Suffer, Suffer Die, No Better For You
From a memoir in progress
© 2002 Dave Archer / All Rights Reserved
A year out of high school, and only months after my wonderful painting teacher, Phil Paradise, advised me to shun the "Beatniks" of San Francisco's North Beach, I sat in the Enigma Cafe in the heart of bohemia sharing a small table with infamous Beat painter, Rick Barton.
It was an enigma.
I'd been hanging around Barton for a couple of weeks. That night I looked across the table at my new Master and brazenly announced, "I've chosen YOU".
From deep in the shadow of his beret, Rick's eyeball rose over the horizon of his cheekbone like the Harvest Moon, then grinning like a Day of the Dead skull Barton said, "I'm cer-ti-fied you know."
Missing my cue to run I said, "Cer-ti-fied?"
"Yes," he answered: "P-Q 109 --- Bellevue."
Taking in a hard pull on the Pall Mall cigarette protruding from an antler holder clinched in his jaw, he leaned over the table and exhaled directly into my face adding, "Paranoid psy-cho-tic ... I have it in writing".
"Oh, that's OK," I said, in my best Snow White voice, "I don't mind".
"Ah ... but you will ...," he chided, "ah, but you will".
And ah ... but I did.
Cheap advice: If you "choose" a lonely paranoid psychotic as a mate, (even after Mephistopheles waves you off at the airport), make sure you're packing at least a stacked Derringer and a couple of pints of cop-quality pepper spray, as long as you keep it hidden. A paranoid psychotic will steal anything: GOLD first, then silver, paper money, and weapons, in that order, and call it "reaportionment" and use a knife to keep you from getting it back.
"My Man" ... was prickly, possessive, brilliant, manipulative, personally sarcastic, survivalist to the core. A taskmaster warrior, queerish at times, a weasely, loving, crazy-violent-man with a flaming trained eye as big as the one Stanley Mouse painted for the Grateful Dead. The man brimmed with knowledge and passion for art. Rick was also deadeye psychic at the level of a Gypsy seer, as well as a black magick dirt magician not to be messed with.
Barton grew up as a "Dead End Kid," on the streets of New York City. And we didn't actually get together for some time after I announced he was "my choice". That came a little later.
His business card might have read:
Which was true.
Which made it worse.
His youth was spent reading classic literature and hanging out all day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When I knew him he lived simply, while simply living for classical spirit and work habits.
He could have held his own with Gertrude Stein, Cocteau, Genet, and Picasso in the same room. He really could have, and they would have loved him and hated him and kicked him out, and then had him back for more. Instead, he settled for us, and if anything, we drove him crazy, which wasn't all that difficult, considering how nuts he was already, which also, was exactly why he "settled" for us.
Barton fairly drilled holes in unguarded psyches at times, exposing weakness, an unnerving experience known to cause rage in the aroused. At times he would turn on me and just bore into my brain like some alien power tool. It was awful because he was so intellectually superior I could almost never fight back, except by leaving. The man simply could not stand to NOT go after me at times. I took it as part of his mental illness. This dreadful exasperating fault that pushed people away, including me.
And when any one went away angry, Rick's considered it a "win" by way of "not competing," over some so-called argument, always while denying he argued. "Ah," he would announce, "I never argue. I hold Socratic discourse!"
People were put OUT of his circle abruptly (and it was HIS circle) if they stole something he loved. For instance, I remember the time a certain tight-jeaned, black-booted, motorcycle-jacketed, white-t-shirted, Fonz-haired young man named, "Ace," stole Rick's classic Zippo lighter. I remember because after he did, Rick complained about it at least a hundred times. "Ace" was no longer welcome. For anyone who would listen Rick would add, "Ace stole a two-headed baby from a sideshow queen once. And guess who helped him out of that fiasco? After he stole that lab-specimen I should never have let him back in".
Two men tried for many years to bring Barton's artwork to a larger public. Henry Evans, the artist's first San Francisco agent and publisher, and Harold La Vigne, his second. There are seven or eight Barton works in the Library of Congress, as well as the Special Collections division of the San Francisco Public Library, (at one time at least) there was a complete collection of Rick's lino-cut work, published by Evans. In the Library of Congress is one work by Rick Barton with myself as David Nelson, "The Penis Is An Angry Face," published by Harold La Vigne, also known as, "Running Elk".
I think it is safe to say that Evans eventually left Rick Barton, because Barton was impossible to work with. And that Harold did not really leave Barton in the same spirit as Evans, but drifted due to time and energy more than anything. For two years Harold had the "Running Elk Gallery" on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, a small place that featured work by Barton, myself, and other's working in lino-block prints mostly. For Harold this endeavor was a pure labor of love. In some ways, he was nothing less than the Alan Lomax of North Beach artists, publishing works and displaying them there, covering the walls with prints. Many, if not all of the people Harold showed had been influenced by Barton.
Most of Barton's painting was accomplished using small Asian brushes. Rick produced thousands of line paintings this way. In the mid and late 50's he was being written up in newspapers as, "The Hokusai Of San Francisco". Still, he never compromised for what he called the "art scene" and it must have hurt like hell.
Joseph Campbell wrote and spoke eloquently on this artistic predicament. The cliché: "great painter in cheap room making important works in obscurity, the suffering for which, spurs ever finer art and madness," all true of course, which is why it is a cliché. Campbell's version: The artist roves the world searching, then eventually shares his work, only to hear, "Oh we've seen all that before ...", thus presenting the painter with two choices: "To hell with them. I know I'm right. They're blind. I'll just go over here and do it for myself," in Campbell's words: "a perfectly valid path".
Or the other choice: compromise ... " ... what do they want? ... psssst ... decor? ... oh horror!"
A game older than time.
Barton never compromised, growing more intransigent, and embittered as the roots of each unrecognized year grew deeper into his psyche.
The trick: NOT becoming embittered either way. (... there are other choices too ... teaching, writing, interviewing, etc. --- Rick's personality type however, definitely precluded them all).
As of this writing, I have no idea where Richard William Barton actually is. I surely hope he is in Tibetan Paradise enjoying every good pleasure for as long as he so desires. In the mid-sixties, during our final trip together in Mexico, filled with anger for him, I packed secretly and left for good.
