My Husband’s Restaurant Choices

Photographer - Tobi Brun

My Husband’s Restaurant Choices

Our first date was at Chili’s, a nice chain restaurant in Starkville, Mississippi, not far from our town of West Point. I remember that my husband didn’t say much, so I didn’t say much
either. We had a good meal and even shared a chocolate brownie with ice cream for dessert. I had a nice time. I thought we got along well, and enjoyed each other’s company, even though we
didn’t talk much, when on dining dates. But somehow, after we got married, the restaurants we frequented became less and less familiar to me, further and further away, and more and more like country buffets and soul food, with less ambiance, no style, American Flags, Elvis statues, and old Mississippi flags with the confederate symbol still on them.

What happened?

For Jimmy’s birthday I was invited to eat at a steakhouse in Columbus, Mississippi with some of his family. He chose a few family members to join him for his birthday meal. We went to Old Hickory Steakhouse. This is where he gets his favorite steak. The best steak anywhere around. The best steak ever made. I realized after a while, that Jimmy’s going out to eat had nothing to do with the
restaurant. It was all about the food. And when he got a hankering for a certain food, he would not sit still until we were on our way to go and get that food, everything else be damned. When
he got a craving for catfish, we would either go to Pheba’s Diner, out past our house, or all the way out near Aberdeen, Mississippi to The Friendship House. And Jimmy never talked to me
when we dined out. He just ate. He would ask me where I wanted to eat. I would answer with some really tasteful restaurant that had atmosphere and Pinot Grigio for me to drink and relax, back when I drank alcohol. Then he would suggest a new restaurant that he wanted to try out, way out somewhere, and the question of where I wanted to eat was just a formality. I would go, even though I dreaded the experience, and the food. It became interesting to me to see how these places were built and to see their decor. Outside there was usually a lot of metal siding. Inside, there was wood. Lots of wood paneling. Some of these restaurants were in huge tin warehouses, or small buffets with soul food. There were wagon wheels and signs on the walls with sayings like,

“Welcome, Y’all!”

I was deflated a bit each time we went to one of his restaurants. It chipped away at my soul and didn’t help our marriage. Jimmy would eat and eat and would not speak. I grew weary of this and we finally started eating at places we could both enjoy. The new Longhorn Steakhouse in Columbus was one, with its cattle motif. We ate often at Little Dooey’s in Starkville, which is a hodgepodge of signs and framed photographs and rooms with tables and chairs, added on, but the food was really, really good. And Mexican restaurants were fair game. As the years went by, I coaxed Jimmy to talk some as he ate, to notice the interiors of the restaurants, and to allow me to eat at restaurants of my choosing. I became vegan, so steakhouses were no longer an option unless they had salads. Now when Jimmy gets the sudden desire to go eat at one of his faraway restaurants or a new restaurant that he wants to try out, he asks his family members to go with him. I simply do not go. I reached my limit.

After twelve years of marriage, many years of cooking deer steaks and cornbread at home, and traveling to remote locales to try out a buffet with steak and fried everything, including frog legs, I know what Jimmy likes in a restaurant, and he knows what I like. I stopped cooking for him after a while, and now we get groceries for meals that we can prepare together. He has learned to speak with me when we have lunch or dinner. But he has a few manners that need changing. He will talk with his mouth full, he wipes his nose and mouth with a napkin and doesn’t fold the napkin over, and leaves it on the table, and the worst part of all that I’ve had to get accustomed to, is that he eats like a prisoner. Yes, he hovers over his plate with his elbows or arms on the table on either side of his plate, and he doesn’t hold his fork properly. He shovels it all in quickly, while having to have a piece of bread or cornbread in his left hand the entire time, from which to take a bite, in between feeding his face. I’m sorry, reader, for speaking this way about my husband, but this is so pronounced that I cannot let this go unsaid. I finally learned that the reason he eats this way is because he grew up in a large family with eight siblings. And out of habit. I cannot change this about him. Believe me, I’ve tried. Jimmy was diagnosed with microscopic colitis and celiac disease and was supposed to eat gluten free. He went through a spell when his digestive system was acting up, which doesn’t happen much now, and once, after we ate at La Fiesta Bravo in town, we left the restaurant and he vomited right in front of the restaurant where he was clearly visible to everyone on the highway and many people coming from and going in the restaurant. This was horrible. I felt
terrible for him but we laughed about it wondering what the wait staff at the restaurant must have thought, or the customers—that the food must have been really bad. What an embarrassing thing
to happen, to regurgitate out front. This happened on at least three occasions, which was not a good advertisement for their restaurant.

We dine out quite often now, and we have learned to tolerate many things from each other. Now I care more about the food than before, noticing my own cravings and hunger. We
talk a lot, and Jimmy cares more about the type of establishment in which we dine. I watch his eating habits which have not changed. But Jimmy eats more healthily—more salads and
vegetables. We eat in Starkville quite often, and much to my disdain, we sometimes eat at the Friendship House where the food is good, but the people and atmosphere are foreign to me. Jimmy likes the catfish at The Ritz’s Magnolia Restaurant downtown, thank goodness, because I see people I know, when we dine there sometimes. And as our relationship has improved, Jimmy is eating healthier.

I love to visit Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law on the Coast. We have our favorite places to go for good seafood. We went to a restaurant called Parish. That’s Paris with an “h.” It was expensive. The food was great, I had a lot in common with the waitress who was an artist, and we drank a lot of wine and beer. And we laughed. We laughed so much it hurt. We had so much fun. As we were leaving we noticed a lounge in the restaurant. We looked in and decided to sit in the lounge to continue our evening there. We ordered dessert drinks. We laughed again non-stop, and had the best time. It was a night I’ll never forget. We have dined out at the ——Oyster, and several other great restaurants, including Commander’s Palace, in New Orleans where our niece
lives. We ate at Lebanon's quite often, and we recently found a great Thai restaurant, Pomelo. Every dining out experience is different with Jimmy. I think I’ve raised the bar a bit for his restaurant selections now. He likes Taste, a really chic restaurant in Starkville, Mississippi, and several other places that seem posh compared to what we were used to. I don’t drink alcohol anymore so that cuts down on the total cost. I like to see Jimmy enjoying his meals. He has become more aware of his surroundings and he likes most of the places I like, which is an achievement on my part. I know we will continue to dine out and hope that our experiences will become more enjoyable.

Jimmy has recently started speaking even more to me during our meals. This is a historic achievement. But he still lacks table manners which may never change, but I am hopeful. I know
one thing: Dining out with Jimmy is never boring. And that makes up for any of his lack of restaurant refinement.

Jane Dill is an emerging writer from Mississippi. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in French, and a BA in Fine Arts. She travels often to Paris.

