eter
helped me build an installation to show paintings that fall in
my second show at Keller Gallery on McAllister Street, a block
from the Veteran's Memorial Museum on McAllister Street (San
Francisco's equivalent of New York's 'Orchard and Rivington'
district) buried behind City Hall and The Opera House. By then,
Allen who I'd met a month earlier (thinking he was trying to
pick me up, not knowing he was on a search for the old bearded
painter with the beautiful boyfriend) was living with us. He
buys a drawing of himself, Peter and Natalie from the exhibition.
Nude With Onions was first shown there. A lady approached
me as I stood by the painting with John Keller who introduced
me to her. After some opening remarks, she asks me,
"What's that between her legs?"
Allen brings home a bottle of Courvoisier
on New Year's Eve. I come from work to join Peter, Natalie, and
him for a pleasant kitchen evening celebration. I awake before
midnight in a stupor. I wake Natalie. No sign of Peter or Allen.
There's half a bottle of Cognac left. We stand on the front steps
to see the starry new year come in. I'm devastated behind the
smile as we toast the new year from the stairs of 1403.
Our household was broken up (or down) by
reshaped relations, and all of us moved now to the Wentley, three
blocks away where we no longer really lived 'together'. That
is, no one to take care of or be taken care of. Fosters Cafeteria
is our living room. Between there and The Place, it feels like
we're in some odd cafe society.
My pain was that of being odd man out,
as I longed for the closeness of relating to one Other. I missed
the odd turns of mind that Peter brought to my Jesuit formed
thought. In a surprising turn of my work after a weekend in the
country, I reached out to that past in 'The Flower Inside', followed
by 'Iris Natasha'. Then, bitterness of abandonment asserted itself
in 'A Rose With Thorns'. When the high spirit of that group of
paintings became apparent to my eye with a show in mind, 'A Rose
With Thorns' seemed too mean a work to include. Allen liked it,
asked for it and I gave it to him. Now my friend Damion has bought
it at a Sotheby's Auction and it seems strange to see it in an
apartment on Capitol hill in Seattle, having hung all these years
pinned to the walls of Lower East Side kitchens.
The earlier experience painting oranges
seemed a pattern repeating itself as I painted my way out of
the emotional devastation of love-loss, at work among colors.
The new works brought poems from friends energized by 'switchboard
central' Ginsberg, that were slid beneath my Wentley door. Late
into the work on this group, an exhibition materialized around
one of the periodic invitations by Leo Krickorian to show with
him. It kept my mind occupied in this age of sadness until August,
when I went 'abroad' to Mexico, relying on literature's 'cure'
for a broken heart.
From titles of my paintings, Allen made
a poem, The Dangerous Garden
of Robert LaVigne.
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