Always impossible to live with, he'd grown worse. Throwing knives and smashing our possessions was bad enough, now he was psychologically cruel to a degree that was unbearable, seeming to delight in demeaning me in front of our friends. I finally retreated to a penthouse in the back of the place and stayed there high on dexedrine pills legally purchased for pennies at the drugstore. I never went out in the light of day and would not talk to Rick or Bob Copley. At night I would phantom-crawl down the iron grillwork in the front of the house, then slip through the shadows into town for more rum, dexedrine, bread rolls and cheese. I did not sleep for a month. I "buzzed". The Mexican desert was cold at night so I wore all my clothes, three pair of pants, multiple socks, five shirts with a jacket. I remember making a hat from eight or nine pair of underwear. I sat up in bed day and night drawing and writing songs, using the empty rum bottles for peeing, Rick style. When anyone tried creeping up to my room I could hear the smallest glass crunch on the stone stairs, I'd growl like a wounded animal and lob a bottle of pee over the rail. After the first couple of bottles they left me alone I can assure you. I finally realized how sick I was, packed my rucksack and hitchhiked out of Mexico, selling my binoculars and other items along the way.
Later I heard through mutual friends that after I left Rick in Mexico, he went into a drunken rage and ripped the cast iron water box off the wall above the toilet. The box landed on his head, blinding him in one eye.
The last time we met, I had not seen him for five years. The chance encounter was at Polk and Sutter streets in San Francisco. He approached me as I was separating papers from my wallet and tossing the useless bits into a street corner trash barrel. I glanced up to find my old lover, friend, teacher, and ultimate trickster-exasperater, leaning heavily on a cane while staggering straight for me. I was simply stunned at his appearance --- completely bald, quite overweight and wearing oddly shaped orthopedic shoes. Obviously walking in pain, as he approached, Barton removed his dark glasses. One puple was white. Neither of us spoke. He leaned toward me over the trash receptacle, fixing me with that milky malocchio, as if silently cursing, "three times three motherfucker --- three times fuckin' three."
I almost said some California crap like, "Come on Rick, you did that to yourself ... "
Instead, my old Master's dead eyeball screamed for both of us. Barton turned away from me then, and hobbled off like the gold rush ghost of old Tom Moore. I felt unfathomable sadness for the man, for us, for everything, art, lovers, The City.
Rick Barton's days were spent obsessing, mostly in two areas of thought and action. First: uninterrupted painting in ways that almost defied the law of gravity. Second: finding quiet places in which to do just that while further obsessing about making money with true art.
Rick sought refuge.
A monastery cell (" ... there are no women in the order ...") for painting. He spoke not infrequently of monasteries in the Greek islands where even female goats are not allowed. Don't get me wrong. Barton loved women and they loved him. He claimed even to sleep with them. He said male artists were better off with each other though. Hey, my lover was a Queen, I know, and he didn't want any competition. He wanted me to himself. And he knew women wanted me more than him. That's how it was.
Before we moved in together, Barton had a room in the Tenderloin. I ran into him on the street and he invited me up for tea.
The room was a ten by ten magician's lair. Every object perfectly placed. On the tight bed, a board holding a tea pot and cup as well as an ashtray and other items. In a row on the top of the dresser there were paperbacks of art and philosophy along with an ink stone he'd named, "Purple Puddle". Rick explained how the ink stone had been carved from an antique Japanese roof tile.
On a night stand next to the bed were arranged prescription drugs, dexedrine and stelazine. Packages of Pall Mall cigarettes flanked carefully rolled joints and a half pint of brandy. Joss sticks stood in a glass filled with sand. My memory is clear because we ended up living together and Rick's rooms were always like this, and ... they were always "Rick's rooms" even when they were mine too. Which was of course, one of our problems.
Varnish, turpentine, Pall Mall smoke and incense layered his lair. A three legged paint box sat next to the bed, holding carefully arranged bottles of varnishes and mediums from Europe. The paint box was a portable one, like a Julian, although Barton proudly announced its Spanish origin. In years to come he often said, "and that's no French paint box motherfucker, and don't you forget it".
The box was weathered from use and stuffed in every cubby with tubes of colors, pencils, chalks, charcoal, kneaded rubber erasers --- plus a seasoned mall stick with a worn leather ball on one end, a folded rag, and a jar of fine brushes.
Rick Barton lived his life holed up in rooms like this, painting.
In his room also, were stacks of antique paper he claimed were, "end sheets from Bach's manuscripts," collected from an antique paper dealer in Europe. This paper he covered with his signature line paintings. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with crude reverse Xerox's of his line paintings, the lines appearing white on a black background. Intermingled with museum postcards of classical art. Many of his drawings were of male nudes, as honest in form as driftwood, all from life, all men he knew. And not, I would learn, all sex partners. Barton charmed nearly every man he met, gay or straight, into eventually posing in the nude. There was nothing fussy or overworked about his paintings. They were mostly line torsos combining shoulders, neck and chest or back, in strong composition, more than mere drawings, they were art objects. Faces young and old, earnest and ragged, fresh and sad. Fellow artists, poets, piano players, hustlers, denizens, their lips, nostrils and ears often portrayed as erotic medallions of flesh.
Barton was never without classical music from what he called his, "transistor". Even on the street he was never without a tiny radio squeaking music in his ear, like some 1964 boom-box-seed.
He was at times, hard enough to hang out with, let alone live with, a notorious liar, cheat and a thief, amoral, and a sociopath with little discernible conscience. I was too, so that helped some. Still, whenever he stole one of my treasures he would say, "Gypsies always take gold and silver, in that order. AND ... I never steal ... I reapportion, thank you."
Well, he stole, and he gave.
It was from Barton that I was introduced to my first antique yatate, a Japanese paint pot similar in appearance to a smoking pipe, except the bowl was lidded with a hinged cover. An Asian brush nestled inside the "pipe stem" section, and the lidded "bowl" a repository for ink, it made the perfect portable painting tool. To avoid spills the ink was held inside the bowl within a bed of raw silk. Unprocessed silk, direct from the worm, never rots, no matter how long it stays wet, even for decades.
