Merry Christmas Trolleycar Joe...

I'm sketching at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in town, where there are lots of windows to let in the good light and keep me away from the smokers outside. Today, it feels like the Christmas season is upon us, with everyone wrapping up and drinking hot chocolate, peppermint flavored coffee and egg-nog lattes. Outside, Trolleycar Joe is getting harassed by the local cops again.

It's a regular occurrence to see Joe's trolleycar bus parked in a side street somewhere in Uptown. You can't miss it; it's conspicuous as hell. The cops come to shake him down...they know he sleeps in there with his young son after they lost their house several years ago. They know, too, that Trolleycar Joe has a lot of seedy friends among the homeless and the young street punks, and that he helps them out whenever he can. I've never seen him turn away someone who is hungry or in need of a dollar. The cops threaten him with a ticket and then leave, knowing that Joe and his friends have their 3 hour parking window timed out to the second.

Today, Joe is getting a haircut with friends. A young couple is outside the trolley, and the young lady is giving him a haircut and a shave. His straw hat rests on his lap as she lathers up his gruff beard. Her partner is also working on another seemingly homeless man on the folding chair next to his. There are three other older men waiting behind them, sitting on the low concrete wall, and they are chatting in the shade of the overhanging trees. People drive by and wave to old Joe and they honk. Some stop their cars and drop off baskets of canned goods...this time of year, they drop off extra blankets because the trolley is drafty and cold in the winter nights.

People are always giving Joe things...maybe it's all the good karma he's built up over the years. A ragged man offers a cup of brewed coffee to Joe, a refill perhaps, and then he walks into the trolley and I don't see him come out for quite some time. Even a couple of hours of unmolested sleep is a needed respite to someone sleeping on the cold streets. The woman finishes the shave, and gives a dab of hair oil to Joe's freshly clipped hair...he is still a handsome old man and you can see that he likes the attention and that he enjoys looking his dapper best.

Just before the hair cutters arrived, I pulled my car into my spot at the coffee house and took out a plate of Italian cookies my Italian mother baked that week. There were a variety of biscottis and traditional Christmas cookies that I knew Joe would appreciate because his parents were Italian immigrants as well. Every year I do this, and every year Joe gets teary-eyed and thanks me with a smile. But as soon as I give him the basket and he gives he a gentle warm thank-you, he immediately takes off the plastic wrap and offers the cookies to his son, his son's friends, and all the homeless that have gathered around. He samples just one of each and lets everyone else enjoy the bounty. I don't know whether to get angry or to laugh. "It's just Joe being Joe," I think to myself . Maybe that's his secret to his karmic good will, to give everything away and it returns back tenfold in friendships and in good deeds.

I'm sketching as the last of the old men are trimmed. The young lady and man take their portable plastic basins, dump the lathery water into the sewers, pack up their scissors and their folding chairs and cram them into their little hatchback. No money exchanges hands, only hugs and thank-yous are expressed and hats are tipped in appreciation. That's the magic of Joe. His son speeds toward the men and he jumps off his bike in a hurry and the men store the bike on a rack at the front of the trolley, locking it down in seconds as if this move has been practiced many times before. His son jumps into the driver's seat and beckons his father inside. Ever the showman, Joe takes off his hat as he waves from the double swinging passenger side door just before the cop cruisers slowly patrol the street.

Joe moves on to find a safer side street for another couple of hours. He'll be back, though.

It's Christmas time and the homeless guys emerge at the table near the window to where I'm sketching and they show off their new slick cuts to each other. One breaks out a cigarette and another emerges with a fresh, hot refill of drip coffee and shares them by pouring them into tiny taster cups that are free at the counter.

Life is good when Joe is around and the karma is flowing. I even get quite a bit of sketching done today and the hot chocolate hits the spot.

Isolation and the Lonely Life of Henry Darger...

I admit that I was curious about the film, "In the Realms of the Unreal," through the papers that praised Henry Darger as an outsider artist and troubled recluse. But I felt uneasy about going to the theatre and watching a limited release film that featured a grown man obsessed with drawing and painting pictures of little girls with tiny penises. It just seemed odd and perverse.

But catching the film on YouTube, I became fascinated by the lonely life of this sad, little man and how his obsession with his illustrated novel became the focal point of his entire life.

It really hit home when I began arranging my sketchbook pages into Mylar sheets and I started ordering and numbering the pages to scan into my website...I had a lot of pages. There were many that were too primitive and badly drawn that I scrapped, and there were the full page ones, the spot illustration pages, the inked pages...things that had characters I would pull out for future reference. There was a lot my brain was tinkering with. I began to feel that I have led an isolated, solitary life and that these pages were the legacy of that isolation.

I began thinking of poor Henry Darger, alone and abandoned at an early age, returning to his shabby little apartment after a day of scrubbing floors at his job as a janitor, returning to his one solace: writing and illustrating a book where he was leader of the Gemini Squadron, protector of the innocence of children, enslaved by evil forces in an unjust, un-Christian realm. He spent his entire lifetime writing over 15,000 pages of this novel, complete with hundreds of full color and black-and white illustrations done with a self-taught, naive hand.

That is a body of work. It is painful to watch the film and listen to narrator read the words that are gibberish and overwrought with the emotion of a novice writer. It is painful, too, to look at the pages and pages of missteps it took to achieve his finished art pieces. All those years, alone and searching to perfect his vision of his perfect and divine fantasy world, where all children were free and allowed full expression in a corrupt, deceitful adult world.

I think, somehow, that this is the steady decline towards a sweeping madness. This type of obsession starts little by little, becoming a daily preoccupation, and then a necessity, and then it merges into compulsion. This seems the way that the cat fancier slowly drifts into multiple cats and then finally to "crazy cat lady"...loneliness and compulsive need take over. This is probably the digression into most pack-rat behavior.

But, still, I can't help but feel that when Henry Darger died and his landlords finally entered his apartment and found thousands upon thousands of pictures, most beautiful, some disturbing, that they were like the first archaeologists unearthing King Tut's tomb. Such a visual treasure of papers and art and books and art supplies scattered in his tiny studio space. Here was a man who spent his entire life obsessively writing and drawing the visions in his head and no one saw his work or heard him speak of it at all, like the proverbial fallen tree in the woods. And now his apartment is a shrine to this lonely venture, his art depicted in books of outsider art and visionary thinkers.

I look at my collection of hundreds and hundreds of pages under Mylar protectors, and there are still more to shake loose from my brain, and I wonder if the isolation and the seclusion is really worth it all.

Here's the link to the first installment on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMBVxJnoPw