Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 3)

Animator! 

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 3)

Sachi showed me into a small office and gestured vaguely towards the work piled upon an animation desk. 

“Take a look at the scene,” she said. “See if you can figure out what it needs. Nobody’s touched it since the animator left this morning. We’ve got to finish it by 10am tomorrow and get it to camera. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, sitting down at the desk.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Sachi. “Want a coffee?”

“Yes, please.” 

Show business, there really is no business like it. 

That morning I’d been at the right place at the right time and showed up with my demo reel, looking for a job. Now here I sat, at another man’s desk to finish his scene. 

A scene urgently needed in a timely manner.

Aha! It’s always better to be lucky than good! 

I rolled through the scene. It was an action scene of a big, burly guy throwing a body into the trunk of a car. I rolled through it repeatedly, trying to visualize it, get familiar with it, seeking its essence. It was quality work. The drawings were solid… the animation smooth and fluid. 

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a good scene to show what I could do. The animator had used a system I could understand and the drawings were interesting without being too difficult. 

By the time Sachi returned with the coffee I was feeling confident I could finish the scene before the deadline, provided I could work all night.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sachi.

I sipped my coffee. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can handle it. It’s a fun scene, and it’s mostly done. All I have to do is not mess it up.”

“Good,” said Sachi. “Anything you need?”

I mentioned working all night and asked if that would be okay. Sachi nodded, saying, “Sure, a few of us will be.”

“Mind if I use the telephone?” I asked. “I’d like to call my wife and let her know what’s up.”

“Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

Sachi left me to it, and after telephoning I began working on the scene. It was interesting in that the drawings were done straight onto frosted cels with colored pencils. Not graphite on paper, as I was used to. One had to be precise and clean with the drawing, rather than my usual scratch and search technique. I had never seen a frosted cel before and I quickly learned I had to be careful, as any erasing would leave smudges, destroying the drawing and meaning time lost in making another. Also, when handling the cels, soft cotton gloves had to be worn to avoid fingerprints, but I had used gloves before and was used to that.

I got down to work. After a while, I fell into a rhythm and began enjoying myself. I love animating. More than that I love making movies. And if you love doing something, it’s hardly work, is it? When I first started my working life, back at the Ministry of Works in New Zealand, we worked in muddy ditches at the ends of picks and shovels with our muscles and our backs and the sweat of our brows. Physical work! Dangerous and manly, with plenty of cursing! I wondered what the ghosts from my past would think of me now, sitting here in New York drawing little drawings in a Broadway film studio built to resemble a child’s playroom. For sure I knew, wherever they were, my ghostly workmates wouldn’t think that sitting on your ass drawing little pictures with colored pencils was anything remotely like working. 

Rest in peace, brothers. Your work is through.

I stopped for a late lunch, ducking out for a slice of pizza, a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette. The beer was a most appreciated luxury, but I was working now and could afford it. A further luxury was a second cigarette, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, resting my sore leg and watching people go by. 

Funny how much friendlier New Yorkers looked after I’d had a meal, with a full belly and a job to go back to. 

Back at the desk working, I had an idea. The action by the burly guy when preparing to throw the heavy body into the trunk of the car (in animation, this preparing type of action is called anticipation) could be exaggerated more, or ‘pushed’ as we call it, to good effect. The body that was supposed to be heavy would have a much better chance of looking heavy this way, and the viewer would have slightly more time to appreciate what was happening. It would mean making the scene longer to accommodate the extra time that the action would take (a few tenths of a second), something that wasn’t always possible in a tightly edited film, so I would have to check with Sachi about it.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s try it and see what it looks like. But, for now, don’t throw out any drawings and don’t change the original X-sheet. We can shoot it both ways and see which we like best. We’ll change the sheet later if it works out.”

I got down to work again and the hours flew by. I couldn’t see the day ending and the night beginning from the windowless office, but the tempo and noise of the busy studio during the day was gradually replaced by an eerie quiet. 