With his black beret in place, Barton referred to himself as, "a Black Hat Bonpo Schismatic Lama". He was a friend of, E. Evans Wentz, diverse scholar of Tibetan culture, as well as author of "The Fairy Folk in Celtic Culture," Barton adopted his title from Tibet's rich tradition.
He was fond of rendering in pencil and working in oils. Mostly however, Barton did what he called, Chinese line painting.
His ink brushes were capable of very fine lines, from single hair to bold, and Rick used them in combination with the ultimate trained eye. All of his line paintings were from life. And on paper at least, almost always from whatever objects and people were in his immediate vicinity. Finished pieces were generally small, about 8 x 10 inches and consisted of webs of line-painted forms.
And in spite of his need of sanctuary studios, Barton also loved working in cafes. His pieces contained gardens of potted plants --- palms and philodendrons abounded --- as well as the tabletop in front of him, including ashtrays crowded with stubbed out cigarettes, with matches of course. He painted hundreds of knives, forks and spoons, as well as glasses, cups, sugar shakers and portraits.
Many of his paintings repeated, again and again, Barton's signature statement: his hand drawing his own hand. He worked toward, "finding the line," as he put it. That is, working the brush and ink for hours as a form of intimately detached meditation, seeking singularity of eye, hand and heart, until his brush moved over the paper like a planchette traversing a Ouija board.
Sometimes, after working for hours in general unease, the Maestro would proclaim, " ... I have the line!" Then beneath his breath grumble something like, "... don't fuck with me now motherfucker ... just light my ciggies and keep the tea coming ...".
Painting like this, the Master could affect an ass heavier than a sunken ship, painting for twenty hour stretches, sipping brandy, popping dexe's, pissing in bottles, puffing Pall Malls and pre-rolled joints, and woe be it unto any mere infidel who disturbed him then. For instance, change the music from Bach to Bartok. Or alter the light. His rage could be volatile when he was happy painting and some infidel screwed it all up. If this interruption came however, after "he found his line" his anger could be atomic.
Whenever he was painting and someone brought him a plate of good food, he would put down his brush, and begrudgingly eat, always saying, "Excuse me for not dining with you ... I eat like medicine ...". And he did. So he could get back to his lines.
The man painted hundreds of thousands of lines.
In fact, I believe it can safely be said of Rick Barton that his actual LIFELINE: his psychic heart monitor if you will, was indeed, whatever line he happened to be painting at any given moment. His work represented in many ways, his larger self, his soul. Like a jazz player uses musical form to both enclose "soul," while simultaneously freeing it, releasing musical birds from cages, then calling them back. If studied, the individual brush strokes in many a Barton painting are quite abstract.
He called himself, "RIKIBUS, The Grand Arachnid," with his finished pages web-like indeed, seemingly made for catching prey --- myself included --- but also I think acting for him, as safety nets, always in place should any mental, emotional, or intellectual high-wire act fail. And he did fail at times, falling into profound depressions over love, money and bad painting. Not often, but when he did, it was awful. Still, paradoxically, it was his art more than anything that was there for him when that happened, and each time he would take on the "daily battle" as he called it, like a prisoner breaking rocks until he had worked ink, brush and psyche back to his living line.
And he did this until he no longer could work, and cheap wine moved in to take the place of painting. I have about thirty letters he sent from San Diego in the late 70's while in this terrible state. Unable to work, fearing what he called the, "coming police state," and living in near complete poverty, near the Mexican border so he could leave the country when things, "got too bad".
Rick's extreme dedication to art influenced many others to take up line painting. At one time there were half a dozen of us or more, in North Beach, all using yatates, painting at cafe tables. We often sat at the same tables working together, Barton of course: holding court. We even published a chapbook together titled, "My Father Is A Whale". Several of us I would say, ranked "most inspired" by Rick Barton's line work: myself included, but especially Harold La Vigne, along with his wife Lani. Over the years the three of us (especially Harold in drawing from life as Rick had done) took Barton's influence the farthest, producing thousands of line drawings.
Rick held court, always insisting each new inductee to the "circle," whether they wanted to or not, join his painting school, "The Academia Vinciana," by ceremoniously marching each of us off to a Japanese antique store on Sutter Street called T. Z. Shiota. There we met Mr. Shiota, a refined gentleman who always enthused respect for Barton's work. Mr. Shiota would slide open the drawer of an antique tansu where he kept the marvelous painting tools, each one different. Sometimes there were many yatates, other times only a few. I picked up mine on lay-a-way, taking Mr. Shiota three or five dollars at a time.
I painted with a yatate for many years, until in the midst what can only be described as this, lurching, loquacious, Lord Buckley binge, in Buena Vista Park, I gave it away, shouting Rick's line, "All beggars and strangers are from Zeus motherfucker!"
The stranger, a man, refused this gift of the mentally ill.
I insisted, "Take it or I'll throw it away!"
He took it.
So I had to go buy another one, which I never liked as much. Still, I always "knew" my yatate would come back someday. I just did.
Twenty eight years later my friend Julia Whitely and I drove to the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco's Japan Center to see, "Shindler's List". We were late. The theater was sold out so we decided to browse the Center. In the first shop we entered, an antique store, there in a glass case, where along with about seven other yatates lay my old friend. With neck hair standing I bought "him" back on the spot for one hundred dollars.
As previously mentioned, Rick also painted in oils. At one time, we lived together for months at the Hotel Cairo, two blocks off the Zocalo in Mexico City. The day after we rented the place, Rick set up his Spanish paint box with all the ritual of a ceremonial magician preparing to summon spirits.
"Oils motherfucker! Oils change everything!," he boomed.
Readying the paint box, assembling it, preparing a fine wood panel to paint on, (never Masonite) ordering the tubes, arranging brushes, turpentine and medium were done with a dutiful solemnity, barely masking the excitement of a brilliant child. When he was ready to paint he produced a postcard of the Virgin of Guadalupe and began carefully, slowly, working first the pencil drawing, then the under painting. The next day, when we returned from a long session of line painting in the streets of Mexico City, the Hotel Cairo maids had brought us a tray of food from the kitchen, covered in cloth to keep flies off. They continued this every day for the whole time we lived there, which was great because we had so little money. Passing in the halls, they always greeted us with, "Ah ... Los jovenes ilustres!".
Thank you Virgin of Guadalupe.
Rick gave them the picture when we left.
