An Artist Loses His Way

PAULINE GREY




Paul was desperate to become my friend and fascinated me with his many gifts. I came to think of him as a supernova, a bright star about to extinguish itself on Tampa Bay.

“Come in! Come in!” He said genially when he opened the door to us.

When I met him, Paul lived by the river, in a cottage that had once been a boathouse whose waterside had been enclosed and sealed and whose dirt floor had been planked over. The resulting enclosure was cold in winter and stuffy and hot in summer, but in spring and fall held delight because its comfort was dependent on outside influences.

When hot summer with its quilting heat and interstitial rains had ended in the fall, I met him during the mild days and cool nights of dew-dripping autumn, which had crept upon us. His cottage, now cool and spare like Van Gogh’s room in Arles, caught my aesthetic fancy.

“Let me show you around! Are you an artist?”

“A bit of one, but I can see you have talent.”

Like a minor Picasso, he diversified, creating drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and decorations. Exquisite examples of each, showing his amazing eye, creative imagination and skilled hand, were posted about his one-room hut.

His slender neatness added to his artistic aura, as if he had been sculpted to be “the artist.” Sensuality swam in this aesthetic aura: a thin nose, full lips, large moist honey-brown eyes, a burnt umber mustache and hair that fell about his head like neat banners of artistic presumption. He was at the same time both vigorous and wan as if he could pounce and be enveloped in the same motion, possessing the rapture and intensity of a visionary.

“And you—you—have umm . . .”

“Nerve.” I returned his smile. “Freedom. Hopefully truth of some kind.”

A Nikon 35mm camera swung from a brown leather strap slung around his shoulders; immediately available, the camera might be swept up at any moment and begin clicking as if it were an extension of his eye and memory. He most often used black-and-white film, but sometimes color.

At times the photograph itself was the piece of art: a black-and-white, light-and-shadow close-up of the rheumy eye of a homeless man; the proud, smooth, thin neck of an ingénue. However, sometimes the photos became a base for something else: a drawing—in pencil or ink—the full sensuousness of a young black girl; the feathery wings of an egret. I gaped with wonder under the impact of his sensitive eye and fingers.

“I met a man—now be patient, the rest of you—Phillip hasn’t heard this story before . . .”

He had other gifts: a glib tongue, a sense of wonder, and a sweet voice. Besides, he loved me—which may have been his downfall. The night I entered for the first time his red-trimmed, gold-lamped interior, I thought it could be a gallery, or a boudoir.

We had some wine and cheese and some happy conversation about what engaged us: art and writing. When at last the others began to make their way to the door, Paul said to me, in a voice that held suggestive hints, “You can stay if you like.”

“No, I have a busy day tomorrow.”

“Then, we’ll get together soon.”

“If you like.”

“You can come downtown to the market place.”

“What do you do there?”

“Make money with my art.”

“I might.”

“Good.” Then he hugged me as if we had been close for some time. “Come back.”

Thus I became part of Paul’s world.

Those were golden days. The revolts of the sixties had diminished, but the new freedoms were still growing. No one knew about AIDS, although people had begun whispering about a “gay cancer.” People were open and accepting. Unprotected sex was the norm. Pot was not uncommon at parties. Other drugs were available.

I felt like an anomaly because I was trying to pull myself together while so many others were opening upward and outward. I had just gone through a divorce and felt whipped and knocked down. I was trying not to drink so much and cutting back on all indulgences, fewer drugs, less sex. I was trying to get back into a healthy physical routine. Eventually, I would be free of all those deceptive encumbrances, but at that time I still fought with them.

People called me attractive, but I didn’t think of myself in terms of attractiveness. I thought only of the next painting or the next poem. Because I was an artist, I mixed with other artists. Because I was a poet, I mixed with other poets.

However, so many artists and poets were into losing themselves while I was trying to find myself. My life became a struggle between wanting to share with other poets and artists, but not wanting to overindulge like so many of them did. I wanted to concentrate on each painting to make it as effective a depiction as I could. I wanted to concentrate on each poem to make it as effective an evocation as I could. I wanted my paintings to speak their strokes and hues. I wanted my poems to shine through a palette of words and images. I didn’t care about fame or fortune like so many other poets and artists did.