Around five in the morning, that dreadful hour after working all night when everything is gray and uncertain, including the animator, I struck a drawing I couldn’t get right. It should have been a simple drawing, too, making it all the more frustrating. I tried over and over, wasting cel upon cel, but still it wouldn’t come. I was tired. I decided to take a break. It would do me good to get up and stretch my legs for a bit, to focus my eyes on something further away than the end of my arm, maybe have a cigarette and another cup of ... 

“Coffee! Hey, Rusty, wake up! Fresh coffee.”

I had fallen asleep at the desk. 

“Huh? Who?” I lifted my head from my crossed arms on the desk, blinking in the strong light of the Luxo lamp, which I had neglected to turn off. “I wasn’t asleep,” I lied, and I heard Sachi laugh. My mouth tasted of pencil shavings and pink erasers. The side of my face was hot where it had been exposed to the drawing lamp.

“Coffee?” repeated Sachi.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” I accepted the hot coffee with gratitude. “It’s been a while since I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” I said. “Working, that is.”

Sachi smiled and asked how it was going. She looked fresh and awake.

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Two more hours, no more,” I promised.

“Perfect!” she said. 

To be continued…

Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 2)

Animator!

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 2)

Sachi stopped halfway down the corridor.

“Well,” she said, turning to me. “Today’s your lucky day!”

“Oh yeah?” I answered hopefully. “I like the sound of that!”

I had just been interviewed and had shown my demo reel, hoping to land my first animation gig in New York with the company Sachi worked for, Broadcast Arts.

Now we stood chatting in the corridor.

Sachi said they had a problem, and maybe I could help. Nothing to do with White Cloud bathroom tissue, the job they had called me about which started next month. This was something else, an emergency, but if I did well, then the White Cloud job was as good as mine.

“An audition, eh?” I answered. “Sure, if I can help.” 

What else was I going to say? 

“Call it a chance to prove what you can do,” answered Sachi. She explained that the animator who had been working on the scene, after working more than two days and nights straight, told the boss (Wolf) to shove his deadline, and had gone home to get some sleep.

“I totally sympathize with the guy,” said Sachi. “The hours on this one were murder and getting worse! But, you know art directors, we had to change something at the last minute and now the schedule’s all screwed up! Wolf! He took this job knowing the deadline was crazy. Hope he’s charging them plenty.”

The problem was, said Sachi, they needed the scene now. Right now.

I nodded my head. Sounded like animation in America wasn’t any different from animation in New Zealand… a job fit for lunatics, optimists, geeks and dreamers.

I’ll let you decide which of those I might be.

“I want to ask you something,” I said to Sachi. “I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s job or anything like that. He went home to take a break, right? And here I am, in the right place at the right time. A miracle! You know, like those old movie musicals, where the star twists an ankle and the understudy, in this case me, gets his big chance!” 

“Yeah,” laughed Sachi. “That’s pretty much it.”

My life wasn’t about making movies, I told Sachi, my life was becoming a movie!

“Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy, where we all die in the last act,” said Sachi, and we laughed together.

We had stopped in the middle of the corridor and people streamed past in either direction. The buzzy energy of the studio was very positive, and I felt myself becoming energized too, and swept up by the rightness of the moment.

Now was my chance, I must seize it!  

“Don’t worry about John,” said Sachi. “You’re not taking his job, you’re helping him out.” She looked me straight in the eye for a moment, before adding, “If you can do the work like you say you can.”

“No worries there,” I bragged, trying not to look worried. 

What else was I going to say?

“Hey! Sachi!” Up rushed a young man wearing lab coat and white gloves. He nodded to me before turning to Sachi, saying, “Wolf says where’s the polarizing filters for the big Mitchell? He was sure we had some and I can’t find them anywhere!” 

He didn’t look very well, kind of clammy and quivering. But you see that a lot in the animation business. His gloved hands (he wore soft white gloves for handling cels) were trembling slightly and he had that odd, greenish cast one gets from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He must have been a camera operator, I figured, because he was looking for polarizing filters for a Mitchell, which is a type of animation camera, and he had an X-sheet (exposure sheet, the guide to how a scene will be photographed) on a clipboard under his arm. With a deadline approaching he’d probably been working long hours, too, like everyone else. Maybe longer. Hours of tedium alone in the dark, adjusting the camera incrementally and photographing cel after cel, frame after frame, painstakingly building up a movie one-twenty-fourth-of-a-second at a time.

