Albrecht Durer.
I made three great friends in that mezzanine during these years. I wasn’t pouring over my books every second. I’d look about me now and then. The first was Bruce, an artist, ‘par excellence’. I noticed that he’d often be sitting at the table right next to mine (I had a favorite one, against the back wall, second from the stairs) and that he always had a sketchbook in hand and was drawing in pencil. One thing that struck me was that he’d sit there and sketch almost as long as I studied, five or six hours straight, both of us intense at our separate Herculean tasks. I couldn’t help but sometimes glance at his pictures but said nothing to him for weeks. But finally curiosity got the better of me. He was looking at people’s hands and sketching them in beautiful detail. He sketched one of mine, holding an open book and I leaned over and asked if I could examine it. It was a beautiful drawing like something out of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. We began talking, he was a very mild mannered, soft spoken person a few years older than me, with long blond hair and handsome, looking like a young Albrecht Durer. With his looks you’d think he could have any girlfriend he wanted. But he was always alone, except one night there (and this is a period covering two years) when I watched two gorgeous blonds come up and sit at his table, right next to mine. They almost looked like twins, and their beauty, being doubled, was overpowering. They had pale skin, long, straight hair, Scandinavian types. They chatted with him for two hours, then left. I didn’t intervene but the next night I couldn’t help asking who they were. He told me that they were classmates together at Mills college, a college of the arts, which he attended for a year. He wasn’t gay but he was extremely shy and a loner.
We didn’t often talk. He was one of the most complete loners I ever met. Most nights we just went about our business. But siting there next to each other for so many hours and so many days over the next years we became ‘de facto’ friends. And talk between us slowly did increase, and our interests and life stories were shared.
He’d gone to the college but was dissatisfied with its teachers and decided to self-educate himself. He found a large, single room for rent that fitted him perfectly, on the top floor of an old Victorian house just a block away, on Channing. The rent was only seventy dollars a month and with strict rent control laws in Berkeley at the time it didn’t change for over the ten years he lived in it. There were three other rooms on that floor and a central kitchen. I noticed over the years, as I visited infrequently, that other tenants came and went, but he stayed on as he had a large window facing South, the perfect light for painting.
He was frugal to a fault and made the little money he needed with part time jobs in restaurants, usually as a dishwasher, (he was the one to give Kim and I so much free food in our bohemian days). He worked as few hours as possible to spend all the more time practicing his art. But he had no goal, no business sense. He made so many beautiful pictures over the years, switching mediums every few, from pencil to watercolors to oil, he could have easily made a good living selling them on Telegraph avenue with all the other street vendors there. I told him this repeatedly. They were so striking he would even achieve fame, because of his talent and the huge amount of time he spent perfecting it. But he kept them all in his closet. I was one of the very few allowed to ever see them.
In the Med. for instance, he chose for several months to sketch faces and heads, usually women, in pencil. Some would see him starring at them and sketching, they’d come over and look at their images and implore him almost to tears to give them the pictures, so perfect were the likenesses. He’d always refuse. Only once did I see him hand over his drawing to a girl, with a contemptuous ‘huff’, after she pleaded with him so loudly and pathetically it was causing a scene. If I’d had his talent at portraiture I would have had an unending stream of beautiful women coming to me, begging fervently for such fine sketches. And they would have got them for a kiss and a phone number, and maybe a night in bed.
At another stage in his art Odyssey he took to sketching houses in pen and ink, setting up a portable easel and seat on a sidewalk and capturing the architecture of a house and yard in perfect proportions. He chose the most appealing houses, and they were almost always the mansions of the rich, on the north side of campus. He’d spend a whole afternoon detailing one and the owners would come home from work, see him there and behold their house miraculously captured. Once again, they’d beg him for the painting, offering money, sometimes a large amount. I remember him telling me with almost pained dismay how he’d always refuse the money, but sometimes just give them the painting to avoid the argument over it. I wonder how many of those intricate sketches still adorn the walls of those mansions, prized, but probably unsigned, knowing his humility.
