Indigo, p.7
Indigo, page 7
There is a large painting leaning nearby that looks to me like the backside of Cumberland Island, looking north from about Plum Orchard with the Crooked River coming in from the upper left (northwest) of the painting, and I say, “This looks like the backside of Cumberland Island, that’s the Crooked River coming in there, this is about Brick Hill or Plum Orchard—”
“That’s exactly where this is! How’d you know?”
“I know exactly where that is and I’ve been there.”
“But this is at about Greystone.”
“Greystone? You mean Greyfield?”
C. Ford Riley does mean Greyfield, Greyfield Inn, on Cumberland, where I imagine he stayed to do this work. The last time I checked, prices at Greyfield—one of the bivouac points for the Kennedy wedding—were $275. When I am on Cumberland I go for the $4 back-country permits, having been already wounded deeply by the $17 ferry fare. C. Ford Riley’s Cumberland painting before us is also perfect, and notable in it, in the overlookable foreground, is some shallow water that is slightly disturbed exactly as it would be disturbed were mullet just below its surface. This, not the exactitude of the scene that allows one to recognize the backside of Cumberland Island looking north, is what is amazing. There is a reason that C. Ford Riley has said Greystone when he has meant Greyfield.
At the end of his sophomore year in college, which was Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, a school he selected because he had met a girl he got on with who went there (a boy in Ortega out of Lee High School might have been expected to go to, say, Washington & Lee or Duke), C. Ford Riley pushed a Coke machine off the sixth-story balcony of the Greystone Building in downtown Rome. (The building was being used as a men’s dormitory; from the Shorter College website: “A significant innovation in the history of the college came in the early 1950s when school administrators and trustees made the decision to recruit the first male students. The ‘Girl’s Creed’ had to be abandoned, a dormitory for men constructed, new sports teams created, fraternities initiated, and very different rules of conduct established.”) The Coke machine produced, he says, a very gratifying explosion in the street below. He was “politely asked” not to return to school until he had gone through “some bullshit”—fairly, he says, because even though he had “a crew of guys to help me, it was my idea, and I was the one last seen touching it.”
He and his friends got jobs bartending that summer at Annie Tique’s, the first flashy restaurant to arrive in Jacksonville Beach, and sold pot to Navy guys, and C. Ford Riley started selling his bird studies also for up to $200 apiece, which he says at the time was good money. The police scared them out of selling dope, which he says at the time was a good thing, and at the end of the summer even without the lucrative drug trade they had good jobs and saw no reason to go back to school.
And C. Ford Riley began to realize he could make a living painting birds. His mother painted and had told him, while dying relatively young of cancer, that he should concentrate on what he really wanted to do, and he had told her—“a pact with my mother”—that he would be the best he could be in his field. She set him up with some lessons with the local bird painter Fred Wetzel, who Riley says was good enough to “let me develop my own style.” In Riley’s memory there was not more than a day together in what might be called formal instruction. “What I have done with my work and my approach is I have looked at what the best was—in any field. I have picked it apart and studied it and set a standard—how do I beat that standard? Like the Beatles, for example. They never stopped in the same format. They had an unbelievable way of changing things.”
“Today, the art today, you wouldn’t believe the number of people that don’t know how to draw. They flash a slide up onto a canvas or whatever it might be, and then they trace out and they paint and try to copy exactly what they’ve got there. And like it’s been said—I don’t know whether I read it or heard it, or something, but it just says it perfect: That kind of, when a person works like that it’s like throwing a microwaveable dish and, and then calling yourself a chef. A great chef. And that”—a backhanded wave of disdain—“you can spot right off the bat. In all genres too. It’s not just this, it’s everything.”
We put a painting of three turkeys on the big easel and frame it with the big gilt frame. The turkeys are themselves framed by two old longleaf pines. Thus they are recognizable as Thomasville turkeys. Thomasville is itself recognized as the epicenter of the last real original forest in the southeast United States, the last stand of the longleaf pines and wiregrass that is said to have extended from Virginia to Florida to Mississippi in one monolithic unbroken park-like terrain that allowed a man to see a deer a half mile away in the woods. The connoisseur of land east of the Mississippi regards these hundred-foot three-hundred-year-old trees towering over their one-foot-high carpet of burnable grass as the best land there is. Other land is sometimes called “second growth and snakes,” its trees a mixed bag of hardwoods and lesser pines and deciduousity and vines and other crap that is, really, just weeds.