Camera operator. I’d done that too, when making my own films. You had to be crazy to do it. Crazy, and geeky because it requires an incredible amount of focus and accuracy.

“We need the polarizers for 18B!” he explained excitedly, adding, “It’s the scene with all the elves!” as if that made all the difference.

“Okay,” said Sachi. “Take it easy.”

He appeared to be a geek on the edge of exhaustion, green and trembling. Just wait till the rest of you starts twitching, I thought. Better ease up, brother, or curl up somewhere and get some sleep. 

I recalled how my dad, exhausted after a ridiculous number of hours on the job, would curl up under his Disney animation desk and take himself a well earned snooze. (He had proudly hauled that desk from the Disney studio in Burbank, where he’d spent seven years animating, all the way to New Zealand when we immigrated there in the 1960s. Later, in one of life’s strange twists, at my dying mother’s request I became my father’s apprentice, and learned animation from him.) When, from exhaustion, his eyes could no longer see and his hands could no longer draw, dad would curl up in the spacious footwell of the giant desk, the chair rolled back out of the way, and have a nap.

“Call me at three o’clock, please, son,” he’d say before closing the door to his office. “I’m going to get a little shuteye.” Inside, he would lift the phone off the hook (purely habit, for who was going to call at three A.M.?) switch off the Luxo lamp above his drawing disc and lastly, turn off the music he always had playing as he worked. 

He would pause for a few seconds with his hand at the recording machine, listening with pleasure, before turning the volume down and off with a soft click.

My father loved music. Country and western music, mostly.

You’d think that I, after listening to my father’s music all those years while I learned animation at his side, would love country and western music too, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong.

It was a bittersweet day for me when for the first time I stayed awake and carried on while my father had to succumb to exhaustion and take to his desk for some sleep. Yes, I was proud of myself for having the strength to carry on where I saw my father stumble, but I was also sad because I had crossed an invisible line I knew I could never recross. For the first time in my life, my father seemed smaller than me. 

I hadn’t seen the line or even noticed the crossing of it, but I knew I would never think of my father in the same way again. 

“Okay,” said Sachi to the young cameraman. “Tell Wolf I’ll be right there.” 

He hurried off. Sachi leaned against the wall and breathed a deep sigh. She was tired, too.

“There’s no business like show business,” I said, trying to indicate I understood.

“How would I know?” laughed Sachi. “I used to be a school teacher. Now I work in an insane asylum!”

   To be continued…

Me and Moby Dick (Part 2)

    I hurried down the hall and knocked on the door of 2C.

It smelled of dog poop at this end of the hallway.       

   I knocked again. Mrs Harp emerged, not from the door upon which I knocked, but from the apartment behind me, across the hall, and shrieked; 

   “About time you got here!” 

   I recognized the angry voice I’d heard buzzing over the phone in the boss’s office not five minutes before. It was a very hard, high, irritating sound, especially grating to my foreigner’s ear. 

“Well, whataya going to do about it?” she squealed.

I turned from the door of 2C to greet Mrs Harp. She stood in worn pink nightgown and matching fluffy slippers, her face thickly painted in makeup. In her hand, which more than anything resembled a bloody claw owing to the length and color of her nails, was a half-filled glass which she waved around for emphasis. Behind her stood the neighbor, looking embarrassed and anxious to be rid of Mrs Harp.

“Well!?” she repeated, “Whataya going to do? My little dogs are in there with that fiend!”

The dogs inside apartment 2C, hearing their mistress’ voice, began to bark ferociously. More dogs inside joined the barking, there must have been four or five of them now. 

Changing her tone, Mrs Harp leaned over to say through the door, “My poor, poor darlings. Don’t be frightened. Mommy will be with you soon. The nice man is going to take away the mean, old, bad man.” 

Then, having finished speaking to her darlings, she changed from loving Mommy to angry Munchkin, shrieking at me, “Do something, you idiot!”