The Fish Tank

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Fish Tank

I’m sixteen.

The boy’s dishwater blonde hair is just long enough to cover his eyes. I call him a boy, but my memory contains no detail of his age. He could be a man. He is older than me—that much I’m sure of. I let my mind tell me he is something between—on the verge, maybe, of
manhood or of an adolescence that will stretch on longer than it should. Or, of something else I can’t quite name. I gaze at him through the fringe of his unwashed hair. His eyes aren’t what hold my attention, but the knowledge that he’s high on painkillers. He parts his hair so strictly down the middle it makes me think of Moses striding through the Red Sea, sandals on dry ground. The boy rubs my feet between his warm palms. It’s intriguing—the way he asks permission to do this. My heartbeat hammers my ears. Without hearing myself say yes or no, I watch him reach down and slowly lift one of my feet into his lap, followed by the other. Another boy exists somewhere in the dark periphery, in the back of the trailer with my best friend, L.

She follows him, her hand in his, until they disappear into the bedroom at the end of the hallway. They stay quiet for a while, long enough for her absence to become a marked presence in my memory. As the boy rubs my feet, I stare across the room into a fish tank casting a purple glow into the dusk. Late summer clouds flare up inside the window frame above the aquarium, pink and orange, before they fade, and the sky goes slack. The darkness turns to nothing, a deep canvas for the pinprick of stars and the sound of cicadas wailing at the new moon. The purple glow reflects off the inky glass. In hindsight, I understand the nothing that happens that night is something. He, the boy with the hair parted in the middle, addicted to pills, doesn’t require anything of me but to lie still while he touches my feet. Yet, there is an unasked question—some dread I can’t put my finger on. I feel the purple lure of the fish tank stain me as I lie on that couch. It lodges in me then, leaning me toward neither red nor blue, but a sick leaching of both together—something secondary, a stalling in the middle. The purple is inextricable. I define it now as the yearning of my adolescence—the desire to be desired. I don’t want this boy, but I do want more than this.

Last year, I turned forty. Since then, I’ve been toying with the idea of reckoning, wondering what the enduring questions of my life are as I allow myself to peer over my shoulder, back into the blank spaces, the irrelevancies that seemed so important to my younger self. Why did I think certain trivialities were important and would remain so, even after the memory faded from view?

Out of the ether of my past, this foot rub materializes to something concrete, like an anchor keeping me in place, dropped somewhere deep into the purple glow of that fish tank. It marks time, denotes context. Now, I look back at myself and think, this is the first thing that ever happened to me. I am born here. But, really, this foot rub is the birth of my curiosity. About myself, about what can happen—about L. and what she does in the back bedroom with the boy she follows there. The question grows inside me—when will whatever is happening for her happen for me? When will a man look at me like that? Take me by the hand, lead me somewhere dark? When will I be chosen?

Something in the fish tank’s purple glow reminds me of a fever dream, some unknowable landscape unleashed in my psyche. There is the feeling of being sunk, delving under. Of something not quite right. It is like the flicker of a television into a dark room, only nothing moves. The purple should be banal—simply the color of the pebbles at the bottom of the aquarium flinging their hue on the far wall. But, nothing is always something, the way the color floats up, skims the surface of memory. The purple emerges from the depths. I imagine the fish study me through the bleary wall—they wonder why I let that boy touch me at all.

This—the fish tank and the foot rub—is the first of many times I’ll wait on L. That night marks the beginning of something I can’t yet see, how she is becoming older than me, even though we are a month apart—my birthday in June and hers in July—Cancer and Leo, the best of
friends. That night, when L. follows the boy back to that bedroom, down the dark hallway, she begins to know things I won’t know until much later. This widening distance between us plants the first seed of jealousy in me. Even though I can’t define it yet, I want her freedom. There is nothing holding her back. Where I am constrained internally, L. is always completely herself.

So much of who I am back then is wrapped up in almost. In falling short of what could happen, who I could be. L. is different—she acts, makes decisions. She goes places, does things. Has relationships with boys. I tag along, always an outsider. An observer. I am forever on the couch getting foot rubs from boys, while she is inside a boy’s room, doing something else. It seems to me that L. lives as if she has nothing to lose. Carefree, grown-up. Sophisticated, even when we are still too young to know what that means. She seems headed, sometimes, for destruction, but her consequences glitter like sunlight on a rain puddle. I want this lure, this shine. Sometimes—often—she follows the voice of the Sirens, but even when she crashes on the shore and burns like a shipwreck aflame on the horizon, it is a beautiful burning. She makes sure of that.

Now, I think back to the version of me who is there, staring into that aquarium. I wonder, what do know now that I didn’t know then? That night is near the beginning of something big and disastrous in L.’s life. But I am still on the verge, still looking for whatever it is that will catapult me into adulthood. I am still looking for the thing—the boy, the love—that will take me off the rails. I believe then that growing up comes hand in hand with heartbreak. On some level I am right. Something about the inertia in the scene frightens me. I can’t be bothered to say no to something I don’t want. I can’t be bothered to turn on the light or tell L. I don’t want to wait on her. Or to tell that boy no, I don’t want him to touch me.

Any difference in the realm of memory, any alteration, a slight shift, and the tectonic plates of the past can move. Everything I know could be different, shifted slightly to the left, just one degree off. But, then, I wonder, is it possible to remember something wrong? Or are things just how they are, and how I remember them is how they exist, hard and fast, in my memory— incorrect or not? That’s the kind of moment it is, looking into the fish tank, into the purple murk. It is pivotal, a hinge. Something in my perception tells me the fish tank and the foot rub isn’t all there is, isn’t the whole evening, the whole story. There is everything else, too—and, how I feel about it. L. is in the bedroom at the back of the house. In my mind this amounts to her being chosen. I am on the sofa cringing as the boy grazes each of my toes with the tips of his fingers. This is the first and most pronounced of many tiny moments of comparison. I don’t want to be chosen by the same boy who chooses L., I just want to be wanted, desired. And, I want to be anywhere else but here.

Whatever is right in front of me is there because of what lies behind me—I am a product of accretion, an accumulation of pasts. I am made of little litterings of light flung on the path after I already walked it, the half-dried footprints leading me through wet, disintegrating leaves. This single memory of having my feet rubbed is the context of all my accumulated selves at one point in time, staring into the swirling purple water. It comes to mind the way a shadow might materialize. An image floats up, out of the darkness, like a candescent creature in dim water. I’m surprised by the persistence of this memory—such a seemingly meaningless event, but an experience all the same. What other moments are there just like this, ones too insignificant to even remember?

