by Pete Hamill
But the eyes were my eyes.
And they looked scared.
Suddenly I felt almost sick: the next day I was supposed to draw Eden Santana, but these pictures showed me that I just wasn’t good enough. If this was indeed Miles’s work, Miles should be drawing her. She deserved a better artist than I was. And I felt ashamed and envious too. Somehow, in spite of everything, in spite of all the same kind of crap that I had to put up with, Miles found a way to do his work. He even found time to draw me. He was serious. In six weeks at Ellyson, I’d made a dozen drawings in a couple of restaurants, showing off to a woman who must have seen me as an amusing amateur; certainly if Eden Santana could see Miles’s drawings, she would know how crude I truly was. I was wasting my life. I was hopelessly behind and could never catch up.
I heard footsteps out in the supply room. Someone grunted and a crate fell. I heard Boswell’s voice. “Shit. Goddamn.” Then another grunt. And then he was walking away. He and Miles were back from Mainside. I heard Harrelson’s voice in the distance, the words unclear, and a door slamming. Boswell was finished for the day.
I should have left then, but I was held by the things I saw and afraid of being spotted sneaking out of the back room. So I waited. Five minutes. Ten. Miles wasn’t coming back. I could stay a while. I felt the way I used to when I showed up early for a Mass and the priest wasn’t there and I touched all of his garments and the chalice and the Hosts, running my hands over the forbidden holy objects. Part of that was defiance; if God existed, then let Him show himself, let Him strike me dead. Part of it was awe of the beauty of the objects. I could play at being a priest. In the same mood, I picked up the tubes of paint. The label said “casein.” I opened one, sniffed it. Almost no smell. Or rather, a milky smell of some kind. Once I’d walked into the lobby of the Art Students League on 57th Street to see if they had courses in cartooning and the smell of oil and turpentine was all through the building. Casein didn’t smell like that. The tins were filled with water, so I knew it must be something you diluted.
For a moment I thought about picking up a brush and leaving a mark on the unfinished painting. Let Miles know that somewhere in the building there was another artist who knew what he was doing. Just take one little section, I thought, paint a brick into the concrete wall, make the sun begin to lift over the horizon. Then thought: No. Don’t do that. Suppose someone did that to one of your pictures? And thought: Go ahead. I picked up the largest brush and hefted it, surprised at its weight.
And then heard a door clicked shut. Silence. Then footsteps treading lightly down one of the aisles. The footsteps stopped. A grunt. A shuffling sound. And there before me, shocked and a little scared, was Miles Rayfield.
“What in the fuck are you doing here?” he said, looking angry and invaded.
“I was wondering what this was doing here,” I said, waving around the tiny studio. “I moved a crate and here it was.”
Miles didn’t budge from the narrow passageway beside the wall. His eyes glanced over the paints, pictures, easel. His voice dropped to a whisper:
“Did you tell anybody?”
“No. I replaced the crate to keep it hidden.”
“The truth. I have to know.”
“Why would I tell anybody?”
He stepped into the tiny room, seeming to fill it. He picked up a brush, tapped his thigh with it.
“I could really be in the shit if they found this,” he said. “Deep shit.”
“Only if they find it.”
Miles sighed. “That’s inevitable. One fine morning, some asshole like Harrelson or Boswell or Jones will move a crate and it’ll be all over. They’ll arrest me. Arrest the paintings. Send me to the god-damned brig and the pictures to that fucking dumpster you’re always guarding …” He smiled in a trapped way, then looked at me. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
I struggled to say the words. “Well, I’m kind of an artist, too.”
Miles blinked. “We’d better take a walk.”
We walked around the base in the fading light. I tried to explain about being a cartoonist and Miles said he thought that if I had any talent at all, that was the way to waste it. I told him I was going to meet a woman the following night and make some drawings and he said he’d like to see them and asked me if she was a nude model and I said I didn’t know, she was a woman I knew and he said that was the worst kind of model, because you want to flatter them, make them pretty when they’re not. He wished there was a life class somewhere in Pensacola, so he could draw from a model again, but there wasn’t ’cause all these goddamned Baptists would raid the place, and I asked him why he didn’t have his wife come down and the two of them could live off the base and he could paint in the apartment and use her as a model and he just shook his head and said, No, that wouldn’t work.
“She’s gone to Jesus,” he said, as we headed for the mess hall. “The last thing the goddamned Christians will let you do is see their bodies.”
“If she’s your wife …”
“She’d sit there thinking of spending eternity in the depths of hell.”
He shifted then, explaining that casein was make of milk products, and you did dilute it with water. He liked the way casein covered a surface, but it was nowhere as subtle or juicy as oil, and you had to treat the boards, which were called Masonite, with a white primer called gesso. Some artists mixed the primer with a little sand to give it a rough texture; Miles preferred it smooth, using the brush to create textures. He mumbled when I asked him what his picture meant, saying he wasn’t really sure. The sailor in the room with the orange obviously thought he was in a jail, with Florida filling the room and crushing him. But he wasn’t sure who the old woman was on that country road and didn’t much care for the picture.
“It’s too simple, too easy,” he said. “Those goddamned trees are stolen right out of Snow White.”