I turned from Mrs Harp and knocked again on the door of 2C. Pounded, really, because one couldn’t hear themselves think with all the racket from the howling inside. It sounded as if Beelzebub’s very own hound of hell, three-headed Cerberus, had been shrunk to the size of a Chihuahua and then joined the Lapdogs of the Baskervilles inside, baying for the pure blood of the innocent.

If there be any innocents left. 

I pounded on the door again, trying not to sound like a flabbergasted cop. 

“Javier?!” I called. “It’s me, Flasher! From the office. Open up, will ya? The boss sent me. Hey, Javier!”

“Screw off!” was shouted loudly from behind the door.

“Javier!” I pleaded. “Come on! Open up, mate!”

The door opened a crack and Javier looked out with panic in his eyes. “Tell that loco to get out of here before I come out, man!” he said.

Then, seeing Mrs Harp behind me, he started to shut the door. Thinking fast, I stuck my foot in the doorway just in time to have it nicely slammed.

“OW!” I cried.

I may have been thinking fast, but I wasn’t thinking smart, because seeing the door was impeded for some reason and would not close, Javier pulled it back and slammed it again, harder this time, into my foot.

“OW!” I screamed again. I looked into Javier’s face. He looked crazy.

“She’s crazy!” he screamed.

“Who’s crazy? You mean Mrs Harp?” I couldn’t think for the pain in my foot.

“She tried to seduce me, man! Go on, ask her!”

“I never touched him!” she screeched. “Crybaby!”

“Come out and let’s go!” I pleaded. “There’s a crowd forming.”

“Yeah!” Mrs Harp screeched. “No one’s going to seduce you now, crybaby.” 

The door opened and what seemed like a million little dogs streamed out and began yipping and barking at our feet. Then, timidly, out stepped Javier. He was from South America, Honduras I believe, about forty years old, a small man. He hadn’t been at Empire Messenger Service more than a few days. The dogs at our feet barked insanely. Javier’s frightened eyes stared at Mrs Harp.

“Keep her away!” he ordered. “She’s loco, man!”

“Okay,” I said, “Okay. Nobody’s going to ...” 

Mrs Harp was suddenly upon Javier, strangling him ferociously and kicking at his shins.

“Asshole!” she screamed. “Keep away from my dogs!” 

“Oh! Ow!” gurgled Javier. “I like dogs, lady!”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, attempting to separate them. Meanwhile, Mrs Harp’s dogs had continued to snip and yip at our heels. We were ankle deep in the little critters. 

“Let’s go!” I yelled and with a tug freed Javier from Mrs Harp. Javier and I ran for the elevator, elbowing aside the curious tenants who blocked our way. 

“Where’s your badge?” demanded the crabby one as I brushed past.

Behind us, Mrs Harp unleashed her lapdogs. 

“Sick em, my darlings!” she cackled. 

To be continued…

"Here You Have Time To Think of Your Soul"

“Here You Have Time 

To Think of Your Soul”

NYC. 1987.

Unable to find work as an animator, I was working as a messenger for Empire Messenger Service, in the Fourteenth Street office.

During a spare moment, sitting on the hard bench waiting for my turn to make a delivery, I would read. I was as much an avid reader as ever. More so perhaps, because apart from the many other benefits of reading, books were cheap and plentiful in New York. 

Almost as easy to get as drugs. 

I recall reading some of the great Russian novelists during this time, which, with their impoverished, hungry, or insane characters (sometimes all three at once), closely matched my own situation during this time. 

I know for certain I was reading Solzhenitsyn, because I used to read excerpts from his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich out loud to the other guys waiting around on the hard benches with me. 

It had started as a joke.

“Hey, Flasher! What you reading today, man?”

Did I mention my nickname at the office was Flasher?

I hope so, because I’m sick of explaining it.

“I’m not a flasher,” I’d answer. “I’m a kiwi. From New Zealand, remember? Reading a Russian. It’s about a guy in prison in Siberia.”

“No shit? We seen you reading all the time and wondered what was wrong with you. New Zealand? Where’s that?”

I explained again as best I could. It was down by Australia at the bottom of the world. 

“Oh. Australia, huh? I’ve heard of that.”

