by Chris Eaton
Anchorites did. And Poseidon shook his head. Wow, this is really embarrassing, he said. But I really can’t hear you. Can you come closer?
Anchorites did, this time bellowing at the top of his lungs, both feet wet to the ankles in surf. Poseidon, once again, said: You must forgive an old man, Anchorites. One more step and you can whisper it in my ear.
And Anchorites did, taking one last step over the unseen ocean shelf, tumbling ass over tits into the sea. Because Poseidon ruled the oceans, surrounding Anchorites with water enabled him to capture the younger god from every angle, see him for what he truly was. Then he trapped him inside a globe of water so that he would be exposed, in his entirety, to everyone else as well. Only after someone fell in love with him, knowing exactly what he was, would he be released.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was Theacronis who freed him. But after his humiliation, Anchorites eschewed love and had himself bricked up in a cell against the side of a mountain for the rest of eternity, so no one could do this to him again. And without the distractions of the outside world, he grew to understand the world in ways no one else had ever fathomed. The site became a famous destination for Greek pilgrims who wished to seek his advice. The word anchorite, now commonly used to denote someone who withdraws from secular life like a religious hermit (and in medieval times would actually follow Anchorites’ example by having himself bricked into the wall of a church or monastery), comes from this story. As does the word anchor, which comes from a word meaning locked in (or) attached to the water.
Chris Eaton wrote a presentation that essentially mocked the teacher for even assigning it to him. But she didn’t get it. She never got anything.
His first drawing was a reproduction of Neil Young’s solo debut. In pastel. Then The Kinks’ Heroin Cats, Prince’s Purple Rain (to practice the lettering), some Velvet Underground, and various others from his mother’s collection. Then one summer while vacationing at their cottage near Buxton, North Carolina (which he would continue to do until he died), he met Devo Raanta, a Finn who claimed to live most of the year in New York City but in Buxton always slept on a blanket on the beach, though he was not a vagrant, both of which Chris Eaton admired. One day after showing the man some of his most recent drawings, Raanta invited him back to his rented cabin for tea. No matter where he travelled, he said, his art collection always came with him. And Chris Eaton was so awestruck by the beautiful display of pretension that he forgot to ask what Raanta even did for a living and how he had accumulated so many wonderful things.
Over the next three summers, Chris Eaton switched from copying his mother’s album art to copying the Finn’s art collection, and with a few gifts of watercolors, oils and false praise, the boy’s early precociousness and proficiency were sufficiently encouraged to continue. Back in Cincinnati, he received various art books from his Empire State benefactor, starting with one dedicated solely to Akseli Rahnasto, who had essentially laid the visual foundations of modern Finnish culture, and was often cited as a major influence on artists in several other countries, including the Fauvists in France and the Blue Rose symbolist group in Russia (and tragically, as far as Raanta was concerned, the expressionist German group, Die Brücke, particularly because of his Portrait of Maxim Gorky (1905)). Chris Eaton was drawn instantly to Rahnasto’s romantic nationalism, reminiscent of the art in his fantasy novels and games, and Raanta was very satisfied. But the more the boy looked into Finland’s Father of Fine Art (a label that was not entirely accurate, as Rahnasto in turn had been a disciple of Tuomo Cedärvi), the more he became influenced by the abstraction in the artist’s later work, after the death of his wife and child when the real darkness set in, when he began to experiment more with colour and abstraction, especially in the series of paintings from his African period, including The Salt Miners (1909), Crabs on the Dock (1909), and Swimming Soldier (1911). These unfortunately provided the perfect jumping-off point for Chris Eaton’s fascination with Die Brücke (mostly Heckel and Mueller, but also Pechstein), as well as the emotional angst and experimental styles of the brutish Septem Group (Jaska Jokunen foremost among them, but also, notably, Lassi and Leevi, who openly mocked Rahnsato and Cedärvi yet clearly owed them a huge debt), Kalle Johanson in Sweden, the latter periods of Kandinsky, and even the clumsy American expressionists like Albright, Ali, Church and Kleene. The boy even said that Church and Kleene made Rahnasto’s colourism seem naïve and superficial. Church and Kleene? Two of the most functional and derivative artists to ever be associated with a word like expression? They made Rahnasto look superficial? Raanta continued to send Chris Eaton books on other great Finnish artists, including but not limited to Aku Ankka and Roope Setä, but the boy’s ongoing admiration for Rahnasto began to have further adverse effects, dropping him firmly in the lap of Edvard Munch. The Norwegian had sat for one of the Finnish master’s portraits, and the two painters had exhibited together several times in Germany, including one show that featured one of the first Scream works, from which it was impossible to keep teenage boys, particularly sensitive ones like Chris Eaton, and over the next year-and-a-half, though Raanta tried as hard as he could to counter it, the boy produced more copies of The Scream than its originator.