“What’ll you do with it?”
“Burn it,” he said. “Or give it to Red Cannon. He’ll think it’s his mother and love it to death.”
I told him I’d bought a newsprint pad and the chalks, and he said newsprint was all right for sketching, but the paper was so frail you couldn’t work it, couldn’t erase or manipulate the chalk very much. “You’ve got to be right the first time,” he said, “and almost nobody is.” We went into the mess hall and sat down with slabs of gray pot roast. “You see, you couldn’t draw this piece of dead animal,” Miles said. “You have to paint it. To get the revolting dead color exactly right. If a man had this color, you’d rush him to the hospital.”
I laughed and he ate slowly, cutting the pieces small, and chewing with the front of his mouth. “Fuel,” he murmured, “just think of it as fuel.”
There were some books about art that I should read, and he could loan them to me, he said. But if I were serious, I had to draw every day. It didn’t matter how many books I read or how many pictures I saw in museums. You learned to draw by drawing. Scribble drawings, doodle them, go off and make pictures. And look at everything. “You’d better feel something about what you see, too,” he said. “If you don’t feel anything about your drawings, they’ll be as dead as this disgusting pot roast.”
After a while, I said: “Could you show me how to make paintings?”
“Sure,” Miles said, as I felt myself swelling with new ideas, images, ambitions, and the sense that I’d made a friend and met a master. “If you don’t try to teach me about that fucking baseball.”
Chapter
30
What Miles Told Me
I became an artist to keep from going crazy. It was as simple as that. My father killed himself in 1930, leaving my mother to take care of me. I was fourteen months old. We lived in Marietta, Georgia, a boring little suburb just outside of Atlanta, and my father was in the furniture business. I don’t remember anything about him. The son of a bitch. After he killed himself, Mother hid all the photographs of him, all his letters, the documents that made up his shitty little life. She put
them away in an old steamer trunk that she’d never taken anywhere (poor Mother) and I didn’t see them until I was what is laughingly called Grown Up. By then, I could have been looking at pictures of George Washington.
Mother did her best. I give her that. This was the Depression, and it was hard on everyone, I suppose, but even harder in the South. The furniture company was gone before Father died; that’s why he died (or so Mother said, telling me about him later, in bits and pieces, and stopping always at the part where she found him in the chair with his thumb in the trigger guard of the shotgun and his face blown off, stopping there until the last time she started the story and then, saying it, telling me, she was rid of it and never told about it again). His relatives stayed away from Mother, afraid, I suppose, that they’d remind her of him, or she would ask for money, or maybe they blamed her in some way, the miserable shits. I just don’t know why they stayed away and I don’t give a goddamn. The fact is they treated us like lepers. I wish them painful deaths. There’s a blur there somewhere. Even now. Mother and I lived in a house where some things were never said.
But we had that house, bought and paid for when Father was alive. He left her that, paid for when he and the country were riding high. A great gabled house, with porticoes and parquet floors and a piano in the living room and bad pictures hanging everywhere. I always had my own room, and after I started drawing (I was seven and the pictures always showed me with a father and mother, O Sigmund Freud, please do not puke!). Mother outfitted one of the other rooms as a little studio. I had my own table and lots of paper and crayons and watercolors. I would sit up there and draw and listen to Mother downstairs, giving her goddamned piano lessons. When she played, the music was nice. When the others played, I hated it; they couldn’t do it right; they were flat or off-key, and this made me draw in the same way, losing whatever it was that I had.
Mother did more than give piano lessons. She had to, to survive, to feed us both, to heat the house, to keep from losing it to the tax collectors. So she took in sewing too, although I don’t know where she went to get it. She certainly didn’t pick it up in the neighborhood. Not Mother. She was too proud for that. Right through the Depression, she still had a colored woman come in once a week to clean. A thin bony woman named Mahalia, who would come to the house when Mother was out and play the colored stations on the radio and dance around. Thin as she was, she had the eyes of a fat woman. Just scared hell out of me. Maybe outside every thin woman there’s a fat one trying to get in. Those damned eyes were greedy, defiant, alarming. You couldn’t make our Mahalia do anything she didn’t want to do and once when I used the word nigger to describe someone else, she slapped my face. Good and hard. I cried and cried, not knowing what I’d done, and then knowing, slowly, when our Mahalia said that she was a woman, a person, colored, but not some damned nigger. I was about ten then, and I didn’t tell my mother ’cause I knew Mahalia was right. I didn’t want Mother taking my side.
Mother kept saying the Depression would be over soon, and then we’d be all right again, but I still don’t know what she meant. It didn’t matter. The Depression never ended, and all she talked about was how hopeless it was, and how even Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal couldn’t end it. Finally, when I was oh, twelve, she took a job in a restaurant. With a pink uniform. Five nights a week. I knew she thought this was a comedown, but she never talked about it; it was as if the humiliation wouldn’t be real if she didn’t mention it. She supported us with the waitress job and the sewing and the piano lessons, although as the Depression went on and on, fewer and fewer little bastards came over to assault the piano. That was good news to me, but terrible for Mother. She even thought it was an aesthetic judgment of some goddamned kind.
