Skating on the Permafrost

On a frigid, wind-blasted January night, at a small county hospital deep in Northern Wisconsin’s frozen tundra, the Artist was dragged, feet-first and screaming, from the protective enclosure of the womb — a bitter shock, from which he would never fully recover. Just moments after this unholy extraction, the Artist first demonstrated his artistic inclination, splattering Pollack-like patterns on the doctor's clean white smock. Two days later, wrapped in a scratchy woolen blanket, he was introduced to the sinus-cinching icebox that was his new home.

It was white. Like a blank canvas, the Artist's whole world was white — cold, blowing, drifting, foot-sucking white. Even his breath was white. It had mass, this white. You could shovel it, move it, but it would just come back and pile up and bury things, transforming even hard-edged objects into gently rounded white mounds. The Artist knew fear, the fear that he might himself become a white mound. It terrified him.

Six months into his fourth year, the dreary leaden canopy finally dissipated to expose a strange glowing object his mother called the "sun." The white world began to melt. Suddenly, the Artist's hungry eyes were regaled with the enticing browns of the ubiquitous mud and the glorious, variegated grays of the slush. He marveled at the salt-encrusted chunks that fell from the rusting wheel wells of his father's new Mercury.

The large white mounds became houses. Slowly, doors opened, people emerged, pale, squinting, unaccustomed to the light, carefully avoiding the twenty-pound ice spears threatening to calve from the eves and impale the unfortunate. It was marvelous to behold. Everything that had been buried was now exposed. Wondrous new things appeared: mosquitoes, humidity, the lawnmower.

Meanwhile, the prophets in the box — Captain Kangaroo, Roy and Dale, Buffalo Bob — provided the Artist’s social and spiritual training. His life was changed, charged. The next six years flew by, rife with hope and possibility. Everything was coming up dandelions … at least until the day a renegade badger dragged the neighbor kid under the front porch where they danced the mastication tango. The Artist's life was about to take a hard left.

The Abduction

They say trouble comes in threes. They’re frequently wrong, but in this case, they were right. First, as we’ve already noted, the neighbor kid was taken by the badger. Then, scandal ensued when the mayor caught his wife in bed with the Methodist minister’s 15-year-old daughter. Neither of these admittedly disturbing events really affected the Artist: He never liked the neighbor kid much, and he was too young to understand the taboos against merging church and state. Ho-hum: Other people’s troubles and all that. The third bit of trouble was different, it mattered, it happened to him.

At this point in the American dream, Wisconsin’s senatorial embarrassment, Joe McCarthy, had already been censured and had retreated into a bottle, but anti-communist sentiment was still running high. Following an unfortunate incident in a Minneapolis union hall, a pair of St. Paul socialists, Ted Gold and Alice Feldstein, were lying low on the farm of a burly German immigrant named Gustav Kruger. While sitting under a dryer at the Silver Bun beauty parlor, Alice heard that an FBI agent had been querying random A&P shoppers on the loyalty of fellow residents. Since Kruger, a contentious prankster, had just sculpted a six-foot snow bust of Vladimir I. Lenin out on the old county road "for the viewing pleasure of the tight-assed Republicans down at the bank," they decided it might be prudent to explore other environs.

After considerable discussion, Gold and Feldstein agreed on a plan: They would disguise themselves by hiding in plain site, just another set of drones in Eisenhower’s America. They went to Sears and bought a set of matching beige outfits. Then they bought a used '58 Nomad wagon, a set of plaid luggage, and some J.C. Higgins camping gear. Perfect!

No, not perfect. In their haste, they’d forgotten the requisite 2.5 children per household rule. They needed kids – fast – so they snagged a 6-year-old girl from a playground in Black River Falls while her mother was away getting a beer and a brat. The next day, they spotted the Artist sitting on the sidewalk in front of his house, plucking the hind legs from a very large grasshopper while it spat brown crap on his fingers. Ted grabbed the Artist, pulled him into the back seat, and they were all off to look for America.

It was Route 66 time. Oklahoma City looked awful pretty. At first the Artist was upset, having been ripped from his ancestral tundra and all, but he soon mellowed. Who could be depressed with all these great roadside distractions? Reptile zoos, cactus candy, petrified wood, dead starfish, and rubber Indian tomahawks. Hooray and hallelujah! The Artist, young and impressionable, easily traded his mother for the Mother Road and accepted Bob and Carol (aka, Ted and Alice) as his new parental figures. He was awash in American road culture, and he sucked it up like a jumbo chocolate malted through a fat paper straw.

Coming of Age

The FBI never caught up with Bob and Carol. In fact, it had become clear that neither the FBI nor anyone else of any significance gave so much as a rat’s ass about them. So, after two years of roaming the highways and byways of the great American West, Bob and Carol decided to abandon the nomadic life. They settled their makeshift family in a three-bedroom stucco ranch at the edge of California’s Big Valley, the San Joaquin, put the Artist and his "sister" in school, and joined the PTA. Orchards, alfalfa, canneries, irrigation ditches, and crickets were the trappings of the Artist’s adolescence. Bob went to work writing insightful stories about school board meetings for the local paper, and Carol opened a small boutique specializing in empire dresses. Real Andy of Mayberry stuff.

It was a typically mundane period of growing self-awareness for the Artist. He was astounded to discover that his penis could now perform amazing new tricks, providing seconds of pleasure and gratification. On several occasions, he felt the burning pain of humiliation, but he soon learned that by banding together with others, he could divert that humiliation to the weak and defenseless, making himself feel better in the bargain. He learned the important rules of the adult world: Having a cool car makes you respected; looking good makes you popular; being nice to geeks and losers gets you shunned.