Oils aside, Rick Barton's first love was always Chinese line painting. Comparing his passion for Asian scrolls and his horror of Western artists he called: "Schmieranski's!" (German for: "dreadful painters") Barton was fond of saying, "Barbarians always bend the paper".
A thousand times I heard:
"The four treasures of a Chinese scholar: ink stone, ink stick, brush and paper --- and don't you forget it motherfucker".
I sure didn't.
An interesting aside about Barton was: he could bring friends to him by rendering their likeness in pencil from a photograph. I witnessed this many times when we lived together. When he hadn't seen or heard from a particular person in months, and had a photograph of them, he would announce his intention, then begin to render the image in pencil on the best paper he could find. These would be small drawings, no more than a few inches in size. He said the more careful he was the rendering, the quicker it worked. Anyway often before the work was half finished, his friend would knock on the door and Rick would always greet them with, "... what took you so long?"
Visiting with him one night in his Tenderloin studio, Barton asked me to relax while he went down the hall for a shower. When he returned, he dressed himself: from garters to overcoat draped over the shoulders of a nice double breasted. He wore a tie and a black beret with fine leather shoes. Barton then added an entire art studio of supplies into his pockets, and invited me to join him on his new job managing a gay after-hours club for some mob types from North Beach.
The place was at 90 Market, close to San Francisco's waterfront. A marquee sign graced the facade, where lettered in red plastic, the top line read, "90 MARKET --- THE LAST RESORT". The middle line in very large red letters read: "LSD," then below that a smaller line of lettering, "HAVE YOU SEEN RIKIBUS DANCE?"
Over the entrance was a wooden sign about two feet long and six inches high, carefully lettered by hand with the single word, "SANCTUARY".
The place was huge, about seven rooms, each "controlled" by Barton. One had a grand piano and little else. Another was an art gallery with a show of paintings by artist friends. A third was set up as a theater with a small stage and chairs and the main room, the room just inside the entryway had an old liquor bar, tables and chairs, a jukebox with classical selections and more paintings on the walls.
It was in that barroom in fact, that Rick Barton gave line-painting lessons to the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. "See here," he would say, "you enter the DRAPERY through the STILL LIFE! You enter the FIGURE through the DRAPERY!"
I think the reason some Angel neverr stabbed him to death was because they "knew," he was one of them. A sociopath. He was.
Barton pushed people to make art. He never walked up to strangers cold and insisted they take up painting, but anyone who sat near him for any length of time, especially if they engaged him in any way, would be recruited, period.
"The problem with Americans," he preached, "is they have yet to learn to express the COMP-LI-CA-TION ... Gertrude Stein said that!"
He was the ultimate artistic control-freak, a regular Sergeant Bilko bohemian. His question was always, "what is your discipline?". In other words, what artistic work do you do on a daily basis. And when he found some poor slob NOT painting, drawing, dancing, writing or practicing classical scales on some preferably ancient instrument like the lute, or flute, he always demanded to know why.
For new recruits, all first meetings were spiced with grave advice, from nitpicking to outright taunting. And ever after the first encounter, whenever Barton happened upon them, the first words out of his mouth were, "how's the WORK going?"
Then if they were slow, he would look at them and sigh this ridiculous sigh, then singsong, "suffer, suffer die, no better for you ...".
Occasionally he would take control, physically. One such case was Bob Copley, an unassuming fellow, casually interested in writing. Barton began his usual badgering, until one afternoon he announced that he had reached his limit of tolerance. Standing from the cafe table where we all sat, Barton pulled Copley out his chair by the back of his jacket collar, then pushing him forward said, "... out the door and to the right ... the last great library was in Alexandria, but the writing store is three blocks from here."
Then with a look of dogged resignation and puffing his cigarette like, "The Little Engine That Could," ordered: "Forward March! A Chinese general always marches behind his army!"
And off we all went, the amiable Copley leading the way to the stationary store. Up and down the aisles we moved, Barton pointing out this and that.
"There, get that composition book. And pick a pen like your life depends on it motherfucker --- it does ..."
Then everyday after that Barton tormented Copley about writing. He would even yell across busy intersections, hands cupped around his mouth, "How's your WORK Bob?!"
Whenever Copley attempted handing Barton a current notebook, the Master always countered, "... is it published? I only read published work."
After six more months of goading, Barton lost patience, "OK, that's it! Pack your suitcase and get your ass to the Greyhound Bus Depot at 7th and Market, and buy a one way ticket to San Miguel de Allende ... Mexico. When you get there, get some coffee and brandy and dexedrine --- you can buy Dexe's in the drugstore down there, they're legal --- and ten cartons of cigarettes. Then sit down on your ass and write ... period. Write every day for a year, and ...then I will talk to you about writing."
And Copely did. A few days later Bob left on a Greyhound for the expatriate art colony in the Mexican desert, where for the next year he wrote as if his life depended on it, which it did, popping dexedrine pills, drinking rum, and chain smoking Pharos.
In the mid-60's I lived at Hotel Margaret, south of Market Street and just across the intersection from the World Headquarters of the Lost Brotherhood of Doom.
Hotel Margaret epitomized my direction at least.
Free fall.
Lobby, stairs, elevator, hallways: grim gauntlets indeed, striated in epochs of cigar smoke and mildew, Spam and green onions cooked on illegal hot plates, and tuna fish, and boiled eggs, and kim chee, and urine, all layering place in tints of tan. So many thousands of people had walked the hall carpets they were rutted with impacted leathery dirt like a double foot path.
Hotel Margaret was bad.
So bad I must have been ripped to the retinas on inhaler cottons when I actually handed over money for a room. And it didn't take long to discover the Margaret held an even darker odor. Some satanic base line of honest to god filth. Especially in the stenchy breath of the elevator, where some days I considered actually calling the San Francisco coroner to inspect the bottom of the shaft for a corpse.
Two weeks later the source of Calvin Klein 666 was revealed.
