Life In The Aerie

By Matthew Storey

I was born in August 1963. In Manhattan.

My Mom and Dad, both born in 1940, grew up in Texas.

Mom, the pianist and voracious reader, was a sensitive soul. She was the 3rd child of 4 born to John, a physician and Olivia. Papa's little girl lost her dad when she was 7, and my Mom lost her window to a world beyond Texas. The 3 kids and a pregnant Olivia, moved in with my Great-Grandmother, Alice, the widow of a prominent Dallas Baptist Pastor, who had a strained relationship with my Mom's Papa. Once the baby was weaned, Olivia went to work in the rough and tumble world of Corporate Energy and Alice, at 63, took over the care of 3 young kids and an infant. An educated woman who had been the wife of a brilliant man, Alice, was nonetheless a devout Southern Baptist who had little time for the curiosities of a pretty little girl who'd always favored her father and chafed at moving from the top to the bottom of the family pecking order.

Mom retreated into her books and the Piano and entered Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, it was the fall of 1954...

Dad was a Motorcycle racer and gifted Artist. The son of Lewis, a Home Builder and Nita, an artistic soul overwhelmed by the conventions of Texas life and the responsibilities of being a wife to her traditional husband and mother to her four boys. My Dad, the oldest by 7 years, gradually became the confidant of his Mom, as she slipped into Alcohol and Mental Illness and away from her life as Wife and Mother. She fired his soul with love of Art and Music and a passion for a life that was unattainable in 1950's Texas. Dad straddled the reality of his boyhood and the possibility of a world beyond, channeling the disconnect into his studies and his Artwork. He too was a student at Good Ole Woodrow...

These two kids, from difficult home environments, who loved Art, Literature, Music...and were horrified at the racism, violence and fundamentalism all around them...gravitated to one another and after High School, headed first to Baylor University in Waco and then to Los Angeles, where my Dad enrolled at Pasadena's Art Center College and Mom went to work. After LA, they made their way back to Texas, and then on to Manhattan where the Art Director's, Advertisers, Publishers and Galleries were and Dad began his illustration career. The whole world seemed to be opening up...Manhattan, 1963, Camelot and JFK...as far away from Dallas as it was possible to be and still be in America.

In August, their son was born (the large head on the VG logo), two weeks before Martin Luther King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Monument...it was must have been intoxicating, the sense of promise and progress, a repudiation of what they'd grown up despising and a celebration of that which they'd only dreamed might be possible.

Then Dallas happened.

Again.

In November.

The Handsome, Urbane, Sophisticated JFK was gone. In his place, a man who could have been one of the attendee's at Grandpa Rogers (Alice's husband) services at Ross Avenue Baptist or a client of Lewis's. A good man, LBJ, but a Texan born and a man of that world - the world they'd left had returned, the city they'd fled had killed their hero, their broken hearts were only two of uncounted millions.

On Christmas Eve, 1963, my Dad's mom, Nita, drank garden poison and left her suicide note to my Dad, she'd disapproved of my Mother, who she felt was beneath his station and was horrified by my birth, which she saw as cementing the mistake. Lewis sent money so Dad could fly home to see Nita in the hospital, but she was gone. Mom and I remained in Manhattan and waited for my Dad to return.

Decades later, in a 1996 Interview with San Francisco Weekly, Dad would describe the events of 1963 as the formative experiences of his life and work. The death of JFK. The loss of his mother.

There was no mention of a son born that year, or the woman who'd been his wife.

In a very real sense, the man who'd been my Dad never did return from burying his mom and his President. My mother, who'd lost her first love when her Papa died, freaked out as she watched her husband retreat from their relationship and home, and, by 1967, Dad left Mom and I for a woman we knew who lived across the courtyard of our Kips Bay apartment complex.

I played with her kids. One day he was my dad, the next he was theirs.

I was three years old.

Mom took one page from her own Mother and got to work on taking care of us, and one from her Mother in Law by descending into pills and booze when the hurt got too deep. She was a bright, vibrant woman of 27, with a 3 year old, who'd lost the only two people she'd ever counted on. We detoured to Texas for a year, where my Mother's sister explained that she'd 'lost her husband' and became a pariah.

It was 1968.

The broken hearted progressives who'd lost their champion in JFK could never warm to LBJ, they lurched to RFK, and watched him gunned down, they flirted with McCarthy and insured Nixon, the same man that JFK had beaten back in 1960. Camelot was dead. Grandma was dead. Mom and I were miserable in Dallas and Dad was remarried back in Manhattan. The dreams we held were the deadest things of all.