I don’t want to imbue meaning into a scene that holds none—I can only say it was a turning point. A scene I look back on now and think oh yes, that happened. And, and then, everything changed. It’s a flag planted in the soil, marking the place where everything ended, and everything else began. It’s the kind of thing only picked up on the trail walking back, only noticed in hindsight, on the return journey. It comes to mind that I may never know what I was doing—when I let that boy rub my feet. The soft accumulation of my experience may never make sense to me.

Behind me, silhouettes creep slowly. The room I occupy—so recently filled with golden radiance—now brims with cool shadow. I watch as the dog follows a warm block of light cast from the storm door across the wood floor. The sun disappears, buried in blue. I sit wondering if what I feel is regret, or if it is simply the way time passes, how memory discards absence, abandons it on equal footing with presence.

Anna Oberg is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Hunger Mountain Review, The South Dakota Review, Mud Season Review, Pidgeonholes, Causeway Lit, The Maine Review, decomp Journal, The Festival Review, and Split Rock Review, among others.

Birthdays Are for Redefining

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Birthdays Are for Redefining

I stare at the names in my Snapchat contacts and idle my finger above the “create group chat” button. I am in the early stages of creating a plan to celebrate my twenty-second birthday, which is a week away, and I need to decide who I will invite to a party that has not yet been planned. As I look at the names of people I have known for years, I hesitate over whether to pull them all into a virtual room and discuss the details of a day celebrating me or if I should scrap the idea altogether. The names of these people once felt comfortable in my mouth along with the words “they are my friend,” but over the last few months, I have found a sour taste poisoning the confidence in that sentiment. It is normal to grow apart from people you were once very close with. That’s what people older than me would say. But is it normal to question if someone is your friend at all or if they ever have been? I question this after years of built-up papercuts that have turned into a gash, scarred over, but still sore.

In the past, my birthday was a sacred day, it was a day that got to be about me. People were nice to me on my birthday and that was huge to a little girl who spent most other days being picked on or excluded. Everyone wanted to come to my birthday, as I spent weeks planning the themes and details of the celebration. It didn’t matter where we went. The arcade, the waterpark, or my mom’s basement where we set up couch forts and stayed up all night. My birthdays were the most fun. Even though I had lots of people to invite to a birthday, the group of friends I grew up with were not very healthy. They talked violent amounts of gossip about one another, got into fights (sometimes physical), and played other friends against the one they were mad at, leaving them

isolated. I knew at the time, even at age eleven, that relationships like that were toxic, but I wanted to be liked, wanted to have friends, needed to have “friends” to invite to a birthday. At age eleven I felt like a friend was a person you should be loyal to no matter what, but my notion of loyalty was to allow others to walk all over me, while I provided support and companionship to those, who in hindsight, didn't even like me.

Merriam-Webster defines a “friend” as “A person who has a strong liking for and trust in another.” Strong liking. Trust. By this definition, I have only ever had one fully platonic “friend” that I had been sure liked me and who I felt mutual trust with, a girl who I no longer speak to because of her lifestyle choices involving drugs, men, and morality. I held onto her for a long time while she continually chose her lust for self-destruction, I wanted to be loyal, but you can only tell someone so many times why she shouldn't be doing hard drugs and why nothing is worth getting put in juvie before the repetition becomes exhausting.

I grew up wanting a perfect TV friendship. One where the two besties would see each other every day; and have each other's backs amidst the rumors, boy troubles, and growing pains; one where I could confidently call someone my “best friend” without awkward hesitation that I was stepping on someone else's toes. But as I've gotten older, I wonder if that wish was realistic. I called Brittany Dunham, a girl I had known for years, my best friend one time. I unintentionally did it in front of Kailee, a girl who has known Brittany since she was a toddler, but who would also call her fat and dumb behind her back. When my sentiment of our relationship slipped, Brittany stared at me with her giant blue eyes and froze, looked at Kailee’s glaring face, and said I

was “one of her best friends.”
Since the early two-thousand-tens, musician/actress Selena Gomez and country-turned-pop icon Taylor Swift have been best friends. They are often seen by the paparazzi on outings from lunches or shopping sprees, they attend one another’s events and concerts, and they almost always sit together at award shows, whispering gossip back and forth to one another. At surface level, they are what I wanted growing up, a supportive, loving sister who had my back, despite the rumors of being a poor performer and needing autotune to sound good. But as I have gotten older, I've learned that a 100% supportive friend may not be realistic, and I find it strange that they have never made a song together. Maybe a “friend” isn't someone you share everything with, whatever the reason as to why they haven't made music together, it seems like these two stars don't mix business with personal.

I read a book back in elementary school titled Friendship According to Humphrey by Bett G. Birney. The books follow a school pet hamster named Humphrey who, through wacky adventures, learns what being a “friend” means. This often involved using kind words, not discussing someone unfairly behind their back, including them in conversation and plans, and respecting them in every general sense. I wanted to have friends like Humphrey did and wanted to be a good friend.

Ashlynn, one of the names in the Snapchat contacts, told me I wasn't being a good friend a few weeks before finals. She couldn't understand why I, a full-time student working six hours a day, did not want to come to her apartment after every shift and watch a movie with the rest of our

friends. She didn't understand why I didn't want to be around my friends after a shift and why I wanted to go home to rest and do homework. “You can do your homework here,” she argued, while her baby boy screamed for more milk, and her boyfriend screamed at his video games. I wanted to be around my “friends”, I loved them, but can someone be a “friend” if they don't see each other at least once a week? Does friendship expire after not seeing one another for a specific amount of time? I wanted to prioritize a full night's rest over my friends. Did that make me a bad friend? Ashlynn seemed to think so. I ended up apologizing and said I would be there next time. I wonder how many times a week Selena and Taylor see one another.

Scrolling through the names on my phone and analyzing them, I can’t help but feel frustrated by what I was seeing before me. The Oxford Dictionary adds in their definition of a “friend” that it includes mutual affection exclusive of romantic or sexual feelings. I frown at the name of the boy who got me to sleep with him while I mourned the disintegration of my first serious relationship, claiming I could trust him with my thoughts and my body, only later to tell other friends that I came onto him. I shift my focus to another boy, one who more times than I can count tried to hit on me while drunk, and finally to the boy who would jump at the opportunity to sleep with me if my boyfriend and I broke up. If you asked him, he would claim he is my boyfriend’s friend like he is mine.

Shaking off my disappointment for the men I know, I move to the women. I stare at the name of a girl whom I have not seen more than twice since she got into a relationship almost a year ago, the friend whom I have helped move thrice who talks about me behind my back, and finally,

the girl who she talks about me to, who I had helped recover from drugs and held while she cried when her boyfriend cheated on her.

