Around the time that somebody walked off with all my Eric Dolphy albums I heard McDoone on my answering machine. Should I pick up? His power to disconcert was enormous, and I usually dodged his calls. He called often, resuming conversations discontinued six or seven years ago when we were still in high school, or, more often, conversations we’d never had in the first place. As the mood grabbed him, he would spout anecdotes, advice, reminiscences, philosophical musings, though rarely did I grasp what he was talking about. Bobby McDoone was somebody I’d always known, and like most old buddies he was part ally, part rival – but with a difference.
Sometimes when you hear your name hollered in the street, you turn and toward you pokes some cordial but completely unfamiliar nose, the advance guard of a mug eager to recall old times you can’t remember. But McDoone was nothing like that. The thing about McDoone was, first, that we really were good friends, there was mutual respect, and second, that he remembered things that didn’t happen but might have or even should have happened.
Well, I decided to pick up.
He said, ‘I’m out again. On the lam. Am I a public enemy, do you think? Or is the public my enemy, my enemy number one?’ He told me he was back in town, back from a three-week intensive course that some small rural college had dragooned him into teaching.
I knew this was going to take a while and I went over to the rear window and leaned against the sill. That dusty window looked out on an alley cluttered with trash cans and half-dead ailanthus trees; the brick wall opposite was patched with ivy which rambled around in a labyrinthine pattern that seemed to mirror McDoone’s speech.
He was going on about a sculpture he was making that he wanted me to see. He said he wanted it to look right from all angles. Many sculptures had fronts and backs, he said, they had to be placed near a wall to stop people from sneaking behind them. ‘The back,’ he proclaimed, ‘implies doubt. It implies guilt.’
McDoone had a riddling way of talking.
‘So what about your own work?’ I said, a stab at sociability. ‘Like, does it have a back that looks less good, or maybe less confident – something you don’t want people to see?’
‘Ohhhh no!’ he said, with a wary, wised-up laugh. ‘Oh no! I see where you’re heading with that one!’
‘Heading? Where am I heading, McDoone?’ It irked me, his conversational manner, his intimation that he’d intercepted my innermost thoughts, decoded unfriendly or malicious signals. So often his mental antenna picked up streams of emotion – subtexts, reservations, ulterior motives – none of which I actually recognized. In any case, we were off on another tangent.
We talked about fronts and backs, about backstabbers, about the backstabbers we knew. After a while he said, ‘There’s something that’s been bothering me. That time you wouldn’t come along with us to the funfair, it was because you were seeing Neve again behind my back, right? You were on a date with her, right?’
‘McDoone,’ I said, ‘let’s get this straight. I don’t know about any funfair. So I could hardly have said I wouldn’t come.’
‘No? Really?’
‘No. And I wasn’t seeing Neve again, behind your back or in full sight for that matter, because I never dated Neve at any point. I never asked her out, even once.’
Talk about total recall – because he was certainly referring to real people and real circumstances. But the details were all balled up, snagged and knotted in a troubling way. Here’s what I resented, though – and admired, too. Neve was a girl in our neighborhood, a Corpus Christi girl with caramel-colored hair flying around her freckled face, who we used to chat with, flirt with really, leaning up against parked cars, dragging on cigarettes. And McDoone, somewhere in that brilliant, troubled noggin of his, had intuited what I’d never admitted to anyone, even to myself: my wish to ask Neve out on a date and, moreover, the likelihood that if we’d got together I would have kept it secret.
Our neighborhood was made for loitering. It always had a lot of candy wrappers and cigarette butts lying around in the streets. The main drag was fronted by a drugstore with a sticky counter, a tin heap of a laundromat, a Korean fruit stand, a barbershop, a sandwich shop, a tiny toyshop that also sold cheap baseball gear. A soot-gray church stood some distance back from the street, with a flight of stone steps angling up to its portal, and sometimes you could also see the preacher aloft there in his collar, talking with a lady in a veil; bumps like chickpeas studded his face. Across a vacant lot from the church, a wall bore the legend ye generation of vipers in huge black Gothic letters. A little way down on one of the corners of the main drag, past our favorite candy store, an old man with an American flag would mount a folding chair at midday and harangue passers-by about communism. Once he accused Neve of being a space alien. Ours was a rundown college district whose streets tailed away into slums with slanting telephone poles and eviscerated easy-chairs littering the sidewalks, yet at the same time it was the most middle of middle-class places, full of opticians and second-story dentists and profs toting laundry-bags with a penguin-like gait.