I was in the lobby waiting for the elevator. When the car came down, through a small window in the door I could see the dark shape of a passenger. So, as the inner cage door began collapsing, I went ahead and pulled the outer door wide open, and got sucker punched with the reek of high Hades --- WHAM! --- and coming from the single most piteous human being I have ever seen in my entire life --- an actual Dickens character, so ripe my immediate impulse was to gag. Horrendous gin blossoms exploded over this poor devil's face. His massive nose looked like a misshapen scrotum, webbed and distorted in broken veins and black clots, as if some hell spider had welded a perverse egg-sack there. Joseph Merrick was handsome by comparison. For one long second our eyes met in fear and loathing. Suddenly then, his walking corpse lurched past me toward the street.
Bolting the stairs on benzoid-wino springs, I vowed to move as soon as possible. And I never used the elevator again.
Still, my room was safe. The day I'd moved in I bought a gallon of white paint and slopped it over everything except the bed spread, sink and carpet.
As Barton put it later, "ah good ... you painted right over the bobby pins I see ...".
The room carpet was like the hide of a giant squid so I covered it with a ten by ten foot rug purchased at Woolworth's for a few dollars. Those were the days. I also got a one dollar Japanese paper lantern from Cost Plus to cover the bare red light bulb. For the light-cord a leather thong with a weird dried fish on it, purchased at Fisherman's Wharf. A box-fish for fifty cents --- strange thing about two inches long, with spiny horns over its eyes. Then using coat hanger wire for an underworld drill, I twisted a hole through the animal's back and out the stomach, thus creating a mummified "fish bead" to hang on the end of the light-cord pull.
That and a four dollar Madras bedspread and next stop: Architectural Indigestion.
In most, if not all cheap hotel rooms, the door is located in the corner of the room. When I could, I always hung a blanket from ceiling to floor, at an angle, blocking the door from inside the room, making for a small triangular "airlock". Then when the door had to be opened, the blanket helped block any hall odors from entering the room, while simultaneously affording privacy. Historians say America was built on alcohol consumption. Straight spirits. No wimpy beer and wine for our ancestors. Colonists drank bottles a day of the hard stuff. Me too when I could afford it. Incense, pot and tobacco also helped make the Margaret bearable.
The only real problem was getting to and from my room. Holding my breath from the lobby to the forth floor while running upstairs was my drunkard's Dipsea.
My rooms in San Francisco hotels often startled people on their first visit. The Margaret was especially so because it was near a large Catholic church where I found at least ten cases of tall, partially burned votive candles, each with an cross in relief on the glass jar. They were stacked in the alley that ran behind the church waiting for the trash man. It was a lot of work but ten trips later I had them under the bed, and from that day until I moved, there were always candles burning on the dresser, the window ledge and the top of the closet box. For special occasions, as many as thirty at once.
One day at the Margaret, I received a letter from my mother, also Margaret --- um, hum --- which included a photograph. Mom rarely sent pictures of herself because she almost never liked them. I pinned the photo on the wall at the foot of my bed. Later, lying back on the pillows, looking into her face, I became overwhelmed with shame. It was as if my actual mother could see me lying there on that cheap bed. The shame so severe I experienced a series of terrible vertigo like compulsions to dive out the fourth floor window head first.
It was horrible, so I left the building and walked across town to see my old friend Mike Kelly. Mike was great, talking me off the ledge, so to speak. Once again. Thank you Mike. I would not be here writing this today without Kelly.
Later that evening I went to see Rick Barton.
Barton had moved from the Tenderloin to a place about six blocks from Hotel Margaret, at San Francisco's YMCA.
"David! How's the work going? Welcome to the Academia Vinciana! Come in, come in. How's the painting? Sit here, tea ... brandy ... both? You know Harold?"
I exchanged nods with Harold La Vigne, seated on a chair with a drafting board on his lap, working with black ink on white paper --- as I recall, painting a forest dense with trees. Beat painter Harold La Vigne worked in the psych-ward at St. Francis hospital. His brother was Bob La Vigne also a Beat painter. Harold and Bob were colleagues of Kerouac and Ginsberg. At the time Harold was in his first few years of painting, and Rick, his friend and self-appointed teacher.
Rick's new room was the same room later used in the Steve McQueen movie, "Bullitt." The most insane room I've ever been in. The headlights of speeding cars whipped past Rick's window 60 and 70 miles an hour, thirty feet away. It was truly mad.
Woosh ...! Woosh ...! Woosh ...! Woosh ...! Woosh ...!
Looking to the lower deck was to face oncoming traffic. Some drivers glanced up, making "eye-contact" for two seconds. The place was perfect lodging for a werewolf or a vampire. The YMCA rooming house sat next to what in those days was known as the "Skyway," an elevated freeway built along San Francisco's Embarcadero. The entire freeway has since been torn down but in those days, due to impeccable engineering, the building almost touched the freeway, banking the elevated road around one corner of the massive YMCA structure with the grace of an Alexander Calder mobile.
Rick offered me a chair at his work table and poured me a brandy.
Monk fashion, he was wearing a dark green robe. Fifteen years my senior he was trim and handsome, with an animated face. Toasting my arrival with brandy and dramatic ceremony, and holding his brush like a magic wand Barton proclaimed: "Welcome to the Academia Vinciana! There are four rules in the Academia --- one, there are no women in the order --- two, all drawing and painting is from life --- three, all models are either nude or draped, and four --- if you are NOT working, leave the room".
Adding quickly, "are you working or modeling?"
I'd forgotten my sketchbook. The Master made a show of it. "Your work! You forgot your work! Oh my god Harold, he forgot his work, this is serious ..."
Barton walked around behind me and began massaging my shoulders. "My god you're as tight as an old mule's asshole ... relax! God you look terrible, what's going on?"
While he rubbed my shoulders I briefly explained how I was doing, which was not good considering my near swan dive from the fourth story window of the Margaret Hotel, depressed, lonely, confused.
Barton pulled me from the chair saying, "Harold, we have a model!"
Then rummaging in the closet he tossed me a robe similar to the one he was wearing. When I hesitated, he actually began unbuttoning my shirt. Barton had a way of violating personal space that made it seem okay, even though it wasn't. His eccentricities were so audacious I was soon standing naked in the middle of the room, putting on a robe.
"Great cock!," he roared.
The man was outrageous.
"Bach!" Rick shouted toward his tiny radio as he grabbed the brandy and poured me a shot.
"Gypsies always have a drink before they dance!"
Suddenly facing me, holding both of my hands, he entwined our fingers and lifted my arms toward the ceiling.