Raanta grew desperate. If Chris Eaton wanted something predictable, then what about Cézanne and Gauguin? Or Derain, who offered the same illusion of simplicity but with actual mastery of the medium? In the boy’s junior year of high school, Raanta dropped them on him like fishing lures, hoping they might gradually bait the boy back to a true upholder of classical tradition like Matisse, or at least someone from the Nabis, like Ker-Xavier Roussel or Christan Oe, who were not medium-sized, stout or well-dressed enough to have ever been popular in their own day. But once again, the examples only sucked the boy deeper into degradation: Deburau and Copeau and Lecoq, none of whom had anything worthwhile to say, and the fin de siècle degenerate Christophe Ratoen (who was even worse, if you can imagine, than the twin travesties from Lyon: Charin or Davaste). At least they were all French this time. Raanta was frantic. His last hope, he figured, was Klimt. If the boy insisted on frank eroticism, he could at least follow something beautiful. And at last all was good. For maybe a month. Until the boy wrote back to him about seeing his first Schiele, the less said the better.
Of course, was it possible to tell, from the few short years Chris Eaton had existed on the planet, that the artistic light in the boy’s soul had been damped and grotesquely refracted beyond help? Certainly it would have seemed so to his Finnish benefactor. But Chris Eaton’s attraction to Egon Schiele was not the common adolescent perversion Raanta might have presupposed. And besides, like a bird without a suitable mate, the boy did not nest on Schiele but continued to flit about, until he discovered the work of Ivar Drasche and decided this was really his home. Schiele had died of the Spanish flu at twenty-eight, still several years younger than Drasche when they first met, as Austrian soldiers guarding Russian prisoners during the First World War. And yet Drasche is often incorrectly noted as a disciple of Schiele, perhaps because of a similarity in their brush strokes, and palette, and expressive lines, and the grotesque aesthetic of both men. But while controversy and scandal typically followed Schiele – and arguably made him more popular, or at least more talked about – Drasche was like a fly on the wall, barely known in his own time, let alone now. Schiele thrived on calumny. He encouraged it. And despite being arrested or run out of town several times, he continued to sell and live off his work. Drasche, meanwhile, worked many different jobs, including machinist, metal worker, furniture-maker and bike-maker (all in high demand during the global depression between wars) in order to fund his creativity.
