Long Past Stopping (2 page)

Sometimes if we were lucky, Mom would bring us along to her jam sessions in the heart of West Philly. She may not have been able to see me smile from her place behind the piano, but I couldn't help but grin from ear to ear seeing her on the stage. At the bar, she was no longer Dr. Canfield, the accomplished doctor of psychology who was engaged in a one-woman battle against the Man. At the bar they called her the “doctor,” and when we walked in everybody knew it. I don't think any white folks had ever set foot in that place; at least I had never seen one, but you couldn't imagine a warmer reception. Everyone seemed to know and like Mom. All the other musicians rotated from song to song, but Mom stayed up there for three hours at a time. She always asked someone, usually whoever was closest to the door, to keep an eye on us, but once the novelty of trying to talk to the two socially retarded white kids wore off, we
would never see that person again. It didn't matter much; we just stood on top of the table, watching Mom until we got tired and climbed back down to the booth. At 2:00 a.m. or so she would wake us up and say good-bye to everyone, and we would get in the Peugeot and drive home.

 

I
N AN EFFORT TO EXPOSE
Kyle and me to some of the stranger opportunities for American kids, Mom sent us off to a circus-arts camp in New York the summer I turned seven years old. The camp was run by '60s icon Wavy Gravy and his partner, Surya, a Sufi clown.

The circus camp offered classes in tightrope walking, juggling, acrobatics, and magic. Since Wavy didn't really have any skills, circus or otherwise, he played a one-stringed instrument he called a unitar and taught a class called Space Eaters, which could be loosely described as an acting class for the other kids like himself who didn't possess, or have any interest in acquiring, the skills for the more technical circus arts.

I'm not sure what it was that drew me to juggling. I was equally bad at everything I tried to do, but aside from tightrope walking, which was limited in how far you could take it, juggling had less of a performance aspect than most of the other classes. True, you did have to do it front of people, but the clowns had to act goofy, and the magicians had to talk to the audience, and juggling seemed like less work than acrobatics and trapeze. It was kind of like staring into space all day.

Most kids either learned to juggle in a couple of days or just gave up. Three days into it, I could barely throw one ball back and forth, but I had figured out that if I spent the whole day at least trying, no one would talk to me. Occasionally one of the teachers, Lance or Surya, would offer a few words of advice, but for the most part it was the first thing I had found that made
not
talking to anyone socially acceptable. So I kept at it despite not being very good.

By the time my mom came back for the big performance, I had been at it for a week and could keep three balls in the air for a minute or so. I had never performed in front of an audience before, and just the thought of standing in front of a crowd of people made me want to vomit. How the hell could I focus on keeping those balls in the air, when I couldn't even keep my knees from shaking? Unable to think of a way out of it, I walked onto the stage, and for almost one minute I forgot about the audience because it was all I could do to focus on the juggling. And despite myself, I actually smiled.

 

I
DIDN'T KNOW AT THE
time that a smile could so drastically change the course of my life. If I had known, I wouldn't have done it, but to judge by my mom's reaction, it was as if Christ himself had come down from the heavens. Actually, Christ coming down would have just pissed her off. It was as if the whole world had just been enlightened by the smile of her seven-year-old son. As a result of this smile, I rather suddenly found myself with an identity, a social network—if you could call it that—and a reason for my existence.

On our return to Philly, Mom lost no time researching the juggling scene, finding out where they met, and who was the best teacher in the city. At that point, I didn't need any outside motivation. As soon as I realized that I could isolate myself in the backyard with my juggling balls, and my new unicycle, without anyone bothering me, I was there. And I stayed there for the next year. Nonetheless, Mom found the best juggler in Philadelphia, and I would go over to his place a couple of times a week for lessons. Fu was a very short Vietnamese immigrant, not much taller than myself, who could juggle seven balls. At the time, there were only four or five people in the world who were capable of that, and all of them seemed to be pretty successful, but Fu didn't use his powers for fame or money. Like me, he just juggled in his backyard. My lessons, however, seemed to have very little to do with juggling. They pretty much consisted of listening to long monologues in his broken English about flow, balance, becoming one with the objects I was juggling, and tuning into the natural order of things. What I actually learned was to tune out and nod my head as if I were listening (which I came to find was also a very useful skill).

