“They’re okay,” I said. “They’re just like big children.”
“They fucking smell,” he said, and then the bell dinged and the doors opened and he walked out.
Crafts for the old people usually meant drawing with crayons, or stringing beads, or making cat’s eyes with yarn. At first I just sat and watched; their weak fingers had difficulty gripping things and some of their wet mouths hung open. On the third week I started drawing them. I had put in a lot of time in drawing classes, especially since the last arrest. In the evenings I didn’t work with the old people, I would go to life drawing and portraiture classes at the Palo Alto Art League. It was just this cool old building that was actually pretty close to the Towers. My teacher, Mr. Wilson, was this wily old guy with a beard like a wizard who wore all denim, every day.
I started bringing my sketchbook and sketching pencils. I usually just drew the old people’s faces. I would draw life in their eyes even though many of their lights had gone out. I would capture their decaying skin with as much realism as possible. Wrinkles within wrinkles, blotches, hair in wisps. And their necks like fowls’: bone protrusion, saggy-soft flesh, goiters. I drew all of the people on my floor many times. The orderlies didn’t care that I hardly helped because they were worse than I was. They were all young, and argued in Spanish and laughed around the orderly station; and the guy orderlies would tease the girl orderlies, and they all would flirt; but when they dealt with the old people they were mean and cold, as if all the old people were animals.
“Those are cool pictures,” Brian said. “They make me think of death.”
“I’m trying to draw them with some dignity. It doesn’t seem like anyone else cares,” I said.
“It’s hard, man. Who wants to care for someone who has lost his mind and motor skills and can’t take a shit without help? That’s why you have all these stupid assholes here, to wipe their asses for them.”
“But the orderlies don’t care about these people.”
“No shit, because they have to wipe their asses and change their bedpans and listen to their insanity every day; we only have to be here twice a week. Imagine if you were here every day.”
“I hope I die before I ever come to a place like this,” I said. Brian said I probably would because I smoked cigarettes.
I drew one woman more than all the others. Her name was Tanya. I liked her because of her smile and her eyes. That was all, she wasn’t any smarter or more coherent than the rest of the old people. She just radiated kindness.
I’d draw her in all different ways. Her face with its cross crinkles, like bunched cloth around her eyes; her mouth: wrinkly soft from so much smiling. I’d draw her full-bodied; grinning in her wheelchair, sitting over the beads that she would thread and drop, which bounced, sharp-sounding, on the floor; or in the TV room, hunched in her sweater: birdlike, brittle, her chair angled slightly away from the television because she wasn’t really watching. And her smile always like a child’s.
One Thursday, during craft time, when they were all coloring with their crayons, I placed two of the drawings I had made of Tanya on the table in front of her. Tanya was working on a red house; the jagged red scribbles shot all over the page and into the blue mountain she had drawn in the background. When I put the pictures down she stopped with the crayon. The color was called “Watermelon.” She looked at my pictures. They were good; one was of her face and caught her warmth, the other was a picture of her in her chair, hunched and staring at nothing. She picked one up and then the other, and then she cooed.
“Ooooh, these are nice, very nice. I don’t play with games, but I like this so much. My daughter come, and she walk good.” Then Tanya put them down and was drawing again. I thought she had already forgotten about me, but as she was going over the jagged marks of the barn with Watermelon, she said, “I’m drawing a barn. The place I grew up in when I was a little girl. My daddy said, when peacetime come to the horses, then we all sleep. Sleep, sleep good, you think?” And then she stopped drawing and looked at me like she wanted an answer.
“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and she smiled and all the warmth I liked came into her face, and then she went back to drawing.
The next day was Friday. In auto class Barry said his parents were leaving for some Mormon thing and he was thinking about a get-together at his house that night, not a party but a group of people to celebrate the full harvest of his plant. I said I would think about it, but I knew it would be him and April all over each other.
After school I went to the Art League like I usually did on my days away from the Towers. I had a class from four to seven and another from seven to ten. It was me and a bunch of older people and one young Asian girl who was pretty good. There was one model per class. In the early class the model was a guy named Ogden who was about fifty-five; his body was muscular but his skin hung a little loose. The teacher, Mr. Wilson, walked around with his gray beard and bald head, and denim shirt tucked into his jeans. He would lean over and give suggestions to people.
I was drawing in a different way than I usually did. Usually I would try to be as exact as possible, like a Renaissance painter, but all that seemed like bullshit suddenly. The drawings of Tanya did something to me. I think I had really captured her, they were my best drawings, but it didn’t mean anything. Everything was changing, things felt different, but I wasn’t sure why. I was drawing Ogden in a much looser way than I usually did. Usually I would just do one drawing per pose, but I was doing five to ten and letting them drop on the floor. Mr. Wilson stood next to me and held his chin in his hand.
“Going fast. Really fast,” he said. I said I was and kept drawing.
“You know, Picasso drew fast,” he said. “He could draw a dove in sixteen seconds, and they’re great, right?”
“The doves? Yes.”
“But that sixteen seconds had six decades of work behind it,” he said, then he dropped his hand from his chin and smiled through his beard. Most of the other students had heard him because he talked pretty loudly, and they all approved of his wise observation, grunting and saying, “Ahhh,” and “Oh, how true, how true it is.” Wilson went on: “Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso. He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn’t enough. Technical skill is never enough. He needed to find his voice. We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it. The technical stuff needs to become second nature.” Everyone agreed with this part too. Wilson said quietly to me, “You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.” I stopped drawing. Wilson went on: “I used to go to art classes with him. He was always trying to break away from classical form.”
One of the ladies spoke up. “Sylvester Stallone, the actor?”
“That’s right. He’s a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.” Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit. Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy. “He did write Rocky, after all.”
During the Stallone discussion, Ogden held his pose. I tried not to listen and draw, but something had gone out of me. I picked up a few of the drawings that had dropped to the floor. They looked like a kid’s drawings, except they were of a naked man.
In the second class we had a woman, Beth. She was about forty and large: her breasts hung heavy and low so that the skin stretched thin at the top of them, and her belly had folds. She was great for drawing, but I wasn’t in the mood. Wilson had killed my motivation for the fast drawings, but I didn’t have the patience to do it the old meticulous way either. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I just drew her belly and shaded it and went over it again and again until it wasn’t any good. I thought about bodies decaying and my own life shriveling.