I thought Paul and I had that focus in common. He didn’t seem to care about fame or fortune either. He had neither, but he was more talented than anyone else I had met.

“What are you doing?” He said when he called early the next Saturday.

“I finished another painting.”

“Of what?”

“Of the sun on the road at three o’clock.”

“Would I like it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come with me down to the market place.”

“Now? I need a bath.”

“Take a shower. Then come pick me up at my place. We’ll go down together. Bring a drawing pad and your kit.”

I brought a sketch pad, pencils and chalk, and my camera, a Yashica with multiple filters and lenses.

I picked him up at the cottage from which he ambled happily, toting his drawing supplies and camera in a black leather bag. As so often, he wore black trousers and a white shirt. I had begun to think of that assemblage as his uniform.

He was animated. “I’m so glad you could come with me,” he expressed as if now his world was approaching fulfillment. He made everyone he spoke to feel that way, as if his or her world was approaching its apex.

Once he had squeezed himself into my little Toyota and we had started moving, I asked him, “How do you make money in the market place?”

“I’m a street artist. There are lots down there: musicians, jugglers, magicians, mimes.”

“Panhandlers.”

“Some, but we artists don’t beg. We offer our art and are paid for that.”

“What particularly do you sell?”

“I sketch people’s faces. You could do the same.”

“I could do an impromptu poem. Do you think anyone would buy that?”

“Probably not. But you could do what I do.”

“No, faces are not my forte.”

“Try it.”

“Maybe.”

I parked two blocks from the market place, which was not really a market place, but a wide pedestrian mall surrounded by tall buildings that shaded the mall in the center of the city like trees around a lake. On either side of the shimmering mall banked shops of various kinds: jewelers, antique shops, boutiques, galleries, florists, eateries with varied specialties. Throughout the length of the mall floated the vending carts of varied street entrepreneurs—coffee and pastry carts, newspaper and magazine carts, flower carts (those were the crack-of-dawn arrivals), then hotdog and sandwich carts, ice cream carts, piercing carts, sunglass carts, T-shirt carts and trinket carts—who had paddled out their wares much earlier before the street artists began arriving. The street artists found their berths in between the carts, so here was a juggler tossing circles of balls or bowling pins; there was a violinist and a flautist, their cases opened to receive appreciation, rending folk tunes into the shadowed air; across the way a silvered mime stayed still as a statue gathering momentum through stasis. Flowing through the mall from all the tributary streets was a river of people, the busiest clipping along, some on breaks treading with wariness, tourists eddying here and there, and some who lived on the street trolling about for castaway items, or perhaps fishing for the munificence of the unwary, police on bicycles or horses, trying to buffer the unsuspecting schools of tourists from the toothy predators and scavengers. The mall bubbled with ramble and surprise.

I was enchanted, but not like the tourists. I became absorbed in the sights and sounds and smells, picked up my camera and began shooting the street people, who were the buoys around which the tourists and clerks and businesspeople swirled. Click—the deceitful white face of a clown above the heads of swarming, gawking out-of-towners; click—a hotdog vendor slapping mustard onto an obscene sausage like a red tongue drooping from white bun lips; click—a rouged slattern with a gapped-toothed smile, chatting up a businessman; click—a rickshaw cabby gasping and snarling as he strained to haul a terminally obese couple (the very people who should have been walking and burning calories) from one side of the mall to the other; click—Paul drawing the face of a little girl while her parents proudly looked over his shoulder and kibitzed, so his face flickered with annoyance.

I also shot shapes: vaulting churches, climbing towers of commerce, the intersections of angles, shadow and light interfaces.

When I stumbled, still enraptured, back to Paul, he had already made thirty-seven dollars, ten dollars a drawing plus tips.

I flopped down next to him. He said, “Did you get some good shots?”

“I think so. . . .I hope so.”

“Draw with me.”

“I don’t have your capacity for reproduction.”

“That would be boring if you did. Try your hand.”

I tried because almost immediately we had two customers at once. I took the second one and drew, but my drawing was more of a caricature, so I sold it as such, discounted to seven dollars.

As soon as I pocketed the money, I heard a sweet voice singing. I followed the strains of “Lavender Blue” to the folk violinist and flautist and Paul, who now stood between them and crooned—his was the lovely voice—



Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green,

When I am king, dilly, dilly, you shall be queen.