Chris Eaton grew swiftly bored by what he saw as Schiele’s excessive narcissism, posturing and sophomoric attempts at shock – potent in its immediate effect but not lasting in its impression. Drasche’s work, on the other hand, always strove outwards, like a plant towards the light, stayed with him even in sleep, no matter whether it was a painting
of an apple, a moustache or a bank clerk. It was a tragedy, the boy felt, that most critics were too concerned about appearing philistine around Schiele to see the real truth: that he had never passed out of his awkward artistic apprenticeship, attempting to disguise his debts to Klimt through nude depictions of under-age girls. Drasche was the real deal, secure enough in his own talents to paint whatever he liked. Drasche resisted the easy money and sought out the models for his most accomplished work in the most nondescript corners of Vienna: the bureaucrats and civil servants, the street cleaners and postal employees. Though his early career was marked with portraits of Viennese celebrities in a nervously animated style, his time as a factory worker issued in a fascination with the everyman, and the first works of Drasche’s new Charest-Harvaton Period (named for his first two subjects, which he initially drew for money as an illustrator for a story in L’Officiel) focused his exotic vulgarity on the day-to-day existence of the common people, with all of its minor events and details, its mundane happenstance, its prosaic routine. Like van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, his work was often clogged with seemingly unimportant objects, long visual lists of machinery parts, lucky charms, books and sewing needles, tobacco, boots. But unlike Eyck, his objects were not symbolic but representative. When he painted a pipe, for example, he was painting a pipe, not the riddance of happiness, or Magritte, or even welding instructions, such as a bevel, or flare, or flare bevel, which more than a few critics have independently posited. His subjects were the people he considered the true epitome of life, just trying to get by, performing their simple tasks and performing them well, like ants in a colony, and he surrounded them with the dirt that remained after digging their nests, because he felt he might, through the minutiae of one particular subject, capture what it meant to be human in a more general way, not to depict just one moment in the life of a person, nor even the complete biography of his socially inert subjects, but to capture life itself in its entirety.
For a full six months, it was mostly Drasche that Chris Eaton wanted to emulate, until the end of his senior year when The National Gallery of Canada bought a painting by Barnett Newman for nearly two million dollars and he became a devout disciple of the American color field painters, like Rothko and Motherwell (from whom the leap to Matisse was not so great, though it was too late for Raanta to witness), as well as John Winger and Russell Ziskey. He was especially obsessive of Anthony Gillis, who by the mid-sixties had moved on from his initial Prussian and Indanthrene blues, his Winsor greens, mixing reds and turquoise-greens to achieve something approaching black, which an artist statement from his second solo show claimed was “to convey strength, simplicity, and the quiet energy of balancing forces,” to increasingly lighter and lighter tones, until his legendary show in 1967 that featured three-dozen unique paintings entirely in shades of white (excepting the one piece called Negative, the centerpiece of the entire exhibit, a canvas coated with black straight from the tube). The canvasses were confined areas of emptiness, devoid of anything, capturing themes based on isolation but with a wide variation including sexuality (Old Lace and Ivory), fragility (Walking on Eggshell), and madness (Who’s Afraid of Isabelline?). The last of these was the largest piece by far, measuring twenty-eight by nine feet. It was used but never credited – or at least approximately duplicated – for the ninth album of a rather prominent British band, leading to a fairly famous lawsuit that he eventually lost but which also helped to make his name.
For several weeks Chris Eaton went to Europe, with an inter-Christian choir singing at local conventions and symposiums designed to repair the rift created mostly by the British and Germans. As they crossed the border into Italy, one of their chaperones claimed to have grown up with an Archbishop in Sweden. And after a few calls on a cell phone the size of a toolbox, they were scheduled for a private Papal audience that afternoon. Chris Eaton wasn’t Catholic. Many of them weren’t. But there was, nevertheless, a universal respect for the Pope in those days. He spoke to them of promise in three different languages, and of forming connections and bonds across continents and cultures. And hope, like they were kids or something. And then he was introduced to each of them in turn, shaking hands and passing out cheap rosaries. In early 1979, when it had come time for the newly vested Pope John Paul II to select which make of rosaries should become the official gifts to visiting groups of pilgrims and young people, nothing, especially some money from the budget, was spared. And the finest plastic, blessed by the Man himself, was delivered into the hands of special visitors with abandon, the Vatican seal printed legibly on the vinyl envelope that held them. Still, Chris Eaton was shocked as the small package was slipped discreetly into his hand, because he thought, at first, that it was a condom. And his shock is obvious in the photo they sold him for the equivalent of fifteen US dollars.
