Out of a Medium's Mouth
out of dark night
Sheila and I had sublet our 9th Street apartment for the summer so we retreated from Black Mountain to the environs of nearby Tryon and set up house in the Octagonal Living Unit. We had lived there for two and a half years before moving to New York, but now we had a three-year-old and a five-month-old with us. The house was an octagon just twenty feet in diameter, but it had a sleeping loft and a small bathroom added to one side. Because there was a cathedral ceiling over the living room, and because of the openness of the octagonal shape, it still felt airy, even with two babies. Slightly cozy, but we spent much of our time outdoors anyway.
Our friends Chuck and Nancy, who had sold us the piece of their property, lived over the dam and through the woods up a grassy hillside. We spent many hours with them, arriving with Julia by the hand and Eleanor in an L.L. Bean canvas tote bag. They fed us drinks and dinners. Having helped us out once before by hiring us to make toys, then renting us the loft for The Upstairs Artspace at twenty-five bucks a month, they came to our rescue again, buying a big piece of sculpture from me. Of course, they had no space large enough to display it, and anyway, the piece was still in New York. This money quickly ran out and we began to fret that we wouldn’t be able to buy food. How could we expect to move back to New York? By now, we both needed jobs and we also needed a larger apartment. Would we be forced across the East River into Long Island City, across the Hudson into Jersey City? Horror. Would that defeat the purpose of being in New York? Back then, yes, probably so.
My friend Sam, who had followed us to New York and then departed a few weeks before we left for Black Mountain, called from San Francisco to tell me about an outdoor sculpture competition to be held in Lenoir, just an hour from our octagonal cabin. It was being run by someone he met back when he was a poet in the schools. He encouraged me to go. Sam was as adept and at ease talking with people and keeping in touch with them as I was hopeless at it. He even contacted the woman and arranged for Sheila and the girls and me to spend the night on her living room floor after I installed my sculpture. We curled up together under her dining room table. I took one of the linoleum pieces I had made over the summer, a scrap of blue like a curling wave hung on the wall in front of a wooden beach chair from the fifties, its seat made from pillow ticking, its direction toward the wave. Against the linoleum I placed two broomsticks, one blue, one pink, the blue one with a vaguely vaginally shaped coil probably meant to hold a mophead.
I called it False Assumptions and it was so utterly unlike any of the other sculptures on view that most everyone in Lenoir and most of the other artists found it jarring, silly. Some laughed. But as luck had it, the judge was right on my wavelength. David Finn was one of the artists whose work I had admired for our entire tenure in New York, though I had never met him. Using found materials and found clothing, he had constructed life-sized figures, both benign and menacing, which he wired to the ubiquitous chain-link fences all over downtown Manhattan. He had just been hired by Wake Forest as a sculpture instructor. I won the competition. The five hundred dollars saved us from going totally broke.
Sheila, whose genius and philosophy of being in the world is to bloom where you are planted, had begun applying for teaching jobs in the area, but with no luck. For my part, I had no intention of getting a job in Tryon. I was all in; consumed by the big exhibition I was preparing of my own work for The Upstairs. Having cancelled the tenth anniversary exhibition due to lack of funds, they needed something to fill in–– an exhibition that wouldn’t cost them anything. My show was slated for September. Bill Arning would write the catalog essay. There was a room above the gallery I was allowed to use as a studio, and I spent long days there in thrall to a narrow group of found materials from which I was expecting some mad alchemy to emerge: broomsticks, scraps of linoleum, thrift-store balls, and the beat up chairs I found squirreled away in the loft above the gallery. My friend Pinkney called one day to tell us their summer foray back home in Memphis was now going to be permanent, but that a friend of his had told him about a job in Virginia at an artists’ colony. It sounded like a good deal––one job shared by two people, he said. He and Janice couldn’t do it because they were staying in Memphis near family. I sent the director a letter, but despite our dire financial situation, I resisted the idea.
