Here is the next installment of "Call Me Mr. Green"
Chapter 14
Eating a Wig
Billy says that you can’t eat a wig without milk. He says that the best way to eat a wig is to
put it in a bowl, shake some sugar over it, and then pour on the milk. I think he’s nuts. I don’t think that you can eat a wig, unless
you are a superhero like one of Stan Lee’s creations. You’d have to have a special stomach and some
kind of mutated mouth and throat that would allow the wig to pass into
you.
Perhaps if you wanted too and you didn’t mind a lot of
carbon in your diet you could first burn the wig. Then you could grind it with a mortar and
pestle to make it finer still and then you could add it to some other
meal. I read somewhere about a woman
from Chicago who did this with her husband’s ashes.
She said that he wanted it that way.
She said that he told her that when they were in bed he
spent so much time eating her, but since she didn’t like to return the favor,
she had to eat him now that he was dead.
From what I understand, she added all of his ashes to a big pot of chili
that she ate over a period of several days.
Apparently, somebody at the police department told her that
it was okay to eat her husband.
Maybe this is what the policeman said.
“Its not your husband anymore, Mrs. Lewis. Its just some ashes that used to be him. So if you eat him, say, mixed into a pot of
chili, it wouldn’t really be cannibalism, because you wouldn’t be eating the
meat of him, only the ashes, the carbon residue.”
Maybe this policeman should be fired.
Chapter 15
Eating a Pig
It’s a lot different if you want to eat a pig. It is allowed for people to not only kill
pigs, but also to skin, slaughter, and devour them. You are allowed to eat pork chops, for
example. Or ham; you can eat ham with
beans, or without. It doesn’t matter. Either way it is legal, and its not
considered cannibalism, even though there are people who might argue that pigs
are people too.
When I eat pigs, I like all the reminders that it was once a
pig to be gone. I don’t like to eat ham
hocks for example because you can see the shape of the feet. A pig’s head would be a horrible thing to
eat. I don’t like pork rinds
either. Or pork tongues, I don’t like or
want to eat pork tongues.
If I saw a pig’s head on the table at a pig roast, I’d
probably take the apple out of its mouth, and try to interview him.
I’d ask him, for example, whether his family is proud of
him. I’d ask him, for example, if he’d rather sit at a chair than to lay there
on the tray like that. Of course, I know
he wouldn’t answer. I’m not crazy.
Pork chops and ham are okay though. They don’t remind of pigs at all. I am more than okay with eating pork chops
and ham.
Now eating a dog would be different.
My own dog is a mutt, but he looks a lot like a golden
retriever. I treat him well, and he has
never tried to eat me, nor I him. I
think that if I were dead and that if he and I were locked in a room, that it
would be okay for him to eat me. But I’d
want to make sure I was dead first. For
example, I wouldn’t want to just be passed out, and have my dog eat my hand,
say, and then wake up from being passed out to find that I couldn’t paint
anymore.
So I hope dogs don’t eat you if you are just asleep, or only
passed out.
I guess it would be okay for a pig to eat me too – but only
in the right circumstances. I wouldn’t
want to be served on a platter so everyone can see my fat torso. Instead, I’d rather be cut up into little
stew beef pieces and cooked in a very rich, winey broth.
I don’t think I’d want to be killed just for that
either. I’d only want them to eat me if
I died by other causes, for example disease, or accident.
And if they don’t want to eat me, that’s okay too. They can just bury me in a big field and
plant a tree in my mouth.
Chapter 16
Over Coffee Again
Billy called up again and said that he wanted to talk to me
over coffee.
I went to his studio, and was surprised to see he had
finished a new picture and that it was pretty damn good.
We got up on the bridge over coffee, and he told me that he
had an idea about what I could do with all the money.
Over coffee he said that it might be a good idea to invest
the money in some kind of company. “A
soap company, for example, would be a good, clean investment.”
Over coffee I agreed that a soap company would probably be a
good investment.
Over coffee, I said that I would look in to it. I will too.