C. Ford Riley realizes that I might not be altogether aboard in comprehending pulling this up and pushing that back, getting harmonies and values and edges, broken chords and straight-out chords, either through the mirror or without the mirror, and says, “Well, I can show you. Let’s see if I can fuck this up right in front of your eyes,” and I say, “That’d be great,” and we regard the turkeys, standing at the center of this painting with a wary eye to the viewer and, to my eye, ready to run. C. Ford Riley interprets the mental state of the middle turkey: “Gentlemen, we better get the fuck out of here because I know something is about ready to happen.” (“My favorite thing to hunt is turkey, but what I really like is to call them, just fuck with them.”) And indeed the middle turkey does seem to be in a slightly more advanced state of alert than the others, and seems to be in charge. It strikes me that it might not be easy to depict shades of mental acuity in turkeys standing in the woods. It might not be easy to perceive shades of mental acuity in turkeys standing in the woods. That might require some thought and some experience on top of a good hand with the paint.
The majestic longleaf pines framing the turkeys, and the turkeys themselves, seem finished in a way that the area behind the turkeys is not—a bayhead or a descent to a river bottom, an area altogether more messy than the clean pines and birds at the front. It is this area C. Ford Riley wants to work. He daubs in some very dark brown oil in a vertical column that would have to be a tree but that looks as he does it like certifiable fucking up.
“I want it to go really far back, so I’m pulling all this up.” He makes some frightening casual sideways wavelike strokes with an alarmingly large (two-inch) regular house-painting brush to the left of the new improbable brown-tree mess, making more mess to its left in paint that was already there. “I know what I had underneath that, so without doing too much”—he takes now a tool that looks like a sharp eraser on a brush handle—“I can take, take and create more ideas here.” The eraser is scribbling and doodling through the dragged two-inch-brush chaos and the new dark-brown-tree improbability leaving trails of apparently no paint at all, lines of almost clean canvas, that look like grapevines in the air or a lightning strike on the bark of the new tree or like, really, nothing at all except more mess and certifiable fucking up, except that already things look more real than they did a minute ago before they got so messed up. The new tree suddenly looks exactly as if it might have been killed by lightning with those weird rips in the bark spiraling down the trunk. “And then,” C. Ford Riley says, picking up a paper towel and wadding it, “I’ll go back”—mashing the wad of towel into the new brush-and-eraser scribbling—“and then I’ll go back generally and I’ll look at that and go either, Okay, this will work, or, That won’t work”—vigorous mopping and pressing and rolling and wiping with the towel—“but most of the time it works. And then”—eraser tool again—“I go, Okay, I like that, so now I’m going to paint that. And then when I get it all to where I want, I go back to my original idea, and I’ll, I’ll do a glaze on top of this, and that’ll push everything back, and then I can pull out what I want to show and what I don’t want to show.”
“What do you mean by ‘paint that’?”
“Well, if you look through here, through the mirror at just what I did, if you can remember what it looked like before, this whole area has been closed in now, but it’s still pushed back farther. My first point of view is going to be forefront, middleground, second middle ground, and distance, going all the way back. And, so I like what’s going on here, so . . . then I’ll take something—”
“We didn’t just paint it?”
“No, I’m just drawing. I’ll tell you: I think this is one of the best exercises I’ve ever had and to this day I work in that method. In elementary school, in school, instead of taking notes I would scribble and doodle. And that’s kind of the same thing that I do now. I just go in and manipulate and turn things into”—he is applying some peach-colored paint to the right side of the new tree and to an indistinct area to the right of that, peach-colored paint that looks like the most inadvisable idea so far: what could be peach-colored in these woods, what could be peach-colored running all the way down the new tree, maybe it’s salmon-colored, face-powder-colored, orange-popsicle-colored, banana-popsicle-colored—“the time of day where it’s that late kind of light.” And behold the new imprudent peach fucking up looks like sunlight coming through these dusky woods at approximately the horizontal, it is sun-colored paint I have been frightened by, and the new tree is lit by it, brilliantly and correctly. It’s five thirty or six thirty or seven thirty in the Thomasville woods depending on your EST and your DST and the month.