If there is a definition of a guy-friend I would say it is something like “A boy you initially view as a brother, who you trust like a brother, that is until they reveal they want to sleep with you, leading to you feeling uncomfortable wearing a swimsuit in front of them.” If I could define girl-friends it would refer to “Either the best mutual platonic sisterhood you could have, or the most isolating experience that creates insecurity, resentment and cattiness. Does not have to be mutual.”

My experience with “friends” has been a heartbreaking one filled with whiplash, but I doubt I have been a perfect friend in return. I have said the wrong things, and have been selfish and too opinionated, but I can rest easy knowing I have always tried to be at least an honest, loyal, and true friend, like Humphrey.

Swiping up and down my Snapchat contacts screen in frustration, it hits me. My definition of what constitutes a “friend” has changed since childhood, and I haven’t noticed until now. Unlike in the past, I don't have the desire to invite any of these people simply because they’re people I have attached myself to. I am tired of feeling the weight of expectations I am putting on myself and others while receiving minimal effort and maximum judgment from “friends” in return. My efforts are unappreciated, my intentions misunderstood, and while I have been allowing people all of my life to put their shoes on my neck, and accepting that this is the weight of a title like “friend,” I am denying myself other possible friendships in the name of loyalty. Or maybe it has been comfortable to stay in relationships that I don’t quite fit in.

I have known most of my friends for more than four years, some as long as six, which is enough time to have fights and disagreements with one another, but at the end of the day, we all are drawn back to the group by a bonfire kickback or a birthday, much like the one I have been mulling over. A lot of different factors could be what drew us back to one another like magnets even after nasty fights, but the most common theory among our group was that we viewed one another as “family.” I believed for a while that people you've known for a few years could hold a candle to blood relations, but my friends never paid for my tuition, never held my hand while I underwent medical procedures, they didn't even stop being friends with my ex after he cheated on me. My family did. What kept us together was familiarity, comfortability, and perhaps a trauma bond or two so that we would have people to go camping with, travel with, and celebrate birthday parties with.

It had taken me twenty-two years to learn how to be all right in becoming unattached to those who have not applied equal pressure, and for the first time in my life, feel comfortable celebrating myself with those whose intentions I do not need to question. Feeling a sense of assurance, I swipe my finger up, on the Snapchat app, erase it from my homepage, and with it, the half-baked group chat disappeared.

I decide, in the end, not to plan a big birthday party. Instead, at twenty-two, I conclude that I have to give up on needing to be celebrated, by people who are arguably not true “friends.” Instead, I will plan a small dinner for myself with my family and boyfriend and let the “friends” who give halfhearted questions about whether I am doing anything for my birthday, a gesture of meeting them at a local bar later that night, a place they would be either way, birthday or not.

Esabeau (Esa) Harrington is a senior creative writing student at Rocky Mountain College in Billings Montana. Her work often involves the relationships in her life and also includes themes surrounding mental and physical health.

THE ARTIST

Redbank Gorge, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, c1936-37

Watercolour over pencil on paper
28.7 x 26.8 cm

Private collection, Melbourne

Image © Albert Namatjira / Licensed by Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2017

THE ARTIST

Some say that art speaks for itself. The truth of the matter is not that it speaks for itself, but that it speaks for the artist. It is the means by which the artist, consciously or unconsciously, strives to reveal something deep inside him that he can only express through his art. It is the symbolic expression of his inner self, of his perception of the world and how he relates to it.

Nevertheless, that does not prevent neophytes such as myself from appreciating art for its face value, whether it be music, dance, theatre, painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, architecture or some other form of expression. My lack of technical knowledge and practical experience of art does not alter the fact that nature has endowed me, like most people, with a fairly keen sense of aesthetics as well as a reasonable dose of curiosity, intelligence and sensibility.

I have done a lot of travelling during my lifetime, both professionally and for pleasure. My childhood friends and family somewhat disparagingly describe me as a rolling stone. I have visited many countries, beginning with my own, Australia, and become familiar with many other peoples’ customs and cultures. In my travels, I have visited some of the world’s major art galleries and museums, chateaux and cathedrals and assisted at numerous exhibitions, ballets, concerts and theatrical performances. But I must say that what I appreciate most is a small number of artists who accompany me in my daily life. While I do not pretend to understand them any more than many other artists whom I also esteem and respect, I feel a greater degree of empathy and humanity in their company.

Among these few artists are the painters Maurice Utrillo and Albert Namatjira. Both were landscape painters. Utrillo was an urban landscape painter and Namatjira a remote rural landscape painter. Both spent most of their lives within a very small area close to where they were born, an aspect of many artists’ lifestyles that has always intrigued me. I suppose it is because it is so diametrically opposed to my own.

I happen to live just a stone’s throw from the modest lodgings on the rue du Poteau at the bottom of the hill of Montmartre in Paris where Suzanne Valadon gave birth, at the age of eighteen, to her son, Maurice. She never told him who his father was. In fact, she never told anybody. Perhaps she did not know herself. Maurice’s birth certificate indicated that she was a seamstress, but as she was young and pretty, she also posed for a number of painters who, naturally, could not resist her charms. Some of the better known were Puvis de Chavannes, Steinlen, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and a certain Miguel Utrillo y Morlius, a Spanish engineer, journalist and part-time painter, who accepted to recognize Maurice Valadon as his son, all the other painters Suzanne contacted having refused.

Suzanne later had a short-lived affair with the French composer and pianist, Erik Satie who lived up the hill on the rue Cortot in Montmartre. She moved into lodgings with her son Maurice just a few doors down the street from Satie’s apartment, in a small building which has since become the Montmartre Museum. Satie fell madly in love with Suzanne and proposed marriage after their first night. During the five months they were together, he composed the Danses Gothiques and he was so shattered after she left him, he composed Vexations. He never fell in love again.

Satie found work as a bar pianist in the Montmartre cabarets and met Claude Debussy one night in Le Chat Noir. Debussy was fascinated by some of Satie’s weird compositions and they became good friends. He was living with his bohemian girlfriend, Gabrielle Dupont, at the time, just around the corner from Satie and the Valadons, in a shabby little apartment.

All these places have become very familiar to me as I go past them five days a week from Monday to Friday when I do my footing, weather permitting. I say footing because I walk all the way up the hill, climbing up the countless flights of stairs until I reach Place Dalida where I take a brief pause sitting on a wooden bench before continuing on up the rue de l’Abreuvoir past La Maison Rose, so often painted by Maurice Utrillo, and then on up rue Cortot past the Montmartre Museum where Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo lived, followed by Satie’s apartment a little further along.

