The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  “What about your lease?”

  “Oh, they were wonderful about that. I would have bought my way out, but they didn’t want the money. They waived it, or whatever. Wished me luck.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I really should have. But I didn’t want to say anything until after I’d closed the deal in Manhattan. Bad girl. I mean, a lot of my stuff is still in that studio. My stuff is living there rent-free, Stanley.”

  Calvin Farnham never responded to my phone messages, if he got them, but then he just showed up one day at the Bozarts. He and a couple of clones were pulling on latex gloves out in the corridor and I confess my first take was Uh-oh, what’s this? He saw my face and laughed. They were getting ready to muck out Tad’s stall, as I might have guessed, and there were precious negatives to protect.

  Calvin and I arranged to meet for coffee at Café Gauguin (my treat, I insisted, ever generous with a check under ten bucks) and we chatted for an hour without once touching on such practical matters as landlords and leases. To Calvin, of course, the world was fairly wide. The Bozarts, which Tad occupied in a haphazard fashion, had no special resonance for him. It was just a cheap available place for maintaining a Canterbury darkroom.

  “I suppose for you it’s been almost like a home,” said Calvin. He meant it metaphorically, that I had been here from the start. Little he knew I had twice taken up fulltime residency in the broom closet—and little I knew how soon I would be doing so again. “And I can see why it feels that way. Those people are absolute sweethearts.”

  Tech? Hargrove? Kristen Dane? Those people?”

  “I didn’t catch her name. But Tad’s rent was overdue, I mean hugely overdue—it was a fair bit of money. And I mean, Tad was gone …” (I passed Calvin some napkins so he could blot his tears and continue) “… just gone from the world, and I had to cope with that. I could hardly cope with all his messy paperwork back here.”

  “Sweethearts, though?”

  “Well, yes. I told her what had happened and she just said forget it. Poof. Can you believe that, Stanley? I mean, they are a monster business, they manage billions worldwide and all. Don’t they have to balance the books or something?”

  “Tell me this, Calvin. How did you manage to get hold of them? Of Kristen?”

  “Well, I did finally sort through the bills. I didn’t want to go to jail. And there was a phone number on the letterhead. Have you had problems with that number?”

  Just a few. And I had a few more when I dialed it again the moment our little coffee summit concluded. Even Nina confessed to problems with the numbers. She had to concede they were pretty well insulated at street level. My guess? You get patched right through to Kristen, no problem, so long as you are calling with an offer to move out or die.

  When I did “bump into her” in the latte line at Wismer Ave. (long after the smoke had cleared) Kristen all but embraced me in her gladness at our chance encounter. “And how is everything over at our favorite building?” she said. “I hope your work goes well?”

  I hoped so too, though I added that we were still bummed out about Tad.

  “The poor dear man. Saddest thing possible. Just heartbreaking.”

  “Any word yet on who will take his place at our favorite building?”

  “Actually there’s no one on the list right now. Although there is a new tenant. You must have met her by now?”

  “No one on the list? I didn’t know you had a list.”

  “Well as I say, at the moment we don’t. It’s a down time for rentals citywide, as I’m sure you are aware. Overall, we are at about 78%.”

  “That’s what, a C-plus? And this would be 78% of—?”

  “Forgive me, Stanley,” she chuckled brightly. “I definitely spend too much of my time chatting with real estate folks. 78% occupancy. We have been as high as 95% in your area much of the last ten years. And the list? I shouldn’t tell you this, but in the past we have had people almost trying to buy their way in—”

  “Bribes!”

  “Well, gifts. Never accepted, of course. Whoever was next on the list was next on the nameplate. But in those days, no one ever seemed to leave Blaisdell Studios.”

  Kristen laughed for me, she cried for me—whatever the script called for—as we waltzed around a minute or two longer. My inquisition had been gentle, her defense disarming, the position clear. Any vacancy that existed or persisted was purely the result of blind market forces.

  She was good. I had nowhere to go with it, nothing left to ask, for of course I had no idea how soon we would again be blindsided, by the Queen Bees of all people.

