Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  “I guess it does,” I said, nodding silently to myself as I portioned some food into each of their bowls.

  Medusa’s Sister

  I COULDN’T WAIT TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL AND LEAVE home for the comforts of an institution of higher learning that would let me make art day and night. My parents were fine with the leaving home part but didn’t like the idea of being saddled with the crushing tuition payments of an art school. Back then, the University of California was an amazing bargain for state residents, so I was under strict instructions to pick the UC campus to which I wanted to apply.

  Since those were the rules, there was one and only one campus for me: Berkeley.

  In those days, “Berkeley” was synonymous with “lunacy.” There were riots for every occasion. There were rallies for organizations that I never would have thought could have sufficient funding to make the Xerox copies needed to let people know they existed. The entrance to the campus was like a street fair that forgot what holiday it was celebrating. Every day I saw people who wouldn’t think twice about wearing a cheese grater or a hot water bottle as an accessory.

  My parents were aware of this, and so to make sure there was some counterpoint, they signed me in to the oldest and most traditional of all the women’s dorms on campus. It was called Stern Hall and it came complete with a “dorm mother”: a square-shaped dowager with a headful of big stiff white hair who, if this had been the 1930s, would have been cast as Mrs. Bissonette, the nettlesome wife of W. C. Fields. Her job was to make sure the “history and legacy” of Stern Hall were carried forth by its current residents. She wasn’t the type of person I would have expected to find surviving in the wilds of Berkeley, any more than I would have expected to find a ring-tailed lemur. But there she was, in her knee-length, pastel frock and low-heeled pumps, presiding over the mandatory dorm meetings.

  This was so not what I’d had in mind.

  I was already pretending that Berkeley was actually an art school, albeit one with a football team and a bunch of other required courses. It was the art classes that fed my sense of identity. Everything about them felt right. From the very first day, I was in love with the poetry and tragedy that being an art student conferred on me. When I skulked around the long, echoing halls of Kroeber Hall, the concrete-and-glass art building, I was transformed from an insecure, identity-crisis-riddled middle-class girl to a dark, potentially brilliant Chekhovian creature: too sensitive and perceptive for your world. Now if I threatened to kill myself, I’d be taking with me a whole catalogue’s worth of never-to-be-realized mixed-media masterpieces. Very nice.

  It took only a couple of weeks for me to begin to fine-tune the details of my new image so that they lined up properly with those of an Important Artist in Training. Through careful observation and data gathering, I ascertained that the Important Artists of the Bay Area dressed like ranch hands. They drank Jack Daniel’s straight up from unwashed water glasses, rolled their own cigarettes, and lived in warehouses where they also worked. Niceties like furniture and expensive clothes were an afterthought for these impressive men, because their art involved dangerous equipment, like acetylene torches, table saws, and Cor-Ten steel. Like everything else that mattered, real art was a man’s job. So I began to make sculpture, not because I liked to work in three dimensions but because of the sense of macho competence I got from knowing how to operate power tools. Though I didn’t smoke yet, I was working on it, aware that I needed a hand-rolled cig balancing on my lower lip when I put on the goggles and stood in that cyclone of sawdust.

  The more I hung around the art department, the more embarrassed I became about the gentility expected from me at Stern Hall. No one could know I lived there or hear that I had to show up at those obligatory dorm meetings. They were more embarrassing than living at home with my parents.

  That first dorm meeting got off to a rousing start when Mrs. Bissonette remarked, proudly and without a trace of irony, that this very dorm had risen to the heights throughout the years of Berkeley’s star-studded past by having its residents associated with a traditional image of elegance. “The women of Stern Hall spend hours on their hairdos, and it’s the pride and glory of the dorm,” she said, reflecting a value system so out of touch with Berkeley in the late sixties that for a moment I wondered if we were all performing in a satirical improv group sketch.