La Maison Rose (photograph by Rodney Crisp)

I walk on past the Montmartre water tower and turn left, towards the Sacré Coeur, circling around the back of the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, another favourite subject of

Utrillo’s paintings. It was consecrated 877 years ago, in 1147, and is one of the oldest churches in France. It is the church of the Montmartrois, the people of Montmartre. They never adopted the Sacré Coeur, leaving it to the tourists who seem to ignore the existence of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. Most of them walk past it without even noticing it.

On 15 August 1534, Ignatius of Loyola, a Spaniard from the Basque city of Loyola, and six of his companions, mostly of Castilian origin, all students at the University of Paris, met in a crypt beneath Saint-Pierre de Montmartre to pronounce the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. That was the foundation of the Jesuit Order of priests, which was given Papal approval through the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae in 1540.

Having circled around to the front of the church, I then turn left and walk around the Place du Tertre where the artists install their easels and paint portraits of the tourists. From there I stroll along rue Poulbot past the Salvador Dali Museum which is located in the building where I stayed briefly when I first arrived in Paris many years ago. The rue Poulbot is named after Francisque Poulbot, a painter, poster designer and illustrator, known for his humanitarian work with the poor children of Montmartre. He created illustrations representing the Parisian “titi”, a common term at the time for street children. One of his illustrations was of Gavroche, the popular character in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

From there, I turn left onto rue Norvins and usually pause for a few minutes in front of the Commanderie du Clos Montmartre, a small hexagonal-shaped, neo-renaissance style building that houses the wine brotherhood of the Clos Montmartre which produces about 500 litres of wine each year. It is one of the peculiarities of Montmartre.

Another peculiarity, not just of Montmartre, but of the whole of France, is that a glass of wine in a street café costs less than a glass of milk, even though the country produces five times more milk than wine. It is one of the world’s leading producers of wine and fifth producer of milk. But now that I think of it, it is true that I drank more milk than wine when I first arrived in France, whereas now, I drink more wine than milk. They say it is better for your health.

The present grape vines on the Butte Montmartre were planted in 1932, some years after the vineyard of a Benedictine Abbey on the Butte was devastated by phylloxera. The Abbey itself had been destroyed during the French Revolution. The new Gamay and Pinot Noir grape vines were planted by local residents and artists who were determined to preserve the area from rampant urban development. Each year, the October harvest, the Fête des Vendanges, draws thousands of visitors from the wine fraternity in the French provinces. Most of the wine is bottled and auctioned off for charity. I have a bottle of the 1993 cuvée réservée red, which I have not yet opened, sitting on the buffet in my living room.

The oldest wine brotherhood in France is the "Antico Confrarie Sant-Andiu de la Galineiro" formed in 1140 in Beziers, in the South of France. According to the International Federation of Wine Brotherhoods, there are several hundred in activity around the world today, mainly in countries with a long wine growing tradition but, increasingly in the new wine producing countries as well. They organise festive events, wine tasting and other promotional activities for their members. It seems that Australia is one of the rare wine producing countries in the world where the tradition has not yet taken root.

Rue Cortot (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

We have over sixty wine-grape growing regions in Australia with official Geographical Indication status. Though they are relatively recent on the international market, some of our wines are of world-class quality. They are not easily found in France, but the better-known reds are the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Eden Valley, Coonawarra and Margaret River wines.

Having accomplished my ritual visit to the Commanderie du Clos Montmartre, I finally head for home. As it is downhill all the way, I now revert to jogging, though the long flight of narrow stone stairs drops fairly sharply and I have to go carefully. Most of the streets on the Butte Montmartre are paved with cobble stones which makes the surface uneven and the going rather treacherous. The cobble stones were laid to accommodate cart horses pulling heavy loads of solid oak wine barrels and other provisions in wet weather to avoid getting bogged down. It is easy to strain an ankle if you are not careful.

On leaving the Commanderie I turn back along the rue Norvins a few metres and then left into the rue des Saules. I glance over to the right as I go past the rue Saint-Rustique, and look along it, up to the dome of the Sacré Coeur towering high above the buildings in the distance. Suddenly, the image of another Utrillo masterpiece flashes before my eyes. Reality and artistic representation mingle in my mind and are confounded.

I continue on down the rue des Saules, past a long line of tourist billboards on the stone wall on my left that relate the two years that Vincent van Gogh spent in Montmartre with his brother, Theo, in 1886 and 1887, against a background of some of his distinctive landscape paintings. In those days, Van Gogh could overlook the natural rural scenery of trees, shrubs and green pastures from the village on the top of the hill, that the urban expansion of Paris had not yet overtaken and replaced with cheap housing for the working classes that were constantly pushed further out to the outskirts of the city. It was a good vantage point in those days for his rural landscape painting. Maurice Utrillo, who was to capture the spirit and atmosphere of Montmartre through his urban landscape paintings in his unique, inimitable style, was only three years old at the time.

On reaching the Maison Rose once again, I turn left into the rue de l’Abreuvoir and follow it back down to Place Dalida, then down the two flights of stairs until I reach the café Le Refuge which I enter in order to pick up a copy of my favourite sports paper, L’Equipe, from the rack on the wall near the entrance. On returning outside to a table on the terrace, Cindy, the waitress, automatically brings me my coffee without a word being spoken.

Having caught up with the latest sporting news, and reassured my wife on my mobile phone that I am still alive and well, I leave my €2.30 on the table, put the paper back in the rack near the door, descend the last long flight of stairs and jog the final kilometre back home.

The Butte Montmartre is the highest landmark in Paris. It served as a strategic point of defence for the city. In 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when government troops attempted to recuperate the canons from the Montmartrois to stop them from continuing the war, despite the capitulation of the French government, they resisted violently, protesting that the canons belonged to them because they had been financed by public subscription. This immediately triggered an insurrection of the working-class population of Paris. It is known as the Commune. It only lasted two months but caused considerable loss of life and damage to public buildings and monuments.

A well-known folkloric association founded in 1921 that calls itself the Republic of Montmartre, proclaims in its charter that it continues to perpetuate the rebellious spirit and traditions of Montmartre, in addition to its humanitarian work. This is an allusion to the Commune. The organisation of the association mimics that of the French Republic with a president, prime minister and government, ambassadors, parliament and ordinary citizens. Current members include the mayor of Paris, an ex-president of France, as well as a number of other politicians and prominent personalities from various walks of life.

The square at the foot of the Sacré Coeur was named Square Willette at its inauguration in 1927, in honour of the first president of the Republic of Montmartre, the painter, caricaturist and illustrator, Adolph Willette. However, the socialist municipality of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, which includes Montmartre, decided, in 2004, to rename it Square Louise Michel in memory of the legendary figure, Louise Michel, who was a revolutionary, an anarchist and an active communarde during the insurrection of 1871. She spent a number of years in prison on various occasions during her lifetime and was deported to New Caledonia from 1873 to 1880 for her participation in the Commune.

