Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (19 page)

My next symphony review, one in which I riffed on a piece by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos, liberally sprinkling my article with phrases such as “dense underbrush,” “hot oozing rhythms,” “predatory jungle cries,” and “sophisticated savagery,” also failed to elicit reader fury: nary a hot oozing letter or a predatory phone call. I did, however, receive soon afterward an invitation to a private afternoon cocktail party at the home of Milton Katims, the esteemed conductor of the Seattle Symphony orchestra. What the . . . ?

The Katims occupied a large, low, modern ranch-style house in an upscale neighborhood. I drove around the block two times before parking and wouldn’t have stopped at all had not Susan insisted. My friends in Seattle were scruffy bohemians who frequented the Blue Moon Tavern, but Susan, pining for her Virginia royalist milieu, could scarcely wait to rub shoulders once again with gentry, and never mind that she knew even less about classical music than I.

From the moment I’d opened the invitation, I smelled a rat, albeit a rat with a dab of Chanel No. 5 behind its ears. Surely it was a setup. Once Maestro Katims and his high-toned pals had me cornered in unfamiliar territory, a couple of cocktails under my belt, I’d be grilled, exposed, shamed, ridiculed, and diced into pieces small enough to fit on a canapé. Susan disagreed or didn’t care. She pestered, cajoled, and finally -- as some women do so effectively -- loosened my resolve with the vaginal wrench.

A uniformed maid admitted us. The clink of glassware and chirp of lighthearted conversation reverberated off elegantly simple furnishings, mostly in beige and white. Near the center of the living room sat a grand piano the size of a gunboat. By the time I’d downed my second cocktail, I could picture it steaming into Havana’s harbor, firing a barrage of Beethoven and Brahms at the Plaza de la Revolución. While Susan mingled, drinking too much and bragging dishonestly about her family back in Richmond, I adopted a nonchalant yet defiant stance on the starboard side of the piano, yet not so close to it that a guest might inquire if I might play.

Before long, the distinguished maestro himself came over, pumped my hand, smiling all the while, and confessed that he and other members of the symphonic and operatic circles had wished to meet the person responsible for those “uh, most unusual reviews” in the
Times
. I believe he used the adjective “colorful.” Never in his career had Katims read anything quite like them, he confessed. It occurred to me then that the culturati were not so much angered or disgusted by me, not so much contemptuous as they were . . . well,
dumbfounded;
that they suspected, bless them, that perhaps I was less an ignoramus than some kind of loose cannon.

Great! I decided that it would be to my advantage to assume the role. The previous day, I’d heard on the radio that a woman in Issaquah, a suburb of Seattle, had been arrested for telling fortunes without a license, so when a member of the opera board asked my favorite opera, I avoided the trap by going on at some length about a libretto I was writing entitled
The Gypsy of Issaquah,
improvising a melodramatic plot on the spot. You must admit it had an operatic ring.

And when another doyenne inquired more innocently if I had a favorite cocktail, I answered, “Oh, definitely the gin greasy.” She looked blank. “It’s Beefeater and mayonnaise,” I explained. After that, I was pretty much left alone.

The “gin greasy” was no joke. It’s an actual drink. Or it was. Once. Briefly. It did attempt a comeback but, for better or worse, did not succeed.

One Wednesday night, after having dropped Lynda at her dorm just ahead of curfew, I was sitting in my Fan district apartment quietly listening to Billie Holiday or Chet Baker when a couple of friends came to the door, bearing a bottle of Beefeater. I welcomed them enthusiastically, then -- since none of us was attracted to drinking gin straight -- went in search of something to mix with it.

Upon peering in my refrigerator, Sherlock Holmes would have instantly surmised that (a) I was a bachelor, (b) was less than affluent, and (c) had very specific tastes. The contents of said appliance consisted almost exclusively of ingredients for the swift preparation of my favorite repast: the tomato sandwich. In addition to several tomatoes, a loaf of Wonder Bread, and three (yes, three) jars of Hellman’s mayonnaise, there was in the refrigerator only peanut butter, cottage cheese, and the blueberry pancake syrup that I occasionally drizzled over my breakfast toast. Hmmm? After serious consultation, the three of us were forced to agree that as mixer for the Beefeater, fruit syrup was the logical choice. You yourself may have concurred.

Well, it was awful! Truly terrible. Please, take the advice of one who has gone where no man has gone before him: never pour your gin -- cheap or expensive -- into blueberry pancake syrup, not unless you’re consumed with self-hatred, have had your taste buds surgically removed, or are a candidate for the title of Epicurean Jackass of the Month.