  * * *

  “The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young: reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  The Golden Age at Blaisdell was relatively shortlived. For one thing, says Arnie Cloud, “1979 was already the 80’s, when you think about it. Things had already changed in this country, reverted back. The great films of the 70’s were ancient history, the new music sucked. And the Gipper was about to become president. There was plenty to despise,” he grins, “just less to protest in any useful way.”

  The Original 12 did cling to so-called 60’s culture longer than most. Photographs reinforce Jan Edelman’s recollection that they were “longhairs, freaks, and dropouts who disdained success—or disdained money as a measure of it.” The artist’s mantra—Better keep your day job—need not be spoken aloud. Several years into the experiment, no one at #4 was self-sufficient through art alone.

  “There was top quality work being done in every room, don’t get that wrong,” says Cloud, whose breakthrough piece “Belief and Disbelief” (1984) stands outside the C.I.T. campus chapel. At the time he was “moonlighting all day” for a landscape outfit, taking on all the least skilled aspects of the projects, “raking mulch off the truck, digging holes, lugging the hod. I was low man, I was the mule. Carried a million bricks. But it left my mind free, it made my body stronger, and the pay was cash.”

  This theme recurs: working for cash, staying off the books, flying under the radar. Deirdre Wright held down two waitressing jobs. Jan Edelman sold kitchen paraphernalia at a shop in Weeks Square. Installation artist Carla Freemantle pumped gas at the All Night Merit on Proctor Street.

  “I pumped it all night, too. Ever wonder who gets gas at four in the morning? It’s the guys who couldn’t tell you why. Dopers, robbers, hit men—or guys who sure looked like hit men. But it paid four bucks an hour under the table, no paperwork.”

  Stanley Noseworthy was the first to make it into the public eye when his play A Cup of Kindness was produced in 1983. (Since that time, it has been performed in a dozen countries.) “I was lucky. It was a good play, I think, but I had no idea how hard it was to get a good play read, much less produced anywhere. I know now, believe me, but I did not know then.”

  Noseworthy’s steady checks helped hold the place together, as others struggled with money issues. Artists with larger studios, and higher rents, often subleased a portion of the space. Edelman explains: “You would put up a screen, maybe cordon off a corner. Then stick someone behind the screen and charge whatever seemed fair. Carla had a silversmith. My guy sat at a table and sewed hats. And he paid his rent every month, because those hats sold like hotcakes in Weeks Square. They were made of felt, with a touch of feather and leather.”

  Not all the subletters paid and, since subletting was expressly forbidden in an agreement the artists had signed, there was little recourse. When Deirdre Wright got stiffed twice in one year, it was Noseworthy who made up the difference.

  “Stan was an angel. He genuinely did not care about money and he was happy to share it out. What he did care about was women and I know he shared it more easily when the lists of the needy included Samantha Soames and Lola Triple X.”

  No one knew Samantha Soames or Lola XXX before they arrived. They had come to the “Hotel Des Beaux-Arts,” as the Co-op was nicknamed, in response to Wright’s flyer at a laundromat. Soames, of course, was already
painting her miniature watercolors; no one can say what, if anything, Lola XXX created during her six-month stint. Nor could anyone say where she went when she left. California was everyone’s best guess, if only because Soames had gone there. In fact, the two never even met. All they had in common (apart from being “sharecroppers” in Wright’s studio) was Stanley Noseworthy’s generosity.

  Though “very much in love” at the time (“and still,” Noseworthy insists, some 20 years past the breakup with “Melanie”), he managed to clear space in his day for other attractive ladies. Nothing was more convenient for such a lifestyle than the “Hotel,” where an atmosphere of sexual freedom existed side by side with the presumption that important work was being done. “Melanie” would not likely intrude upon such work, nor was she concerned about her boyfriend’s loyalty. “She trusted him!” marvels Cloud. “But we were all a lot younger then.”