Who told you so, dilly, dilly, who told you so?

'Twas my own heart, dilly, dilly, that told me so.



Call up your men, dilly, dilly, set them to work

Some with a rake, dilly, dilly, some with a fork.

Some to make hay, dilly, dilly, some to thresh corn.

While you and I, dilly, dilly, keep ourselves warm.



Lavender's green, dilly, dilly, lavender's blue,

If you love me, dilly, dilly, I will love you.

Let the birds sing, dilly, dilly, and the lambs play;

We shall be safe, dilly, dilly, out of harm's way.



I love to dance, dilly, dilly, I love to sing;

When I am queen, dilly, dilly, you'll be my king.

Who told me so, dilly, dilly, who told me so?

I told myself, dilly, dilly, I told me so.



He saw me watching him and like any good performer looked back as if he were singing the song just for me. I smiled appreciatively, amazed at his repertoire of talents. A crowd grew around the song and music. Faces in the crowd showed enchantment, some tearing because Paul’s rendition was hitting emotional cords and drawing them in. After he stopped singing and after an instrumental coda by the two musicians, coins and bills rained down into the instrument cases. The violinist said, “You can sing with us anytime, Paul.”

“You are one gifted son-of-a-bitch,” I told him when we took a break for lunch at one of the hotdog vendors.

He ignored the praise. “And you are one beautiful man.” He returned the compliment, not because he felt he had to, but because he wanted to.

We carried our hotdogs and drinks down near the river, found a round table with an umbrella and sat to eat. “Do you support yourself this way?”

“No, the street scene works best on the weekends. The crowds are bigger and happier and more willing to part with their money.”

“What do you do during the week?”

“I’m an office temp.”

“Really? Then you can type, too?”

“Eighty words a minute. How do you support yourself?”

“Three part-time jobs: art-framer, bookstore clerk, substitute teacher.”

“Which bookstore?”

“It’s a mall chain.”

“I clerk at the campus bookstore for SFU at the beginning of each term when they need the most help.”

“I thought they hired only students.”

“No, anyone, especially if you know the owners.” He winked at me when he said that.

The rest of the day I spent sketching some of the buildings downtown and some of the scenes along the mall. I covered eight pages of my drawing pad with pencil and chalk.

Paul drew a few more portraits and made some more money, but he also skittered about like a water bug, commiserating with this and that street artist, his best art always being his charming personality, his panache, his joie de vivre. He also snapped some photos, but his were more carefully staged, more carefully framed, more carefully postured than mine—drawing in passers-by for models, setting up props, arranging the shot until he was satisfied or his impromptu volunteers became impatient and irritable.

At his cottage, he was very productive, transforming a young girl’s innocent photo into a spiritual goddess of hope. I sighed when I saw what he was doing one Saturday afternoon visit. “That is wonderful . . . so luminous.”

“Thanks.”

“You should enter it somewhere. I’m sure it would win.”

“I will.”

He had also blown up and framed some of his photos from the street into sepia scenes of street life. They, too, were impressive, very artistically staged and framed. “These are good, too. So fin-de-siècle.”

He took my picture that day, snapping photos around and in his cottage. Some were silly, some were artsy, but some were moments of ease captured when I sat in thought unaware that he was still shooting.

Several weeks later he showed me his drawing of me. It was a diaphanous portrait of a thinker; so much I that it startled me that he could have captured my essence.

“It’s yours.”

“Are you giving it to me?”

“Yes, but not now. I’m entering it in something.”

“I insist on paying you. What would you sell it for?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Done. I’ll get you a check.”

My own work was going well. I had started a novel and wrote some every day, and I was producing one or two poems a week. These poems were shaping themselves, so after the initial burst of inspiration, I had to refine each one like a sculpture not only paring and carving new distinct shapes, but also gluing on additional shapes and forms. Eventually, I had a stack of poems that had force and impact.

The poets were gathering at the Left Bank Café, where once a month we threw readings. The café, once someone’s two-bath residence, sat small and ensconced in the remains of a grove, so citrus scents swam around it, making the walk down the flagstone path both visually and aromatically enticing. The tables inside were small and round, designed for two, but often clogged with four or more, who used the tables as beer pitcher depositories, some pitchers full, some half empty, others drained.

