Coming to Life in a Dead City
March 2020. New York City. The media called us heroes, their way of writing our obituaries.
Four days off in eight weeks. The city emptied. I had no tolerance left for talking about what was happening, so I walked. COVID badge required just to be outside. Alone in the largest city on earth.
I found the street murals. Felt their texture. Studied them from different angles and distances for a long time. I started hunting them. My mind was as open as it gets. I’d watched a 28-year-old code three times in one shift and brought him back twice. Standing in front of those walls, feeling all they were, I surrendered entirely. Something sprouted in that dead openness that I didn’t ask for and didn’t want. I left the city having seen more coronavirus patients than my entire home state.
Back in Arizona, it got weird quick, so I picked up a spray can. First piece: a 60-inch portrait on a stucco wall. Then another. I couldn’t stop. Didn’t try. Every shred of grief, rage, and emotional sediment that had no clinical outlet- a bloodletting into paint. Oversized. Unapologetic. Clinical. I had once attempted a pencil portrait of a girlfriend. It wasn’t the reason we split, but it would have been justified. I knew nothing about art. But I wasn’t discovering it either. Who learns portrait painting with expensive spray cans on Arizona stucco? I was bleeding somewhere, and those were my stitches.
Six months later I was painting commissioned murals in San Antonio, a city I hadn’t been to since I was born there. A block from the hospital on my birth certificate. We didn’t stay long back then: Dad sentenced to thirty years, Mom seventeen and back to the grandparents in Alabama. No other connection to the place, but there I was, and this time I stayed. Painting into tendonitis, through historic torrential rain that hid my tears, under a 100-foot tarp that echoed my voice back at me, having a conversation with my mother. The one who always showed up. Whose funeral I missed in 2017. It was the best goodbye I ever gave anyone.
Many strokes later, I still don’t call myself an artist. OK fine, but I struggle to do anything worthwhile without an emotional surge.
I try to stop, but I haven’t.