McDoone had been a sort of star, a kid we regarded as a prodigy. In high school he was a science whiz, a real-life amateur inventor, anointed in his senior year with a prestigious scholarship to MIT. We cheered him on – we sensed his fragility, his need for sympathy. And indeed he lasted only a year in Cambridge, returning with a mysteriously changed personality. Soon after that I ran into his mother outside the drugstore and she explained the change, told me that her brilliant son had discovered, of all things, art – the warmth of it, the freedom, the sensuous excitement. No more science for McDoone! He was an art zealot now, multi-talented, unquestionably terrific at whatever he put his mind to.
His new vocation, it turned out, was sculpture. Suddenly he talked a blue streak about it, almost unintelligible but very smart-sounding, and often I looked in on him. Having a free hour or two in the early evening, before I had to put on my white gloves and cap, I’d reach his building just as the two glass globes on either side of the stoop would be starting to glow against the gathering dusk. McDoone or his mother would buzz me into a dark lobby floored in mosaic tilework, now chipped and discolored, and I’d take the spiral staircase two steps at a time to the fourth floor, turning briefly to watch a gobbet of my spit plummet through the stairwell to the ground – I’d done this in every stair I climbed since childhood. Their door would squeak open without my knocking, and against a haze of bleak light from within his mother would form a tallish, lumpy silhouette. A heavyset woman with a pale face and lank dark hair, she always wore long woolen dresses and work shoes and, in the cool months, out-at-elbow sweaters and lisle stockings, like a cleaning lady in a movie. She never began by saying hello, but would murmur something guarded like, ‘Do come in but tread softly – he’s modeling in wax.’ Or: ‘Don’t touch those things on the kitchen stove, they’re wet clay pieces, unfinished.’ If I asked her whether he was available, she might say, ‘No, sorry dear, he’s terribly busy, but I’m sure he’d be happy to see you.’ And if I asked whether he was getting a lot done she would answer, ‘No, he feels he isn’t,’ to my bafflement, ‘but he’s very prolific right now.’ Apparently her maternal veneration permitted, even prompted, mutual contradictions.
Sanctioned by his mother, McDoone had transformed their fourth-floor apartment. Their narrow quarters, essentially an old tenement flat, did not naturally answer to the purposes of an art studio, but its shadowy rooms were densely crowded with half-finished, protectively-shrouded sculptures in plaster, wood, and marble, with wood chips and stone fragments covering the floors, even the mosaic floor of the bathroom. Drawings and studies rustled near your feet. In the alcove of the bay window stood a tall plaster statue of a young girl of the traditional nymph type, a remnant of McDoone’s first sculpture studies, outmoded in style but remarkably skillful all the same. Here and there, stepping cautiously about, I might detect an earlier geological epoch beneath the array of materials, as when I made out the cadaver of a Victorian sofa under a row of gunk-filled pails. Over this jungle Mrs McDoone presided, half nursemaid, half mastiff; while of the whereabouts of a Mr McDoone I never heard one single thing.
McDoone himself was intense, gangly, hollow-cheeked, always swimming in oversized drab work clothes. And his way of holding forth had remained the same since high school. His speech was disjointed, pitched somewhere between the jocose, the poetic, and the simply unfathomable.
‘Did you know,’ he informed me once, ‘that I took sculpture with Mariani awhile back?’
I did not know that. Mariani, who taught somewhere downtown, was an artist making waves at that moment.
‘So how was it?’ I asked.
‘Well, he taught us a lot about Mariani, I’ll say that. Once in class I made a small wire sculpture that was kind of too sharp, and he cut his hand on it slightly, trying to show me something. He was furious.’
