(The author’s drawing of Roberto Clemente on a page in the 1925 classic, “Street Traffic Control” by Miller McClintock, McGraw-Hill, NYC. Pen, ink, and watercolor.)

People hand me old hardbound books, I find them, or somehow, they find me. I re-purpose these old textbooks and other such volumes and genre tomes that fall into my hands where they become something else entirely. Mind you, there is enough of an old soul and hip capitalist in me to not deface a first edition of “On the Road” or the paintings of Picasso… there is simply a vast sea of otherwise ordinary books that have gone unread and await a new life. A National Geographic account of the “heroism” and “discoveries” of Lewis and Clark becomes a show ‘n’ tell treatise on how two closeted gay explorers opened up the Native lands to white insurgency in the name of God. I clean up and move on to the next one.

(Hey kids! Collage is FUN!!!)

(Photo of the author, David Alan Goldberg with friend, Caroline Brinegar, taken by mutual friend, Jacob Caldwell Yount, Charlotte, North Carolina, June, 2011.)

Of the past twenty-four years that I have been living as a legal, tax-paying, voting resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, for the greater sum, sixteen of those years I have spent on the streets of Charlotte. Homeless. By no choice of my own.

True, in those years I have been in rental situations that have lasted two months to a year, but then, my finances run out as I struggle for more work if not for a decent back-up plan. Add on to that back in August of 2006, I was nearly killed in a collision as I was riding my bicycle “home” to a tent behind Area 15 in the Optimist Park neighborhood of Charlotte. It was in the evening, there were no witnesses, and the CPD misreported where the accident occurred. I sustained no broken bones, yet I was mangled enough that it took me one month to be able to walk again. Two months to get up the nerve to ride my bicycle again.

I still greatly suffer from injuries mostly to my hips and tailbone, sharp pains in my feet and shoulders. I can no longer hold on to a paying job that has nothing to do with drawing or painting. No more washing dishes standing on my feet for eight to ten hours. The only government subsidy that I receive is a food stamp/EBT card that affords me $200 a month groceries only. No cash. I am currently working on an SSI claim for back pay and a monthly check that will get me into an apartment. So, still, for right now, I have no where to lay my head at night.

From November until the end of March, local churches participate in the Room in the Inn program. Depending on the evening, there can be anywhere from 109 beds to 211 beds available. All of us have to stand outside the back entrance of the Urban Ministry Center in the elements, more often than not, freezing rain for two hours, while being yelled at by a police officer hired for intake and one of the representatives of Room in the Inn to “maintain order”. If you are a senior citizen or female, you get a bed every night for the duration of the season. First to eighth timers have a decent chance to get a bed. How many days are in the winter months? November, December, January, February, and even March which can be pretty damn cold for any individual fighting to maintain mental and physical health. I spent one night in the mens shelter over the past winter. Never again. Lights are on all night. The place reeks of something just this side of death. Guys are running around all hours of the night. Guys masturbating in their bunks. Lots of yelling and “carrying on”. One night of that insanity was all I could bear. I got maybe two hours of sleep.

People ask me, “DAG, where do you live?” or “DAG, where do you sleep?” My answer is always, “Anywhere that I can.” What that usually means is anywhere I feel the safest to nod off, as peacefully as possible, and within a fair distance of all the places that I frequent during the day. Usually, almost every night, that place is the atrium in the building where Amelie’s French Bakery is anchored. Amelie’s has no jurisdiction over the atrium, they share it with the other tenants of the building.This Tuesday morning, June 14th, about 6:00 A.M. was one of those times, yet again, when and where I nodded off sitting up in a chair. A fairly warm cup of Amelie’s coffee also sat upright on the table next to me. One moment, I was tethered between a foggy English forest that was suddenly invaded by a flying barracuda and a sliver of reality when I was verbally rattled awake by the dulcet tones of Genevieve, manager of Amelie’s. She yelled and screamed at me that I can never, ever sleep there, and that she was tired of seeing me there every day, asleep. I responded to her, saying, “Sorry, I am not hurting anyone. All I did was nod off.” “WHAT???” she screamed at me. I repeated myself as my stomach was tying itself into a knot. “Well, I am tired of you nodding off every day that I am here! There will not be another time! I will not warn you again!” She has done that to me several times before, as has Amelie’s co-owner Lyn, and custodian Warren, whose tactic is to come into the room, even when my eyes are wide open, and hollers, “WAKE UP, DAG!!!” in front of the other customers. Trust me, after sixteen years of chronic (i.e., not by my own choice) homelessness, I am quite used to being pushed into one corner after another, only to be hounded out of said corners by both the same people and the same kind of people. Essentially, the way that they went about it is all wrong. I was hurting no one. I was in no one person’s way. I was not obstructing the flow of business in any way.