Q: How many paintings do you do a year?
A: A lot.
Q: A hundred?
A: Almost.
Q: What do they sell for?
A: A small one, twenty-five to thirty-five—
Q: Twenty-five what?
A: Hundred.
Q: And a big one?
A: A big one? Well, several years ago I broke the six-figure mark.
C. Ford Riley gets the Subway tab. I offered, he counteroffered, I never participate in check fights. Ortega people might not understand this, but the girl who talked Bob Burns into quitting Lynyrd Skynyrd understands this.
I ask C. Ford Riley who his audience is and he says, “Welp . . .” and is understandably flummoxed.
“Ted Turner?”
“Ted has a large . . . amount.”
C. Ford Riley explains that he has not met Ted Turner but that Ted Turner has bought a number of paintings. He says people like Turner are in another world; they fly private jets to Argentina on Saturday to hunt ducks and are at work Monday morning. I tell him that Ted Turner has just run off with the wife of a colleague of mine in the literary world, and that I had to remove Turner as a character in a book of mine putatively for legal reasons, and C. Ford Riley says Ted Turner gets in more trouble with his mouth, and that Ted Turner would not have sued about being in a book, and I say I know, and that he is not in trouble for running off with Bob Butler’s wife, he just has Bob Butler’s wife, and C. Ford Riley hands me a snapshot, saying “Look at that little son of a bitch.”
In the photo are three men in camo clothes and camo makeup in a duck blind holding up so many ducks that their smiling faces are almost obscured and look like ducks themselves. Turner is in the middle, a happy man. If a Randall is the knife for people who want what C. Ford Riley can give them, and Thomasville is the epicenter of the good land, Ted Turner is the man, the quintessential man at the center of men claiming kinship with good land. In Look at that little son of a bitch is a tone of admiration that is broader and less literal than simple admiration. It is an admiration that looks in the mirror and is a broken chord and sees oneself there too, that looks at the land and the man who would own it, at a rich man who holds up ducks with the same glee as a poor man.
Down at the river we watch mullet jump in their playful-looking sawtooth leaps. The water is hot and flat and a tad muddy. C. Ford Riley throws a cast net on a small mullet and then the big ones get wary of the dock and of the men on it holding the blue net that would look to a mullet in the water like a man wearing a blue skirt. The almost necessary speculation as to why mullet jump begins: because they need extra oxygen (weak); because they like to play (fair); because, like dogs who lick themselves, they can. C. Ford Riley says, “I almost thought, once, they are looking for where to go.”
We hie ourselves south to do some actual fishing on the Matanzas River. By rule when fishing with untested partner, C. Ford Riley sends me north in my kayak and he goes south in his; this way if I am a greenhorn I will not be a liability to him, only to myself. I am enough of a greenhorn that when I change bags as we launch I leave my nippers and have to chew through monofilament leaders to change lures, which takes so much time that when I see redfish tailing I refuse to change lures and I keep trying to get them to hit the Skitter Walk I have on instead of putting on a spoon, and when I get back I do not have a redfish and C. Ford Riley, who has put on a jig (he has put on, actually, a Berkley Gulp! New Penny Sans Plastique 100% Biodegradable three-inch shrimp that stinks to high heaven), has a redfish lashed to the side of his kayak that looks like a three-foot model submarine cruising with him. He’s as proud as Ted Turner buried in ducks, and he’s happy to say that he usually does not keep these fish, but exceptions have to be made, at points, and I agree. The best I can do is show him how to properly string a fish through the jaw not the gills. This is a down payment on the two paintings I will commission from him when my ship comes in.
In the picture I want of a mullet jumping, it is entirely likely he will put a tenable and readable expression on the mullet’s face that suggests the mullet is looking for where to go. The other painting I want, and that I will entrust only to him, is of a redfish and a speckled trout together. These two fish are in certain ways the cat and dog of inshore salt water, one delicate- the other heavy-boned, one with scales hard to see and the other with scales like fingernails, one spotted many times and the other spotted usually once, one silver one copper, one coltish the other bullish, and they occupy nearly the same place on earth and do nearly the same thing (though a redfish can eat an oyster if it wants to and a trout may hurt its mouth on a sans plastique shrimp). The two fish constitute as strong an argument as there is for the brilliance of Darwin or God. If C. Ford Riley will paint them, the argument may tip one way or the other.