We swam and canoed in the little lake below our house that had been created by damming up Alexander Creek. The oaks and pines grew right up to the edge of the water, but the sun overhead warmed the water. I helped Chuck build a small dock off the dam. We christened it Lake Alexander (the name of the creek that fed it and by coincidence, my middle name), though it was more the size of a farm pond. Standing in the muck on the edge of the water, we’d stop every so often to pull small leeches from our skin. Sitting on the dock at dusk with the moon rising behind us, the drone of cicadas provided background for bullfrogs and the occasional nightjar, a whippoorwill or a chuck-will’s-widow.
Summer slipped languorously into September and still we hadn’t made the decision to go back to New York. The thought of starting pretty much from scratch was daunting. With two kids, we would need a bigger apartment, which would mean better-paying jobs. Important parts of our support network were disappearing. Pinkney and Janice back to Memphis. Nancy Weaver to Martha’s Vineyard to be with Dave, a ship captain she’d met. Sam had married Pinkney’s Memphis College of Art friend, Doll Mohead in a ceremony at Lake Alexander––I canoed her down the aisle. She was now pregnant and they packed it in and headed for San Francisco. My show at The Upstairs received very positive reviews in Atlanta ArtPapers and The Arts Journal, both written by Alan Sondheim, a respected critic who taught at the Atlanta College of Art, but nothing sold. The dream of supporting myself through the sale of art was fraying at every seam.
From where I sit now, it isn’t just that I was naive to think anything would sell, I seemed to sabotage that possibility by my insistence on creating things that did not hold together physically, that were not discrete objects like baubles, that frankly mitigated against being sold. Nineveh: A fishing pole, a found, unaltered scrap of linoleum in the shape of a whale, and a rubber doll plastered inside a hole I punched in the sheetrock wall. Who, but the most dedicated, adventurous collector or museum would buy something like this? And, given my bona fides at this time, how did I expect to attract such a person to a non-profit gallery in a small mountain town in North Carolina?
Remarkably, this piece was later selected for an exhibition at White Columns called Fragments, Parts, Wholes: The Body and the Culture curated by Saul Ostrow. Even in New York with the endorsement of an avant-garde exhibition space and a respected critic, it didn’t sell. It didn’t even register. No matter, it was too late.
One night sometime near the autumnal equinox, as the four of us slumbered inside the little octagon, I was jolted awake by what sounded like the screams of a woman in some unspeakable distress. Sleeping naked, I bolted out of the bed and clambered out of the loft down the rickety wooden ladder I’d cobbled together from scraps of two-by-two. I jumped into a pair of wellies, threw open the screen door, grabbed the only thing on the coat-hook–– Sheila’s beige trench coat –– and threw it on. I ran down the hill and across the dam toward the screams, the coat billowing out behind me. As I ran, I picked up a stout stick, not knowing what I was about to face. A rape in progress? A man with a gun? On the far side of the lake, crowded into the corner of a barbed-wire fence were two dogs, faces bloodied, teeth bared. Against the fence were three of Chuck and Nancy’s goats, screaming bloody murder, the neck of one already torn out.
Anyone who tells you that acting on instinct is the best thing to do has never found themselves in any danger. I acted on instinct, raising the cudgel high above my head and hollering at the top of my lungs. Then I charged the dogs. What the fuck was I doing? Here were two dogs, mad with bloodlust, expecting a delicious meal. Did I really think they would give that up? I let fly a roar that could raise the hackles of even a mad dog and as I flew at them, they stared me down for an instant and then turned and ran. I dropped the stick and grabbed the small animal with the torn gullet. Nothing to do but throw him over my shoulders like a sopping woolen sweater. The trench coat blowing open, my bare torso exposed, I trudged up through the grassy field like some mad mixture of Picasso sculpture and sexual pervert.
When I got to the house, I banged on the door, the goat still across my shoulders. Chuck threw the door open, Nancy just behind him; both recoiled in alarm and confusion, blood dripping down my body, the coat open, my legs bare but for rubber boots. In an instant Chuck apprehended the situation and ran out the door toward his goats. Nancy helped me take the wounded beast from my shoulders and lay it on the grass. It died a little while later. The other goats, herded back up the hill by Chuck, survived. The next morning, the farmer who owned the two dogs, having been told about the incident, took down his .30-.30 and shot them both.
Two weeks later, with an offer of jobs at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, we drove to New York to begin packing up our things to depart.
EXCELLENT
you tell a fine tale.