The Complete Collection. William Wharton

where I was. One possibility would be to paint the insides of garages. But I want to be outside in the sunshine; I’ve had enough looking inside at people’s personal garbage. I want to see long distances.

      I don’t want to paint these rows of suburban houses either. I know it’s a big part of America, but I don’t want to paint it. I know from experience I only paint well things I want to paint. If the push doesn’t come from inside, it’s only work.

      But there’s one thing that has turned me on; it’s those Venice beachfront stores and old houses. I roll down and park where Rose Avenue runs into the beach. I rock the bike up on its stand and stroll along in my dungarees, deep pockets for nails, small pockets in front for a folding rule and flat carpenter’s pencil. I lean forward with the box on my back. My insides are settling slowly like a glass of beer going flat.

      I stop at an old brick motel, a strange-looking building with an up-slanting courtyard. It’s got dark green faience tile roofing with tiles missing. French doors close off the courtyard from the wind. The sun is trapped, held in that courtyard. It’s something to paint. It’s a California version of Mad Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria; not some grotesque imitation like Disneyland but the same kind of mind, a romantic mind, a mind that didn’t want to build another ordinary motel.

      This is a fantasy in brick and tile. There’s even a tower in back with wooden stairs leading up to it. I’d love living in that room back there on top of that tower, and once I’m inside this painting I will.

      It’s amazing how fast painting comes back. It’s as if I’d put down the brushes yesterday. I’m right into it, no loss at all.

      I’m putting the last licks on the underpainting when I look up and the sunset is happening. I can’t believe it. Holy cow, they’ll think I’ve run out on them!

      I pack my box and jump on the bike. It feels like old times, smelling of turpentine, moving on a motorcycle with the box and a wet canvas flapping on my back. In Paris nobody pays much attention to me; I’m part of the scenery. But here I’m getting hoots and hollers from passing cars; I guess they think I’m another California clown. I pull over and turn the painting upside down on the holder.

      At home, they’re still glued to the TV. I go out back and change into my regular clothes. I use the garden hose and a brush to scrub the paint out of my hands. I start dinner and tell Billy he can eat with us or take off and do whatever he wants. I give him five bucks, the keys to my motorcycle.

      Dinner doesn’t go too badly. Billy stays and is on his best behavior. There’s no overt lip-smacking; no farting, not out loud anyway, no belching. He claims he gets stomach aches if he doesn’t fart and belch on schedule. Mom’s behaving, too. We get through the meal fine but I develop indigestion waiting for something to happen.

      After dinner, Billy leaves. I wash dishes and sit with Mom in the living room. For some reason, the TV isn’t on. Maybe Billy’s maniac approach satiated even Mother. I want to talk about how it was when she and Dad were young, how they met, what they planned. I know I’ll never get it anything like straight. I know too, she won’t actually be lying either. Her fantasies, even more than with most people, get realer, truer, to her with time.

      I’m interested in listening. I’m beginning to realize I’ll soon be the oldest branch on the male end of our particular genealogical tree. With Dad gone, I’ll have no more direct access to tribal family information. I should’ve talked more with my grandparents to find out what they were like, what they thought. I’m needing cementing. There’s something tenuous about being male, nothing in line, all so zigzag. I want some Mother glue to help stick myself together.

      It’s astounding what Mom doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how many brothers or sisters her mother had. She knows a bit about her father’s family, the black Protestants, but nothing about her mother’s. My God, we all disappear so quickly, so easily.

      She tells how she met Dad under an awning outside Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. She was fifteen and it was raining. She’d snitched her older sister Maggie’s hat to look dressed up and older. The rain was ruining it and she was crying. Dad shared his umbrella with her.

      I can’t imagine Dad carrying an umbrella, especially at eighteen, but times change. For the greater part of his life, Dad wouldn’t even wear a hat in the rain; said it was good for his hair, made it curl. That all changed when he went bald.

      At this time, Mom is only a year out from under her nervous breakdown and working in a candy factory. According to Mother, from the beginning she knew Dad was the man for her. I wish I’d talked with Dad about what he remembers.

      Mother had been dating another fellow, ‘a very nice Jewish boy from a very well-off family’, to use Mom’s exact formula. I’ve heard of Sidney Parker often enough all my life. ‘He didn’t have a Jewish name, but he was Jewish.’ Probably every woman has some man she brings up as the one she might have, should have, would have, married. Maybe men do this, too, and I just haven’t noticed it.

      Mom switches on the TV. She has a fairly consistent evening schedule of particular shows. There’s also a Dodger game, but Mom doesn’t like baseball. We compromise. I see the second inning through two out in the third, then all of the seventh and eighth. By this time, the Dodgers are behind eight-three, so I imagine they lost. Johnny Carson takes preference.

      Between the third and seventh innings, we watch a show called All in the Family. Mom insists the star of this show looks like me. He’s called Archie Bunker, a sort of hard-hat, hard-nosed jerk with all the racial, cultural prejudices of the poverty mind. I think he’s supposed to be basically sympathetic.

      Maybe it’s like seeing yourself by accident in a three-way mirror at Sears. You see things you don’t let yourself see usually: the thickness of your neck, the real extent of your pot, the generally crappy posture; but I can’t accept myself that way.

      Sure, we both have blue eyes, OK, but then so did Adolf Hitler. We’re both cursed with turned-up noses; how about Bob Hope? But Bunker has white hair and I don’t. Maybe it would be white if it hadn’t fallen out; who knows? The main thing is, he looks so stupid, tight-together pig eyes. But I might look stupid, too, if my hair hadn’t receded, making me look as if I have a high forehead. I hope my soul isn’t as hidden from me as my physical identity.

      ‘See, doesn’t he look like you, Jacky? Doesn’t he? Even the profile; see that? If only you didn’t have a beard.’

      I triple-resolve to never never shave off my beard. Also, I start on an instant diet. It lasts three days.

      I like to eat; I won’t look in mirrors. What the hell, fifty-two is fifty-two; I have to look like something; I can’t always be a boy.

      It’s amazing how much they squeeze into those situation comedies. Eleven minutes of any half-hour show is reserved for ads and station breaks. So they work it all out in nineteen minutes.

      No wonder everybody’s anxious and feeling there’s no meaning or continuity to things. You watch TV long enough, you get a warped view of the world. Normal-paced living seems slow, boring.

      After Johnny Carson, I put Mom to bed, with Valium beside a glass on the bedside table. I don’t want any more of the drug-addict business. If she can’t sleep she can take them; it’s her life. I’m learning, but slowly.

      Now I can’t sleep. I find myself staring at those ‘by the numbers’ paintings Dad did of The Blessed Mother and The Sacred Heart. For some reason they’re hung the wrong way. Usually they’re hung with The Sacred Heart on the left as you look at them.

      I can’t say I’ve ever consciously noticed a special way to hang these pictures but it must have seeped in during nine years of parochial school.

      I don’t think enough, ideas come out of nowhere. Maybe that’s what thinking is. But right then an idea comes. At my age now, I’d consider Jesus, even at his oldest, thirty-three, as a snot-nosed kid, a hotdogging post-adolescent. I lie there in the semidark. Johnny boy, you’re getting old all right.

      When