I like soap. It has always served
me well when used as directed. Other
times though, it has not been so helpful, like the time when I tried to make
soap shoes.
Chapter 17
The Soap Shoes
Incident
On my fourteenth birthday I got a box of soap as a
present. I took the soap back to my
room, and put it under my bed. I was
fourteen, and soap isn’t what I really wanted for my birthday. What I wanted for my birthday was a BB gun,
and some new pajamas and a new transistor radio. I didn’t get any of those things. Instead, I got a big box of soap.
My dad came up to my room.
“You look disappointed Kiddo!” he said.
I said, “Umm.”
“Well,” my dad said, “When life gives you lemons, make
lemonade!”
I thought for a moment and then replied, “So – if life gives
me soap – I should make soap-ade?”
Dad laughed.
“No, son. What I mean
is that you take what you get, and you make it into something that you really
like and want. Take that soap, for
example. That’s a lot of soap. You could potentially make it into something
new, which would far surpass any other Birthday Presents that anyone has ever
given you.”
And on that note, my dad left me there to think it
over.
A little later, I was looking at the soul of my shoe. I thought that maybe I could make a bunch of
shoes out of the soap and that I could then sell those shoes to people who were
obsessed with having clean feet.
Then I went over to the box of soap and opened it. I took out every bar of soap that was in
there and took all the paper off of them.
Then I built a little fire in the corner and put a metal bowl on
it. I melted the bars of soap in the
metal bowl. Then I poured the soap into
shoe-shaped molds that I made out of some old plaster.
For straps, I used the ribbons that mom had used to wrap my
birthday package. I have to admit, those
were some elegant looking soap sandals that I made. Teva should start selling a line of sandals,
not made of soap, that look like them.
They would be a big hit.
It was raining outside when I took my new shoes out for a
test walk. At first they worked just
fine. And with the rain pounding down,
they started to get really foamy.
They also unfortunately got very slippery and soon I was
sliding down the street unable to stop myself.
I slipped and slipped, until I got to the river. Then I fell into the river and found myself
caught in the current.
Luckily for me, the soap floated, because I can’t swim.
After awhile I managed to get out of the river.
When I got home, mom pointed at my bubble-shoes and
laughed. “What happened to you?” she
asked.
I just took off the shoes and went to my room. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I
hadn’t already made all the soap into sandals.
As it was, I couldn’t even take a shower after my ordeal, because I
didn’t have any soap.
Chapter 18
Over Coffee Part 3
Over coffee, Billy and I laughed about the soap
incident. “You had better be careful
with that money then!” he said.
Over coffee, I asked if he wanted another fistfight, and he
just smiled and said oh, no, I’m fine.
Once a week is plenty.
No longer over coffee I walked home and thought about those
soap shoes. I bet there is a way to make
soap shoes that don’t make your slide so much.
Maybe soap shoes with leather straps.
Chapter 19
This is the Chapter
in Which Nothing Happens.
Nothing is going to happen in this chapter; so don’t hold
your breath.
Wait for it…
Chapter 20
Ashley’s Mom
When Ashley’s mom came over, I gave her some tea. We drank tea together in my studio. I asked her how the nursing job was coming
along. She said it was coming along
fine.
She told me that Ashley wanted to become an artist. I felt a little proud about this.
She also told me that Ashley mentioned that I’d come into
some money.
“I guess that’s true,” I said. “Would you like to have some?”
She said no thanks, that she had plenty of money. Then she suggested that Ashley might need
some for College.
“But she’s already been to College.” That’s what I said.
“Oh, yes. When you
are right, you are right.”
So, not having much to talk about, we sat there and watched
the steam dancing our names over our teacups.
Eventually, she started to get bored.
“Remember that night in the emergency room?” she asked.
“I sure do,” I replied.
Then she stood up and walked over to me. She sat down on my
lap. Just like always, I suddenly responded with my strange
incentive. She pulled up her skirt and
didn’t let it go to waste. “Kiss me like
a Stranger,” she said. And I did.
Later on I was painting while she slept on the couch.