Mom chose to leave Texas, chose to marry Dad, chosen 'that life' and failed...a year later, we returned to our real home and I grew up in Manhattan, with my single mom - two damaged kids trying to care for one another. Dad lived with his new family, had a son with his new wife and fought in court with my Mom over Child support for me. We'd meet for weekend visits and they'd tear into one another on the street outside our 21st Street apartment. We'd hang out at Dad's places, first in Brooklyn, than Connecticut and I'd be dying inside and my Dad would ask me things like 'why hasn't your Mom remarried?' - which, to someone who lived with the broken woman in my house, seemed like the cruelest of cruelties.

Dad and I were not close.

Life went on. I boarded a plane at 12 to visit my Dad for the summer in LA, excited to be a kid flying alone, but also dreading the experience of being with my Stepmother, who I was scared of. I'd grown into a dynamic kid, extremely well read and informed, a gifted athlete and a curious lover of books, comics, skateboards, music, animals...I was hopeful that my Dad would see how much I had going for me and would help me get that feeling I'd been missing, of having a DAD in my life.

I walked off the plane and my dad greeted me with his 2 stepkids, the son he'd had with her, a strange woman and a red headed kid I didn't know.

He said 'Matt, I'd like you to meet my new family'.

I'd long since learned to roll with changes that might seem bizarre to other kids. I met the 'new family' and was relieved to find the 3rd wife was a terrific person, who had a handle on what I'd been through and made time for me, where the 2nd wife (like my Grandmother) had always seen me through a prism of who my Mother was. Dad was busy, a thriving career and juggling two families on the West Coast, it was not going down the way I dreamed. But it was cool in its own way, I loved Skateboarding down the Hollywood Hills and into downtown, buying comics and checking out street scenes so different than the ones I was accustomed to.

Dad and his new family moved back to Kips Bay, which meant my neighborhood, and we had a period of relative normalcy in that we saw each other regularly and formed somewhat of a relationship. I was a teenager now, a smart, damaged kid who spent my after-school time playing ball and hanging out with my working-class buddies on the streets. I was the sort of ballplayer who was able to play with the men, and the men drank and drugged after games, I joined in and picked up habits that would alter the trajectory of my life. Habits that had similarly afflicted my Grandmother, my Dad's brother and my mom.

Dad broke up with his 3rd wife, after the birth of his 3rd son, and lived for a time in a studio on Mercer street in the Village. I'd breeze in from my escapades and find him working hard on his art, preparing lesson plans for his art students or meet new women in his life. He married again, and moved to San Francisco, and we didn't see each other for a decade. I got engaged in 1993 to a woman who I'd been dating since 1985, my Dad wondered how I would be dealing with her Catholicism, a question that I bitterly resented when he posed it but one that turned out to be prophetic when it came down to discussions of having children and where we might live. We never married.

In 1996, I was dealing with the fallout of several bad decisions I'd made in business and my mom suggested that I should go spend time with my Dad in San Francisco. I picked up and moved to SF to live with Dad five days after Christmas, 1996. Dad had a wonderful little apartment in the shadow of Coit Tower, with a little porch in the back for me to sleep in...I took it slow, worked on my business goals during the day and my fitness through the various 12 Step programs I required and the little Y in Chinatown. We did our best, as two adult men, to form a bond and succeeded to some degree. But after only a few months, his 4th Wife, who now was a trusted friend, began to appear more and more in the apartment and it became clear I was cramping dad's style. He was amiable and kind, it just wasn't the lifestyle he loved - having to be a care giving parent to a child of 32, who'd been aching for that care for almost three decades. The re-run rejection had a predictable impact, I met a woman and moved in with her, then got a place in The Mission and dad went back to the life he'd known.

We lived in the same city, but we never got together.

I moved back East in '98, first to Miami, then Westchester and back to Manhattan in 2003. Dad lives in San Francisco with his once and current wife, teaches Illustration at two different colleges and has a career in Illustration and another in music and performance art. His brilliance has been reflected in generations of devoted students who themselves have gone on to glittering careers in the Art world. Dad has combined his unmatched ability as a draftsmen with his searching, probing intellect to generate an incredible body of work.

We speak on the phone occasionally, typically when I've had too much wine and need a break from writing. Dad is kind and genuine, its good to talk to him and to share our views on matters that matter.

