What Holds Us Together, series 3, no. 16. Graphite, pastel and cotton floss on paper. 2020
The air in this room is thick from stale cigarette smoke. It saturates the carpet and bedspreads, and little black-rimmed craters pock the white plastic ashtray sitting on the particle board desk in the corner. I’ve already plucked a mystery insect from a pillowcase belonging to one of the beds, despite sheets that, on the surface, appear to be clean. Through thin flower print curtains you can make out a collection of abandoned coal storage tanks and conveyor belts, situated next to a middle school ball park where kids are cheering each other on.
What Holds Us Together, series 2, no. 27. Graphite, ink, colored pencil and cotton floss on paper. 2020
Half of the TV’s eighteen channels have Christian programs. Jimmy Swaggert’s voice as he delivers his “Message of the Cross” is overlapped by others belonging to longterm hotel residents creeping out from different rooms.
“… I need you…”
“… I don’t give a FUCK what anybody…”
“… gonna beat the shit outta…”
“… that’s BULLshit..”
“… you better git - ”
“... BITCH...”
“… they took my money, they took my…”
“... fuck this shit...”
- cough -
Outside the town’s collection of mold-stained buildings scatters out over soft green hills with tops obscured by fog from the day’s rain. Downtown are thrift stores and gutted fronts with Donald Trump t-shirts, baby clothes and World Wide Wrestling Championship posters displayed in the windows. I looked for beer in the grocery store, which had none. A boy there with black circles under his eyes roamed the aisles like a ghost.
I wanted to come here, knowing this would be a hard place. I wasn’t wrong. Along US85, just south of this hotel, there are hundreds of dilapidated trailer homes with cluttered yards and faded siding peeling off in sheets. There are churches but no businesses other than the occasional gas station. Haunted-looking people peer out from windows, but drop back fast when their gaze is returned. And I was pretty sure that if I’d indulged my voyeuristic side, camera in hand, I’d probably be met with a shotgun.
My last blog entry was written nearly 6 months ago. In it I am still in La Paz, Bolivia, running around the 12,000-foot-high city with my best friend, waiting for the climate to warm up before heading further south. I got so wrapped up in spending time with him and living in the moment in that exotic, equally disturbing place that I stopped writing. I didn’t need to then, because I had someone to disappear with. We parted ways in the remotest section of Bolivia. He “pressed the eject button” and I kept going. The day he left I tackled the most challenging road I’ve ever ridden and b-lined for Buenos Aires as fast as I could, unmotivated to stop and smell the flowers as I may have been had circumstances been different.
By not writing, I’ve allowed myself to linger in that place, with him, where a very large part of me still exists.
But there is work to be done.
There is too much to write about, obviously. There’s this huge missing chunk of the story that’s every bit as complex as all the others. But to backtrack and describe everything else that happened feels like a waste of time, a distraction from the task currently at hand, which is to consider what all those experiences mean collectively and carry them forward into tangible products, new works of art that parlay all this garbled stuff inside me into visual objects others can attempt to understand.
There is no formula for this. No grand design; it all comes out in fits and spurts, messily at first till some recognizable shape emerges. To be in the middle is the worst because you have to shove through all the ugly stuff, accept inevitable bad decisions and fail miserably till things start to make sense. It requires commitment and faith. Which can be shaken.
On February 3, 2016, I boarded a plane and returned to the United States from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’d sold the XT to a young British woman who’d been riding the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle and needed some autonomy; left two more embroideries behind, in Bolivia and Argentina, bringing the total number of artworks distributed throughout the Americas for In Search of the Frightening & Beautiful to 45; spent Christmas in the summer warmth of Sucre, Bolivia; camped on the vast ocean of salt that’s Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni; and dumped my bike some 4 or 5 more times in sand and mud, hauling it back upright myself or finding various kind souls to help.
But rather than try to write the rest of the story here, I’ll stick to photographs for now. Not that they’ll do the job…quite the contrary. But it’s what they leave out, the questions they pose, that are, to me, most interesting. Questions I face now as I consider what form this project will take in the future.
