THE MOANING LISA

I can begin by saying that I received my first camera in '67 or '68, although the exact date remains cloudy. But many years before that, on the exact date of December 25th, 1949, the craving came on me. Not specifically for the camera, but certainly for the artist's life. I won't argue that I was born with the gift. (We are all born with the gift!) Yes, God gave me the talent, but under my direction it's taken a lot of wrong way turns, lying dormant for years at a time.

The craving first manifested at the age of eight. That was the day I received my first paint-by-number kit. In fact so strong was my initial calling that I even retained the name of the inventor, Richard C. Hess, who eventually died on my 50th birthday, rest his soul.

1949 was also the year I was adopted into the middle class. I had been discovered by the Board of Health living with an old coal miner without education in a garage without electricity or plumbing. Contrast that with today, when kids living on the streets and vandalizing subway cars are discovered by the art directors of important museums.

My dad was a hermit, really a grandfather that was pawned off on me as the real thing, but he turned out to be loonier than Vincent Van Gogh and Grigori Rasputin rolled into one. His first desperate act was to push my mother out the door when I was two years old and commence to groom me as his lost son. The original son, my father, hadn't bothered to return from World War Two, disappearing instead into a void. When I look back now I realize that I was already angry, especially with my negligent mother. Perhaps it was I who was more instrumental in pushing her out the door and out of my life, needing to breathe in a way that none of the adults at that date were capable of doing. Thus did I grow up amidst the coal dust and sunflowers, cultivating my anger and dreaming of the Moaning Lisa.

That first year in the middle class proved to be my undoing. Not only did I have to start playing a part other than the one I knew by heart - that of hermit's protégé - I was also deprived of my birthright. Because of a power play by my new parents I was forbidden to visit my grandfather except on special occasions, one being the Christmas of 1949. He was a poor man, but he managed to bring me one small gift that year. Nearly blind he couldn't clearly see the paint-by-number kit he pulled off the shelf to bring to me. Imagine everyone's horror when I unwrapped my gift to find the gaudy Reclining Nude inside. Grandpa had of course meant to select The Lord's Supper.

Indeed, imagine my new parents' outrage! She, a two-bit imitation of Rosalind Russell, was first to react, snatching the box from me with one hand, and grabbing the old man, my grandfather, with the other. And out the door he went. Her husband, a two-bit imitation of Clark Gable, who even grew his ears big to look like his idol, took the box and of all possible futures, painted it and placed it above the head of their bed where it remained for the duration of my stay there, six years to be exact.

What an absurd alter piece it was, a surreal shrine to the goddess of fertility. Consider further that the pair had adopted me because they were unable to conceive children. I was their ticket to decency, needing me as they did to keep up airs in their chicken-shit community of which I was never a part but a commodity.

As I said, it was the beginning of my craving, my potential psychosis. Eventually it would even lead to my becoming an artist! Naturally the entire episode is wrapped in archetypes and tarots. My True Father. The Gift. Its Theft. Etc. But that was only the beginning of sorrows. My grandfather, bless his soul, had labored his youth away in a coalmine, toiling from the age of eight to fourteen without seeing daylight but once a week on a Sunday morning. Likewise Michelangelo's father has rented him out to a rock quarry where he toiled those valuable pre-pubescent years away. And now here I was, the same pubescence in hand, doing my penitence, working off my apprenticeship, wasting my God-given inheritance as a commodity of the middle class.

I began my career that very day, not as an artist, unfortunately, but as a criminal. And so it was that an inexpressible anger drove me on until puberty finally grabbed me by the balls and flung me far and wide, landing me smack dab in the middle of my wildest dreams. The fist thing I did, upon reaching the magic age of testosterone, was to steal a black Cadillac hearse from a funeral home. The police gave my young soul quite a complex when they told me there was a body in the back and I was being booked for kidnapping. But it all turned out to be a joke (to them), and as a result I spent the next three years behind bars perfecting my talents. Upon release I spent a few more years in the bars drinking myself into the oblivion of manhood, ready to kick whatever ass that needed to be kicked in order to reclaim my lost oil paint set from those rip-off bastards over there in the middle class!