Here’s one last example of his odd relationship with his artwork, which I never did comprehend, after years of thinking about it, it was so strange. One day (in Jan. 1984 and almost exactly ten years after we first met) I ran into him by pure chance. Here’s the entry:
Sunday Jan. 8th,: I met Bruce at the ‘Renaissance’ coffee shop this evening. I went first to the Med. but it was full so I proceeded to the Renaissance. That this chance was not a fateful or determinant fluke of my future course in life, the next few months will tell. For Bruce told me he was moving out of his cheap, artist’s lodging and as I was sitting with him I conceived the plan of moving into it, and with the liquefiable assets I now have, I could live and study there a year in ‘Thoreau-like’ solitude, a plan I cherish but which recedes from me like a dream as I get older, weaker, more inclined to luxury and less to full time study.
He told me, to my surprise, of his settling in with his girlfriend and of them having a baby together, a great change in his life!
This was the night he invited me over. Most of his belongings had already been moved out, but there was a bundle of some fifty larger drawings and paintings dating back to his school days, leaning against a wall in his open closet. He told me he was going to destroy them but that if I wanted one, I could pick one out to keep. It was dusk and as I began to leaf through them in the empty room, I felt sad that such treasures would soon be burned. I wanted to keep them all but knowing his character for so long I didn’t even ask. I picked out a most beautiful portrait of a Dutch girl, (something he’d done in one of his courses, which employed models to sit for the students to draw), a half-length, done in charcoal on slightly brown paper, three feet in length and two wide. She is sitting, hands folded in her lap, her face one quarter turned to the side, her eyes staring into the distance, with an almost ‘Mona Lisa’ smile, only sadder, as if ‘smiling at grief’.
I would have treasured that picture forever. I had it framed and glassed when I moved into Steve S.’s place in Oct. of 1984 and hung it on his living room wall for safe keeping. It stayed there so long and he liked it so much, (fell in love with it in fact, which he told me many times) that I couldn’t bring myself to reclaim it years later. I hope he still has it. I know he later moved in with a girlfriend down the street. I’m sure he took it with him, but I’m not sure he’s still alive, being ten years older than me. I hope it’s on someone’s wall and appreciated. I explain the story in loving detail when I get to that date in my narrative.
But back to Bruce. I never knew him to have another friend or socialize. I invited him once, and insisted he come, to one of our wild, ‘speed’ parties above the Starry Plough in ‘78’. He did show up, drank a few beers, stayed a few hours and left.
I ran into him later that year (1984) again on the street. He was with a Korean woman pushing a baby in a carriage, their baby. He told me they were married. She was short and heavy set and not at all pretty and spoke broken English as we talked a bit. I wondered, first of all, that Bruce had married and had a baby, but wondered even more at his choice of a wife. He was so handsome and talented, and his character was so kind and considerate, he was a perfect choice and model of a husband for any smart and lovely woman.
I met him a year later sitting in the Med. one night, looking downcast and with no sketchbook in hand. He told me he was having a hard time adjusting to married life, was unhappy and having troubles with her. I didn’t pry into the details, just told him I was sorry for him and cut the meeting short, feeling bad, but had no idea what to say. His mind was always inscrutable to me, a complete mystery.
I saw him one last time on a memorable occasion. It was one of my last days with Lindsey, January of 1986. I took her out to a restaurant for breakfast after a night together. I had just met Sanita (my future wife), in Mexico the month earlier and told Lindsey I was in love and that Sanita would soon be flying back to me. So she knew her time was up. It was a cheap diner and I took her there to explain matters in greater detail. We sat down and I saw Bruce, sitting at another table, alone. We went to his table and he told us he was now divorced and happier. There was a T.V. mounted on the ceiling nearby, playing some Sunday talk show, and all of a sudden interrupted with some breaking news. It was January 28th, 1986, and the space shuttle had just exploded upon take-off. This disrupted all personal conversation. We finished breakfast watching it, parted with a handshake and that was it.
As I write this picture of my friend Bruce, it dawns upon me once again that one of the most salient features of my life (and this record) is that I was constantly attracted to and managed to befriend the oddballs in life, so much so that I’m reminded of a line in Samuel Johnson’s poem on the death of Robert Levet:
‘Of every friendless name, the friend’
Johnson had the same disposition as me, or perhaps it’s a trait of character, a curiosity about others, all types, as he also befriended a rag-tag set of strange people and even had some join his household and live with him.
