SAGA OF THE ONE ARMED BANDIT

"SAGA OF THE ONE ARMED BANDIT"

The Resurrection of Eddie Balchoswki

I first met Eddie Balchowski in 1963. At the time I has just gone “underground,” to mourn the death of my grandfather, moving into the ground floor of a soon to be condemned building on the edge of Chicago's Old Town. The move paralleled my life in a striking way, as I moved into secondary stages of an alcohol and drug addiction that would drag me even deeper underground as the years turned into one another.

But in '63 I was still a novice. Eddie, sensing as much, befriended me and became my mentor and role model when my guard was down. My real heroes at the time were historical figures like Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, mostly imaginary constructions, however with drugs coursing through my body and Balchowski standing there in the flesh it was easy enough to make the substitution. At the time I never suspected that he was a junkie. Although I had begun to immerse myself in downers, tranquilizers and drink, I remained a real amateur when it came to heavies like Balchowski.

Eddie's addiction grew out of his service in the Spanish Civil War, where he lost his arm and replaced it with a habit. Years later he became a novelty with the affluent yuppie crowd, plying them with samples of the childish outsider art that they love so much to invest in. It was the perfect combination: his subtle lack of artistic talent and their blatant incomprehension of what's relevant in life or art.

In contrast to my young 22 years and rustic storefront digs I was also performing duties as a union steward for the Chicago Local 743. It was an absurd situation that grew out of a temporary job I had taken to facilitate my fledgling career as an artist. The object was to work long enough to amass huge stockpiles of paint and canvas for the future day I would quit the job and devote myself full-time to the creative life. So I stumbled into the steward job. Nobody else would take it for fear of being fired. In fact, there hadn't been a steward or a contract for more than eight years. I did my job all right, even taking the bosses into federal negotiation and arbitration, gaining for the men a contract, retroactive raises, sick pay - the works! It was of course the wrong thing for me to have done. Neither side wanted it. The bosses for all the obvious reasons. But the men didn't want any attention directed towards themselves because they had been ripping the company blind for years, stealing everything from Parker pen sets to huge mahogany desks they would load into gypsy vans pulled up to the dock with phony bills of lading in hand. No one was watching them because the entire crew was in on the deal. Except for me. For my part, I got the shit kicked out of me one night as a group of workers jumped me after work to express their displeasure with my meddling in their affairs. But still I persevered, looking to that sunny day I would leave all this mess behind and enter my studio to paint full time without interruption. Sure!

Several months transpired. I continued to stockpile. The building was finally condemned by the city. Everybody left but myself and a Mexican woman and her children on the second floor. I don't think she understood that she was supposed to stop paying rent and move out. The tragedy for her was that it took one of her children being chewed up by a rat before she decided to leave. Which left only me. And the rats.

I went about my business, drinking whiskey around the clock, on and off the job, and adhering to a fairly regular schedule of painting every evening for four or five hours, at which point I would take a break and head to Wells Street to drink beer and listen to Paul Butterfield and Sammy Lay down the blues before sunrise.

It was on one such night that I returned alone to the storefront to find my domain thoroughly ravished of the several hundred tubes of Rembrandt oils and dozens of rolls of canvas that I had been stockpiling over the year. Also missing were 29 completed oil paintings that had graced my walls. They were a mixture of expressions, my `serious' work and a more commercial style that had been specifically designed for inclusion and sale in the summer art fairs.

What a shock to my brute but tender soul. I was quite willing to accept the fact that the rats had long ago become so bold as to make themselves right at home in my studio, sometimes hopping over my body as I lay in a stupor between commitments. But this was too much… whoever did this deed was a rat of stupendous proportions!

An investigation pursued and Balchowski was captured. Of all people, Eddie Balchowski, my friend! I could hardly believe it. But believe I did, as the cops stopped by on the way to the station house to have me identify the bundles of paintings that were being held for evidence. Somehow the cops had known just where to look. Of course they didn't look fast enough because the couple of thousand dollars worth of painting materials had already disappeared. Apparently he couldn't off the paintings as easily. Was he just a bad thief, or did it say something about my artworks? Later, as the State prepared their case, I was offered $100 to parrot their position in court. I declined. In fact, I attempted to drop the charges against Eddie. After all, he was my friend, I reasoned. But the State saw it differently and Eddie remained incarcerated. Thus we lost track of one another. He never showed up at the storefront again. And I moved on.

The ordeal was soon over for me. I had a good cry. At the trial, my 29 paintings were returned and I prepared myself to set out the winter with the rats. In fact, I was planning to head back to work and begin amassing another stockpile of art materials before spring. A little setback like this was not going to keep me from my dreams.

The next day sitting there all alone and staring at those 29 paintings got me to thinking. Just this past summer I had taken some of those canvases to the street fairs where it was becoming easy for me to support my art habit. I'd developed a successful style, which in truth was more a reflection of the Impressionists from which I was drawing my inspiration at the time. Not my own style but a style nonetheless. I went ahead and claimed it anyway. As I say, it was beginning to put some cash in my pocket.