Each poet stood in turn declaiming his or her verse out of a corner of the Left Bank Café, while the listeners drank and smoked and ate, absorbing calories, carcinogens and inebriation along with the lines that flew like invisible creatures of another dimension into their consciousness, previously unimagined floating otherlinesses.

I had gone to readings and had read a couple times before Paul asserted himself there, too, not reading or reciting, but singing a heartrending rendition of “Barbara Allen” while the poets took a break. The attendees applauded him, but the owner reprimanded him.

“Tonight is the poets’ night. We have music every night but tonight. You have a terrific voice, but come another night.”

Paul, almost in childish defiance, retorted, “No, every night is everyone’s night, and everyone should be anyone who wants to put himself out there.”

The bubbly audience applauded again as if another poem had been read.

The owner laughed in spite of himself before he screwed up his sternness and barked, “Off the stage!”

Paul found me and said, “Did you see how that man treated me?”

“With justice and fairness?”

“He was mean.”

I put my arm around his shoulders and tugged him to me, “But he loves you. He wants you to come back and sing for him.”

Paul hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. “Do you love me?”

“Of course, I love you.”

The next week Paul had a full-time job that had grown out of one of his temp jobs like an expanding lymph node. He told me proudly, “The boss gave me a raise and put me in a desk near his office.”

“You’re a very good typist.”

“But, Phil, I have plans for that office.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can see ways to make it better.”

“But you just got there. Isn’t there an office manager?”

“Sure, but she’s so content with the way things have been.”

“I don’t know if I would upset the apple cart before I owned more of the apples.”

Three weeks later he was fired like a tumor cut away from the still breathing patient.

Paul said, “Phil, I only wanted to improve the place.”

“It was too soon to take over.”

“They will miss me.”

“They won’t forget you.”

Then in rapid-fire succession three triumphs came to Paul. First, a gallery began showing his photos, especially the sepia street scenes framed in brown matte and brass and glassed. Second, his portrait of me was chosen to hang in the Bay Garden Museum in a display of local artists who had passed a juried show. I went to the museum with him, and there hung my airy countenance, the philosopher king of nothing—a dreamer, a bard, a masseuse of words, a hungry artist.

Paul said, “What do you think?”

“Congratulations. You nailed me, but not to a cross. It’s deserving of its place. You should be proud.”

Third, his luminous drawing of the young girl won another juried contest. He made a hundred prints of the award-winner and began selling them. This win also came with a contract: $1000 for painting a mural on the back wall of a handball court.

The art critic for a city paper wrote: “Paul’s exquisite gift with pencil and pen is like the sun rising over the ocean, illuminating for the viewer a reality never before imagined. The gradients of black and white shades are so tender and so finely diffused that I have rarely seen the like; I call them Pauline grey because no one before has ever articulated them so well or been so finely attuned to a melding of form and emotion.”

I cut out the article, folded it and filed it in my desk as if it were the herald of a new dawning.

Paul never finished the mural, never collected the $1000. He was replaced by another artist who finished the mural in two weeks.

“They were rushing me to finish,” Paul explained to me. “I told them that I had to work at my own pace. I wasn’t going to just slop something up there.”

“Normal people have deadlines and expectations. They want to see the finished product, so they can show it off. They want beginnings and ends, so they can get on with their lives.”

“But I’m not a normal person.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re not a normal person.”

“No, I’m not, but I know I have to exist in the real world.”

“Why?”

“Because no other world exists for our physical bodies; the world of the mind is another place, which is where you and I live our true lives.”

Paul’s eye moistened and glared with a mixture of anguish and anger. “I don’t like the world sometimes.”

“Who doesn’t?”

To cheer him up, I went dancing with him, down to Ybor City to the gay clubs. The drinking made him manic, so his previous mood dissipated and he joked and danced and laughed, feeling the acceptance that he couldn’t find in the “real” world.

By the end of the night, he challenged me. “Why can’t you be gay?”

“We are what we are,” I replied. “Unfortunately, I’m a true heterosexual: straight as a blade.”

“Why did you come here with me?”

“Because I care about you.”

“But not the way I care about you.”

“No, not that way. It’s impossible for me.”

I left, but he stayed. He wanted to party with his own kind. I went home to bed to sleep and to be ready for the next day.