Last week, my roommate, Erin, told me I'd received an e-mail from my dad's companion, it was an invitation to a Lecture Dad was giving at the launching of his featured show this summer at The Society of Illustrators. The Society is located on 63rd Street, between Lexington and Park Avenues.

I know this because I am a Dogwalker, and I walk my beloved Chester right in front of the Society every single day of the year. My walk down the block is filled with conversations with doormen, hot dog vendors, embassy employees, event planners, other dog owners...it's my backyard.

Today, when I walked by, the front of the Society was flanked by two placards announcing my Dad's show, 'Life After Black: The Visual Journals of Barron Storey'.

I took a cellphone picture of the exterior signs, and I tried to go inside to get one of the announcement cards. The door was locked, labeled 'Private' and the two women inside acted as if I wasn't there, perhaps put off by my Yankees Backpack? My High-Top Converse Sneakers?

They knew right away, this was not a place I belonged.

Dad and I will get together, we'll have a meal or a chat. I think he realizes I won't be making the show.

I'm not the sort of fellow you'll find at an opening, for the same reasons it wouldn't make sense to bring my Dad to the Yankee game I enjoy, or to sit in the Grandstand at Belmont Park, or lay out on Long Beach...we're different men.

And there's the political tenor of his work as well. I respect EVERYONE's right to believe what they wish and to express that belief as they see fit. That right, however does not extend to doing so in my presence. Dad's the same way. He wishes me well here at VagabondGuru.com and understands that, for me, these columns and these rooms are my journals. But we disagree on much, and communicate to audiences in our own ways.

If you know me or have read my work, you know there are two rooms you never want to invite me to.

The first being the sort of rooms my Texas family favor, where the crowd is Anti-Immigrant and Pro-'Life', where homophobia, anti-semitism, anti-catholicism and feudalism are gospel and Progressive, secular, bisexual, stoners from New York City are the 'Bad Guys'.

You know. Guys like me.

Invite me to that sort of room, and fights will ensue.

The other room, which I suspect might develop for my Dad's opening, is a place where the group consciousness runs towards Anti-Capitalist and Pro-Palestinian. Here, the folks known as 'Them' are financial speculators who engage in global currency and equity deals for profit, people who fill their leisure time with spectator sports, moderate progressives who are Pro-Israel and hawkish on Islam.

You got him. That's me, right here.

In this sort of room, the disagreement is more cordial, no fighting. But the disconnect is heartbreaking, and the distance no less firm.

Every son wants to look up to his Father, and to feel that his Dad would do anything, pay any price, make any sacrifice, for him. I've watched Red Sox Steve's Dad these last few years and I've seen what that looks like.

Every Wife hopes her Husband will find joy in devotion to his family and sublimate himself to their care and her happiness.

Every Father wishes his son will grow to share his values and appreciate the choices he has made.

But most of us will never live those lives. The next time you hear someone say that we need to re-stigmatize single parenthood, I hope you will remember the story you just read. Single parents happen, and not just in the ghetto. For every black or hispanic family dealing with this situation, there are three white families dealing with the exact same circumstance. I've got a picture of Mom, Dad and I, circa 1965, and you could easily be looking at a snapshot of Marilyn Quayle's fantasy life (ewwwwwww!).

Doesn't matter. There is no such thing as 'looking the part', only 'living your ideals' and, when your ideals don't match the circumstance, its time to go. Regardless of the situation left behind.

My mom and dad married before they knew who they were.

Each other.

Themselves.

They saw and experienced things in LA and NYC that were beyond the expectations they had when they bonded back at Woodrow Wilson High. It happens. It always will. You cannot and SHOULD not legislate those relationships and you can never make a man stay and provide for a family that he no longer believes in. When you read this, you are reading the story of people who MADE it through, but two of them did so with scars so deep, their lives were never what they might have been.

Tough. That's life. We all had chances to move on and make our own way, and two of us were not able to make the transition. There is ZERO value in demonizing the person who makes a change. There is PLENTY of value in figuring out a system in extracting cash from the departing parent while it STILL MATTERS - the State of California finally came for my dad's income while I was living with him, in 1996, and on behalf of his then, 25 year old son, from his second marriage to a woman who had killed herself the year before. They collected half his pay, but the money went to the State - not the children or wives who went without decades before. What is the point of that?

The point that DOES matter is to make sure that the sorts of kids who can make it out of these family dramas intact do not have to be the sorts who are so gifted they will then make it all the way to the White House.

All kids deserve a real chance at life and as many helps and pushes along the way as it takes, let's put ourselves towards the answers.