Much to my mom's relief, I began talking to people at the juggling meets in Franklin Square, and even made a friend my own age at school. Life was moving along, and aside from the minor things like not being allowed to watch TV or eat anything with sugar, dairy, wheat, chocolate, or meat in it; or having to wait twenty minutes after we ate to drink a glass of water; or not getting our immunizations; or not seeing any Western doctors (even when a car hit me at fifty miles per hour right across the street from the Children's Hospital); or not being allowed to play competitive sports; or finally, being the bastard children of the great white devil himself, who was not a red man with horns like I had thought, but actually a white guy somewhere up in Massachusetts who was posing as a motivational speaker—aside from these small things, there was, in retrospect, a sense of normalcy that we would never experience again.

I
WAS A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD
art-school dropout living in a storefront at Sixteenth and Mission streets in San Francisco when I met Lawrence. He came in to my life like Satan in one of those little Christian comic books that the Mexican women would hand out on the street, the ones in which you get in a fight with your parents about not going to church and suddenly Satan, disguised as a rock star, shows up at the door with a crack pipe and says, “See, your parents don't understand you, but I do…” Only instead of a crack pipe (that would come later), Lawrence appeared with a piece of tinfoil, a drinking straw, and a dirty brown lump of heroin.

My friend Jake, whom I had gone to school with at the San Francisco Art Institute, had found the storefront about six months earlier, and there were six of us—mostly artists and musicians—living there. Not knowing anything about construction, we were still in the process of building our rooms, learning as we went along. The place was close to six thousand square feet including the basement, which was filled with two feet of water when we moved in. Our goal was to eventually create a multipurpose space, where we could put on art shows and music events and have room to work on our own projects as well.

As time passed, my initial excitement about the storefront was dimin
ishing, and depression, which I had experienced in waves for as long as I could remember, was creeping back.

I tried to fight it off by keeping busy. Aside from continuing to work on the space to make it livable, I had taken on an internship with a piano restorer and was playing in my band, Optimist International, plus every Saturday, Eli (my roommate, high school friend, and bandmate) and I ran a music venue out of the large front part of the commercial space we were calling home, featuring experimental music by people who simply had nowhere else to play. We inherited the night from a restaurant in the neighborhood called Radio Valencia, which could no longer justify having three customers on what should have been their busiest night of the week. The owner didn't care so much about losing money, but that he was losing his employees. No one wanted to work a Saturday night shift only to make fifteen bucks in tips. So he donated fifty chairs and gave us his mailing list.

Everyone who lived at the space was encouraged to use it for public events. Jake, having gotten to a point where his art work was Pure Concept and could no longer be expressed through the making of objects, started granting one-month residencies to his ten-by-fifteen-foot studio, having no use for it anymore. His idea was to give artists some space to work for a month and afterward host a public showing of whatever it was they had made.

It was a good idea, considering that the studio wasn't being used. The dot-com boom had driven rents so high that it was getting harder to find both work and exhibition space in the city, but aside from coming in to have a look at the room at the beginning of the month, not one person actually used the space to do any work. Instead, these artists would spend their time talking and thinking about what they were going to do, and then they would talk some more. I couldn't help overhearing some of these conversations, as we still hadn't built our bedroom walls up to the ceiling yet. I'm not sure what was worse, listening to my friends talk about art or listening to them have sex.

“So Jake, listen to this idea,” I heard a voice say one morning while I was still lying in bed. It was Erin, Jake's best friend and the visiting artist that month. “I get a suit, and change into it, and then I cut my hair, but I'm smoking cigarettes the whole time. Ha ha…What do you think?” Erin loved laughing at his own jokes, 90 percent of which were completely over my head.

“Yeah, that could be good,” Jake agreed.

“You don't think it's too much like that piece what's his name did in Nayland Blake's class?” Erin asked.

“Well…I hadn't thought about that. I guess it does kind of seem like a similar idea on the surface, but the sweat suit he was wearing has a totally different connotation than the symbolism of a business suit.”

“I don't know, heh, heh, it is pretty funny…but I'm wondering if it's too didactic?”