  When Wright was forced to evict Samantha Soames, Noseworthy stepped in to pick up the tab. He calculated that “another few months of Sam would be a bargain at twice the price. Not that there was any such deal—you know, guns for hostages or whatever. She didn’t even know I paid the damn bill. Sam had no reluctance about sex that I recall.”

  Lola XXX did express such a reluctance, saying she had never before had sexual relations with a white man. Her benefactor was quick to assure her he had a distant black ancestor on his father’s side, and produced a blurry photograph of a coffee-colored sharecropper—“no relation, sexual or otherwise”—as evidence.

  “I lied,” says Noseworthy, “but so did she. I found out she had slept with the whole Rainbow Coalition—and God love her for it. Or to paraphrase Ben Jonson” (Noseworthy tends to quote from what he calls ‘the dead white male playwrights’) “‘Come my Lola, let us prove while we can the sports of love.’”

  Noseworthy and Cloud were rivals in some ways, but both were eager to help the chronically indigent painter Monk Barrett, whose slides were lavishly praised at every gallery, yet never accepted. According to his contemporary Rich Kenniston, “Monk’s stuff is beyond astonishing. The canvases draw you in like a complex jungle you can’t resist exploring. Powerful, original stuff.”

  The first time Barrett heard his paintings were “not quite right for us” or “too advanced for us,” he felt good about it. Later times, not so good. “These are extremely promising” became his least favorite in a lexicon of what he came to categorize as “goodbye phrases.” For if the work was merely promising, what could he do to fulfill that promise? The paintings were completed, after all, and they represented his best efforts.

  His options, as he saw them, included “doing less ‘advanced’ work, waiting for the world to catch up, and continuing to jump out of cakes naked for grocery money.” In fact, he would still be jumping from those cakes as his 40th birthday approached, raising the possibility he might soon be too advanced for that clientele as well.

  For the rest of the Original 12 (all still present in 1984) prosperity lay just out of sight. Ironically, when success did begin coming to hand, it would loosen the bonds at Blaisdell Street. Everyone agrees that the Golden Age at #4 had a lot to do with the youthful struggles the young artists shared.

  “But let’s not get carried away,” says Edelman. “Success is a relative term, and prosperity is way too strong a word. Several of us were surprised to find ourselves solvent, how’s that? We were making a living. But this was 1985, and we were making a living by maybe 1965 standards.”

  * * *

  For the next little while, things were surprisingly mellow. The new roster was weird—just me and the three odd couples—but it sort of worked.

  I had to accept the fact that Clapper and Rose were a couple. They just were. They did all their lunching and munching together, and a lot of back-fence visiting. If you saw one, usually you saw them both. Otherwise Rose kept to herself, though she and I did develop a few grunts of greeting, a minimal modus.

  Liz and Ed were, as I mentioned, more of a couple than any actual couple I know. Those two shared everything: fridge, hot plate, coffee machine, humidifier, phone—even the message machine, which instructed you to “leave a message for Liz or Ed,” as it might in the marital home. They shared everything but a bed. For that they each employed a spouse, though (another oddity) neither of these champions of children’s literacy had children of their own.

  Which was not the case with our lesbian couple, Bea and Beryl, each of whom had issue from marriages undertaken before they had discovered or (revised) their sexual preference. In fair Canterbury, bluest city in the bluest state, such family histories are hardly news.

  The Queen B’s quickly became our resident elders—not that they seemed so elderly when they replaced Kenny Battle in ’86. Somehow, by ’87, they had aged 30 years, while the rest of us were aging one. Bea’s hair had been black and Beryl’s a sort of mahogany brown. We turned around twice and they each had fleece the white of snowfields glaring in a winter sun. Robert Frost White on your paint-chip chart.

  Clapper’s theory is that their hair was already white, and they simply decided to stop coloring it when they became our mom. Maybe they were simply too busy presiding over our straggling community, making everything cozy. Early on they harnessed and civilized the coffee room, which had previously been an unused pit. They donated a set of comfortable chairs, and a coffeemaker, and every day they would bring in home-baked pastries. Then they started having cookouts at their house.

