Signs

I

I hitched to Port Arthur on the advice of an art professor, certain I wouldn't stay long. At the time—1970, my sophomore year—I was thinking of becoming a painter. "In our day, the central principle of art is collage," the professor said. "Image-bits, like a series of little road signs. They reflect our country's fragmentation." We were sitting in his tiny office at UT. He pulled a book from his shelf. "Currently, our finest collagist is this man, a former Texan named Robert Rauschenberg. Ever heard of him?"

"No."

"Well then, son, you need to patch some holes in your know-how."

The collages consisted of ordinary objects: pieces of cardboard boxes, bus tickets, laundry lists, newspaper clippings.

"He's mostly in New York now—where you'll have to go if you want to make it in the art world—but you'd do well to breathe the air he did as a pup," my teacher said. "Go to Port Arthur. Find the heart of Texas. Its uniqueness. Its peculiarities."

Port Arthur was a gob of mud. Crooked houses sank into bayous. Silkworms—"tree devils," in the local patois—slithered up mossy trunks. Refineries ringed the town: roaring fire-tongues.

I checked into a "Monthly Rates" motel. The Wayfarer. Hookers hung around the parking lot. Petroleum tankers pulled off the highway onto a gravel shoulder underneath the motel sign ("Heated Pool/ Cable TV"). Their brakes hissed. Catcalls in the dark. The girls, in gold sequined skirts or purple hot pants, ran to the trucks and hopped inside.

Rauschenberg had cleared out of here as a young man. What remained of the places he knew, soda fountains and dance halls, had been eaten by the petrochemical air. They were barely recognizable as human habitations. Texas was no place for a painter. I've got to get to Italy, I thought. How do I get to Italy?

My love of portraiture had solidified in middle school when my English teacher, Mrs. Hollins, introduced us to Botticelli during our reading of Dante's Divine Comedy. Botticelli had illustrated scenes from the poem. I cherished the artist's name. Sandro Botticelli. Saying it was like singing opera.

Mrs. Hollins showed us black and white slides of Dante's female spirits. They looked like spider webs freshened with dew. With one line, Botticelli could evoke a person's history. His illustrations gave me a glimmer of what preachers meant, in their sermons, by "Grace." My favorite was Piccarda Donati, a former nun forced by an evil brother to leave the convent and marry against her will. Dante meets her in Paradise, on the moon. Though her soul has been saved, an air of defeat clings to her. Botticelli posed her with a slightly upturned face, a leaf-like gown, a modest, prayerful attitude. Her sepia eyes were tightly contemplative, her hair a brush-back of two or three pencil lines, and her mouth a dark dab welling up from the page like a wayward drop of ink. This is how I tried to draw the girls I liked.

Now it was eight years later and I was casing Port Arthur for signs I was meant to be an artist. Each evening, I'd grab a burger or some soup in a twenty-four-hour café and retreat to my room, sketching things I'd seen: tractor tires, antique lanterns, mailboxes made from irrigation pipe.

One night my mother phoned me from the Panhandle. "How are you?" I asked. In the parking lot just outside my room, the sequined ladies huddled.

"Same old six and seven," Mom said. I pictured her standing on the scuffed red linoleum in our boxy old kitchen.

"Dad?"

"Sits in his study, staring." Years earlier, he'd suffered three hemorrhagic strokes. He didn't say much now. Once or twice a month he'd claim he'd got a visit from an angel. In that part of Texas—the northwest, blustery winds, blistering sun—it took massive infusions of faith just to get through the days. We had almost as many churches as bars...