Bill Wegman
The first time I saw Bill Wegman, I think, I was on a porch over a lake in Maine at dusk and a fellow came paddling by in an aluminum canoe trolling a fly. I called to invite him up for a drink and was violently shushed by the people on the porch drinking. He doesn’t drink anymore, it was imputed to me, and the implication obtained that his not drinking was a matter of such delicacy that were I to tempt him in the way I had Bill Wegman could be ruined. In this quiet corrected air on the porch I watched the interesting lone figure of Bill Wegman continue on his troubled way untroubled. He was wearing a funny-looking kepi with flies pinned to it and was sitting in the rear of the canoe. His weight tipped the front of the canoe way up in what is called, now, by me, the weather-vane configuration of canoes. Any woodsman is familiar with the weather-vaning of a canoe: the bow will swing downwind and you will go nowhere but downwind, if there is a wind. But there was no wind on Loon Lake and Bill Wegman went forward, having perhaps waved at me and my bad idea. The woman who had remonstrated the most against my hospitality had the largest breasts I had seen on a live human being and I would later learn that she had taken a man away from a friend of hers once, and the friend had, in revenge, flashed her own breasts at the large-breasted woman and screamed, “They’re real!”
The large-breasted woman and the normal-breasted woman had been friends and waitresses some thirty years before at York’s Lodge, a log affair so large that it had accommodated in the day the restaurant they worked in, a laundry, a lobby full of mounted big-game heads, some not from Maine, a fireplace a child could walk through without stooping, a boiler room, a library, a sitting porch facing the lake, a sitting porch not facing the lake, and even a machine to wash change, the kind of touch you hear about famous hotels in San Francisco having. The Lodge had served some fifteen or twenty cabins around it where the guests who ate at the restaurant and marveled at the animal heads and lounged and had their change washed stayed, and they were provided a newspaper and a fire in the mornings in these cabins by a boy. It was halcyon. By the time I saw any of it, it was gone. The Lodge was closed, the waitresses were flashing each other as old women, the sign in the Lodge that read No Jews or Consumptives was apparently offending no one, and the cabins had been sold off to individuals.
Bill Wegman at this point owned one of the cabins, called Sunset, in which he had photographed two Weimaraners in bed and called the photograph Ray and Mrs. Lubner in Bed. The close cabin and the cozy bed and the heavy bold plaid blankets and the logginess of everything, walls and furniture alike, were altogether so Maine-woods that even the perversion of two dogs looking like a happily married bourgeois couple in bed could not undo the Maine-woods kitsch. The Maine-woods kitsch in fact was enhanced by these goofing, Kinseyan dogs in bed. The Maine-woods kitsch, in fact, was no longer kitsch: these dogs in this bed made you want to be in the bed, own the cabin, be precisely in Maine, possibly even be in a happily married bourgeois couple. Were anyone else to put his dogs in bed it would look like dogs in bed. How did these dogs put there look like, well, something that had meaning? Who was this Bill Wegman dude?
Bill and I sat at the chipped white-enamel metal table in the kitchen of Sunset. I was in the fevery tremble of a hangover and I brought up the subject of my having invited his ruination by inviting him to have a drink so imprudently the other night as he weather-vaned by. Bill might have smiled. He told me that he had gone to Memphis once very drunk and remembered everything, and he had gone to Memphis sober and remembered nothing. This was just one of the sad ironies of living on the planet without booze. Bill did not say “the sad ironies of living on the planet without booze”; I thought it, trying to size up what the planet would be like as I steadily prepared to have to live on it myself. I was resisting the move. Bill said it was actually more fun after you made the move. Another improbable idea. Bill got on a Bakelite phone with a rotary dial and called a woman in New York, his girlfriend-assistant, and said, “Bring up a tube of that good red paint,” paused, said, “A big one,” and got off the phone. Then he said two women were going to visit and he’d had relations with both of them and this had never happened before and it might be weird. Ray and Mrs. Lubner’s bed was right over there and there was no other bed and I had to agree. I thought maybe this Wegman dude was too New York for me, maybe too Paris. But he sounded like he was from California, or nowhere at all. And he was not going to utter the phrase “sad ironies” without more or less figuring out how to get a dog to say it. This much I knew so far.
