I’ve been reading Yellow Submarine to UGI the cutest buddhist and he is singing all the time: “All you need is love” and I am melting like a chocolate easter bunny held too tightly in the hand.
All the paterfamilas jive has got me thinking of the time I played my last game of catch with the old man. Oh yeah, it was after he had already died. Those of you out there who went to my old man’s funeral have already heard this story. It was my uligi, or eugi, or eulogy, or whatever.
I think I’d got you to the point where the old man was sleeping soundly…
In the morning he awoke swollen like Verucca Salt (or was it Violet Bick?…) in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was huge and silent and in need of a shit. The thing about my dad is that he was a fairly proud and stubborn man. The home care workers had given us (sold us) bed pans and a portapotty, but he wasn’t having any of it. For months he shook off whatever opiate stupor he was feeling and sat on his porcelain throne like the king he seemed to me as a child. He tried to maintain dominion over his failing lands, like Lear slowly going mad with the pain and drugs and cancer.
On the day after his infant sleep, we tried to move his blueberry body towards the yellow bathroom, but he crashed against the cork doors and couldn’t go forward or back and so I peeled the plastic off the flimsy portapotty and he sat there in the living room swelling up.
You see, his lymph system had shut down over the past 48 hours and all the water he would usually process through that reptilian system of canals was backing up and flooding the Holland of his boddy. I was just a little Dutch boy and nothing would stem the flood. He sat on that portable potty for what seemed like hours and in his eyes you could see him getting smaller, while his body grew and grew.
He did not die like Elvis in Memphis. We shot him full of morphine and put him to bed – we’d moved it close to him in the living room and he fell into a sleep again. But this sleep was different and began with a distant rumble like thunder on the horizon.
It was the beginning of the death rattle… Where all the water broke the dyke of his flesh and headed for air…his lungs. The sound grew hour by hour and into the night… like forboding… like a drunk snoring in an imposssibly long breath. You’ve never heard a noise like it, unless you’ve heard that noise.
At about four in the morning the house went suddenly – weirdly – silent.
The king was dead: Long Live The King.
Le Roi… Le Roi… Le Roi!
And my mother started laughing hysterically. My brother Christian and I looked at her as if she were posessed.
I thought, “Great. Dad is dead and my mother has gone insane. What am I, Job?”
She said, “He’s in me. I can feel him. He’s inside me and he loves me…aaaha ha ha ha…..oooooooooooooo……” She was raving now. “Oh,” she said now becalmed. “He’s gone.”
I thanked my lucky stars, when suddenly something tickled my insides as I took a breath. I started laughing, like an idiot.
It was as if I’d taken a bong hit of GOD. He was inside me and playing my ribs like Lionel Hampton. The tune was ridiculously inappropriate laughter. The text was, “Thank you, thank you, Danke Schoen….”
It went on for some time and then suddenly, like an ejaculation of spirit, out of the place where the Jews wear a yamuka and the Mets wear a blue ball cap… in a great gallactic woooosh…. he was gone.
We turned off all the oxygen and so I could light candles now and I used the matches and wax to draw fatty ash portraits of his dead face.
my mother has those drawings, so this Fasnacht mask will have to serve as a metaphor, or stand in untill I can scan those deathmask portraits. It captures the feeling perfectly. Mummanschanz
When all was said and done and the room was made empty and the all the candles had flickered out and the morphine was poured down the drain by our home care nurse (who only a month later suffered a brain anurism and ended up the patient… fate is cruel)… I was suddenly unemployed. You have to understand, I left my studio, my woman, my life and married the dying of my father. I was, like Sinatra, a man alone.
This is at it’s core a story about design and gardens. When my father decided to shut down his graphic design company, Visualconcepts, he was an old dog. He’d tried to bring my brother into the business, but the computer revolution seemed to spell the end of his craft. He thought any idiot with a computer could make good design and his top dollar prices would disappear (boy was he wrong, but that’s what it looked like to a painter who was essentially a faker as a graphic designer… sure he’d gone to the Kunst Geweberschule in Basel, but he was a painter… only the Americans were fooled – and he walked off the boat a typesetter and into a plush New York international-style-modern office an Art Director… he told me on smack nod, “I’m a faker… I wanted to paint… I don’t know anything about graphic design… I just know what I like… slap some sans serif type face over a good picture and voila!” … he thought himself Salieri in Amadeous – just smart enought to see a good picture, but not quite smart enough to make one… he thought of himself as a sort of overpaid picture framer… I, however, had to lay out the pills and the vials and the tubes and cans – on a laquer tray of his choosing…everything had to be in place… drugs, tissues, strange alternative essiac tea, shark cartiledge… I think he was a Japanese Samurai… which makes him an okay designer in my book… but it was that Daffy Duck seppuku comedy routine… you can only do it once… I was the grateful audience).