"Have you seen Rikibus dance? Grape crushing! Dance motherfucker! Dance!"
Dancing terrified me. Except for square dancing, I hadn't danced much in high school, let alone had the slightest idea what this crazy man meant by "grape crushing."
Frozen, yet not exactly resisting, just definitely not "getting it," I stumbled here and there.
"Loosen up! Here, like this ... on the balls of your feet, on the ... ah...! My god Harold ... enough grape crushing," Barton snorted, "... well, on then, to the Three Line Game!"
He led me to his bed, a mattress on the floor covered with a Peruvian blanket.
"Lots of pillows," he said, as if that made it okay.
I glanced at Harold and although he was less than ten feet away, he was so deeply concentrated on his painting he could have been in another room. I actually spoke to Harold about this recently, and he told me that he remembers the night well, but really did block out what was happening at the other end of the room. For one thing, Harold's artistic concentration is supreme when painting. For another he recalls a partial screen. That, and he told me, he considered it none of his business.
Rick leaned over the bed and pushed his cigarette holder into my mouth, complete with a burning Pall Mall.
"Here," he said, "a pretty boy without tobacco isn't worth his SALT".
He moved away then and I could hear him muttering over his table, "and take your ashes with you motherfucker ... take your ashes with you ..."
Soon he was back, with papers, paint pot, and other things, arms loaded with supplies. Brandy, Pall Mall's, ashtray, pre-rolled joints, a lighter, his drawing book, a tube of KY jelly and towel. He tossed the KY and towel to me with a flourish.
"Hold this, we may need it," he chuckled.
Now I was worried. Was this a joke or would this man actually try something in front of Harold? And I was a hustler. Although Barton was handsome, I wasn't attracted to him that much. He wasn't my Beat "type," that's for sure.
What Barton called the, "Three Line Game," he had invented years earlier. After ensconcing himself next to me on the bed, then carefully arranging his things in order he said, "Remember now, the Three Line Game is a Barton!"
Each Three Line Game is played with two pieces of paper the same size. Each artist makes a line, then hands the piece to the other, back and forth, making three alternating lines per sheet. One artist begins, the other artist ends ... perfect circle if you will. A finished game is two completed sheets: side by side. Rick handed me a blank paper and his small Asian brush loaded with ink.
"Your line."
"I can draw anything?"
"Paint ... anything, sure".
I painted a disembodied head (no doubt my state at the moment), then handed the paper and brush back to Rick.
He hummed, then painted a picture of his own hand, holding his brush.
Note: "line" is not necessarily what is actually meant by Rick's nomenclature: "Three Line Game". We line-painting artists all played this game with each other in cafes and bars, but some times we played in each other's studios with other paints and tools as well. We used pencil, ball-point, oils, anything. A game could go on long distance too, through the mail, in any format, etc. Postcards, ART MAIL, letter inserts.
When he finished painting his own hand, Rick handed the piece to me and I painted a butterfly on the tip of the brush. Then he took the other blank sheet of paper and made the first line on it, then I the second, and finally he, the third.
"Game!," Rick called.
Once again: use two sheets of paper equal in size for each game.
On the first sheet: Artist A. marks first --- then artist B. marks --- then artist A. marks last.
On the second sheet: artist B. marks first --- then artist A. marks --- then artist B. marks last.
It's most fun to do a lot of games, say fifty ... or 100 sheets ... putting them aside as you go, not looking back until the end, numbering the back if you wish, (in case they get mixed up later), then when all are complete, lay them all out on a table or the floor, in order of some sort. A square, circle, or row. I like to lay them all out on the floor in a big square, in left to right rows like reading, and sit on a chair and study them, because I like to go over the progression and absorb the "changes" we went through during the painting. There is no winner. The Three Line Game is not a competition although some people play it that way.
Barton said thousands of times, "I don't compete!"
Think of it more as a SUM-THING.
If you can't be happy with no winner you're square. Jazz is not a competition. It's something players are doing together. That's the whole point. The "Three Line Game," is like that.
Anyway, then Barton leaned over and opened my robe saying,, "... models are either nude or draped," then leaned back and began to paint a picture of me. Now, the harder I tried not to get a hardon, of course, the harder it got, not to, well, you know what I mean. My job was sort of being there. Chauncey Gardener ala carte. This was about Barton's audacity really, not about getting off. He didn't care.
Letting his robe fall open to cover us, Barton sat on my groin. I shouldn't have painted that butterfly on the tip of his brush. Well, I did say, "I've chosen you!"
I remember him saying, "I've practiced yoga for twenty five years".
I'll say this, I've had a warm spot for yoga ever since.
With cars flashing past the window I was glad we were on the floor. Classical music, drugs, brandy, hip art. Beat-stripes. No doubt about it. Soon we would be living together.
In spite of his problems, the man could be tender and understanding. I'll say this for him. He was a tall Beat original, stooping for none, not Ginsberg, Corso, Rexroth, Ferlingetti or any other so-called cultural icon. Not a one of them. Rick Barton was a true artist, and an amazingly well educated man for having had no formal education. The pompous were always challenged on any bullshit they pandered, Rick being an instigator of what he called Socratic discourse. "I never argue!," he would declare, then proceed to "argue" someone's psyche into attacks of violent mania by asking simple questions, one after another, until they cracked.
Over the years I knew him Barton often talked of his past as a "Dead End Kid," and sang snippets of the old song, "Down on the East Side at toidy toid and toid, dat's my home sweet home ..." He claimed a lot actually. For one, to have studied art with, Amédée Ozenfant, in New York. His descriptions of Ozenfant's studio, with a nude model always posing in an alcove for his students, and other details, rang true.
For another, to be a bastard, which I surely believed. That his mother, Rosy, had been a hooker who worked the New York docks. He also claimed to never have attended public school. To have taught himself from the classics borrowed from the New York Public Library and absorbed at home while listening to Bach fugues on the radio, beginning with a crystal set. His youthful freedom came from being raised by an aging grandmother perpetually exhausted from working fourteen hours a day in a laundry. She simply could not control him.