Didactic was a word that pissed me off; it was always being thrown around in art school. In fact, you couldn't have a real conversation about art without it, but I could never remember what it meant.

“I guess it depends on what your point is,” Jake said. “If what you're trying to say is that we should all give up on art and get jobs, then yeah, I could see how some people might see it as being didactic, but if the statement is that cutting your hair and wearing a suit can be a form of artistic expression, then it could work.”

“You don't think people will think I'm making some kind of a statement about Jeff Koons?”

“Maybe…but is it for or against?”

Then Erin started laughing again. “I know. What if I was telling jokes the whole time?”

Christ,
I thought.
If they continue doing shit like this, they're both going to end up wearing a suit and working nine to five, and it's not going to be so funny.
Unable to listen to them anymore, I finally made a move to get out of bed. Erin must have heard my loft creak.

“Oh shit, was Oran asleep?” he whispered to Jake.

“Yeah, but it's one thirty. What am I supposed to do? Not talk in my own room?” He said it loud enough that it was obviously directed at me.

“Hey, go ahead and talk,” I yelled back, “but I just want to let you guys know, you sound like total assholes!” I had always hated conceptual art, but since dropping out of school, I had become much more vocal about it. Jake and Erin had heard this from me so many times that they just ignored it.

A month later Erin showed up, cut his hair, put on a suit, smoked a cigarette, and told some jokes. The highlight was when he threw his still-lit cigarette butt into the surprisingly large crowd and it landed in someone's hair.

The next month our neighbor Izzy, also known as the Sasquatch, got naked and poured champagne all over herself. The month after that, a girl I had never seen before showed up and banged her head against the wall until her forehead was a bloody mess.

I was always judgmental of these projects, but I tried my best to hold my tongue and be supportive if only to offset the fact that every Saturday night my roommates would go straight to their rooms and put on their headphones to avoid the racket coming from our weekly music event in the living room. They were as offended by my musical taste as I was by their art. The truth was that we were both lucky if we got even ten people to show up to one of our functions.

 

A
SIDE FROM JAKE'S
“residency program,” he was also appealing to other artists in the community to come up with ideas for events. One such idea was from a visiting faculty member at the Art Institute who was also a professor at Stanford University. Lawrence, while not exactly famous, had managed to make a name for himself in the art world back in the 1980s. I knew who he was because a couple of friends of mine, including Eli, had been in his films, and I had gone along to the shoots a few times in the past. I never saw a final version of any of these films, but the shoots always involved wearing weird colorful costumes, drinking lots of alcohol, and smoking brown lumps of heroin off of tinfoil with a straw. Since the heroin was technically a movie prop and I was not in the movies, I never got to try it.

I wasn't really interested in heroin anyway. I had tried it once when I was eighteen, and again a couple of years later when I was in a very short-lived relationship with a heroin addict. It wasn't bad; it was just that lying around completely immobilized didn't appeal to me. Granted, I was an art-school dropout, not a Stanford philosophy professor, but I failed to see the concept or artistic value behind Lawrence's work. In my mind it was nothing more than an excuse to get together with a bunch of people and get fucked up—a theme party with a video camera. Jake, however, was excited that Lawrence wanted to shoot a film there.

He wanted to use the basement, which was flooded again, and still full of rusted, disintegrating metal shelving and other trash from the previous tenants. Because it was built below the water table of the creek that flows through San Francisco's Mission District, it was always wet. The water would drip out of the crumbling brick walls and seep up through the disintegrating foundation. The sump pump was always breaking down, causing six to twelve inches of stagnant water to accumulate, depending on how quickly we noticed it. Our basement was half a block long and sloped down toward the back, where most of the water came
from. I would often ignore the flooding until it got within ten feet of my rehearsal studio, at which point I would take off my shoes and wade barefoot out into the darkness, trying to avoid sharp objects and grope around for the hole we had made for the pump, reaching down, sometimes almost to my shoulder, to free the switching mechanism from whatever it was caught on. This was always followed by a mad dash to the shower. Who knows what the fuck was in that water, but afterward any part of my body that had made contact with it was always covered in this light brown, translucent, oily substance.

When we had first moved in, there was also this white fluffy mold that covered almost everything in the basement. We made an attempt to brush it all off with a broom, but it was back the next day and we quickly gave up. Same with the various types of unidentifiable mushrooms growing out of the walls and cracks in the floor. The basement had a dark vibe, to say the least. Maybe that's why Lawrence wanted to use it. So after pumping out the water, consolidating the rusted shelving into a pile, and swapping out the one bare 60-watt lightbulb for a 120-watt one, the place was ready to go.

Lawrence arrived and set up a table underneath the lightbulb. Then he laid out a mirror with a razor blade on it, a piece of tinfoil, some pills that I think might have been Valium, a bottle of tequila, six canisters of nitrous oxide, a bong, a couple tabs of acid, a bottle of aspirin, a conductor's baton, and a colorful pile of little balloons. He began the task of ripping the balloons open, each of which contained a bag of coke and a bag of heroin. After separating the white bags from the brown ones, he emptied a bag of coke onto the mirror and put a lump of brown heroin on the foil. Then he set up his camcorder and waited for people to arrive.

Eventually, maybe twenty people showed up. It was hard to tell because it was so dark. You couldn't really see anyone unless they were within a few feet of the light, and it was so creepy that no one was really speaking above a whisper. At some point, Lawrence broke the awkward hush by standing under the light and telling us about the piece.

“So, this piece is called ‘Composition for Mood Swings.' When you feel like it, come up to the table, take the baton, and point to whatever you want.”

He then walked over to the camera, turned it on, and walked back to the table. Conductor's baton in hand, he looked straight at the camera and said, “Composition for Mood Swings,” waving the baton around as if he were conducting an orchestra. Then he just stood there and waited. The first guy to walk up to the table grabbed the baton and pointed to
the bottle of tequila and the aspirin. I'd already decided the piece was total bullshit, but as long as I was there, I was going to try something more interesting than that.

I stood by myself in the back corner, drinking a beer, until almost everyone had gone up and ingested the various drugs. When I finally made my way up there, the cocaine looked yellow and sticky, and the last thing I wanted to do was take acid or smoke pot. The only thing that looked at all intriguing was the heroin. I grabbed the baton and pointed to the tinfoil, but there wasn't much left. Lawrence handed me a straw, set his lighter under the foil, and I inhaled the last of it. Then I headed back to my dark corner and waited for something to happen, but I didn't notice anything different. I was as anxious and judgmental as ever.

Some more people pointed to a few more drugs, and when only the bottle of aspirin remained, everyone left.

 

A
FEW NIGHTS LATER,
Lawrence showed up at the house, which was a bit of a surprise since I was the only one home.

“Hey, Lawrence. Jake's actually at work right now.”

“Oh, that's okay, I was just in the neighborhood and thought I would stop by,” he said.

“Oh, did you leave something here the other night?”

“No, I just thought I'd come by and see what was going on.” Lawrence made me very uncomfortable.

“Not much. I was just heading over to the Casanova,” I said looking for an escape. The Casanova Lounge was a bar on Valencia Street where Eli bartended. I don't know how the place stayed in business. The owner seemed to want to draw a very specific crowd of fucked-up artists and musicians, but none of us ever had any money. So we would drink for free until two in the morning and mope about how shitty everything was.

“Hey, do you mind if I come in for a minute, and I'll head over there with you.”

“Sure,” I said, letting him in. I figured he needed to use the bathroom, but as soon as he got in the door, he pulled out a couple of balloons from his pocket and asked me if I wanted any before heading over to the bar. I figured, why not? I didn't feel anything the other night, and I was still kind of curious.

“Sure,” I said. “Why don't we go to my room?”

Sitting down at my desk, he opened a balloon, unwrapped the cellophane from around the heroin, and broke off a lump of the brown sticky stuff, which he placed on a little piece of foil that came from his back pocket. He then reached behind his ear, producing a three-inch straw that was kind of melted and brown at one end. Being a gentleman, Lawrence handed me the foil and the straw, which I put in my mouth so I could get my own lighter out of my pocket. I ignited the lighter under the foil, and a big cloud of smoke came up before I could even inhale.