Okay, back to the drawing board. “How about,” I ventured, only half in jest, “the mayonnaise?” It made sense. After all there are few edible substances on this earth that mayonnaise cannot improve. I believed that then and I believe it now. My companions were understandably skeptical, yet no one moved to interfere when I loaded a heaping tablespoon of Hellman’s into the blender, then added three jiggers of gin.

Once blended, the mixture resembled a young bride’s failed attempt at béarnaise sauce: pale yellow, thin, and runny, like the contents of a zombie’s chamber pot. I filled, in the absence of cocktail glasses, a trio of paper cups with the stuff. Collectively, we closed our eyes and sipped. Then, sipped again. It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. Even my friends, who lacked the wisdom to recognize that mayonnaise (invented by wanton nymphs who once frolicked in a grotto on the slopes of Mount Olympus) is the true and authentic food of the gods, even my pals had to concede that the gin greasy (as we’d dubbed it) was entirely drinkable -- although it may have only been in comparison to the blueberry-pancake-syrup martini. In any case, we finished off the entire bottle of Beefeater that way and felt the better for it.

Despite its favorable impression, twenty-five years were to slide by before another gin greasy glazed my palate, this time with a less favorable reception. One afternoon in the late 1980s, I was sitting with Curt Boozer in the bar at Cafe Sport, a restaurant in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, when something prompted me to mention the curious cocktail. Curt, the son of pro basketball star Bob Boozer, hadn’t exactly led a sheltered life, but he looked incredulous as I recounted my gin greasy adventure. When I persisted in extolling the concoction’s virtues, however, he became not merely convinced but intrigued, eventually insisting that we consume one then and there.

The bartender was not receptive. He thought we were just being alcohol silly, and anyway, there was no mayonnaise at his station. Determined now, we appealed to our waitress. Coleen was a stand-up girl and she knew Curt and me fairly well, as we both dined at the Sport two or three times a week and were generous tippers. When she found a free moment, Coleen went to the kitchen, fetched a small bowl of mayonnaise, presented it to the bartender, who then, scowling all the while, mixed the drinks according to my instructions.

When Coleen brought the finished product to our booth, one glance told me these were not the storied gin greasies of my youth. This version was less yellow than green. Green, green, green, green: did the barman think us supporters of Muammar Gaddafi? It just wasn’t right.

Curt was puzzled by my hesitation. He was starting to suspect I’d been pulling his leg all along. So, with my credibility on the line, I toasted him, and we each took a swallow. Then we made a face that would have fit right in on the facade of Notre-Dame. Come back, blueberry pancake syrup, all is forgiven!

It turned out that the only mayonnaise in Cafe Sport’s kitchen was herbed mayonnaise. Herbed! Laced with tarragon and basil and God knows what other pungent weed. I can’t say whether the nymphs on Mount Olympus would have been appalled, but it took a while for Curt to trust me again, for me to trust Cafe Sport, and as for another entry in the Gin Greasy Diaries, well, that seems to have been indefinitely postponed.

21

jiminy critic

When at age five I announced my intention to be a writer, I had not the skinniest notion that that job description might include writing art criticism. Yet here I was in my early thirties writing critiques instead of literature, which is to say, producing carob instead of chocolate -- or, worse, itch power instead of lubricant. On the other hand, because I’d yet to find my literary voice, my personal style, or my subject, functioning as a critic on a regular basis served to sharpen my wits, deepen my insight, and steel me to face looming deadlines without a twitch or a flinch. Moreover, I was consistently in close contact with creative minds.

Some of those minds, naturally, were more advanced, more original, more possessed than others, and I made it my mission to separate, to the best of my ability, tough minds from the weak, the driven from the lazy, the radiant from the dull. This had never been done in Seattle before, and there was considerable brush (no pun intended) in the so-called art world to clear away, a number of undeserved reputations to bolster or deflate; an approach, of course, that endeared me to some quarters, made me a pariah -- and a target -- in others.

Not surprisingly, I was attracted to the unconventional, and when I was moved by some radically inventive work, I was reckless enough to climb out on a limb and sing its praises, even when there was a posse down below shaking the tree. Never, however, was this a question of my taste being superior -- or inferior -- to that of others in the art community. To respond to art in a meaningful way, notions of “taste” must be set aside or tossed out the window. Taste becomes legitimately operational only when expressing preference between works of relatively equal aesthetic weight. To prefer Matisse to Picasso, for example, can be a valid expression of taste, but to prefer Thomas Kinkade to Picasso isn’t taste at all, it’s aesthetic vulgarity. (Please feel free to shake my tree.)