“Good book?” asked another.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You really sympathize with the guy. Shukhov’s his name. He’s in prison in Siberia, freezing and starving. 

“Ugh!” I shuddered. “Makes me cold just reading it.” 

I laughed at myself and my vanity. I thought I was cold and hungry, which was true, being a struggling artist at times I was, but Ivan Denisovich was freezing and starving. 

There’s always someone worse off, isn’t there?

“What’s he in prison for?” they asked.

I told them, then I had an inspiration. “Want to hear some?” I said.

No one said no, so I began reading aloud. 

It was the part where Shukhov is waiting to be searched by the guards and is nervous about the piece of blade hidden in his mitten. It was a lucky choice to begin reading there, not just for the perfection of the writing and the tension drawing you in, but it was a good choice because most of my fellow workers had had run-ins with Authority in their lives and could empathize. Possibly they had even been searched themselves by unfriendly cops with big guns and nasty clubs. For a fact some had spent time in the jug, usually for non payment of child support or drug busts. At least, that’s what they confessed to. Certainly, like millions who’ve read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they sympathized with Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

“You should rejoice that you are in prison. 

Here you have time to think of your soul.” 

Ah, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you magnificent bastard!

After that, anytime someone wanted to hear some of it, they would simply ask quietly or come and sit close by expectantly. Then I would begin reading aloud from whatever point in the book I was at. I enjoyed it immensely, the words seemed to come alive when spoken aloud and I could see the story afresh in my mind’s eye. Sometimes my audience numbered eight or ten, sometimes half that, but usually somebody was waiting around and wanted to hear it. I eventually read through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich aloud more than three times during those winter weeks, sitting on the hard benches with my audience of fellow waiting messengers. 

Waiting for a delivery and the chance of a tip. 

Waiting for a call from a film company and the chance of a job.

 Some of my coworkers wondered at the wisdom of all this reading and suggested I join them at their various downtime occupations instead. Occupations that included buying, selling, smoking, shooting or snorting dope, gambling with dice or cards, sleeping it off in the “John” or finally just pitching the whole thing in, taking the day off and heading for a bar or strip joint way uptown. 

I went with them once. I figured I owed it to myself, as an artist, to gather human experience from every strata of the socioeconomic order. An artist must experience life! Besides, I wanted to see the strippers. It was quite a day, what I remember of it, involving about a dozen drunken, drugged up, disgruntled Empire messengers, five overworked strip club bouncers, eight cops in four cop cars, three terrified pre-op transvestite strippers and one worldweary police desk sergeant.

He let us all go after we promised never to return to his precinct.

You should have heard the strippers curse us as we left!   

“C’mon!” said my coworkers at least every other day. “Screw work! We’re off to the strip club again!”

“That’s okay, mates,” I’d reply, remembering the first time and the hateful look in the desk sergeant’s eyes. “Not today, much as I’d like to. I’ve got to work. I need the dough.”

It was a low paying job, why did I take it so seriously, they wondered? After all, the boss could go and take himself a giant flying leap! Life was short! 

“Man, where’d you say you were from? Australia? Well brother, here in New York you got to take it easy. Take it easy or you’ll wear yourself out! Sheee-it! You’ll end up with your freaking ass in a sling!”

“My what in a what?” I asked. I was still having trouble with the American accent from time to time. 

I had no understanding of an ass sling.

“Crazy Limey!” they laughed.

“I’m not a Limey,’” I protested. “I’m a kiwi."

“From New Zealand, remember?” 

Empire Messenger Service

Empire Messenger Service 

NYC. 1987.

My first days working at Empire Messenger Service were spent in the Thirty-fourth Street office, located in the basement of the Empire State Building. My duties were simply the delivery and pickup of packages within the famous building itself, riding the elevators up and down all day, collecting packages from the basement and delivering them to the lofty inhabitants almost a quarter-mile above Fifth Avenue. 

I wasn’t the only messenger, there were dozens of us, scuttling up and down and all over the massive building. 

You think the Empire State Building is big from the outside? You ought to deliver packages in it. 

Within a week, though, I found it mind-numbingly boring.