  Even more galling to me was another of our house rules: the gloriously coiffed women of Stern Hall, Mrs. Bissonette explained, were required to participate in a predinner ritual that was like something out of the antebellum South. At five-thirty we all had to gather at the head of a spiral staircase, in our dinner dresses, and follow Mrs. Bissonette on a magnificent promenade to the dining room, Gone with the Wind–style.

  I did not take this news well.

  First of all, I had brought just one dress to school with me, and that was only after a heated argument with my mother. Every other piece of my current clothing I was carefully allowing to acquire a patina of random paint splatters, the better to reflect the seriousness of my artistic intentions.

  When the dorm meeting came to a close, I quickly met two other like-minded girls who were similarly offended by this indignity. The three of us began plotting a campaign of protest. The best we could come up with on short notice was the idea of wearing our so-called dinner dresses on top of whatever jeans ensemble we had worn to class that day.

  And the very next evening, we put our plan in motion. When the dinner promenade was lining up, I arrived wearing my navy blue sleeveless A-line sheath over a black-and-purple striped T-shirt, a pair of jeans with one knee ripped open, and paint-splattered cowboy boots.

  It took only three days of these forward-thinking fashion statements before my two new best friends and I received word that Mrs. Bissonette wanted to talk with us. We were summoned to the dorm mother suite, where she sat in unamused silence, seeking an explanation of our behavior.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair to force me to take time off from making art to change into a dress for dinner, knowing that a few minutes after that I’ll have to change right back into work clothes again,” I explained.

  “Maybe you are not a good fit for Stern Hall,” said Mrs. Bissonette.

  Those were the ten words I’d been longing to hear.

  From there it was a mere hop, skip, and a jump to forging my parents’ signatures on a release form, so that we three renegades could rent an apartment off campus. Now there would be nothing keeping us from setting up the kind of free-spirited creative environment befitting individuals of limitless abilities such as ourselves who were ready to take our place as the kind of human beings to whom the next century would no doubt owe a great debt of thanks.

  Our new apartment was a four-room promised land in a two-story stucco building, a mere fifteen-minute bike ride from campus. We didn’t have furniture. Furniture was but a first unnecessary step toward a stifling life devoid of all meaning. Besides, the place came with a card table and a couple of folding chairs. As far as I was concerned, it was fully furnished.

  Everything about this apartment was perfect. Imagine a refrigerator that contained only the food my friends and I put into it! I could be on an unending diet of only celery and sugar-free Jell-O and no one would ever dream of saying a word! At last I had a place I was proud of, where I could invite the right kind of interesting young man in for a cup of weird licorice-smelling tea in a room lit only by scented candles, as I did that very first week, when a guy from my Basic Design class stopped by at midnight. There we were, at the card table, inhaling cinnamon in a flickering open flame, listening to the new Doors album and discussing existence while also playing with a can of rubber cement. We were layering globs of it on the tabletop to form interesting sculptural shapes that were even more awesome when you set parts of them on fire. Okay, yes, for a few minutes we set the whole table on fire. But we put it right out again with a couple of big pots of water. And by the end of the evening, you could hardly see the black smoke stains
way up there on the ceiling of the kitchen.

  Next thing I knew, spring quarter was over and my roommates were packing their suitcases and heading home for the summer. Though I’d landed a part-time job as a counter girl at the Lunch Box in Berkeley, it didn’t pay enough for me to cover the rent for our three-bedroom apartment alone. I couldn’t bear the idea of giving up my freedom yet was unable to figure out where to find more roommates on such short notice.

  Somehow I managed to convince my parents to let me enroll in summer quarter. I could stay on in Berkeley and live in some much cheaper apartment that I swore I was going to be able to find. The most compelling part of my argument involved a couple of very famous visiting art professors who would be teaching just this one summer, then never again. For a passionate, committed art student such as myself, I pleaded, it was the kind of rare opportunity that couldn’t be missed.