Saint-Pierre de Montmartre (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

The Sacré Coeur is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Its raison d’être was determined by social and political forces difficult to imagine today but which continue to remain vivid in the memory of the secularists and socialists of Paris, especially in and around Montmartre. There was an unexpected epilogue to the long history of its construction.

War had broken out in July 1870 between France and Germany, which was under Prussian rule at the time, in what came to be known as the Franco-Prussian War. It only lasted six months. France capitulated in January 1871, putting an end to the siege of Paris which had lasted 132 days. Casualties were heavy, particularly on the French side: 139,000 deaths, 138,000 wounded and almost 400,000 prisoners of war as well as 100,000 interned in neighbouring countries. The Catholic authorities attributed the defeat to divine punishment which they asserted was amply merited due to a century of moral decline since the demise of the monarchy during the French revolution and the deep schism that had developed between legitimate

Catholics and royalists on the one hand and illegitimate secularists and socialists, on the other. In addition, they considered that the redeployment of the French military garrison protecting the Vatican in Rome, to the battle front during the Franco-Prussian War, leaving the Holy See unprotected, was totally inadmissible. They also severely condemned the ruthless assassination by the communards of the Archbishop of Paris and a number of other ecclesiastics during the secular uprising that broke out less than two months after the end of the war.

Legislative elections were held in France in February 1871 for the National Assembly (France had a unicameral legislature at the time), followed by a presidential election in 1873. The monarchists defeated the republicans at both elections with a comfortable majority.

This paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy and the influence of its close ally, the Catholic church, in state affairs. Although the tentative to restore the monarchy failed in the autumn of 1873 due to internal dissensions among the conservatives, the influence of the Catholic church was fully restored and resulted in the decision to erect a basilica, declared of public utility, as an act of repentance, on the site where the Commune originated, on the top of the Butte Montmartre.

Poster of Utrillo’s Rue Saint-Rustique (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

A decree of the French National Assembly of 24 July 1873, responding to a request by the Archbishop of Paris, specified that the construction of the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur is to "expiate the crimes of the Commune". Construction of the edifice commenced in 1875 and was completed in 1914. The Sacré Coeur was consecrated by the Archbishop of Paris in 1919.

However, public opinion had already moved back in favour of the republicans. A new constitution was approved by a majority of one vote in 1875, and the republicans won a triumphal victory in the legislative elections of 1877. In 1905, they passed a secular law that establishes the separation of church and state, excluding religion from the public sector and relegating all forms of religious expression to the private lives of those individuals who voluntarily adhere to it. The individual rights of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion were guaranteed by the state.

It is clear that the renaming of the square at the foot of the Sacré Coeur by the socialist municipal council of the 18th arrondissement of Paris in 2004, in honour of the revolutionary communarde, Louise Michel, was a barely disguised bras d’honneur to the anti-republican and anti-secular authorities who imposed the construction of the Sacré Coeur.

Revenge is a dish that is best served cold, so they say, and nobody could possibly serve it better than political and religious zealots. They have memories that transcend generations and are never lacking in imagination or guile when it comes to organising the feast.

The religious authorities had waited nearly half a century before taking their revenge on the Montmartrois and the Montmartre communal authorities waited nearly a century before retaliating. No sign of battle or open conflict, a subtle and silent war of insidious, offensive symbolism.

Hermannsburg, or Ntaria as it is now called, has little in common with Montmartre and despite the fact that the weather is fine most of the year, I doubt that I would want to go there to do my footing five days a week. It is located 125 km west of Alice Springs and was originally set up as an Aboriginal mission by two German missionaries. The town and surrounding land were handed back, in 1982, to the traditional owners who were granted freehold title.

Albert Namatjira was born there in 1902, when Maurice Utrillo was 19 years old. For the first thirty-three years of his life he did not have a family name. It was quite common for Aboriginal people to have just a first name or even just a nickname. His parents called him Elea and he was baptised Albert by the missionaries. He signed his paintings Albert and only adopted his father’s totemic name, Namatjira (“flying ant”), in time for his first solo exhibition which took place in Melbourne in 1938. Maurice Utrillo was eight years old when he received his family name from his mother’s chivalrous Spanish friend, Miguel Utrillo y Morlius.

Albert Namatjira was one of the first full-blooded Aboriginal peoples to obtain Australian citizenship. Six of them saw their names deleted from the Northern Territory’s register of wards of the state in 1957. Unfortunately, what was intended to be an exceptional privilege, created a series of situations and events that produced exactly the opposite effect. It was more of a handicap than a privilege. Albert and his wife, Ilkalita, baptised Rubina, discovered that as she and the children remained wards of the state they would not be able to live with Albert in the house they were planning to build in Alice Springs.

The following year, Albert was charged with supplying alcohol to a member of his tribe,

Henoch Raberaba, who was also a landscape painter, and sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. He had been condemned under white man’s law for respecting Aboriginal tribal law of sharing resources. After a public outcry and two appeals, the sentence was reduced to three months, but he finally served only two months of open detention.

Lutheran Mission, Hermannsburg (Photograph by Ludo Kuipers, 1990)

Australian citizenship had brought Albert and Ilkalita Namatjira nothing but pain, grief and misfortune. Nevertheless, citizenship was granted ten years later, in 1967, to all our indigenous compatriots, many of whom continue to experience the same difficulties as the Namatjiras integrating European culture and conciliating it with their own traditional culture. Obviously, this is not something they brought upon themselves. They had no say in the matter. It was imposed on them by the British Crown and government who decided to colonise the country, without regard to the sovereign rights of the indigenous peoples who had occupied it for over 60,000 years. We, non-indigenous Australians, have inherited the problem. The onus is on us to solve it as intelligently and as humanely as possible. But, unfortunately, we do not appear to be any closer to succeeding today than we were in 1958 when Albert Namatjira was sentenced to prison. In fact, the problem seems to be getting worse.

According to the 2016 census, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples represented 25.5% of the population of the Northern Territory and 84% of the prisoners. Their prison rate was 13 times that of the non-indigenous population. In Queensland, they only represented 4% of the population, but 32% of the prisoners. Their prison rate was 11 times that of the non-indigenous population. The suicide rate, for the whole of Australia, of the 5 to 17-year-old Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was 5 times that of non-indigenous youngsters of the same age bracket. This raises serious questions as to the effectiveness of the $33.4 billion the federal government spent directly or indirectly on Aboriginal affairs for the period 2015-2016. We have obviously got something wrong, somewhere along the line.