One of the ghosts of the University showed up.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m the ghost of Richard Brautigan.”
I didn’t believe him of course. I know that Richard Brautigan is dead, but I
also knew that he had not lived in Milwaukee.
Not ever. So I smiled the smile I
save for the worst sort of liars and I said to him “You must be lying.”
“No,” he said. “I
have been haunting an aero plane traveling between California and Billy
Mitchell field. Somehow today I managed
to get off. Now I’m here.”
I just went on painting and refused to listen to the ghost
of Richard Brautigan.
He told me he’d come back later.
I went to my bookshelf and found my copy of “In Watermelon
Sugar”.
On the cover was a photograph of Richard Brautigan.. In fact, it was a Photograph of the same
Richard Brautigan that I just sent away.
“Humph,” I said.
I finished my painting by adding the ghost of Richard
Brautigan to it. He was standing by the
refrigerator in the painting, under a bare yellow light bulb, checking to see
if there was any butter. In the picture,
Richard Brautigan is thinking about using the butter as a new kind of dental
floss.
I don’t think it will work.
Chapter 21
Season the Day
I tried to explain to Ashley’s mom when she woke up that
there was an old saying, “Carpe Diem” and I was trying to remember what it
meant in case I wanted to use it in a sentence.
Ashley’s mom thought about it for a few moments.
Then a light bulb went on over her head.
“It means season the day!”
That sounded right, but when I tried to understand exactly
what that meant, I was a total failure in doing so.
A little while later, I went into the kitchen and found a
bottle of curry. I used this by
sprinkling it on today’s date on the calendar.
“Now,” I thought, “I have seasoned the day.”
A little later I was painting some more and Ashley’s mom was
sleeping some more. That is the second
time I saw that ghost of the University, Richard Brautigan.
“Its not season the day,” he said. “Its sneeze the day. It is a saying that old doctors used before
there was actual medicine to use for curing things. If somebody came to them, these doctors would
say “Sneeze the day” in Latin, because a lot of their patients were Mexican,
and it sounded more powerful. “Carpe
diem, they would say. Carpe diem.” And even though these doctors had no
medicine, people felt better!”
I thought long and hard about that. Finally I looked it up on the Internet. I found out that both Ashley’s mom and that
ghost of the University Richard Brautigan were wrong.
“Carpe diem” actually means seize the day.
In fact, the symbolic meaning of Carpe diem is very similar
to the advice my dad once gave me. What
Carpe diem means is actually “when you get lemons, make lemonade.”
A little bit later, I got interested in Ashley’s mom again,
so I woke her up with a special touch to a special place. This time we were both lying on the couch so
it was different from the times when she sat on my lap. I remember wishing, as we both drifted off to
sleep, that I could be in two places at once.
If I was, I could have painted the two of us on the couch using my
strange incentive.
Chapter 22
Ashley Again
Ashley stopped by later.
She had a chameleon with her, on her shoulder. A small golden chain went from around its
neck to her neck. It was like the two of
them were conjoined twins, conjoined by the metal chain. She looked very pretty today, almost exactly
like her mom.
She took a deep breath and smiled.
“I can always tell when you and Mom have been playing
games. I can smell it on the air. “
I snorted at her. She
shouldn’t be aware of such things yet as her mother and I doing that thing we
do sometimes.
“Its okay! Said Ashley. “I’m not a kid anymore. I know what you guys do.”
I relaxed a little because I knew she was right. Even so I wished she wouldn’t talk about
it. She might not be a kid anymore, but
she definitely is a lot younger than her Mom and me. She is, in fact, young enough to be our
daughter.
A little later I went over to see what she was working
on. She had a brand new plate, and she
was drawing on it with sugar ink. The
image was one of her chameleon blending into a background patterned with
geometric shapes. Then I went back to my
painting.
A little later, I heard her say “Fuck!”
I quickly went over to see what the problem was.
She was washing her plate under hot water and rubbing it
gently, like I showed her the other day.
“Look,” she said.
“It’s all washing off!”
I reached in and took the plate from her.
“No,” I said. “Look here – and here.”