Times were more than slim. Rick's grandmother could afford chicken only twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And oh how he waited all year for those two special days. One year, just before the holidays, Barton broke his jaw trying to shoot the neighborhood bully with a homemade blowgun dart. Rick claimed to have researched the formula for the Amazonian poison, curare, and was attempting to lob a poisoned dart into his enemies ass while coasting by on roller skates --- a sort of Gary Larson "early drive-by shooting". So his story went, picking up speed, his skate hit a crack in the sidewalk, causing him to fall forward onto his homemade blowgun, thus breaking his jaw one week before Thanksgiving. With his jaw wired shut, the only way Rick could eat chicken was by poking slivers of meat between his teeth and "chewing" with his tongue.
Barton took "revenge" later by tricking the bully into grabbing away a railroad torpedo and hitting it with a hammer. According to that rough New York story, Rick sat on the sidewalk hitting small chips from the torpedo, popping them off like cap-pistol shots, knowing the bully would be attracted. I know about torpedoes because we used to play with them as kids too. We'd go down the tracks until we found some. A railroad torpedo, about half the size of a package of cigarettes, is actually a lump of considerable explosive. Wired to a railroad track it makes a loud bang when the train wheel hits it, sending a signal to the engineer. Sure enough, Barton's enemy grabbed the torpedo away. Rick yelled, "Don't hit the whole thing at once!," knowing the guy would surely do whatever Rick told him NOT to do. And according to Barton, did! Sadly, blinding himself.
Rick's grandmother was so poor that eggs were also a special treat. When she brought eggs home, once or twice a month, she always hid them. If Barton found the eggs he was so hungry, he would dive under his bed with the carton and suck all twelve as fast as he could, even while she jabbed bruises into him with the handle of her broom.
One story concerned his hitch in the Navy and how, on a voyage that included China, he went AWOL and studied Chinese line painting with a master whose name translated as, "Old Geranium". Who knows? I don't think so. It's just my personal opinion from knowing Barton.
Through Rick I met Grant Daily, a handsome hustler in his early thirties who lived in a Nob Hill apartment, the "kept boy" of a wealthy San Francisco businessman. Rick called Grant, "San Francisco's leading dilettante," underlining Grant's habit of walking away from projects and enthusiasms. We spent quite a lot of time visiting at his place. One day Grant "accidentally" spilled the entire contents of his Manhattan directly onto the drawing I was making. That is, Grant stood over me, where I was working,, seated at his living room table and said, "that's a great drawing David," then somehow managed to drain the entire contents of his drink, including the ice, all over my artwork. Rick lunged for him screaming, "there are no accidents motherfucker!," waving his block cutting knife, swearing like a Circus roustabout. Grant bolted out the front door calling behind him, "... just lock up when you leave".
The gay cruising life was as dangerous then as it can be now. Grant liked cruising for tough boys. I was with him once when he picked up a hoodlum I would never have even glanced at. Back at his apartment he had the fellow undressed in half an hour. A few years later Grant was found dead in the same apartment, hogtied nude and stabbed over a hundred times in non-vital places, a victim of the same serial killer whose crimes were depicted in the Al Pacino movie "Cruising".
Rick Barton introduced me to Nata Piaskoski, the photographer wife of the late painter Martin Baer. Rick had known Baer for years and considered him a great artist. Of course, Baer was a great artist. After his death, Martin Baer was honored in fact, with a major retrospective at the Modern Art Museum in San Francisco. Nata hired me to help her catalog her late husband's considerable legacy of paintings and drawings. We worked for months, going over each one, measuring and identifying everything as to material, era, and subject. I remember wonderful renderings of Krishnamurti from life, among the thousands of other works.
Working with Nata was elucidating to say the least. Like Salvador Dali had in Gala, Martin Baer had a fierce guardian in Nata Piaskoski. Artists often have strong partners backing them up. You find it everywhere in the artworld. Even me. I have a African lion hound.
Barton often talked about how tragic it was that artists produce great bodies of work, only to have it all lost when they die. He put it, "When an artist has no 'Polish Lancer' like Nata, then his relatives descend like Incubus and Succubus and a whole life's work ends up rotting in garages from New York to Seattle. It's a travesty how Americans devalue their artists".
I do not remember the term "relationship" ever being used between Rick Barton and myself, or anyone else I knew in the early sixties. We lived together, slept together and worked together. And one day we boarded a bus together and traveled to see exiled Bob Copley in San Miguel de Allende, where he was holed-up living in a small room. On a shelf near his writing table were least seventy completed notebooks, written on both sides of the page, in cramped left-hand script.
And just few minutes after our arrival Barton was yelling, "... red pen! ... you wrote them all in red fucking pen?"
"... ah ... yes," came Bob's bemused reply.
Rick sighed deeply, then ripped the first page from the first book and stuck it the molding of a window frame, "You my friend, have just done a year's work in disappearing ink. This calls for a drink".
Rick was right. A few hours of direct sunlight on Bob's writing caused it to disappear, gone with only a trace of indented paper. Barton "ordered" Copley to copy all of his notebooks over using black pen and such was his influence over the downtrodden, Bob actually did. Recently Mike Kelly told me that he still has notebooks written in red pen that are just fine after forty years. Mike's opinion is that Barton was tormenting Bob unnecessarily because you're not supposed to leave a notebook laying around open where light can age the ink anyway.
That happened around 1965 or '66. The last time I saw Bob Copely was a chance encounter on Market Street in San Francisco ten years later. Chain smoking Pall Mall's in such a way that one side of his upper lip seemed permanently stained a deep ochre color. Quite theatrical really. As if a makeup artist for the opera had taken a brush and painted the stain there so it could seen from the audience. Ashes fell away or got blown off in the breeze. Copely's face was webbed with lines, originating in the outer corners of his eyes. Lines I wanted to believe came from laughing. And he did laugh a good deal.
Around five foot four, Bob wore an overly large army surplus jacket, tan work pants and worn leather shoes. In his early forties, he seemed smaller than I remembered. I wondered if he was shrinking before his time. His skin was bloodless. The pallor of a night person in sunlight.
He carried a thicknotebook under one arm, and there --- in BLACK pen --- he had carefully rendered a unique plan, a complexity of written notes, illustrated with crude sketches, what is called "outsider" art, really. His sketches mostly illustrated pyramid cities rendered as naively and obsessively as the Watt's Tower or Grandma Prisbey's Bottle Village.