But also an ill omen had appeared that past summer. As I was closing a deal with a young couple who was ready to take one of my paintings home with them to hang over their couch because it had the right shade of blue in it, a scraggly youth who had been watching the proceedings blurted out “I know you and you're full of shit, man, you're no artist at all! I know you and you work for Standard Stationery Supply on Lake Street… you're an order filler!” Well, all hell broke loose! I grabbed the painting from the surprised couple and smashed it to the ground. Then I took off after the kid - actually we were the same age - chasing him as far as I could before he vanished. When I got back to my assigned area the young couple was also gone. I was so mad I packed up and went too. What good was it to consider myself an artist if no one else believed it? Who was I fooling? I vowed to change all that right then and there. Even if I got off the plane in Japan someday the first name they would shout to me would be `Artist!' not `Order Filler.'” There would be no mistaking who I was from there on out.

In the meantime I was crushed by Balchowski's betrayal. Perhaps because it hit too close to home. After all, I felt that I was daily betraying my own interests in continuing on at the stationery company. I most certainly was not the artist I passed myself off to be. And that's the crux of the matter. In the final analysis it all boils down to how you make your money. That's how people ultimately identify you. It's what relationship you get sucked into each morning when you wake up that defines you. That's clearly the position from which you must daily fend for yourself. No way was I going to continue living a charade. What had the past year left me with anyway? No money. No materials. Only a few tattered outfits that I wore to the job at Standard, paint stained and out dated. My next paycheck would have to go towards replacing them, with nothing left over for materials. What a quandary!

As usual the inevitable happened. I didn't have to do a thing to take the next step forward in my career as an artist. Some cheap assassin did it for me. The very next day, in fact, as I took lunch at the supply company, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's brain was splattered across the TV sets of America for all of us to see. I don't know how many times he was shot or by whom, and no one else does either, but that bullet changed a whole lot of people's lives that day, mine included.

They say that anyone who was alive on that ominous day remembers exactly what they were doing. The poet John Giorno recalls that he was with Andy Warhol when the shots were fired, and that the two of them passionately kissed away each other's tears. Me, I headed for the liquor store on Lake Street, bought a pint of Old Grand Dad and caught the Ravenswood train over to my storefront abode. There, alone at last, I began to mourn with the rest of them.

To be sure, that was the day it all clicked into place for me. I never returned to the stationery company, not even to collect my paycheck. Instead I became an artist that day. That fast. No longer just someone preparing to become one, I was one from that moment forward. And I was determined to never work again except as an artist. So come what may, I weathered out the first critical year holed up in a storefront with busted windows, fighting off the rats by clubbing them to death and marshaling local Latino gang members into service, fixing broken windows and just generally keeping an eye on the place and on me. (Never mind what favor I did for them!) Even so it was a very long winter, without water, without heat, without a bed to sleep on. But all things considered, I was an artist. What the fuck did I care!

I ran into the One Armed Bandit twenty-five years later. I had since gone away from Chicago, lived a lifetime and returned, clean and sober. My photographic work was being displayed in a plush coffee house and gallery on the north shore and was scheduled to hang there for the duration of the month. I got a phone call the next day telling me I would have to remove the work that I had just the day before installed. The proprietors, two plush broads from the north shore, had somehow had the good fortune to make contact with the infamous Eddie Balchowski and he had agreed to grace their walls with his amateurish efforts at art. Eddie who? Hey… where had I heard that name before? I wracked my brain for the answer and was hardly prepared when all those years came tumbling back on me. The irony! Here was Balchowski once again entering my life to wreak some additional havoc. I had forgotten his name after all those years, retaining only the painful experience of loss that derived from our previous encounter. And of course, it was a strange kind of impasse when we met that second time around. Setting my anger aside I acquiesced, allowing Mr. Balchowski (my elder of some dozen years) to once again remove my artwork from the walls. The difference this time around was that I supervised the removal.

And so it was with great trepidation on the day we met that I shook the hand of the one arm he had left. He didn't recognize me from Adam, and so I just kept my feelings to myself and focused the lens. At that fortuitous moment a youth happened by. Eddie instinctively grabbed hold of the boy, perhaps to shield himself against penetration. Certainly I had wanted to picture the solitary soul that I knew him to be, but fate would have it differently. Or rather, Eddie himself chose to present a different side to the camera - in order to appear as a guiding light to the young boy, pointing with the stub of his butchered arm to some unforeseen future for the lad, as he had done so many life-times ago with me. As I clicked the shutter it occurred to me that had Eddie not entered my life when he did, I might still be loading those Dymo Label Makers onto conveyor belts working their roundabout way down from some dusty sixth-floor depository. Thank you Eddie, for eliminating my plans for the rest of that day. And every day since.

BURKHART STUDIOS

2845 N. HALSTED STREET CHICAGO ILLINOIS 60657 773 348-8536