It is interesting to recall that in New South Wales, which has by far the highest Aboriginal population in Australia, a number of early decisions of the Supreme Court held that Aboriginal people were not subject to colonial criminal laws for crimes committed by themselves upon themselves. In 1829, in Rex v Ballard, Justice Dowling declared:

“Until the aboriginal natives of this Country shall consent, either actually or by implication, to the interposition of our laws in the administration of justice for acts committed by themselves upon themselves, I know of no reason human, or divine, which ought to justify us in interfering with their institutions even if such interference were practicable”.

Much to my regret, the wisdom of that judgement of Justice Dowling, nearly two hundred years ago, seems to have been lost in the sands of time.

Steinlen and Emilie (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

On his release from prison, Albert Namatjira was in a severe state of depression. His spirit was broken and he had given up the struggle. He no longer wanted to paint and died of a heart attack three months later, on 8 August 1959, less than a fortnight after his 57th birthday and just four years after the death of Maurice Utrillo in 1955. He was buried the following day in Alice Springs (Mparntwe, in the local Arrernte Aboriginal language).

Maurice Utrillo was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent de Montmartre. The image of the tomb he shares with his wife, Lucy, flashes through my mind every time I go past the cemetery when I do my footing. I also glance across to the statue of Steinlen holding his wife Emilie affectionately under his arm in the little square just opposite the cemetery where they too are buried. Their tomb is easily recognizable because it has a tree growing on top of it, right at the back of the cemetery, a little further up the hill from the Utrillos’ tomb. I imagine the tree’s roots have been holding them both affectionately in its arms for some years now, all three, tree roots and couple, inextricably intertwined in a fond embrace.

I think of Albert Namatjira as a bicultural (Euro-Aboriginal), remote rural, watercolour landscape painter of the first half of the 20th century. Whereas I see Maurice Utrillo as a French monocultural, urban landscape painter of roughly the same period, even though he commenced painting a little earlier. Neither of them can be said to have had any formal training in their art, but both received encouragement and advice from more experienced artists: Rex Battarbee for Albert Namatjira, and Suzanne Valadon for her son Maurice Utrillo. Battarbee had studied commercial art in Melbourne and later became a self-taught landscape painter. Suzanne Valadon was an autodidactic portrait and landscape painter and quite a remarkable woman, having risen from poverty and social insignificance to fame and relative affluence during her lifetime through her painting. She was a close friend of Edgar Degas who bought some of her paintings and used his influence to help her become the first female painter to be admitted to the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were among the celebrities who attended her funeral, in 1938, at the Cimetière parisien de Saint-Ouen, a Paris cemetery extra muros, just north of Montmartre, not far from where I live in the 18th arrondissement.

Redbank Gorge, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, c1936-37

Watercolour over pencil on paper
28.7 x 26.8 cm

Private collection, Melbourne

Image © Albert Namatjira / Licensed by Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2017

While Albert Namatjira and Maurice Utrillo were worlds apart, geographically, culturally, ethnically and socially, I feel that they also have much in common. I sense the harmony, the silence, the simplicity, the spirituality and the beauty fashioned by undisturbed nature that emanate from their paintings. Even though the decors are different, the landscapes of both artists are peaceful and reassuring, far from the demands, tensions and anxieties of daily life. They incarnate the calm serenity that time alone can produce and reveal the beauty that nature alone can create. The artists are no longer of this world, but their spirits live on in their paintings. Their presence is almost tangible. I have interiorised some of their landscapes and contemplate them at leisure in my mind.

Apart from his early period, there are no signs of people, animals, birds or any other living creatures in Albert Namatjira’s paintings. The streets are usually silent and empty in Maurice Utrillo’s urban landscapes too. It is, perhaps, for that very reason that they command my attention. They seem to have some important message to convey which they want me to apprehend and from which nothing should distract. I feel compelled to concentrate my mind and focus on their tableaux. But I sense that their landscapes are painted with a poetic vision of mystical significance which I do not understand. Still, I am happy to feel their presence and to enter into communion with them. Another distinctive feature of many of Namatjira’s paintings are the white ghost gum trees of his remote rural landscapes. A similar distinctive feature of Utrillo’s paintings is his white period.

Namatjira extracted soil from the hills of the landscapes he was painting and used it as pigment to paint them. Utrillo mixed plaster with zinc white to paint the old, ramshackle buildings in his urban landscapes. Namatjira often painted from memory. Utrillo often painted from postcards and also from memory. Namatjira was imprisoned for sharing alcohol with a member of his tribe. Utrillo became an alcoholic when he was 18 years old and was interned several times in psychiatric hospitals. Namatjira was born and raised in a Lutheran mission. Utrillo painted so many portraits of churches and cathedrals, he seemed to be obsessed by them. He became a fervent Catholic and was baptised at the age of 50. Both were prolific artists, often repeating the same landscapes over and over again.

Both lost the desire to paint before they died, Namatjira in a terrible state of despair and depression, Utrillo having finally found the appeasement that had been lacking all his life. His mother had taken the precaution of arranging for his marriage when he was 52 years old to Lucy Valore, the widow of a Belgian banker. Lucy successfully took over the relay from his mother, managing his affairs and maintaining stability in his life. Suzanne Valadon died peacefully three years later, in 1938, the year of Albert Namatjira’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne.

Maurice and Lucy lived in a comfortable home in Le Vesinet, one of the chic outer-suburbs on the western side of Paris, where Maurice learned to play the piano, wrote poetry and lived a quiet life. He died on 5 November 1955 at the age of 72 in the Splendid Hotel in Dax, a town in the south-west of France near the Spanish border, reputed for its feria and hot thermal springs. Lucy had taken him there for treatment of a lung disease he had contracted.

Mount Hermannsburg (Photograph by Ludo Kuipers, 1992)

Albert Namatjira and Maurice Utrillo were exceptional artists who managed to surpass the influences of their day and develop their own personal styles. Their landscapes were the product of their natural talents, the singularity of their childhoods, and the dramatic events that punctured their lives. Their vision and creativity remain a constant source of inspiration.

When I was living in my old family home in the bush on the Darling Downs, it only rained about once every five years and, when it did, the Myall creek broke its banks and we were flooded out. The same phenomenon now seems to be occurring with the winter snow in Paris. As far as I can recall, the last time there was any snow to speak of was in the winter of 2013. Perhaps it will snow again this year. I hope it does. I have been walking and jogging regularly through Utrillo’s coloured landscapes on the Butte Montmartre. I miss the melancholic landscapes of his white period in which he expressed the tristesse, despair and sentiment of alienation that oppressed him most of his life. It was during this period, from 1909 to 1914, that his art attained its apogee without ceding anything of its simplicity.

Every five years more or less corresponds to the rhythm of my trips back home to the Darling Downs where I still have an extended family, but no longer a close family. Time has taken its toll. At least I am free to go walkabout through some of Albert Namatjira’s iconic Central Australian landscapes when I visit my father’s grave in Tennant Creek, about 500 km north of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway. Albert Namatjira is just as much a link to my homeland now as the members of my extended family.