  “Next thing you know, we’ll be holding hands and saying grace,” Monk complained. And soon we were, Monk included, though he was heard to mutter over the grilled salmon, “We might as well be Unitarians.”

  The B’s were serious huggers. If they weren’t hugging one another (or The Runt, their shaggy German shepherd), they were hugging you, hugging the UPS man. When Monk asked Beryl if she was one of the tree-huggers, she scolded him gently: “I believe that’s something of a metaphor, Elwood.” Then she hugged him.

  Neither of them needed to earn money. One had a large divorce settlement, the other a robust trust fund, though I could never remember, nor did it matter, which was which. I’ll confess that at first I pegged them for dabblers or dilletantes, not serious artists. What is serious, you may ask—and what is art? But they were complicit in my mistake. They were potters, and constantly downgraded their work with a ready jest—“Oh we just pot around”—and their air of good-natured distraction.

  My dictionary says that art is “the making or doing of that which displays form, beauty, and unusual perception.” Which pretty much describes everything the B’s did, for clay-and-glaze was not their only medium. There was food. I have no patience with the apotheosis of Chef Jeff or the successive crazes over vertical, horizontal, and diagonal food, but to watch the B’s prepare a meal was to see that mere knowledge (of the sort contained in recipes) has little to do with the finished product on a talented cook’s table. There is artistry involved.

  Likewise in their garden, with its sinuous footpath tied to light lines and sight lines, to the turning of seasons and the sequence of blooming (with regard not only to color but also height, weight, tilt, and texture) and the small fruit trees which neither shaded the suncraving plants nor failed to shade the shyer ones, and the whimsical scattering of objects such as the gorgeous sandstone sundial every bit as precise as your fatty Omega watch.

  The entire texture of their lives was a constant work of art, although (or because) they made no show of it. The B’s were so solidly grounded here that we never dreamed they could be transplanted. Septuagenarians or not, those gals had only just begun their lives, they were way too ruddy and peppy to let in disease or death. They were ruddier and peppier than we were, besides which they were our mom: they would be there to make the chicken soup.

  So it hit me like a roadside bomb in Baghdad (no way to know it was there and then KABOOM) when I saw the note they posted in the coffee room. The announcement that they were in Florida for a “fortnight” (they often tal
ked like Masterpiece Theatre) and when they returned they would be “relocating down there for the duration.”

  One could hardly see this bizarre choice as voluntary. The B’s were beyond grounded, they were quintessential Yankee ladies with hair of Robert Frost White. The sunbelt? Their own children thought they were nuts. But Bea just chuckled when I asked if they had been subjected to pressure. Muscled out.

  “It wouldn’t have taken a great deal of muscle,” she said. “It’s just the right time to make a change, Stanley. Berry turns 75 this year.”

  “Happy Birthday,” I said to Beryl, joylessly.

  “Thank you, Stanley,” she said, and hugged me. “Three-quarters of a century.”

  “And why not spend the next quarter someplace warmer?” said Bea. Sometimes they reminded me of those side-by-side news anchors who take turns reading sentences off the teleprompter.

  “You should come visit us in St. Augustine. We will have room for guests.”

  “You don’t by any chance golf, Stanley?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Well we’re smack on a golf course—and we’re members!”

  “Not that we play golf either.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Oh it’s a whole little world. You’d never know it was a golf course. There is a bird sanctuary, and a lovely protected marsh, and there are lakes and canals—”

  “—restaurants, a supermarket, a cinema. Right on the grounds.”

  “It sounds godawful,” I said. “And so completely not you.”

  “We’re not it, more like,” Bea laughed. “But hopefully we are not too old to grow and learn. I intend to master that silly game. Why not?”

  “Frustration,” said Beryl, “that’s why not. Everyone says it’s crazymaking. And frustration can age a person prematurely.”

  “Fine, then we just stroll over to the Fountain of Youth. Which is within walking distance, Stanley.”