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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o k]

Sketches of Those We Have Known:

Schofield, the painter, suddenly realized he could no longer dream and so, for a year, put away his canvases, paints, brushes, and locked up his studio to take a job at a warehouse along the Berkeley shore.

He as nearing fifty and while he could no longer dream he still had ideas that, he told himself, could be better cultivated away from his art, among people who had little interest in them. When the ideas was complete he would return to the studio and put into form what, during the day grew stronger and stronger in his mind.

The years had pressed his belly which hung evenly over his pants like sacks of soft flour. He wore blue, tight shirts fit snug into his belt and discolored Levis with two leather cowboy boots, always pointed in toward each other when he sat. He was known around the East Bay as a fine, abstract painter and kinetic sculptor. He had many showings but was never satisfied with the way his career had turned out. When the University asked him to teach for a quarter, he refused politely and told his friends nothing disgusted him more than to see "would be artists" learning the discipline under the sky of academe.

His friends were not artists for the most part but salesmen, grocery clerks, highway patrol officers, and lathe operators. From them he could perceive the dark self of the culture in more lurid ways than by watching TV or reading. They all had wonderful crack-pot theories on why life was ending soon and that, too, seemed to delight him no end. "Give me more of your earnest silliness," he would say to himself while listening to one of his friends as they sat on thread-bare chairs with the sound of traffic flowing in from under the window.

But, then, most of his work became the depiction of skeletons. Skeletons of a variety of colors and shapes. Fat skeletons and thin ones. Leering ones and scary ones. He became obsessed by his skeletons, going so far as to include animal skeletons in his repertoire. The last skeleton he drew was so thin it nearly disappeared into the paper he was sketching on. The eye sockets seemed to glare up at him with a message. He then spent days and weeks not being able to sleep and wondering what had happened to his potential. "It is almost over! And I have done nothing! It's ended with skeletons!"

The warehouse proved to be mollifying. The people accepted him and he did his work dutifully, sometimes even with panache. This feeling of comradeship was something new for him and he became addicted to it. He became addicted to the regular paycheck and the calm rhythm of life that had been absent in his artistic days. "Yes," he thought to himself, "after this I will be able to paint better, no question." After awhile he started to take on an air of authority, of someone who knew human nature and should be listened to. The employer enjoyed this and encouraged it until he made Schofield the manager of the warehouse. He became a happy man. He only had one bad incident. He had a significant meeting he had to attend early in the morning. He put himself to bed early and made sure the first light of morning would hit his eye so he would wake up, even before the alarm clock. He slept soundly. But then he had a terrible dream in which he was inside the warehouse and sitting on top of piled boxes were a row of skeletons leering, laughing, pointing, taunting him until he ran out of the warehouse. The dream woke him up. It was 3am. He got up and paced around. He went back to sleep an hour later and was horrified to discover he had overslept. By the time he got to the meeting it was nearly over. It had cost him a promotion. It had cost him the moral courage to return to painting; the justification!