He said he'd been at it for months, planning not only new cities, but a whole new social order and revolutionary political system to go along with it. We talked for an hour or more, standing in that doorway, reminiscing about "Polk Gulch, the artist's area where Copley had first met Rick Barton, at a table in Foster's Cafeteria below the Wently Hotel. The Wently, famous in the 50's for Beat boarders, also boasted what was perhaps San Francisco's most infamous glory hole. For years, management used every material known to western science to block the hole between two toilet stalls, only to find a new hole, always in the same place, usually the next morning. Finally, in one last all out effort, and sparing no expense, management welded a slab of plate steel in place. You guessed it. One week and one cutting torch later it was back, and thus it remained, for years to come, so to speak.
Copley's plans for future cities and society involved the building of giant pyramid structures. And not just any pyramids.
Copley's pyramids would be made of rubber.
"We have the materials and the workforce to change everything to the better, if we really want to David. All we need is the political will of the people. Once we have that we can dismantle all the existing buildings, in every city. We don't need to plunder the earth for construction materials," he said slapping the granite entryway with his hand, "this stone right here is our greatest natural resource. Cities! Buildings! You might not realize this right now, but you and I are, at this moment, standing on a wealth of natural resources and building supplies. We can tear everything down and use the same stuff to rebuild pyramids. Imagine a whole city of pyramids David, how much light there would be for gardening. We could have parks everywhere. Imagine 'Big Sky Country' in San Francisco. And we'll use a lot of rubber. That way earthquakes wouldn't cause damage. You can't knock over a rubber pyramid David, and with rubber, everyone would just bounce around inside!"
I thought, " ... hum, best have rubber furniture too ..."
"Where are you going to get all that rubber?," I asked.
"Used tires! We have enough already ... mountains of it!"
"And the 'political will' of the people?"
"That's where you come in David. I need your support. You see, I'm running for President of the United States in the next election."
See, when he met Rick Barton, Bob Copley seemed ordinary to me, not a bohemian, but more a day worker gone astray. And of course, a lot of Beats were just that. Bob was serious, with a good sense of humor, still, square to some extent. The writing he did in those first notebooks in red ink was unreadable, to me. We were quite friendly though, even if his political rambling could be irritating.
I will say this for him. Bob Copely had the tenacity of a kudzu vine on espresso. I liked his "outsider" art, even if he didn't see it as such. At least writing gave him an absorbing discipline. Something to live for. Bob was "gone" way before he met Barton, that's for sure. We all were. Rick collected "gone" Beats. He called it "pulling our wires," and even boasted of his "web" spinning. In fact, the reason Bob seemed like a "fairly normal guy" at first, was that next to Barton's paranoid psychosis, we all seemed fairly normal. Hey, I hope Bob is doing well tonight, living in the Diamond Penthouse of the tallest rubber pyramid in Las Vegas, Nevada. I really do. And Bob, if you read this e-mail me: dave@davearcher.com.
That Barton was unwilling to compromise for the art market is an understatement. He never reacted well to any offers concerning his work, except offers to buy it outright. I saw him threaten to knife people for even suggesting, in good faith, that he might do something commercial.
One day in Mexico, after we had been living together as lovers for over a year, we were in our studio garden, on a beautiful spring day with birds singing under a blue sky full of white clouds, yet as usual, Barton sat complaining about never having any money. We mainly lived on his SSI checks, occasionally working in nightclubs as swampers. There were no nightclubs in San Miguel de Allende. Only cantinas, and they weren't hiring. I was a spend thrift. That morning, without thinking first, I casually mentioned to the Master that I thought the linocut he was working on at the moment --- a great facade of the Parrochia, the main cathedral in town --- "would make a fine Christmas card ..."
Instantly berserk, Barton grabbed an ashtray full of cigarette butts and smashed it on the tiles at my feet, then reached for his knife. I ran for the street and could hear him smashing things from half a block away. Months later he would still bring up one of the only commercial suggestions I ever made to him, always in his most sardonic tone ... "well ... we could always do Christmas cards ..."
Paradoxically, he spent most of his time talking endlessly about exactly how one might go about making a living in the arts, while avoiding actually doing so. A real trick.
He loved telling the story of the night Henry Evans had a dinner to introduce Rick to a client. The client offered to pay round trip air fare to Oregon, plus all expenses, and one thousand dollars, for Barton to go there and paint an intricate line drawing of the forest for a magazine ad. That's all. And this was the late 50's when one thousand dollars was more like five.
Rick told this story every chance he got.
During the years we were friends I must have heard it forty times. He loved telling how he looked across the table at the guy and said, "no". How Henry Evans almost had a cafe coronary and how Barton had triumphed, once again, over crass commercialism.
"I am not a performing monkey!," he would announce to his artist friends.
Rick could hardly pay the rent and often went without meals or ate at the "monk's kitchen," the free food line at Golden Gate and Jones Streets in the Tenderloin. I had no problem with his saying no, only for hating the world for asking.
Still, Henry Evans had published Rick's work, and with great enthusiasm, true to the spirit, true, on the best paper, and could not have made a cent from all his labor, yet when Evans found an opportunity, if not exactly gloating, Barton declining was downright rude.
Rick's anger at the "injustice" of the art market, "the scene" as he called it, was legendary. He would fly into rages, especially blaming America for, "not recognizing her artists!" His grief drove him to give away his priceless line drawings in saloons to people who could little appreciate his genius. Barton never went anywhere without a notebook of loose leaf fine paper and would sometimes have as many as 150 fantastic paintings with him. Once when people wouldn't take them --- sensing the wrongness of it --- in frustration, he threw the entire lot into the air like a drunken card-toss, blanketing a North Beach bar with two years of work.
I can't help it.
I hope with all my heart that those drawings the Master threw in the air that night in the Coffee Gallery Bar never really fell back onto the floor to be trod under foot, but kept rising higher and higher until they joined Tibetan clouds somewhere, and Sir Richard William Barton is there in silk robes, sitting on the best cloud of them all, surrounded by long-lashed angel's playing Bach fuges on stringed instruments just for him, and drinking the finest brandy, and puffing the best damn muggles around, in the coolest pipe he ever stole from me, and man, that was one great pipe.
I really do.
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