When the assistant director of the Seattle Art Museum labeled me “a Hell’s Angel,” I took it as a compliment, thinking it was because of my two-fisted, impolite treatment of certain sacred cows and venerated charlatans, but it turned out that it was my practice of arriving at museum exhibitions aboard my black Jawa motorcycle that offended his effete sensibilities. The wife of the director of said museum did at one point attempt to take out a full-page ad in the
Times
to denounce me, but the paper, to its credit, refused to accept it, an act of loyalty that cost it a hunk of money.

To be embraced by some, despised by others, is usually the mark of an effective critic. I cannot pretend, however, that I excelled at my job. Oh, I could “stir up the animals,” as H. L. Mencken liked to put it, but at deconstructing a painting from an informed, formalistic perspective, I was barely competent -- at least during my tenure at the
Times,
getting by primarily because I was good with words and didactic enough to provoke strong reader reaction. I worked very hard at getting better, however, studying, reading, looking, pondering, developing a larger vocabulary, and a wider frame of reference; and by 1966, when I was reviewing for
Seattle
magazine and occasionally, for national publications such as
Art in America,
and
Artforum,
even writing catalog essays for the Seattle Art Museum (now under a new, less antiquarian, regime), I’d become astute enough to sleep with a clear conscience.

Eventually, in 1967, at age thirty-five, it would be art criticism that would pry open the door and nudge me out permanently onto the shining yet slippery path of literary fiction. In the meantime, it was to have an unexpected and ultimately benevolent impact on my marital situation. To wit: Susan and I spent the majority of our social life in the company of artists. Over time, she observed that even the best, most successful of these artists were, in private, ordinary flawed human beings; that they put on their jeans one leg at a time, as the saying goes. So Susan, her reason increasingly fuzzed by alcohol, decided -- and declared -- that she, too, was an artist. If so-and-so could do it, him with his foibles and problems, so could she. I have through the years witnessed more than one example of this particular delusion. Sure, the greatest geniuses pee and poop just like the rest of us, but that in no way suggests that we are even remotely their creative equal, except perhaps in the confines of the toilet.

Energized by her demons, the paintings Susan commenced to sporadically produce possessed a certain raw, primitive power. They were haunted much as she was haunted, but were totally devoid of the slightest trace of technique or discipline. She entered one of these sloppy monstrosities in a show I was jurying, entered not in the amateur category but the professional, and let me know that if her painting wasn’t accepted for exhibition, I would suffer consequences.

Heck, I was already suffering consequences. Kendall, as well. Susan had become increasingly abusive, sometimes physically, to us both. But now I saw her sudden transmutation into a “professional artist” as a solution. Gradually, more slowly than I would have liked, I was able to convince her that if she were truly a painter, she would have a painting studio. Moreover, that she needed her own living space where she might be alone to commune with her muse, free from the distractions and domestic duties that shackle the bourgeois housewife.

Pearl Bailey must have been watching over me still, because I found a tiny, inexpensive, two-room house on a lot with some apple trees (an urban cabin, really) close enough to our Ballard District apartment so that Susan wouldn’t feel that she was deserting Kendall (though ten or so years later, they were to become irreconcilably estranged), and helped her move in. It wasn’t long before she was living there full-time, drinking heavily and occasionally attacking a picture plane like some distaff van Gogh with 90 percent less talent and 50 percent more ear; while Kendall, now age four, and I reveled in our freedom.

I bought the little girl white sandals and frilly white dresses with sashes, and thus attired, she became quite a sight around town, perched on the back of my black motorcycle, as we roared off to art openings, concerts, and film premieres. We also accompanied friends on rain-forest camping trips and nature hikes, and today she remembers those days as the happiest of her childhood. Although Susan, with whom I never again cohabited once I managed to ease her out, refused to allow me to adopt the child (claiming in one drunken rant that I wasn’t living “a realistic existence”), I’m proud to receive a Father’s Day card from Kendall each and every year.

I recount that experience because some unhappy reader -- who knows, maybe even you? -- may at some point desperately require advice in developing an exit (or eviction) strategy, and alas, Abigail Van Buren is dead. Should the mate with whom you share living quarters become, as sometimes happens, intolerable, and you are all too aware that you can neither move out nor force him or her to decamp without precipitating hellish, gut-ripping, guilt-ridden, tear-splattered scenes, why not appeal to the party’s unrealized (and doubtlessly unrealistic) creative urges? Praise their artistic potential, challenge them to follow their dream, assuring them that fame and fortune await if only they could acquire the necessary solitude, the private space in which their caged bird might take wing. Come on, it’s worth a try. It worked for me.