  It didn’t take me long to find that cheaper apartment on the Oakland-Berkeley border: three rooms in a row, railroad-style, with a Murphy bed, on the ground floor of another old stucco building. And no, I still wasn’t planning on having furniture. Free of the compromises required by having roommates, I seized the opportunity to set up my new apartment the way all the big boys did: as a studio. I would transform my little flat into an enormous warehouse full of important art. Immediately I began setting aside a little money from every paycheck at the Lunch Box to buy the things I knew I needed more than tables and chairs: a jigsaw, a belt sander, and a power drill.

  The day I walked out of the hardware store as a full-fledged power tool owner was a very proud day for me indeed. I was holding real physical evidence that I had transcended every stereotype and limitation associated with my gender. There could no longer be any doubt that I was an artist of substance, despite the fact that my version of the requisite ranch-hand/artist persona now sometimes included miniskirts with knee-length high-heeled boots.

  Summer quarter seemed to be shaping up very nicely. I got in line early enough to be enrolled in all the classes I wanted. Plus, even more validation was waiting around the bend. One of the Internationally Famous Art Professors, a man who’d had solo shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Marlborough Gallery in New York and London, began to show special interest in me! Not only did I get into his class, but I was the one he invited out for coffee during our midmorning breaks! I could hardly believe my good fortune.

  The Internationally Famous Art Professor was a medium-sized bookish-looking guy with short brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a trim graying beard. He wasn’t young or hip or especially fun to talk to, like my classmates. But I didn’t really expect that from someone so prominent in his field. When you were that successful you didn’t really have to say much, I figured. Talk was cheap; fun was overrated anyway. Learning to look past uncomfortable silences and see the depth lurking beneath them was part of the privilege of knowing a real art star.

  I never said much during our class breaks together. Just being allowed to stand there and sip my coffee, while my professor and his friends held forth, seemed like reward enough. The extra attention he lavished on me made me feel so special that I began to carry myself in a way that reflected my newfound status. I felt more three-dimensional. I had a sense of place and weight in the world. I began to develop an image of myself as magnetic and powerful, as someone of whom you should be aware.

  Still, when Mr. Internationally Famous asked me matter-of-factly, at the end of class one Friday, if I was available to go out with him the following night, I wasn’t sure, at first, if I was understanding him correctly. After the words finally sank in, no other answer made sense except yes.

  It never occurred to me to think of him as anything but a mentor. It didn’t seem possible that he was asking me out on a “date.” I wasn’t even nineteen. He was, like, forty-five or something: much too old to be attractive, an adjustment I assumed all people over forty were aware of and had learned to deal with somehow.

  I remember standing in front of the small closet in the corner of my studio, staring at my unexciting wardrobe, not sure what to wear for this occasion. It didn’t seem right to show up in jeans for a Saturday night outing with an internationally renowned art star. I tried on different combinations of the various things I owned, until I finally settled on a short navy blue belted T-shirt dress with white edging and my tan high-heeled boots. The boots, I hoped, added a certain no-nonsense ready-for-action gravitas to the girlyness of wearing a dress.

  Standing on the edge of the bathtub so I could see my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, I felt bohemian yet fetching, stylish yet gutsy. I was an artist but still a girl.

  I took the bus over to the condo complex where Mr. Internationally Famous was living for the summer. There I learned that an amazing piece of synchronicity had occurred. Joining us that evening was the other famous visiting art professor, who, unbelievably, was also mentoring a girl genius from his class! What a coincidence: two future art world heavyweights, both teenage girls, both being mentored by Internationally Famous Art Professors at the same place and time! What were the chances?

  As I entered the completely silent room, the second professor and his mentee were on the couch, sipping glasses of white wine. Everyone was gracious and friendly, but it all felt awkward right away. For brilliant men who spent their free time supervising the hanging of their work in world-class museums, neither had anything much to say tonight.

