In Passing

The Gallery called about the T.S. Eliot Square Dance paintings. 2 for 275? No. Am I becoming arrogant, because I had a good month? 137.50 seems too cheap, as I will never make anything in visual art that I like more. I can make others. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' could lend itself to one or two more square dance calls. Eliot is the only poet I can stomach. His Catholicism notwithstanding. It is Eliot's glasses that the shifty, deceitful elderly lady dealer wears. That's why I initially liked her. There could be no other reason. I have loaded twenty or thirty slabs of marble into her Jeep Cherokee with nary a thanks, and still been civil, even solicitous. Damn frames tricked me.
Mick of "Just Dandy" has died. He was the fourth person of "3 of a Kind", I think. He had been with his partner, the Fagin-like Roy, for 35 years. He had kidney failure, went on medication, then dialysis, had a leg amputated. He never seemed entirely well, even ten years ago. Words were slow to leave his lip, like tipped molasses. He seemed slow on the uptake and his eyes focussed with effort, like he was just crawling out from a nap under the bed. He gave the impression that his tongue was fat, that he chewed it like a pacifier. He was, though, the most... untroubled of the group of dealers. He had a sweet disposition, and reserved his scorn for the scorned.
He would sit on the sidewalk, while Roy sanded down an end table, and his head would slowly turn to watch the boys walk across the street. He was Floyd the barber, capable of homilies on the weather, business.
I remember being scandalised that Roy sanded down furniture. It seemed dishonest to me at the time. He wsa deliberately disguising the condition. Other dealers, knowing the lay public carries this incomprehensible prejudice, would just criticize Roy for doing it on the busy corner. In their shops you would hear the muffled sound of sanding in the backroom or upstairs.
I would often walk down the street and sit next to Mick. Never exchange many words. Just sit. He was easy company. Unpretentious. Genuinely nice. He would hand money out to just about anyone that asked. And many did. Without reservations- even when business was slow, he would just give money to any impoverished street kid or addict.
Julie, who worked for them, stopped me on the sidewalk downtown to tell me. "Mick passed."
and... "I think he passed on Labor Day." and "Right before he passed he was beginning to walk again." This passage is the tip of a belief system whose mass, I trust, will remain submerged.