STREETWISE

"STREETWISE"

Photography and drawing are worlds apart. They represent two different ways of looking at the same world. Before I met Sherman I had a limited concept of the world, like Beckett's disembodied voice before encountering Pim. I knew about comic book heroes and movie stars and even a little about my missing parents, but nothing in my experience paralleled Sherman's perception of the world.

Like many a lost soul of the 60s I shared the hippie's unrest, although I was a dozen years older and from a different social class. But that didn't stop me from smoking their dope and collecting myself around the same street people they did. The hippies I'm talking about finally grew up and returned to the suburbs to manipulate their wealthy parents out of house and home, utilizing the wisdom they gleaned from the street. On the other hand, my association with the street people was almost a given, necessary to keep me streetwise and abreast of the times. Ever since I left the boy's home in the 50s I had been developing into a creature of the street and sure needed all the lessons I could get in how to survive it.

The first thing Sherman ever said to me was “You, Clark Kent… Me, Superman,” speaking the words in a matter of fact way that suddenly stopped short of contempt. Months later, while sharing a soda pop, he further elaborated on the concept of the Superman. Not Nietzsche's version, but his own. In the months that followed, I watched with awe the many days on which the spirit moved him. Patrolling Venice Beach by day, prancing its length and breadth with a calculation that was nothing short of choreography, his every move was a reflection of the ocean's tides. On many such days he literally absorbed the vibrant colors of the sun, as evidenced by the blazing halo of orange that tinted the edges of his colorless wool beard and nappy hair. And on any given night he could be found at the ocean's edge, appearing as a magnanimous and rare form of nobility, a new version of Poseidon overlooking his kingdom. Thus did he stand above the wave drenched rocks that jutted from the man-made beach, casting the stored daylight outwards to the abandoned ships and other derelicts that lined its desperate shores. Here was a true beacon on the rocky coast.

Months before I met Sherman, way back in the historical 60s so many people talk about now as if they had been there, I had never looked through the viewfinder of a camera. I was 28 years old, a well-reclused and decidedly mad young man - an artist, to be exact. I was content to live out my fantasies in paint and canvas, living off to myself in a garret questioning nothing. But in contrast, I was also beginning to spend more time in the streets, gobbling down a lot of drugs designed to tranquilize and lobotomize life's bottom line. Chief among them were heroin and morphine, but then there was a steady stream of others, like Quaalude and Demerol, talwin and valium, Nembutal and Seconal, all dressed up in fancy red and yellow jackets and washed down with copious amounts of whiskey.

But it wasn't always down. The hippie's drugs of choice were the psychedelics that produced for them such a fantastic array of hallucinations, and yes I washed down a lot of that transient psychosis along with their communal wine. Of course, in the 60s in California, that meant going to jail a lot!

Usually I was lucky and ended up with compatible cellmates. The day my luck ran out I found myself locked in tight with three others in a jail cell designed for two, essentially a 5x8 feet concrete plot completely walled in from floor to ceiling except for the entrance which was made of evenly spaced steel bars that let the noise of a 1,000 incarcerated souls flow easily in through the spaces between them. This compact scene contained two bunks with metal mattresses bolted to the wall and consumed about half of the available space. Oh yes, and then there was an open urinal in the corner.

Since these cells were two-man cells, the additional occupants were forced to curl up on the cold stone floor at the feet of the other two, bodies often tucked awkwardly up under and around the toilet bowl. It was quite a trick, but you got used to it.

On the day in question I looked around to discover that I was the only white man in sight. Over in the corner sat one big black son of a bitch who wasn't too happy about me being there either. And when I say big I mean this guy was six and a half feet tall! He was pointing his finger at me and ranting about his dead mother and about how a white son of a bitch like me killed her when he was yet eight years old. I tried to tell him that it wasn't me that did the deed, that I was a much younger man, and besides, I grew up in another part of town. He didn't want to hear anything I had to say, having just returned from court with a murder rap and a life sentence attached to his head. He was pissed off! And everybody in the cell was a little bit leery of what he might do, just sitting there in that crowded rat's nest waiting for transfer out.