She took that waitress job because of me. She was convinced that I had talent, thought I was the greatest artist since Leonardo, or at least since Norman Rockwell. She saved all my drawings and made me date them and framed some of them. She bought me supplies. Nothing was too good for her darling little Miles. And then she enrolled me at the Art Institute in Atlanta, in the kiddie class every Saturday morning. She had to come up with bus money and charcoal and paint money and lunch money. That’s why she started waiting on tables, just telling them at the restaurant (which I never saw, another mystery to be imagined and not touched, smelled, felt or seen) that she could work any day except Saturday.
All through this time, I started to feel odd. Out of it. Weird. You know how I feel about baseball. Well, even then, a kid, I didn’t care for the game, never learned it, never played it with the other kids. I don’t know why. Maybe it was timing. The summer I got scarlet fever, I had to stay home while the other boys were learning and by the time I could go out to the street again, I was already behind. Also, I felt strange, ugly even, with this damned big head, and I couldn’t throw right or something … So I decided I didn’t like the game. But I knew I was ahead in at least one goddamned thing and that was drawing. I had that, and the others didn’t. So when football season came around, I felt the same way as I did about baseball. The same for swimming, too. Mother kept telling me that all the public swimming pools were just filthy breeding grounds for polio, and in some ways she was right. And she warned me that if I played football, I could break my drawing hand, my arm, my shoulder. I wouldn’t be able to do this … thing, this magic thing. This thing of putting marks on paper that made human beings and places and light come to life. She was afraid for me and I was afraid of her being afraid so I never learned any sport. I don’t know how they’re played or how I’m supposed to watch them. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s very sad. But I don’t care. I don’t miss sports at all. They’re of no interest to me.
But I did grow up feeling very strange. No father. No sports. No friends. And this mother who lived to feed me and please me and guide me, this mother who kept a big drafty house just for the two of us.
That Saturday art class changed everything. For the first time I met people who were something like me. The school was a community of oddballs, loners, kids who stayed home to draw instead of throwing rocks at buses or putting pennies on railroad tracks like every American kid is supposed to do. They were from all over the city and some of them had parents who were divorced and one had a father who was dead and another a father who’d just disappeared. We began to feel that people who didn’t make art or have screwed-up families were the real odd ones in this world.
My mother slaved to help me. You know all those clichés about wearing your fingers to the bone? They were true about Mother. The most expensive things were art books. They still are. But our public library was truly rotten, because good art books always have nudes in them and the goddamned ignorant Baptist idiots wouldn’t allow nudes to be shown in a public place. Afraid the whole male population of Marietta would whack themselves into a coma. So Mother bought the books for me. There was hardly a week when she didn’t come home with at least one book or an art magazine. Always on payday. I used to get excited when I woke up on a Friday morning wondering what she’d bring me that night. I suppose when most boys my age were reading the sports pages or comic books, I was reading Walter Pater and the journals of Eugène Delacroix and books about Rubens and Leonardo and Degas. I was copying pictures from these books, trying to discover how they had done what they did. And I was drunk on books about Bohemias. Dreaming about the Left Bank in Paris and Greenwich Village in New York and garrets everywhere. I wanted to leave the town of Marietta, the state of Georgia, the whole goddamned backward South, and join the real artists in some country of art.
When I graduated from high school, I went right into the Art Institute. By then, Mother had saved some money, don’t ask me how. I guess the war changed it. I guess the damned Japanese ended the Depression when they bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, Mother became the most unlikely goddamned Rosie the Riveter in America, but she did it, working at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Marietta, her hair tied up in a kerchief. When the war ended she was hysterical for days. At first
I thought it was just panic, that she was terrified that she was going to lose her job and the Depression would come back with all its goddamned horrors. But it wasn’t that at all. Mother had learned that the Enola Gay was built by Martin and so she was sure she’d helped drop The Bomb on Hiroshima. It was as if she’d killed every one of those people, just by slamming a rivet into a tail section. She cried about taking blood money. She told me that now everything would be different, that The Bomb was something new in the world. And then she cried again.
But she saved a lot of the blood money, and when I was ready to go to art school full time she had enough for all the extra expenses. I was doing oils, tempera, learning about casein and gouache, and all of that cost a lot. There were some amazing students there, and plenty of fakers, too. Abstract Expressionism had just been given its name, with a big glossy spread in Life magazine, and every second painter was talking about space and the picture plane and trying to paint like Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. I went my own way. I liked faces, bodies, mood, weather, atmosphere. I loved drawing, not dripping. Maybe I was just afraid to take risks. But I kept going, doing it the older way. It was strange to be out of fashion at eighteen. Still, it was the South; they didn’t really care about all this newfangled stuff from New York. So I had my first show in June of 1950, while I was a junior at the Institute. At a small gallery in Marietta. The pictures were still hanging when the war started in Korea. I was terrified. And furious. I’d grown up believing that World War II would be the last war in the history of the world. Or at least the last American war. I really believed all that crap. And here on this lovely summer day, with my whole life ahead of me, another war had started. In some goddamned place called Korea. Men were dying again, and soon it would be my turn too.