I mentioned it to the boss.

“All right, Flasher,” he said. He still called me Flasher, refusing to believe I didn’t have a felonious past as a wienie wagger. “You haven’t screwed up yet and I haven’t had any complaints about you. We’ll put you out on the streets. It’s a chance to earn a few more bucks.”

There were Empire Messenger offices up and down Manhattan. I was transferred to the Fourteenth Street Office, close by Union Square. 

The extra bucks came when you had a delivery more than three blocks away east to west, or more than six blocks north to south. In such cases, you were given two subway tokens, covering the journey there and back (good on a bus also), to further speed you along. It was accepted practice for a messenger to augment his income by pocketing these tokens and walking the entire distance. One could sell the tokens later for cash. 

This I began to do.

Within a couple of weeks of implementing this practice, however, my knee started acting up painfully from an old motorcycle injury I’d sustained years before. 

It’s a funny story involving a Suzuki 500cc two-stroke twin, a barbed wire fence lining a lonely curving road at night, and a Jersey cow.

I believe alcohol also played a part.

Too bad we haven’t got the time to go into it now.

It’s probably a better story than this one.

Anyway, I found the walking part of being a messenger the difficult part. After pounding the hard, unyielding pavement of NYC for a few weeks my feet would be aching and my knees exploding after only one delivery a mere block away. With each agonizing step along Fourteenth Street the bones of my legs and feet would pop and crack. 

I could hear this painful leg music even over the sound of automobile traffic and the insane honking that inevitably accompanied it. The fiendish honking of car horns in Manhattan never ceased, day or night, although what good it did anyone remained a mystery to me. 

I hobbled along, my ears ringing, my feet aching and my knees burning, thinking this could never last. 

I recalled my friend Buck from the Ministry of Works. I was sixteen-years-old when I began working in the ditches with the road gangs, and Buck had befriended me and shown me the ropes. He became a kooky, profane uncle to me. He had had a crippling accident years before and couldn’t work with the others, but remained behind at the depot, where he cleaned up and made the tea for our smoko breaks. 

“The tea boy,” he called himself with a bitter laugh.

Now here I was, destroying my body for minimum wage to deliver something to somebody I didn’t even know.

Hmmm, I thought. Buck had hobbled in pain from place to place, too. 

Forget this, I decided, so I started taking the bus or subway in every case. This reduced my income considerably, but saved a great deal of pain and wear on my lower body. 

So my plan to make millions in the personal delivery business by avoiding the use of mass transit and pocketing the proceeds was scrapped. 

It wasn’t all bad fiscal news, however, because sometimes in the messenger business one received a gratuity. A crinkled dollar or a few quarters dropped into your hand. Ha! Ha! The first time someone tried it, I refused. I’d never been offered a tip before and my first reaction was to be slightly insulted. 

No thanks, I said, that’s not the kiwi way.

However, it didn’t take me long to realize the stupidity of that philosophy. I soon learned to stand expectantly after making my delivery, my body language suggesting that a modest gratuity would not go amiss and now was your chance to help an out-of-work animator, down on his luck. Then I’d finish with a big, friendly smile. Thank you, kind sir or madam! 

No, better yet, bless you, kind sir or madam!

Other times, one was met with hostility or fear, or not met at all, just a hand reaching out to grasp the package and the door slammed in your face. 

Bam!  

Usually, one was merely met with indifference. You were simply the invisible messenger boy, a very small part of their day. After observing you through the spy-hole, they would open the door, sign the receipt and take the package from your hands without looking at your face, perhaps offering an anonymous dollar as the door was shutting. 

Thank you. 

Click.

I got along well with the other messengers at Fourteenth Street. 

It was sort of like working for the Ministry of Works again; totally masculine, rough and tumble and lots of cursing. They were mostly good guys who showed me how things worked and welcomed me into their world. 

Perhaps it’s difficult to believe, but America is a strange place when you’re from somewhere else. 