Rodney Crisp is an Australian author and freethinker who lives and writes in Paris near Montmartre, the favorite haunt of the 19th-century impressionist painters, between the modest lodgings in which Suzanne Valadon gave birth to her son, Maurice Utrillo, and the elegant bourgeois apartment of Paul Cézanne.

AXL, THE DOG

Photographer - Tobi Brun

AXL, THE DOG

In one of my previous careers, I worked at an art gallery. Back then, there was a celebrity with whom almost everyone in the neighborhood was familiar. Named after the lead singer for Guns and Roses, Axl was an English bulldog. For whatever reason, he never developed beyond the
size of a large puppy, which kept him adorable, even when fully grown. Though owned by the woman I worked for, he was also the mascot for her business, Mimi Ferzt Gallery, which represented post-Stalinist, nonconformist Russian and Baltic States art.

There is no Mimi Ferzt. In between occupants for the gallery space, an independent movie production filmed at the location and put the name Mimi Ferzt on the doors. The name is a play on words: “Me Me First.” In the film, Mimi was a gallery owner. With the name still prominently displayed, it was decided that keeping the name Mimi Ferzt added an allure and mystery to the gallery’s biography. We got a kick out of artists who told us that Mimi had said she promised to give them an exhibition. The gallery was a spacious, square room with a ceiling that reached a height equaling three stories. Other perks included stark white walls, polished wood floors, a century-old decorative tin ceiling and a large, custom built reception desk that had been left by the previous tenant, a museum that relocated to Connecticut. Having been a non-profit venue subleased to Mimi Ferzt, the monthly rent remained well below market value. It was located in the very desirable neighborhood of SoHo.

When I first met Axl, it was love at first sight...at least for me. Still a puppy, he would sit between my legs under the reception desk, and gently chew and lick my fingers. Within about 30 seconds, tiny red spots spread up my arm. I soon faced the realization that I was allergic to
Axl, as I am to most cats and some long haired dogs, such as Shelties, who have a double layer of dog fur that produces a dander similar to that of cats.

But I was not allergic to Axl’s coat... just his saliva. I was able to scratch his belly and pet him, but I had to stop him from kissing or cleaning me with his tongue. Sometimes I couldn’t resist allowing the affectionate bonding he offered. After a few moments of being licked, I would have to excuse myself to one of the gallery bathrooms and flood my arm with cool water and soap. In time, the rash would vanish.

Thanks to the size of the room, Axl and I were able to run around inside the gallery. Sometimes I would gallop or skip. I’m sure I looked ridiculous. On or off his leather leash, Axl began to prance next to me, like a miniature, short-legged thoroughbred. With all four paws off the
ground, he would arch his back, extend his front legs forward and hind legs behind him in what practically appeared to be a graceful ballet jump, which I’m sure looked even more hilarious next to my animated movements. I believed I was a genius, having taught Axl to show off
these skills. At some point I was informed that English bulldogs had been trained to “prance” for centuries. It was part of his inherited lineage. In the European tradition, bulldogs had been sent out into bull-fighting rings prior to the battle between the matador and bull. I’m guessing
it had something to do with the small dogs taunting and angering the bull.

English bulldogs, an invented breed, are thought to have originally been a mix of Asiatic mastiff and pug. Now registered as purebred, they are expensive to acquire. Whatever the origins, they are not able to copulate naturally. That means someone has to extract the semen from a
male and insert it into a female English bulldog. Don’t ask me how all of this is performed. A turkey baster comes to mind.

English bulldogs aren’t known for their intelligence. They are fairly low on the totem pole for canine smarts. But they are usually very sweet. Axl was no exception. He was affectionate and cuddly and easy to love. When taking Axl for a walk on the streets of SoHo, inevitably we would be stopped multiple times by strangers who wanted to pet him. Axl’s master was generous in allowing me to take him out. Maybe walking a dog can become a chore day after day. His owner was happy to have others take him around the neighborhood during work hours. One of the funniest experiences I remember having was being stopped by Drew Barrymore. She asked his name and leaned down to pet him. I said, “Axl, you’re such a celebrity.” Immediately, Drew stiffened, stood erect and walked away. Even though I had said Axl’s name, she heard what I said as being about her.

A year down the line, I was offered a job at a competing gallery and accepted the position as Assistant Director. A few years later, I learned that the owner of Mimi Ferzt had gone to Russia to look for artwork to add to the gallery’s inventory. Apparently while there, she had also adopted a puppy and brought him back to New York. I don’t know what kind of dog it was, but something considered rare and exotic in America. He looked like a small, short haired grey wolf.

I hadn’t visited Mimi Ferzt Gallery in a long while. I stopped in to say hello to some of my former colleagues. One of these employees told me that the new dog was hostile and didn’t belong in a city apartment. He had constantly gone after Axl. Axl was now quarantined in the
basement of the gallery, cordoned off in a small space next to the staircase. He had one of those plastic cones around his head, which always looks funny to me. As if the dog was wearing a lamp shade or a large collar that belonged to Queen Victoria. But this was not amusing at all. Axl had been attacked by the Russian dog, and now had stitches in his ears and the back of his head. The cone was to protect Axl from disturbing the sutures while his wounds heeled.

I went down to the gallery basement to see Axl. He was sitting quietly in his little cubby hole, blocked from getting out by a wooden board. I leaned over and said, “Hello, Axl.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he started growling and barking incessantly. Nonstop and angry. I believe he recognized me and was barking in fury. Why did I let this happen? Where had I been? Why didn’t I protect him? I walked upstairs, shaken and heartbroken. Then I found out that his owner wanted to give him away. Apparently, his novelty had worn off. I offered to take him. But it was not to be. He was
given to strangers. And from what I was told, Axl died within the year. I don’t hold the secondary owners responsible. But I do blame the gallerist for not letting me take him.

Bulldogs aren’t known for living long lives, but at the very least, Axl could have spent his final days safe and with someone who loved him and whom he had known since puppyhood.

Around that time, I became friendly with an artist from Rome, living and working in New York City. When applying for a financial grant to subsidize an artist’s studio, he asked me to write him a testimonial for the Approval Board. As a thank you, he gave me one of his paintings, which hangs outside of my bedroom. It’s of an English bulldog.

Andrew Sarewitz has published more than 60 short stories (website: www.andrewsarewitz.com) along with several scripts. Mr. Sarewitz is a recipient of the 2021 City Artists Corp Grant. His play, Alias Madame Andrèe, garnered First Prize from Stage to Screen New Playwrights in San Jose, CA.