es, it was an exit door. They came to the ghetto fleeing America, not trying to gain entrance. They were escaping from the emotional dust bowl of their families, their schools, their jobs. Stoned at night, they would stare in the windows of the corner bodega, watch the mice scurrying over piles of green plantains and sweet potatoes, and breathe a sigh of relief. Home was far away.

  Most of them were younger than I, but they had a lot to teach me. They brought the political counterculture of the Sixties to my doorstep. They were an infectious ferment spreading through the bowels of the ghetto. They agitated the intricate privacy of my apartment, which was now full to overflowing with enormous assemblages of Lower East Side garbage.

  I began writing an extended essay about the end of avant-garde art. I wrote that painting was lost in a meaningless play with limits that no one cared about any longer. The libratory promise of art was now to be achieved outside the frame of the canvas by the total imaginative transformation of reality.

  I typed away in my apartment, setting the typewriter on the lid of the bathtub, but never finished. I was like a nervous swimmer arguing myself into jumping from a high rock into the river. Once I jumped there was no reason to continue the argument.