  While my professor went off to fetch me a glass of wine, I strolled around the mostly empty room, looking for things to examine. Unfortunately, the shelves of the temporary residence were empty and the walls uncomfortably bare.

  The next time I tuned back in to the conversation, the other art professor was saying something on the topic of the orgies he claimed were everywhere in Berkeley that summer. This came as a big surprise to me. Not only had I never seen hide nor hair of an orgy, I couldn’t recall the topic ever being mentioned. But I quickly tamped down my embarrassment by telling myself that anything either of these brilliant guys might say was just more grist for the mill that fed their art. Since I had nothing at all to add, except my stupid discomfort, I feigned interest in the view of the rest of the apartment house from the concrete patio instead.

  Soon it was time for us to leave, so we all got in my teacher’s VW Bug and drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. Our dinner destination was a Basque family-style restaurant in the North Beach section, just down the block from the Condor and a couple of other very famous topless-dancer bars. The whole neighborhood was lit with three-story neon signs of naked girls with flashing lightbulbs for nipples.

  Inside the restaurant, the four of us joined a long table full of other diners. That was fine with me, since I was still having trouble thinking of things to say. I knew nothing about Victorian erotica, another topic that kept surfacing, but then again … I was an interloper, a student, a neophyte. I was there to learn. My opinions were beside the point.

  After dinner, the four of us walked up the block to see a show by Charles Pierce, an internationally famous female impersonator. International fame seemed to be everywhere that night. Mr. Pierce was performing in a small club with an ornate, gilded stage that had many rows of folding metal chairs set up in front of it. He opened with his impression of Bette Davis doing Scarlett O’Hara on a swing covered in plastic flowers. The mostly gay male audience began to swoon. This was my first female-impersonation show, though I definitely knew all about them, because I had been living for years in the Bay Area. Drag shows were as key to the local economy as crab fishermen and mime troupes. The idea of a man pretending to be a woman didn’t seem that weird to me, though I was also embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t sure why the idea of a man in a dress and a wig was supposed to be so awe-inspiring. Then it dawned on me: maybe this was my Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge moment! Seeing it through an art student lens, I realized that I might right now be in the midst of the new avant-garde … the very people who were blazing the trail
s through the future of art history! Maybe I would find my place among them as one of the very few female artists who knew her way around the demimonde. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and pay attention.

  That was what I was thinking when the Internationally Famous Art Professor leaned over and put his tongue in my ear. This ear bath continued for so long that it seemed to require some kind of reaction. The only one I could find inside me was coiled like a snake and shaped like the words “Uh-oh.”

  I knew I was supposed to find this pleasurable. Since I didn’t, I tried to turn up the corners of my mouth and arrange my face accordingly. The last thing I wanted to do was offend the Internationally Famous Art Professor.

  By the end of the evening, when Mr. IFAP pulled his Volkswagen up to the curb in front of my apartment to drop me off, I was still flummoxed. “Thank you so much,” I stammered, my hand on the car door handle as I prepared to let myself out. He stared at me expectantly, waiting for me to speak.

  “Would you like to come in for some tea?” I finally asked, not because I wanted to spend more time with him but because I couldn’t bring myself to be anything but gracious to Mr. IFAP. Anyway, how bad would it be to have him come in and see my studio?

  And what timing! As of today, there was even a place to sit in my apartment: a rotting rattan love seat I had taken from the curb across the street before garbage pickup removed it forever. Now it faced into a room that was full of workbenches, and sawhorses topped by doors so they could also double as worktables. The floor of the room itself was covered with piles of sawdust, proudly unswept: proof that I didn’t just own power tools, I also knew how to use them.

  “Come sit next to me,” he said, patting the seat beside him as I approached carrying tea, served in ceramic cups from my Boy Scout mug collection, each one emblazoned with an individual troop insignia. For Mr. IFAP, my favorite: Region Twelve, decorated with a decal of an angry black-and-red bull’s head in a yellow circle.