‘So he took it personally?’
‘Did he! He held his hands out toward me, shouting, “See these hands? These hands are my bread and butter!” Think of that, eating your own hands.’
Of course I took this as a joke, and tagging along I said, ‘Well, it certainly cuts down on food bills.’
But really . . . was it a joke? And if so what kind of joke?
Another time, he said, ‘Do you know that I spent last June, when you weren’t around, as a tree in the park?’
‘A tree –’
‘I don’t want to repeat that experience, it was pretty passive, but it’s better than being a refrigerator. Don’t you think?’
His words threw me, I had none of my own to reply with, but I tried to fall in with his train of thought. It was tricky, because I admired him. Deep down I sometimes thought I wanted to be more like him.
Since McDoone was a longtime pal, though one whom I often avoided, I would always go to see him alone. Our memories, real or imagined, could not be shared with outsiders. But always, at the door, his mother’s pallid gaze would confront me. Her watchdog face was wholly expressionless, intransigently blank, despite the intensity of her opinions. For her talk had the rigidity of the household ideologue, the fixed indignant tone of the outraged newspaper-reader, though none of it had anything to do with politics – it all centered, rather, on the arts. It was a kind of refrain championing artistic innovation, the experimental, the postmodern, the ‘transgressive’, whatever that meant. Why couldn’t these ‘stupid jerks’, she would intone, maintaining her opaque, impassive look, why couldn’t they ‘get behind’ conceptual art or site-specific sculpture or the new earth-art? Her eyes were brownish-gold in color, appearing really gold in that washed-out face, and as her invective mounted they would gleam more and more brilliantly, like orbs of precious metal. This disconnect was so unnerving that after a few sentences she would lose me completely, but soon I grasped the gist of her argument – it was a surreptitious glorification of her child, a train of fierce emotions presented as a high-minded critical stance. And after McDoone’s conversion to art she enrolled in two sculpture courses at a nearby adult-education center herself. I gathered they were advancing together, side by side.
The latest of McDoone’s phone calls had come at summer’s end. At this period, during the first mild days of Indian summer, I was finishing up my gig as a limo driver and wondering what to do with my life. I roomed with a good friend called Dimi, who was four years older than me and well along in his studies in graduate school. Dimi was a Greek American – son of an Orthodox priest – who liked to refer to himself sardonically as a P.K., a preacher’s kid. And the least one could say is that he was not exactly washed in the blood of the lamb, for religion had boggled his brain, his irreverence growing so total that it encompassed virtually everything around him. He would train his waggish levity on every sacred cow in our vicinity, and also on himself, and on me. His tall stature, dark eyes, and sybaritic plumpness appealed to the feminine element in our set, as did his ripe smile – Neve told me once that his lips reminded her of ‘busted grapes’.
Dimi loved to tease people and to trade insults with them, the insults being a perverse token of acceptance, so that an atmosphere of affectionate raillery pervaded our kitchen, where, on my nights off, we would sit up late with the windows open. The warm breeze would bear ghosts of rock music and a din of crashing crockery as we chatted and laughed and drank wine with whoever dropped by. And late that September, one of those who happened to drop by – to venture casually into this haven of slaphappy chatter – was Bobby McDoone.
Dimi immediately cottoned to him, both to his unique mental outlook and his evident susceptibility to leg-pulling. Physically McDoone had never been more arresting than he was just then: spikey-haired, so skinny as to seem fashioned of rope, untrusting yet exalted, he would abruptly yank off his steel-rimmed glasses or make boxy shapes in the air with his hands to illustrate this or that artistic conceit. It never occurred to him to sit down, much less take a sip from his wineglass. One could see why McDoone amused Dimi, what with the bizarre pronouncements and the wound-up self-regard, and it might have seemed at first as though he and McDoone shared a lively fondness for conundrums and absurdities; but I began after a few of these visits to sense a strange discordancy, a bungled rhythm or going-out-of-key. Once, McDoone got onto the subject of artists who had died young – he mentioned Raphael – and Dimi, with his tongue literally in his cheek, asked him whether he, McDoone, was not already too old to die. ‘I know I am,’ Dimi said. ‘I’m in my third or fourth youth. My death would have no éclat whatever.’
