When a “down-and-out runaway on the runway” is ushered back towards stability by a series of real life angels…
by: JH Lucas
Selling out. That’s what the punks called it, when you compromise yourself for money. There’s only so many times you can skip out on rent or bills, only so many times you can dine-and-dash before the reckoning comes. But eventually it comes. In this world, you need money to survive. And punk or not, money changes you. In many different ways.
1986 New York was a sketchy beast. And there I was, an art school dropout among crack addicts and AIDS victims, club kids and class warriors, trying to survive as a young hardcore punk. But even with my head shaved and my boots steel-toed, it was a disaster. Actually I was the disaster. Or rather, the disaster was coming for me.
I could feel it when I woke up on a bench in Tompkins Square park, hungover, clutching a busted pipe to protect myself against the junkies and rapists and scavengers of Alphabet City. I could feel it when I woke up on the stoop of some Yuppie’s brownstone in SoHo, hungover again, and he apologized for waking me, scared I was a junky or rapist or scavenger. I could feel it when I came-to on the Staten Island Ferry, still drunk and covered in blood, between two dominatrixes taking me to their dungeon in Great Kills. Yes, the disaster was surely coming, I could feel it.
I had to get the fuck out of New York.
It was just too much, moving from a drowsy suburb to the city that never sleeps. I needed something in the middle. So I called a friend back home who had traveled around and asked where I should go next.
San Francisco.
I didn’t know a soul there. Where I was going to sleep when I got there. How I was going to survive. But I grabbed my art school portfolio (which Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine had rejected, thank you very much) and my duffle bag, took a cab to JFK, and bought the cheapest one-way flight I could find. The red-eye. Which is how, shortly after midnight, I found myself in the cheapest middle seat on the cheapest plane, next to an unexpected angel named David.
Angels are real. I don’t mean the kind with wings or haloes or harps or any of that corny religious stuff. I mean spirits – kind spirits, who, if they did have wings, would take you under them. It’s what they do.
David was a highly peculiar angel. He was maybe thirty-five or so, prematurely balding, with a mustache covering a slight lisp. His flight through New York was a layover from London, where he and his roommate had been on vacation. David worked a day job in an office, something to do with insurance; I wasn’t sure what, it went over my shaved head. But his real passion was history. David loved dead people.
“Dead people are just more interesting.”
Not just your run-of-the-mill dead, the absolute bastards who win out and have their lives re-written as demigods. No, David preferred the small men of history. Men like Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln. Yup, David wasn’t interested in the assassin, he was interested in the assassin’s father. The senior Booth was the most famous actor in America in his day. He was also a violent drunk, in and out of money for most of his life.
“He would perform in pubs for the price of a drink,” David said.
“I know the feeling,” I said, as he bought me one from the flight attendant.
So yeah, Booth was a sellout. You do what you have to, right? When David found out I was a struggling artist, he commissioned me to paint a picture of Booth (the elder Booth of course) for him. He also offered me his roommate’s room, since he was staying back in London for another month. So there I was, the down-and-out runaway on the runway, with a drink in hand and a free place to stay and, soon, some money in my pocket. Angels — see what I mean?
Over the next few months I met other angels in San Francisco, each another step in my journey of building a new life. Alicia and Jenny and a guy we called Jersey, who showed me around the San Francisco music scene, punk rock and otherwise. A fallen angel named Aaron, a techno-goth friend from art school whom I randomly ran into on the street. We hopped in his 280Z and drove around all night, imagining our future lives here, him as a music producer, me as an artist. We ended up in front of a huge black office building at 1005 Sansome Street, blasting New Order as the sun came up over what looked like a techno-goth castle.
“One day I’m going to work in that building,” Aaron said.
“Me too,” I said, although what would a punk rock artist do in an office building?
As a painter, I made my living painting. Apartments, mostly. Restaurant signs. The odd commission here and there. Back in ’86, San Francisco was affordable. Who wanted a “job” when you could do anything? One anything led to another, which led to a motorcycle, which led to a crash, which led to Percocet, which led to an opiate addiction. And oh yeah, I got my girlfriend pregnant along the way.
I could feel it creeping in: a need for change. Stability. A better life. What I didn’t know was how to get it. Especially since, after the crash, I could barely even walk. People weren’t exactly lining up to hire a disabled art school dropout with weird hair. And, to be honest, the idea of a regular job made me throw up in my mouth a little. But I had to do something. Sellout it is.