Feelings temporarily subsided and I began to sketch. Often times in difficult situations I withdrew into an automatic denial, hiding behind my art and hoping for the best. I've often heard this about artists, that they hide themselves behind their mediums when they can't handle something that presents itself to their senses. Well, just a minute! Isn't it obvious that some shit ain't meant for handling, that it's often preferable to walk away from it and do something constructive, like flush the toilet. Maybe I couldn't cope, but neither could this dude. He wasn't even going to make the effort!

It turns out that the guy was a militant Black Panther and I reasoned that the best thing for me to do would be to tame this cat right now! So I rendered his likeness with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of yellow legal paper. I was drawing on the old adage that the recording robs the soul, which has been specifically applied to photography but in a pinch might equally apply to drawing. You know the saying, “The Natives Still Call It Voodoo.” But let's get real here, even if not politically correct. The photograph, or recording, doesn't really rob the soul, as the natives in fact postulated. Rather a new soul is created in the process of feedback. A parallel soul is created, with power to affect the original. Notice how that power was used against the Panther by the system. The judge took one look at that big black son of a bitch and completely ignored the man living inside. The judge did the rather obvious and he judged the book by its cover. O, don't get me wrong here… this dude was guilty all right! And we all knew it, including him. As I say, everybody was a little leery of what this guy might do, and they were obviously more concerned for themselves than they were for me.

Anyway, the drawing... I was about to hand it over to the Panther when he lurched off the bunk and leaped straight for my throat. And that's where he attached himself as he began to strangle the breath from me. “What are you lookin' at me for, you white motherfucker?” he wanted to know.

I wanted to tell him but he wouldn't let go of my throat long enough to speak. He took up that rant again, about his dead mother and how I killed her, taking on the terror stricken aura of an eight-year old black boy witnessing the horror of his mother's death at the hands of some nameless southern white red neck. Everybody in the cell could see that he was reliving the entire episode and was about to substitute me for his dead mother. Thank God a couple of the (br)others pulled him from me and convinced the cat to cool out.

When I finally got a chance to show him the drawing, it still didn't sit too well with him. “What's that to me, honkie?”

Like I said, way back then I had never really thought about the world in any specific terms, especially in the terms other human beings used. I was a recluse, raised by a hermit, and a little bit overwhelmed by it all myself. I lived in my own world. I admit it! But here I was all of a sudden dropped into the middle of some other world, a steamy primeval jungle that demanded of me an explanation for my presence. Hell, I knew why I was in jail - for inciting a riot, heroin possession, disturbing the peace, drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest and the real clincher, open flask. (Of course the judge would dismiss all counts but the innocuous misdemeanor open flask when my court date finally arrived a week or two down the road, but in the meantime the extra trumped up charges were enough to keep me locked up - along with thousands of others - justifying once again L.A.'s claim to the highest percentage of unsentenced prisoners in America and the funding that comes with it. Maybe in the entire world.)

Yeah, I knew why I was in jail all right! But what I didn't understand was what I was doing locked in the same cage with this prowling Panther. What was my relationship to this nameless black man supposed to be about, as he set off on his way to the big house, never to be seen by society again? I had received a brief glimpse of a life that to most people went unnoticed, and it wasn't like I was watching it on TV. Not that they'd put his story on anyway. But the question kept nagging me, “What's that to me, Honkie?”

In retrospect, I can honestly say that I still don't know “what it is” to him. But then I'm kind of clear about “what it is” to me. Whereas most artists are content to submit their drawings to teacher for approval, whereupon they get them back marked, erased and sometimes redrawn for them, I was not in that school. My teacher didn't give me a grade, unless it was in terms of graduating to a newer and more inclusive level of awareness, nearer my God to Thee, wherein prejudice and judgment have no part in the qualifying document. Looking back into that small classroom in L.A., I see now that I was receiving my first degree in psychology, and that drawing was my diploma. Since that time, and through the medium of photography, I have learned to grow and draw a lot closer to the answer the teacher asked me.

BURKHART STUDIOS

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