She did. When she did
she saw what I saw, that there were tiny deposits of etching ground in what
appeared, at a distance, to be large expanses of bare metal.
“Its just that those areas were densely drawn. You’ll see when you get it in the acid!”
Together, we went to the overhead hood where the acid trays
were. Carefully so as not to splash
Ashley placed her etching plate into the acid bath. I handed her a goose quill from the tin. Together we bent over the plate and gently
she brushed the bubbles forming away with the feather.
“See?” I said.
We let it sit in the bath for twenty minutes.
Meanwhile, we each had a cup of tea.
I went to the marble slab and poured out some vine black
pigment and a mass of oil. I mulled the
mix into a very nice slab of ink.
Then I checked the press to make sure the drum was at an
even setting. Sometimes when Billy comes
in he leaves the press all cockeyed.
Ashley took her plate out of the acid and rinsed it at the
sink. Together, we looked at it closely
and now it was obvious that the ground had held and all her marks were
there.
I handed her a can of mineral spirits. She splashed the plate with it and used a rag
to wipe off the etching ground, and dried the plate thoroughly.
When Ashley prints her etchings, she uses a streamlined
process.
Instead of using her fingers to spread the ink over the
plate, she uses a straight wedge of mat board like a squeegee to spread
it. Then she skips the Tarleton wipe and
goes directly to a newspaper, then a hand wipe.
When she was done wiping down the plate, it looked spectacular.
We laid the plate on the press, blotted a fresh sheet of
copperplate paper, set it over the plate, and lowered the blankets. Ashley cranked the press. We were both breathless waiting to see the
print on the other side. I lifted the
blanket so that she could lift the print away.
It was beautiful.
Chapter 23
How to Make a Sugar
lift Etching
Its really not difficult to make a sugar lift etching.
First you make the sugar ink. I know of two good ways to make sugar ink.
The first way to make it is to get some very good cane
sugar. In a small dish, heat up half a
bottle of India drawing ink. When it
begins to steam, but before it boils, add about two teaspoons of sugar to it,
stirring until it is completely dissolved.
Pour the ink from the dish back into the bottle to reconstitute it with
the rest of the ink.
The second way is easier.
Take a bottle of India drawing
ink. Pour a little bit out to make room
for the sugar. Now, take a bottle of
Caro syrup. Replace what you took out
with the syrup. Close the bottle and
shake it vigorously.
Both of these methods produce workable sugar ink.
The other thing you need to do is to prepare the etching
ground. You can use regular liquid
etching ground, but it tends to be a bit thick, and often dries leaving ridges
where the brush passes. This can make
the size and shape of your lines distort.
So the best thing to do is to mix your liquid ground with lacquer
thinner.
It is best to test the ground on an old plate. Paint some on. If your zinc plate looks like a golden plate,
then you have the correct solution. If
your zinc plate looks more brown than metallic, add a little more lacquer
thinner to the mixture.
When both materials are prepared, clean your plate with
alcohol and allow it to dry thoroughly.
When it is dry, make a drawing on the plate using a brush or a pen to
apply the sugar ink, just as you would draw with regular India drawing
ink. If the ink is sticky, or doesn’t
flow well, add a little water, but only enough to make the ink workable.
When your drawing is finished, allow it to dry.
Then, using a fresh, clean very soft wide brush, paint a
very thin and even coat of your liquid etching ground mixture over it.
When the etching ground is dry and hard, take your plate
over to the sink. Turn on hot
water. Run the hot water over the plate
while gently rubbing with your fingers.
Be careful not to scratch the etching ground with a fingernail or
callous.
Where you have drawn with ink, the ground will crack and
lift away from the plate. Keep rinsing
the plate until all the drawn areas have lifted clean.
Proceed then as you would with any etching, using the acid
bath and timing you normally use.
If your drawing included large black areas, you can improve the
quality of black on them by adding an aquatint resin to the plate midway
through the etching process.
This will texture the lowest areas of those large black
shapes, allowing them to hold ink better.
Print your plate as normal
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