My new workmates found my cursing particularly impressive, although I often had to repeat myself because of my accent, and this helped to break the ice. Particularly after they heard me call the boss a few names, after he’d called me some. (It was hardly a fair contest. A kiwi can out-curse anyone alive and I had an advantage having learned my swearing in the ditches with the work gangs.) It helped too, that I went out back and smoked a little reefer with them now and then. For they were a little suspicious of me in the beginning, me with my “English” accent, my suntan in the middle of winter and also being, except the boss, the only white person working there.

A great many of us were from another country, though. 

Most of us working without proper papers.

“What are you doing here, man?” they asked me. “You said you were an American. You got a social security number, don’t you? Sheee-it!”

What some of them would have given for a Social Security Number!

I told them about my dreams of hitting the big time in America. 

That I was an animation artist trying to crack it in New York. 

Boy, you should have heard them laugh when I said that!

Stubborn Artist

Stubborn Artist 

New York City. Winter, 1987. 

What I’ve come to call, with a laugh at fate, my starving artist period. 

Don’t worry, we weren’t actually starving, just pretty hungry for a few days now and then. We managed to survive on the staples of a New York artist’s diet; pizza, street food, and beer. 

So, with our bellies as full as they were going to get, there was time to pause and consider the finer things in life. Manhattan offered ample opportunities for cost effective options, as it has done for generations of out-of-work artists before and since. Exploring the city was a fun occupation in itself and not everything one does need cost money, especially the museums and parks. 

The parks allowed you the chance to remember what green was and to feel something softer than concrete beneath your feet. If it were the weekend and the weather was fair, the parks had a wonderful atmosphere as people rushed to enjoy themselves before the weather changed. 

Often I would take my sketchbook to the park. I'd draw dogs and children off the leash, both of which are good subjects, perhaps because they act so naturally. I also enjoyed drawing squirrels and chipmunks (critters which do not exist in New Zealand), and birds in trees or scratching for worms in the grass. The mounted police, with their beautiful, shiny horses, also made for the chance of a good drawing.

An artist must keep himself in continual practice. Look for stories and draw those! Observe everything! And remember to draw with love in your heart.

Because if you think it's shit... it is shit.

Anyway. We really were hungry and out of work, but it wasn’t so bad, if you kept the fears at bay. It helped to have a partner like Suzie, who could take it and not complain, sharing the bad times and the good, who even brought some sunshine and gaiety into our uncertain lives. Anything you did with Suzie was fun, for she had a way of laughing at the world that got you laughing, too.

So we kept pretty busy, in spite of our meager resources. 

If the weather permitted we bundled up (if Andrew weren’t going out, I could borrow his overcoat and gloves… Suzie had winter clothes of her own, not taken with the stolen suitcase) and headed out. To save money we’d walk downtown instead of using the subway, then catch the Staten Island Ferry. It was just twenty-five cents for the ferry trip and what a view of the bay, my god how do you describe it it's so breathtaking? The Statue of Liberty looked smaller than I expected she would, standing lonely and proud as dozens of boats circled and pestered her, tourists snapping photographs by the thousands. Being on a boat was like being in the park. It gave one a chance to escape the dark valleys of Manhattan’s skyscrapers for a while and enjoy the sun on your face. 

Some of the best museums and galleries on earth were all within walking distance of the apartment. Sometimes we bought a dime bag from one of the dealers in Washington Square, careful not to inadvertently purchase oregano like we once did, and enjoyed a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing on Fifth Avenue, Suzie would take a last toke and we would run up the wide, imposing steps to the entrance, laughing and breathless. 

Only a small donation was suggested, so we could easily afford it. We ambled along the spacious galleries, stoned, soaking up the cultural artifacts, paintings and masterpieces. I loved the African section with its collection of fetish sculptures and masks. It reminded me of when we’d lived in Africa. Suzie went quiet while we were there, and I figured she was thinking of her family, so far away. The quiet and dignified museum interior was a world away from the city outside, a great escape from the noise and bustle of Manhattan.

There was also the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. We loved it and returned there many times. I used to stand across Fifth Avenue against the wall under the leafless, winter trees that lined the park, stamping my feet to keep warm while Suzie bought a hot dog from the corner vender. 

"Over the top, please!" she'd order in her sing-song voice. 

