By Mather Schneider
I had been following Shawn on Facebook for a while when one day he blocked me. If I remember right, it was because I admitted to never having watched the television show “The Wire.” I might have also posted a George Strait video on Shawn’s page, while drunk. And I might have called him a punk-ass punk.
A couple days later he unblocked me and asked me if I would write an introduction to his art book. You see, he often posted his watercolor paintings on Facebook. He walked to St. Pete’s beach and he painted these watercolors. They were childlike. There wasn’t much evidence of skill and his self-portraits looked nothing like him, but I liked them. It seemed strange that he would paint so many self-portraits but that was Shawn for you, that’s artists for you. When he stopped talking about television dramas and conspiracy theories and how the world was out to get him and stopped being a punk-ass punk and just posted a painting, it was like another side of him, a better side. The paintings seemed alive. They probably didn’t look as good in real life as they did on the computer screen and I don’t know if you could call them “art,” but they always brightened my day.
I told him I’d think about it. With this on my mind, I went to work at 4 the next morning, climbed into that stinking taxi cab in the pitch blackness. It was a long day at work, 12 hours, not a monumentally shitty day but an average shitty one. At the end of the day, I still had no idea what to say about art in general or Shawn’s art in particular. After I waited in line to wash my cab, I waited in line so the yard monkey could inspect it to make sure I didn’t damage it. Then I went inside the dingy office to hand in my daily paperwork. It was Friday and there was a crowd in there, maybe 20 cabbies, another line. It was hot and the office was only about 15 feet by 15 feet, the size of a jail cell. The cabbies were lined up at the cashier window where the cashier sat in her cage. The line reached to the wall and then bent and followed the other wall to the corner. I didn’t feel like squeezing in behind that last person, a rare female cabby, so I just leaned against the far counter to wait. All the cabbies were bragging about how much money they made and I knew it was all bullcrap and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I didn’t make much money and I was in a foul mood and maybe that was clear from my body language and the way I didn’t say anything to anybody.
While we were waiting for the cashier to do her interminably slow ritual, another cabby came in the door. The female cabby at the end of line pointed at me and said: “He’s after me.”
The cabby looked at me with a red scowling face and said, “Are you in line?”
“Yes.”
“You just like standing over THERE, or what?”
The biting hatred in his voice startled me, though it shouldn’t have, it’s common enough.
I said, “Yeah, I like it here.”
This was a lame thing to say, not even close to a witty retort but, like I said, I was taken off guard. My mind was elsewhere. My mind was occupied with art and all the insightful things that could be said about it.
He was pissed because I was standing 4 feet from the proper place where I should have been, like some kind of corrections officer. Our society is about rules, and the art world is just as indoctrinated and full of that philosophy as anyplace else. And yet, I often heard artists talking about freedom, as if they were the freest robins in the forest, as if they knew something the rest of us did not. Their art set them free, set their spirits free, they sang that constantly. But most of them didn’t seem very free to me. They certainly seemed untroubled and smug. Is that the same as free? There was nothing free about their university degrees where they learned to talk about their art, to explain to dumb people how great their art was, what was hidden in it and how meaningful and valuable it was. There was nothing free about their horse hair brushes, their canvases and beautiful frames, their “studios,” their “retreats.” Not that they made any money from their art. They didn’t make money, they spent money, and where that money came from was often a mystery. They guarded that secret like a golden chalice. They seemed like a gaggle of egomaniacs in love with the fantasy that they were rebel geniuses. At the same time, they dressed fashionably, thought fashionably, lived fashionably, drove fashionable vehicles. They were as well adjusted as your ordinary hairdresser. Many of them had skill, there was skill galore, no denying that. But there wasn’t much light. Or maybe I was blind to it.
“The line’s HERE, buddy!” the cabby said to me.
Everyone in the room tensed.
“Go ahead of me, then,” I said. “If that will make you happy.”
He didn’t say anything else. The room stayed quiet. The line moved up and I waited, leaning against the counter. When it was finally my turn, I stepped in front of him and did my business with the cashier and got my reward. I bumped his shoulder when I walked past him and waited for the swing of the fist that never came. It was all gross and surreal and it burned in my stomach for the next couple of hours.
Lines, lines, lines. A whole world of assholes standing in lines, even to the point of feeling righteous about it. And then there was Shawn, that motherfucker, he couldn’t even paint within the lines. He couldn’t even draw a palm tree. His chimneys were crooked, his people malformed, his dogs looked like rabbits. I smiled thinking about it and realized once again why I liked Shawn and why I liked his art. He didn’t use the expensive materials. He didn’t get a degree. I don’t think the moron even graduated from high school. He simply walked down to St. Pete’s beach with his Dollar Store watercolors and made these goofy paintings full of innocence and feeling.
When I got home I went on Facebook but there were no new posts from Shawn. No watercolors, no rants, nothing, which was strange because he usually made several posts a day.
For the next few weeks there was more silence on his page. I hate to admit it but I felt an emptiness in my life. That’s how pathetic I was. I still hadn’t written the introduction to his book and I didn’t know how to tell him.
Then one day there was a post from someone else on his page. The post informed us that Shawn had been arrested and found guilty of statutory rape. He had been given a prison sentence of ten years. The person told us Shawn would appreciate any mail correspondence and put the address of the Florida prison, cellblock D-2. I wrote the address down and the next day his entire page was deleted.
I thought about writing him for a long time and then one day I did. It was a short letter, mainly platitudes and weather talk. I didn’t know what to say. In 3 weeks, his response came in the mail with the big red prison stamp on the envelope. He thanked me many times for writing him and told me my letter was the only one he’d received. He told me he was depressed and had lost weight and now looked like those stick figures he drew. He insisted that he was innocent and that he missed the beach and his watercolors and that he was only allowed a pencil and a few pieces of paper. The paper was lined and his handwriting was tiny. He compressed two lines of script between each line on the page. At the end he wrote, “Have you written the introduction to my art book yet?”
I started to write the introduction about a hundred times but never got far and eventually gave up. All I could think about was how transitory everything is, how it all goes away, and the darkness in my soul. Stupid shit like that. I simply could not see the point. I kept driving the cab and paying the bills and fighting the demons. I bought some watercolors and tried my hand at it. He’d inspired me. My paintings were bad and seemed dead on the paper. I thought about sending one to Shawn but I didn’t. The paints dried up and I threw them away. Even though I felt guilty, even though I was guilty, and still am, I never wrote him again.
A few years later I saw a post on Facebook about him. It showed up on my feed like a lizard on the windowsill. The post was a brief statement informing us that Shawn was “deceased.” It gave no details and was posted under an assumed name with zero followers or friends. That’s the way life is. Art struggles against it, maybe. The post got 3 likes and several comments about how he deserved it and good riddance and may he burn in hell and stuff like that. Like these people had been waiting in line for years for this moment. Most of them were artists, free spirits feeding on divine radiance. Hard to feel sorry for a guy who raped a girl, I understand that. But I didn’t know what was true or what was false and doubted any of them knew either. Kind of like nobody really knows what art is or what it’s for. In any case, the post was soon deleted, and I didn’t have to think about it anymore.
END
Mather Schneider’s poetry and prose have been published in many places since 1995. He has several books of poetry, one book of stories and his first novel, The Bacanora Notebooks, was recently released by Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson and works as an exterminator.
The Bacanora Notebooks: Schneider, Mather: 9798858639787: Amazon.com: Books
The Bacanora Notebooks: Schneider, Mather: 9798858639787: Amazon.com: Books