Houston, TX, USA
3 months have passed since I arrived at Cherryhurst House. A safe, lovely cocoon in a once-“edgy” neighborhood, in a land where there is decent plumbing, my native language is spoken, and the water doesn’t carry Giardia. I have basked in the luxury of throwing my used toilet paper in the toilet bowl rather than in a wastebasket overflowing with other people’s “shit tickets”. There is a comfortable bed covered in gigantic pillows, a kitchen with real working appliances, a well-groomed back yard nestled in live oak trees, and a ridiculously friendly, lovable dog named Lucy.
There is space. Work tables. A reliable internet connection. Amazing, supportive people. And time… with which to figure this whole thing out.
Admittedly I’ve spent much of the last three months staring at walls, allowing the previous ten to sink in while fighting off an ever-present, creeping state of despair. It comes from the gaping space between my current existence and the one I just left behind, combined with that inevitable question mark hovering over my own future. On the road life is simple, boiled down to the necessities of food, shelter and (in my case) machine maintenance. Exchanges with people are generally brief but more often than not, profound. And from the vantage point of a motorcycle, every second is loaded with a visceral, physical level of awareness that only other riders can understand. Making meaning isn’t as easy when passing moments aren’t jam packed with new images and sensations. So I must despoil myself.
It is no accident that I landed here, in this particular city. For the first two months I walked everywhere, to the post office, for groceries, art supplies or hardware, in this place where very few walk. I’d cross vast open air parking lots for paper clips or printer ink at the Office Depot. Sprint across 4-lane boulevards, dodging late-model SUVs driven by pissed-off rush hour commuters just to get to Trader Joe’s. Then haul my booty in fabric grocery sacks the 1.3 miles back to home turf. Sharing sidewalks with sweaty guys in mirrored sunglasses and old ladies in wheelchairs with plastic bags dangling from the handlebars. I noticed the weird stuff, the broken pipes and painted-over signs, the bits of trash left by construction workers building massive white-walled "minimalist" condo complexes squeezed into empty lots where small, half-decayed bungalows once stood.
Then I got another motorcycle. A bigger one. A Suzuki DR650: still light and built to tackle any terrain but fast enough to survive the freeways. Suddenly Houston expanded beyond the 2-mile radius my legs would take me…and I started remembering things.
My family lived in Houston from 1980-87. We moved from the suburbs of London during an oil boom, when gated communities and subdivisions spread across swamps north of the city like out-of-control cigarette fires. My parents split up a year later and I lived with my mother till 4am the morning after I graduated high school, at which point we both climbed into loaded cars and fled together for the east coast. For my mother and me, Houston was a tragic place, defined by painful events and struggles. We were each forced by circumstance to figure out who we were: my mother as a newly independent single mom, me as a teenage outcast, an awkward wallflower who found salvation in punk rock music and the tribe of freaks who identified with it.
My Houston is filled with ghosts. There is one around every corner. From the club I nearly killed myself driving to (high on MDMA, better known as “Ecstasy”), to an archway in a nearby university campus where I posed like Cyndi Lauper for a Barbizon Modeling School photo shoot. Upscale strip malls that were once used car lots…a mid-century modern furniture boutique where my favorite record store used to be.
While the bike has opened floodgates to the familiar, it’s also given me access to new unknowns - here in Houston and beyond. Neighborhoods in other parts of town that transport me back to northern Mexico, with windowless cantinas and taquerias where the food is cheap and delicious, and the guy behind the counter is delighted that I can speak a little Spanish.
With a motorcycle I can see and experience things more clearly. And the space separating my current self from the one that just blasted through Latin America is getting smaller.
May 11, 2016
A couple of weeks ago, I loaded up the DR and took off for the east coast. It was my birthday, and I needed to press my own friggin’ eject button. I took very few pictures and wrote virtually nothing, needing to empty my heart and brain, see people I love, and clear the emotional cobwebs keeping me from thinking straight. I wanted to pick random destinations and disappear.
Which is how I ended up in Madison, WV. A place as destitute and poverty stricken as any I’ve encountered in rural Mexico, Guatemala or Bolivia, nestled in some of the prettiest fog-enshrined mountains I’ve ever seen.