MEAT OF THE STORY:
So in retirement, my father read the sunday times and saw an article in the magazine about a moss garden in Kyoto, Japan. I don’t think I need to talk about the connections between Japan and Modernity and Swiss design philosophy here. If you don’t see it, please do research. Start with Art Nouveau and Monet, and Van Gogh and… fuck it: Modernity is simply the West digging the East and now vice versa.
He said to me, “Lexi look at this moss garden. Do you think we could do something like that in the swamp? Moss always grew well there.”
I said,”Sure, but dad, read the article. Moss is a tricky woman. It takes forever to grow. This thing is tended by serious monks who have stepped out of the Karmic Circle to return again and again to tend the moss. It took thousands of years to make that moss Garden… That’s where Amataratsu lives, man. This isn’t casual sunday gardening, this is religion and Nation. Nippon des ka?.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said dissmissively. “I’m just saying that it burns me up that the swamp by 684 is feral…We could make it beautiful… I think I’ll do it. A river garden! Like Giverney.”
And I knew enough to know it was a fait accompli, but the thing is that when a man in his late sixties begins to build a path to the river…
I didn’t like the garden. He would call me at ridiculous hours of a sunday morning saying, “Lexi, there is a two hundred pound boulder I need to move in the Japanese garden, I’ll pick you up. We’ll have lunch and then we’ll move he stone.”
I’d say in groggy voice, “Dad, man, I was up painting till sunrise… let me sleep.”
“Good,” he’d say. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
I’d sleep for two and a half hours and get a call, “Lexi, never mind. With you mother and lever I moved it myself. But if you’d like a nice lunch…”
And I’d go over and have white wine and sandwiches and see the progress on… well you could call it THE WORLD.
So when his corpse was in the hearse and the spirit and shot through me and the drawings were drying and the sun was coming up like a big bald head, I went out to his garden:
this was me around then… skinny, happy, dumb, and poor, but I had to walk over the lame ass arch bridge my brother had built (oh he was put in cahoots too…. we all were, but Christian who was in Colorado and too far away and ironically too atheist to get involved) and then you landed on an Island called St. Helena. In other words, you entered this fiction world by way of my mother… which is presumably the way you entered this world. You arrivec first on St. Marcel… the father and from there the Isle de St Louis and the Isle de Cité… further on past bamboo and grasses were CDA (Chirtian, Damon, and Alexandre) and the Okeefenokee. Now the Okeefenokee was the never never land at the end of the garden… it was purgatory.
I don’t know what my dad was talking about, but I remember like yesterday’s rain the map he drew so carefully when I broght my (then new) sweetie to visit. There was a mythology to the place. It was his greatest composition… Solierei my ass.
Garden Map Recreation, ink on Japanese paper, ITIN ’05
That day of days I walked out there with the laughter and tears still in my lips. The sun was coming up still and the world was bald and blue (here comes the sun king)… in a notch before the arch bridge (which turned into something like a three angle hexagon bridge because my brother liked straight lines) I found a single yellow tennis ball… I think it was a Spalding.
These balls would floast down from HAL… I’m sorry: IBM, and jam in the nooks and crannies of the moss garden. My father would trap and bag them like furrs and bring them to my Yale Lock Factory (LAA… looks like ALE from I-95) studio and my first solo show at Sound Shore Gallery was all what the big man had fished out of the Byram River for his son (you can give a man a ball, or you can teach him to catch a ball…)
So I picked up the ball and negotiated the labiryth path to St. marcel and I thought to myself that Plato and Bucky spoke of perfect shapes… I thought that a sphere must be the most perfect and so I threw that little Spalding ball into the current of the river and it stuck.
I meand to say that it sat in the middle of a current, smiling at me at its seems and then…
It came back.
I thought, “That’s pretty fucking weird, man.” And threw the ball back in to the spring-running water and it stuck again.
Now you must dig me, this was no eddy in the stream. I watched leaves and sticks and shit flow by the Spalding, but it stayed loyal, like a dog and always smiling back at me.
So I sat down and did my om nam renge kyo chant and then said, “Dad, really. Man, you are freaking every one out. Just go. I love you, but I want you to go.”
And I threw spalding back into the flow and it came right back and I picked it up and threw it without saying a word. I heard a nightingale cry out, like an infant and when I looked back, Spalding-dad was gone and I followed the flow all the way to the Okeefenokee. The ball had traveled an impossible distance and avoided a myriad of briar patches.
I like to think it made it to the sea, but it, at least, made me see:
There is more on Heaven and Earth than is contained in your Philosophy Horatio.
So if you are ever hitting the skids, I guess you should ask the first attractive face you see: “To be, or not?”
Hope and pray that the answer is: “Vivre”
But remember George… All Things Must Pass.