‘Okay, but what really gets me,’ said McDoone, passing this right by, ‘is all the fuss made over Jesus’ death. Okay, he was still pretty young, but what joy did he give to the world compared to Raphael, or, say, Giorgione? Mozart! Really, why is Jesus more revered than Mozart?’
‘Ah, my friend, but you’re being unfair,’ Dimi said. ‘Remember, there’s a lot we don’t know. I mean, you don’t know, Jesus may well have played an instrument.’
At this McDoone screwed up his face. Not only did Dimi’s delight in sheer silliness elicit no smile from him, but he seemed to grow more and more diffident, more distressed by Dimi and maybe by me too, given my unthinking complicity with my flatmate.
As that Indian summer rolled toward a final dervish whirl of windswept leaves, McDoone cut an odder and odder figure in our kitchen. Our windows were closed now against the evening chill, and the snatches of rock music and the rattle of crockery sounded muffled in cotton wool. Intoxicated by the stillness, McDoone would talk and talk, describing perhaps a new piece in metal, or a group of sculptures of locks that he was designing, or a project to create a series of site-specific pieces for state prisons. And as for Dimi, well, Dimi could not resist tormenting him.
Then came a moment when everything changed. On the surface it would have been hard to say what made McDoone so anxious, so wary, that final evening. Was it Dimi’s jovial teasing, to which he had never gracefully responded, or our failure to indulge his magniloquent self-involvement, or maybe some pressure inside him, some welling-up of dread, that had finally reached the boiling point? Whatever the case, he suddenly ceased his speechifying and drew himself up to his full height, his silhouette standing out against the kitchen’s white walls, and hovered there staring bug-eyed at a small clock sitting by itself on a shelf – our sorry version of a proper kitchen clock. He turned his glare on me.
‘You’re using that machine to – to steal my energy!’ he exclaimed. ‘I see what you’re doing – it’s an energy thief!’
Taken aback, I believe that I glimpsed, for one moment, something essential about McDoone’s strange notions and what I made of them. To downplay the horror that flooded over me, I chose to do what I had always done, to jolly him along, to join in with the charade he was staging. I took hold of the little clock; I raised it to his eye-level; I said, in a goofy tone, ‘Look at it, McDoone. It’s giving me every ounce of your energy.’
But this was not a charade, and he did not laugh. With a nameless animal sound he flung himself through the front door and down the stairs and out into the street. Dimi and I followed him, chanting over and over ‘Hey there, we’re only joking!’ but for him the phrase must have had a mocking, sinister ring the more we repeated it.
Outside, he was standing in the middle of the dark street, peering at us. We tried to wave him back indoors. And then he was stooping, and picking up something – I believe a piece of metal.
There came a loud crash from a car window beside us.
For several months I refrained from going to see McDoone. Nor did I encounter him anywhere – he seemed to have vanished. But on one of the first evenings of early spring, I trudged over to his building. I was buzzed in, and climbed to his door, where his mother stood sentry in her usual manner. He wasn’t there, she said, he had gone away.
‘He was getting very overwrought,’ she said. ‘As you may have noticed. He’s very nervous, it’s part of his intelligence really. He’ll be staying with some people who can take care of him. Qualified people. Just for a while. I hope they realize what they’ve got on their hands. His special gifts, you know.’
I went back downstairs and sat on their stoop. I had nowhere to go, having given up that driving gig. The orb-shaped lamps on either side of the entryway were just beginning to glow against the thickening dark, and all the shops but the laundromat had closed. Passing cars were honking brutishly. I thought about McDoone’s riddling way of talking, about his anecdotes, his metaphors, if that’s what they were – so many missed clues. Then I decided to head over to the park where he had dwelt awhile as a tree, and to try to imagine what he meant by that. I turned left and, still meditating, passed under the generation-of-vipers sign. The traffic noise was getting to me, I wanted to escape it.
Image © Gavin Bannerman