Meaning with everything, or "All the Way" as New Yorkers called it, and we'd laugh. 

She always got it wrong.

I’d light a Marlborough and look across the street to admire the sweep and simplicity of the graceful Guggenheim building. I thought it extremely beautiful in the silver winter light. I enjoyed the elementary mathematical precision touched with whimsey of the design. Suzie would join me and finish my cigarette while I finished her hot dog and we’d cross the street to see what treasures waited within. 

Then there was the Museum of Modern Art.  

I love modern art. It speaks to me more directly than any of the other visual arts. And now to see them in person! Not just pictures in books. I could stand and admire Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows, and turn to view a sublime Joan Miró Constellation painting without moving from the spot! Dali, Klee, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Matisse and on and on and of course the greatest ever, Picasso. 

I couldn’t stay long in the midst of such greatness, it was overwhelming as a viewer and belittling as an artist.

Why should I even try to be an artist, I thought, when I’d never be as good as they?  

Luckily, I was too stubborn to listen to myself when I talked like that.

What if everybody thought that way? Nothing would be achieved and there would be no cultural progress for our civilization. 

Which is not to say that as an artist I achieved much or advanced civilization even by an inch. 

It is only to say that I can be quite stubborn, sometimes.

ZIP Code 10001 Pt 2

PT 2

“More F-Words!”

I watched the taxi hurtle away down 7th Avenue, happy to have survived my ride in it. While passing a bus on the inside it narrowly missed a young mother pushing a baby stroller crossing at 26th Street. The taxi driver shook his fist at the startled mother and honked insanely. 

Which takes two hands and perhaps explains the slight collision of the taxi with a pretzel cart, scattering dozens of the twisty snacks into the street where they were crushed under the tires of 30,000 roaring, belching, oversized American vehicles within fourteen seconds! 

The pretzel man shook his fist at the taxi and cursed tremendously.

No one paid him the least attention.

Except us.

“Did you see that?” asked Suzie. “Shame.”

If you know a South African then you’ll know that “shame” can mean almost anything. Shame you had a nice holiday, shame your car broke down, shame the puppy is so cute.

“See it?” I answered. “Did you hear it? That pretzel guy could really curse up a storm!”

It seemed to Suzie and I that every one of New York’s seven and a quarter million people (at the time of which I write, 1987) were here at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. 

The noise and bustle were tremendous!

Throngs of people pushed past us, going this way and that. People of every size and shape, speaking languages we’d never heard before and didn’t understand. Including American English. They were dressed differently too. Heavier. Warmer. Darker. 

Many people, to our surprise, were drinking and eating in the street as they hurried along. Food wrappers and paper cups littered the sidewalks. 

Men wheeled racks of clothing and fur coats up Seventh Avenue against the traffic, cursing the cars and buses which narrowly missed them on all sides. 

I stood among the chaos and looked around… it was pandemonium!

“LOOK OUT!” cried Suzie, pulling me back from the curb.

“Yikes!” I yelled as three busses, 28 taxis and eight bicycles almost ran me over.

“I think you got a little too close to the road,” said Suzie.

“Yeah and the blasted traffic is going the wrong direction too!” I laughed. “So I didn’t see ‘em coming!”

“Excuse me, Suzie,” I added, then I turned and shook my fist at the murderous traffic while I cursed up a storm.

No one paid the least attention to me.

“Boy!” I said to Suzie after the cursing, “You have to keep your eyes open around here, don’t you?”

“Just like a New Yorker,” laughed my wife. “Don’t worry, dahling. You’re doing okay. So far.”

“Did you notice no one cared that I was standing in the street shaking my fist and cursing up a storm?”

“Maybe your cursing isn’t up to scratch,” suggested Suzie.

“Never!” I insisted. I was rightfully proud of my cursing, learned at the bottom of a muddy ditch when I worked as a laborer, many years ago. 

Since then I’d stayed in continual practice. 

“It must be my accent,” I explained.

“You’ve got to use the f-word way more,” said Suzie, “to keep up with the locals.”

“Right!” I answered. “More f-words.”

New York! I thought.

What a f*cking town!

   To be continued…