Mostly, this was just a time of irresponsible fun for the Artist. High school: Paper, books, teacher’s dirty looks; beaver shots; shot-gunning Oly talls out by the river before the after-game dance; cruising the main drag looking for who knows what; sitting around with buddies wondering what to do with so much energy in such a pathetic little backwater. After seemingly endless years of this American Graffiti scenario, the Artist graduated, a freshly minted adult, still wet behind the ears.

Hell, No …

… we won’t go. Student deferment or extended Vietnam holiday? No fool he, the Artist was quick to appreciate the value of a higher education. Besides, with the changing political climate, Bob and Carol had more openly migrated back to the left they left behind. Their politics, combined with peer pressure and the unwavering moralistic self-righteousness of youth, strongly influenced the Artist’s development during this period. Early paintings depicted Eldrige Cleaver, a soul no longer on ice, a burning Bank of America, Mickey Mouse, fist raised in protest as the Fantasyland castle burns in the background, some serious shit. Art in service of the revolution. The Artist’s adoptive Jewish parents were proud of their little bolshevik. Power to the people.

It was an exciting time, an adrenaline rush, a visually explosive experience. There was school, of course, but it was of secondary importance to the Artist. More important were the gatherings, the culture. Music, protest marches, the Haight, $10 lids, Filmore posters, Mr. Natural, and the colors! Everywhere color, unabashed, bold, sensual, in your face color. Head shops. Kesey’s bus. Sitting on a hilltop at Altamont, the Artist watched an endless stream of brightly clad hippies march into the grassy amphitheater like exuberant gypsies seeking sympathy for the Devil, Pan, and Bacchus. Dope, acid, peyote, name your poison. Newly enamored of hair, incense, and hedonism, Bob and Carol moved to Berkeley and opened a macrobiotic restaurant. Carol changed her name to Jasmine. The world was vibrant, energized, and the Artist knew in his gut that a party of this magnitude could never end.

Headlong into the Void

Can you say screeching halt? Sure you can. The Artist’s party didn’t just end, it hit the wall like a crash-test dummy. The vengeful Old Testament God ejected him from Eden, unceremoniously plopped him into the mainstream, the dreaded real world, and the great yawning corporate maw opened before him with engulfment on it’s mind. The war came to an end, Nixon slimed out of Washington in disgrace, and Bob and Carol, citing irreconcilable differences, each decided to take a road less traveled by.

Despondent, and just materialistic enough to reject the starving painter scene, the Artist gave up all hope and entered the land of Dilbertesque cubicles, fluorescent tubes, motivational posters, and semi-annual performance reviews. It was a hideous nightmare. Middle managers, fresh from the latest "Creative Leadership" seminar, power-walked the hallways in tasseled loafers and sensible black pumps, spewing the latest inanities, exhorting their beleaguered subordinates to work smarter — and harder. Be a team player. Learn to play golf. Bubble with enthusiasm on demand. Become like us. You will be assimilated.

Face to face with the beast, what could the humble Artist do to save himself? He needed a sign. Then, in a dream, it came to him. A large rutabaga, sporting a bright lime-green fright wig, winked conspiratorially, and with an impish grin said one word of such incredible moment that the Artist awoke with a tear in his eye, "Fermentation." The Artist heard the word, and the word set him free. Desperate to escape the spirit-numbing valley of bits and bytes, he became a disciple of Saint Elvin Bishop, vowing to lay off the hard drugs and "just go for a 50-, 60-year OD on Budweiser." It seemed like a good plan at the time, but, as stalwart Republicans oft remind us, once you embark on the "slippery slope," you’ll swish on down to perdition faster than a fat kid on a Slip-N-Slide™.

And slide he did. Right into the murky depths of the pit. It was fen and fey, reeking with the stench of myrrh and moldy potting soil. The years that followed were a blur. The Artist skidded down skid row. His art devolved into primitive abstract finger paintings, for which he’d concoct lengthy treatises of impassioned bullshit to help patrons read meaning into the squiggles, which were, in reality, no more than the spastic quaking of his delirium tremens. Not surprisingly, this body of work sold incredibly well in the tonier big-city galleries.

But the Artist was no Bukowski. In fact, he wasn’t even much of an artist any more. Each time he’d think about creating something, he’d just pop a top instead, pound another nail in his coffin. He wasn’t dry, but his muse certainly was. Short of money, he shacked up with a burned-out whore in a run-down Turlock trailer park, conveniently located within easy stumbling distance of a bar called the Broken Chalice. Then, one day, everything got dark, and it stayed dark for a very long time …

Resurrection

Sunday morning, coming down on the floor of a shabby $10 room in a downtown Bakersfield flophouse, with no idea how he got there, the Artist heard the deep, resonant voice of the Right Reverend Billy C. Wirtz breaking through the tule fog that engulfed his consciousness. "My brothers," the voice implored, "put your hand on the radio, and you shall be saved." In pain, both spiritual and physical, the Artist reached out, fought off a wave of nausea, and put his trembling hand on that little Panasonic. ZAP! The Holy Spirit shot through his arm and tossed him against the yellowed wallpaper.

Who’s to say whether it was truly a Divine Intervention or just a frayed power cord? Does it really matter? Whatever. The Artist swore then and there to walk the straight and narrow — as soon as he stopped drooling and could stand without falling, that is. Much like his first Wisconsin thaw, the frozen layers of profligacy began to melt away, exposing the fertile mud of a second chance.

Years of excess and debauchery behind him, the Artist now lives a life of monastic simplicity. In humble raiment, he sits for hours in the lotus position, contemplating the improbable career of David Hasselhof, checking his e-mail, and basking in the glow of a 10-watt bulb.