What it really depicts is another side of my tragic friend Judy, superimposed over the head of a casual acquaintance of hers named Sam. Judy once bragged that she gave the best head in town. That was the day we met. Over the next several years she set out to prove it, jumping on any opportunity to demonstrate her prowess. Sam was one such opportunity. On such occasions I usually made the wine run, to spare myself the pain.

Even before wine got the best of Judy she was in the habit of picking up whomever for whatever as long as there was a pack of cigarettes or a shot of speed in it for her. This is the same Judy whose dad was a bartender in ritzy Palm Springs, California while she was growing up. The same Judy whose dad talked the young 17-year-old thing into signing the document that committed her alcoholic mother to an asylum from which she never came out alive. The very same Judy whose dad next talked her into performing in one of his porn videos, plying her with speed and alcohol to keep her subservient. That is, until she broke her hip and was forced out into the street by her loving father. The same Judy - no, by this time an entirely different Judy! - Whose mother, still incarcerated, heard of these things and just lay down and died one afternoon. That's the Judy in this picture… the real Moaning Lisa.

The night this picture was made Judy and I were holed up in a rundown rehab apartment in the projects drinking cheap wine with our host and whoever else was on hand, just generally trying to get through until daylight when we could be on our way again. Throughout the night people came and went. One of them was Sam. He had just had the cancer cut out of his throat and a tube inserted through the hole for breathing. Instead, Sam used it to suck down cigarette smoke, forcing the cancer ever deeper within him.

Aside from being a casual acquaintance, Sam was also one of Judy's nickel and dime tricks. At least that's how Judy described him. For her, he was always good for a bottle and a pack.

To make matters more interesting, I had been in no condition to hold a camera for over two years (blame it on the shakes) and had just that very day, on impulse, purchased one and loaded it with film. It was that time of the month, and either Judy or myself had received a disability check, so the money had been there.

I'm primarily a 35-millimerter photographer - that's what all the black lines are doing around my photographs, they're actually the edges of the negatives. But this camera was a medium format issue. It was a cheap imitation of the legendary Rolliflex, this one called the Pearl River, made in communist China and selling in the States for under $50. I couldn't pass it up! Besides, I reasoned (in my inebriated condition I'm not sure how it was accomplished) that I was taking a step up into larger format photography. Ha!

Night turned into morning with several of us sitting around at the breakfast table. Breakfast was what was left of the cigarettes and wine. That's when I noticed a roll of film sitting up on its edge. What the hell was a roll of film doing in a dive like this, I wondered. It turned out to be nearly twenty minutes before I realized that it must've come out of a camera. But it wasn't just any camera, mind you, but my camera the film must've come from. Wait a minute! My Camera? Did I come in this joint with a camera? My slow mind began to think it out!

I also wanted to know how the son of a bitch had enough sense to unload the film from the camera first, before they walked out with it. Why would he? Did he know me? Did he realize that I would be heartbroken without my film? Was he really a son of a bitch after all?

Perhaps the culprit was a daughter of a bitch! For sure, nobody at the table had a clue, except Judy, who vaguely remembered me having a camera for a while but wasn't really sure when that was. Of course Judy would've known, from watching me, how to unload film from a camera. Perhaps she had something to do with the disappearance. Oh well… such is life in the slow lane.

Sure I knew… Or I do now! Or at least I know what Leroy told me. So I was the culprit all along, the one who had so carefully unloaded that Pearl River, thereby preserving that one solitary image for posterity. Thank God for my photographs, because without them I doubt if I would have recalled even this one flimsy memory out of a lifetime squandered down there on the boulevard.

Oh yes, the double exposure. It was the only image on the roll, the rest of the film being blank. Apparently I had not bothered to advance the film lever. I've never made a double exposure before or since, and I get the feeling that I will never want to again.

But you know, the most absurd thing of all is not my pictures, or the stories behind them, but rather the people who come to me continuously wanting to know, “Did they pose for that picture?” Or the mother of all questions, “Did you take these pictures?”