There was another girl on the trip from St. Petersburg, with a slim waist and chest, her cheeks sunken like northern roads, and her spine almost malformed, her waist jutting forward so abruptly. One night after a group dinner in Paris, she pulled him from the restaurant back to the hotel. His roommate was in their room and would not leave, so they moved to the stairwell. I just want to kiss it, she growled, then started licking, up the base and across the crown, before taking it full in her mouth. He’d never slept with anyone before. Never even masturbated. And he was surprised to discover that it was slightly painful, especially around the foreskin. No one had ever told him what a foreskin was, certainly never explained how he should clean it, and he wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t supposed to hurt, this first time, at least in some tiny way, so he ignored the burning and tearing as her lips and tongue worked him over, and the defenseless foreskin retreated further and further, from where it had fused itself to the glans, until she suddenly placed both hands on his thighs and reared violently backward, the slick spill of something across her chin.
“Jesus Christ!”
The blood was all over her teeth, dripping from her chin to his thigh. She was holding her stomach like she might throw up.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He had no explanation.
Thankfully, she was too embarrassed to report anything to the chaperones. For the rest of the trip, she just wouldn’t look him in the eye.
Soon none of the other girls would either.
He’d never really thought about boys before Phil. All he knew was that he wasn’t interested in girls all that much. Or, basically, hanging out with any of the kids at his school, boys or girls, just a bunch of rich brats with nothing better to do than smoke pot and complain about their trust funds. His parents sent him to a private school so he’d have better opportunities. The public school around the corner didn’t even have a pool, for Christ’s sake, built in the Cold War to withstand missile attacks and look like a penitentiary but not to foster any sort of learning beyond the Three R’s. So they shipped him off to Shorecrest along with the cripple kid who lived down the street and who couldn’t handle the stairs. His new school somehow managed to cram elevators every five or ten feet, even in the single-level buildings, just to show how wealthy they were; the only time anyone used the stairs was to hang out between classes, and the staircase you chose to sit on marked your social standing.
The only real benefit to attending Shorecrest was going on class trips. And all he had to do to qualify was join one of the many teams and clubs. The easiest, he figured, was to join the “orchestra,” made up almost entirely of prodigy violinists and flutes. No one, up until that point, had taken up the tuba, so he didn’t even have to audition and barely had to practice. He was all they had. It was also an instrument that allowed him to remain aloof. The trumpet and clarinet sections were like haunts of annoying little songbirds, the way they giggled to themselves during practice, or pecked at their lunch in little groups. Every time one of them sneezed, he thought the rest might wet their pants. And still, putting up with the band seemed a brilliant way to see the world, like Hemingway had done, or Oscar Wilde. All he h
ad to was survive the rest of them. And that was what Walkmans were for.
More often than not in some foreign city he could be found listening to The Cure in some overcompensating hotel lobby, surrounded by miniature potted palm trees, drawing pictures of himself in a ring-bound notebook, only more buff. Even in Southern Europe, they’d decided that a palm tree signified a tropical vacation, and the hotel was full of them. It just wasn’t hot enough for them to prosper, and the pots they kept them in restricted proper root growth, so they remained in a state of constant arborial adolescence.
This was when Phil Taylor, the hardest drummer of hard rock, nearly tripped over him “trying to find the sodding ice machine,” complimented his drawings and invited him up for a little party they were having.
“You mean, to your room – ”
“What are you listening to?”
He held up the tape.
“Geezus, I love that shite…”
“…”
“Makes you feel like it’s okay to be different from everyone else.”
And Chris Eaton wasn’t out yet. He was simply innocent enough to think they were just kindred spirits. Here was someone who understood him, who could relate, in a mature sort of way, who’d heard of The Cure and The Pet Shop Boys and even Depeche Mode. “Pictures of You” always made the drummer cry. His own songs, Phil said once they’d gone up to his room, were trying to capture those same feelings: “Of despair and fucking isolation in a world of bleeding fuckwits.” And when he grabbed an acoustic guitar from the corner and played him one, Chris Eaton cried for him. With him.
“You should record it.”
“It could probably use a better bridge…”