I didn’t see Paul for weeks after that, and when I did because he came to the bookstore where I worked, so we could have lunch, he told me that he had moved out of the cottage by the river. He looked much the same except for his eyes that seemed to cast about for an anchor on which to hook his conversation.

I bought our lunch and we sat in a booth and munched and talked across the table.

I asked, “Where are you staying?”

“I’m living with Jay.”

“You are? Who’s Jay?”

“Someone I met. He loves me.”

“That’s great. . . . Do you love him?”

“He’s very good to me.”

“Do you love him?”

“He says I don’t have to work. He can support us.”

“But you don’t love him?”

“Maybe not, but I had no choice. I got behind on the rent on the river. You should come to the clubs.” His voice contained a plea and a challenge.

“No, I should write. Do what I must to support myself, but always write.”

He emitted a sound that groveled between a growl and a whine. “You’re a little crazy with your writing. What does it get you?”

“No, when I write is the only time I’m sane. Speaking of which, what are you working on?”

“Nothing.”

“How can you stand not drawing or creating?”

“I’m creating a life.”

“What life is that?”

“It’s me on the street.”

I didn’t see him for months. Then a mutual acquaintance told me, “Paul’s living on the river again, but downtown.”

“Downtown?” I queried, knowing that good housing near downtown was sparse. “Where downtown?”

He gave me the address and said, “He’s not doing well. Prepare to be shocked. Don’t be angry with him. But he needs someone to care. You might be just what he needs.”

Apprehensive, I tarried and toddled downtown to the address: a flophouse on the river: an old wooden hotel, now renting rooms for $50 a week. I creaked up the wooden stairs to the third floor. I knocked on the door with the skewed 3D.

The door squeaked open, and there stood an avatar of Paul in dingy T-shirt, frayed jeans a size too large and barefoot and unshaven for several days. His eyes were red-rimmed. He seemed not to recognize me for a minute. Then he smiled and said, “Phillip, what are you doing here?”

“I came to visit.”

“Come in. Come in.” He said, faking his old conviviality.

I stepped into his room, which was definitely not a studio, but a boudoir. White gauze curtains like the unwrapped wrappings of a mummy floated inward from the river breeze. A yellowed sheeted mattress on the floor was shielded by more gauze curtains. I thought of a spider and its web. Unlike in the cottage on the river, the sink was unscrubbed, dishes were unwashed, papers were strewn in piles along the baseboards, and his few clothes were piled hither and yon.

I stood in the middle of his dilapidation and, choking back an emotion that tried to suffocate me into muteness, said, “What are you doing?”

“Living,” he answered in a flat monotone so unlike the vivacious former voice that it slapped me and blanched my cheeks.

“Where’s your art?”

“There.” With a shaky upturned palm he motioned toward an unruly stack of his luminous girl prints, ready to tumble like an eroding tower of Babel. Next to the prints sat a cardboard box with a jumble of photographic prints, some already spotted and curling.

“Paul, you need to get a grip on yourself. Your art is important. Remember where you were a year ago.”

“Art,” he sneered, “is nothing.”

“You know this isn’t you . . . this sloppy person.”

“Do you want a drink?” He motioned to the table where a quarter-empty whisky bottle sat, its fool’s gold liquid beckoning like a siren.

“No thanks.”

Defiantly, he grabbed the bottle and swigged a deep gulp, plopped the bottle down and glared at me. He would be hopeless to talk to.

I begged, “Let me take your remaining prints and keep them for you.”

“Do what you want.”

“You need help, but I can’t help you,” I scooped the prints onto the cardboard box and lifted box and prints into my arms as if I were lifting a malnourished child from a gutter, and then grabbed two dusty drawing pads propped crazily against the wall. “I’ll keep them in my garage.”

“Whatever.”

I stumbled out over his threshold, and he shut the door behind me.

Trundling down the steps with his prints was awkward; the prints slipped and slid around; the drawing pads strained against my grasping fingers. Trying to extinguish the painful blaze in my heart, tears trickled down my face. I could hear his sweet, artful, but strained, voice singing faintly, “Lavender’s blue . . . dilly . . . dilly.”

End of "Pauline Grey"

For me Tampa Bay was a crucible in which my old life ended and a new life began, for there I found people like me, artists and writers.  Some headed steadily toward their goals; others stumbled.

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