On move-in day Commonwealth was clogged with station wagons and U-Hauls, the sidewalks impassable, and bodies in the B Line trolleys were crammed against the windows. It was a bit harder to see myself as very rare after that, but a kid can do much to restore his illusions if he sets himself to the task. The city was like a contest to see who could make it and who couldn’t, and my major in art was a constant competition, one in which I acquitted myself well.
For graduate school I moved to Chinatown. Professor Wei’s family had just moved an aunt out of a tiny studio, and they were renting it for five hundred. A twin bed wouldn’t fit, so I made use of the cot the professor’s aunt had left. That October, in an attempt to fool myself that the cramped space could be made homey, I carved a pumpkin like we’d always done in my home growing up. As an art student now, though, I thought I’d better do something more than a squiggly smile and two round eyes, so I set out to see if I could make a pumpkin look like the Mona Lisa. I threw out the first two drafts, though the second was passable. On the third I found I was able to carve a pumpkin that didn’t just look like Mona Lisa but projected the same feeling as the painting, the haunting smile and the wandering gaze. It went up in my window, the only jack-o’-lantern in Chinatown.
A few days later, a man in a neatly tailored suit knocked at my door. I thought I was in trouble for something. He introduced himself as Juan Pacheco, a venture capitalist who happened to like the pho joint downstairs from my apartment and had seen my handiwork. When he asked how much I’d charge to do a pumpkin of Bob Marley, I told him I was too busy with a class project to take on anything else. He leaned in to take a quick survey of the size and condition of my apartment.
“Look,” he said, “what’s a month’s rent for you?”
That was two days before last year’s Halloween. I didn’t pick up any more clients then. Really, I didn’t think of Pacheco as a client but rather as an eccentric windfall. But the following October I started getting calls not just from Pacheco but from his friends and from other acquaintances who’d been to his Halloween party last year. “Can you do Charlie Chaplin?” they asked. I did Picasso’s Guernica and a Dali clock. I did the Yosemite Valley for a homesick Californian.
A kid carving a pumpkin sees two media: the pumpkin and the empty spaces. As I settled in I learned how many more there were: the orange of the outer shell; the creamy yellow of the rind, which on its own could be carved into intricate designs; the empty spaces; the shadows created by carefully placed recesses; areas of the inner cavity lit by the candle flame; areas through which the flame could be seen directly; effects that could be created by the placement of multiple candles. By the end I could create warmth or silence, movement or stillness, and I could make the eyes of a portrait twinkle. Most pumpkins I could finish in a half a day. The Laocoön took two.
I had three days to carve Deckinger’s ten-gourd skyline, two of which I was scheduled to work at the art supply store. My manager was furious that I called in sick for two shifts directly preceding a holiday, but as my pumpkin income meant I no longer had to steal my painting supplies from the store, I felt karmically balanced about it. I’d had thirty-three sales that October. To manage all those jobs, I’d been carving three or more pumpkins a day for the last ten days. I’d developed a preservation regimen as well. With a bleach bath, a coat of petroleum jelly, and a sprinkling of silica beads, I could get a carved pumpkin to last two weeks. That work had netted me seventeen thousand dollars, which was almost as much as I made per year at the shop. The Deckinger commission would put me up to twenty-two.
I walked down Newbury Street to find a model for the panorama from one of the watercolor artists who hawked their paintings of Fenway and the swan boats and Faneuil Hall to tourists. I picked out an eight-by-ten of the Charles with the Mass Ave Bridge and Back Bay behind it. Like all watercolors, let alone all street art, it was lacking in detail, but it gave me the bones, and the rest would be easy enough to embellish.
“How much for this?” I asked. None of the pictures had a price tag.
“Forty,” said the man wearing a black pageboy hat and cheap button-down. He was making a show of blocking in the marina.
“For an eight-by-ten?”
“Don’t try to haggle for it. Buy three or more, you get twenty percent off.”
It was a brisk evening with lots of traffic on the commercial lane. A street musician’s impoverished guitar provided the soundtrack to matrons in military-style coats walking eastward toward the park hotels and girls in ridiculous high-fashion outfits prancing by on their way to cocktail hours. The painter watched the hems of their skirts as they passed, and even as I felt disgust for him I realized I had been doing the same. I drew up closer to watch him work. He was competent, of course. He painted quickly, each scene a repeat of a scene he’d done hundreds of times before. I was getting quick with my carving knife, though each image I did was new, and even though my pumpkins were admittedly not real artwork, I disliked the feeling of a parallel thread between me and this hat-wearing amateur.
“You sell many?”
“Summers? A ton. Fall and spring, enough. Wintertime I gotta play mall Santa.”
“You’re not even fat.”
“Try and find a fat guy in Boston without an Irish accent.”
He said he’d taken some community college classes before going to study with a few seascape painters up in Maine. He listed a few names I’d never heard of, names unknown outside the newspapers of the little communities they lived in, probably selling their paintings of marine rocks to the elderly via mail-order catalog. I told him to thin out his brushstrokes if he wanted to add more detail.
“I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, kid. I think I’ve got it down.”
I figured he would be doing it fifteen more; in fact, I’d passed a sixty-year-old art hawker on my walk down Newbury whose paintings were nearly indistinguishable from these.
I gave him forty dollars. I had about two hundred with me, having deposited the nerve-wracking balance under my mattress at home. On my way back home from Back Bay, I stopped in a liquor store and spent most of the rest of what was in my pocket on a bottle of Paul Giraud. I had two leftover uncut pumpkins in my little studio, but the remaining eight I would need to bring home one by one, so I stopped next in a Back Bay grocery, though I could get them in Chinatown for half the price. The rest of the walk was a struggle, with the eight-by-ten tucked into the back of my jeans, a large pumpkin under my right arm, and my left hand wrapped around a bottle of the most expensive alcohol I’d ever bought, but I enjoyed the comic figure I cut as I waddled through downtown Boston like some overloaded Russian peasant.
There was no heater in my studio, but it was directly above the kitchen of the Vietnamese restaurant, and that heated my space quite well. Steam smelling of beef stock fogged through the gaps in the old hardwood flooring. I was obliged to do my carving, as well as my painting when I had time for it, in the corner by a window that I cracked open a few inches. It was the one place in the apartment I could keep cool, and I didn’t want too much heat to set any of my carvings prematurely to rot.
I had just the key lines down: the bend of the river; the diagonal cut of the bridge; select trees along the bank; the squat outlines of the Back Bay condos; behind those, the tall silhouettes of the Pru and the Hancock tower. I set electronic tea lights inside them so I could see how the cavities would look illuminated, but I had to imagine the flicker, the movement, that actual candles would provide.