My marketable skills were limited. And what did I have to show? Some paintings of lesser historical figures and my celebrity-rejected art school portfolio. I knew that if I wanted to make any real money in art, it would have to be advertising, which was big in San Francisco. So I converted my art school portfolio into ads for things you couldn’t sell. Regrets. Aspirations. Misunderstandings. Advertisements for me. Who would buy such a thing? I was determined to find out.
I would hit up the ad agencies for whatever lowly job I could get. But even hitting them up wasn’t easy. There was no internet in those days, you had to hunt for jobs in the real world. So I went to the library and copied the San Francisco pages from The Black Book: a fat directory of ad agencies that helped the world’s biggest brands sell diabetes (Coke adds life!) and cancer (More doctors smoke Camels!) and everything else you needed to fulfill the American Dream. If you’re going to sell out, sell big. Agency after agency I called, and agency after agency turned me down.
“What’s your professional experience?” they asked.
“I’ve done some commissioned paintings of lesser historical figures,” I said.
“We’re not hiring,” they said.
But NO is just the first name of YES. So after I exhausted all their receptionists by phone, I decided to exhaust them in person. I un-punked my hair and put on decent clothes, grabbed my portfolio and cane and hobbled my way through San Francisco’s advertising district. I rarely got to actually talk to anyone. Mostly I had to drop off my portfolio and wait. If I was lucky, I’d only be in the lobby for an hour or two, hobbling around on pins-and-needles, and maybe I’d get to speak to someone on the bottom rung of the coke-fueled ladder of success. If I wasn’t lucky, the receptionist would say: “Leave your book. We’ll call you to pick it up.”
Then I would thank them and hobble back to the bus home and wait by the phone for a day or two, with my foot in a bowl of ice water to kill that burning feeling. I only had one portfolio, so as my girlfriend’s belly got bigger, I hobbled and waited, hobbled and waited, icing my foot and hoping for angels. After a couple weeks, I was down to the last two agencies. Finally I got the call:
“You can come pick up your book now.”
“What did you think?”
“We’re not hiring.”
There was one last agency. All I needed was for someone to give me a chance. Where was my angel? What the fuck was taking them so long? I grabbed my cane and caught the bus across town to the advertising district. Retrieved my oversized portfolio from the wordless receptionist. Double-checked the last address in The Black Book. It was hobbling distance. I hobbled.
I passed a row of office windows, and inside the office, I saw people working at drafting tables. I hobbled up close to the window, leaned my portfolio against the wall. Cupped my hands to the glass, pressed my face to the window, studied the people inside. They were working on artwork. Advertising artwork.
“Can I help you?” a voice said behind me.
I turned to see a man standing by an open door. Early thirties but a young early. There was something about his eyes that made him extra-young. Curiosity, maybe? Who was this crippled kid peering through his window?
“I can do that,” I said.
I picked up my portfolio. Was this my angel? What took him so long?
“You have to use the front door,” he said.
He pointed down the hill and he went back inside and shut the door. What was his deal? He could see I had trouble walking. My portfolio was the size of a refrigerator, and he wanted me to walk around to the front door? Why was my angel being a dick?
And this is where the miracle revealed itself. I hobbled down the hill, dragging my oversized portfolio around the corner to the front door. 1005 Sansome Street. The techno-goth castle Aaron and I said we would work in one day. Like magic.
I took the elevator up. Went to the appropriate front door. Met the man properly. Got a quick tour of the agency, which was really just a design studio for overflow work. Left my book and hobbled home.
That night, as the mother of my child lay sleeping on the futon, I sat at the kitchen table with my foot in a bowl of ice water and looked out over the rooftops of the Lower Haight and pondered my future. I could barely walk. I couldn’t even sit properly for more than an hour. Honestly, who would hire me? It was asking a lot. Even of angels. It wasn’t like New York, I couldn’t just run away. I was out of options. I was going to be a father. I had nothing. A sellout with nothing to sell. In the morning I got the call:
“You can pick up your book now.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“How does $16 an hour sound?”
It sounded like the future. It sounded like stability. It sounded like fatherhood and success and a strange new life. It sounded like selling out. I was ready.
Born to a single mother and raised in a trailer park in North Carolina, JH Lucas achieved escape velocity through art and writing, moving to San Francisco first, and now living as an immigrant in Lisbon, Portugal. “Selling Out” is from a series of creative nonfiction stories exploring adversity, fate, luck, coincidence, and the cosmic unconscious, entitled “A Plate of Shrimp.”