So, immediately, I rode off on my bicycle. To a house where good friends are who allowed me to shower and change my clothes… and completely unexpected, naptime on the couch in the living room.

I have been thinking about this all day, as to what actions I should be taking. I have been teetering between deep prayer and exacting a voodoo curse (just kidding). If I could afford so much as a weekly room, I would be there already. As it stands, I can barely afford anything. There is no truly affordable housing in the City of Charlotte. Jobs are scarce. The economy sucks. People are scared. More people are forced into homelessness daily.

I thank you for reading this/hearing me out. I really needed to get this off my chest. Many of you already knew of my day to day battles and circumstances. To those of you who didn’t, now you know. Now, you know.

(Photo of same author at Buskapalooza taken by LunahZon Photography, downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, May, 2011)

Given the current tenor of the day that “Children Are the Future”, whereupon we elevate babies and children as indisputable idols no matter whose foul, sputtering creation they may be, every one of us coupled off with child-bearing hips is being led blindly off a cliff. Don’t get me wrong, babies and children continue to delight me. Individually and in small groups, like Christian fundamentalists, like frat boys, they are bearable. Even entertaining. It’s the fetishization of our progeny in the culture that is inherently sick. I could take a mental health holiday on this, go to the deli and grab a Philly steak sub and root beer, bike across town and back, post a couple of disturbing photos in the body of this post, but what about all the other sane individuals in the USA who are at least as repulsed as I am of how we worship children as saviors of our shitty lives. We believe fully that by procreating in the pool of life, we all have meaning. Advertising agencies love us for our collective ignorance. Welcome to the ultimate hustle. You can definitely have my portion.

You take the time to shuffle the deck while riding the “L” train from 8th Avenue and 14th Street to New Lots/Van Sinderen and the old Brooklyn your dad bent your ear over time and again. The rumble and robotic screech of the MTA transports you and your curious spirit along with your fellow passengers who have rich lives and stories to tell just like you, but as soon as you board the subway in Manhattan, all of you become similar persons… everyone is in the same boat, so to speak. The train is yours. The shared, glazed-over egg tempera glow of every face that looks furtively away at any suggestion of eye contact, no matter how innocent it may be. The green-lit indifference that makes all of us appear to be underwater, the prevailing sadness, and fear of being studied under a microscope. The train is yours. Claustrophobia inevitably sets in, at least on some small scale. You want it all to be over now. You will willingly do this again not even half an hour later. You love The City. You always have, although this is the first time you have ever so much as set foot in this exotic concrete and steel frontier, this New York City. Being the youngest son of a native Brooklynite from Flatbush Avenue, it goes without saying that this is your birthright. The train is yours. Sketchpad and Rapidograph in hand, you also brought with you a level of courage, spontaneity, street savvy necessary to blend into any situation. The shared fear dissipates, you are okay with this. Twelve years later, you look back with contentment. The “L” train is still yours.

“the children of ferocity dance through the stubble glides dead as a cabbagehead
of Insurance Towers dance through the rubble over the massive postures of the
of High Rise Slums dance through the newspapers dance the broken bones destroy
issued through the mouths of witches burning in the backlots “

Amon Liner
(May 29, 1940 – July 26, 1976)

You may be wondering why I titled my blog, “Dirge for Amon Liner”. Who the hell was Amon Liner? To the best of my knowledge, he was only the greatest poet to ever emerge from the urbanized, industrialized forest, farmlands, and Native American burial mounds of Charlotte, North Carolina. I have only read two of his great works, and those are, “Marstower” (Red Clay Press, 1972) and posthumously, “Rose, a Color of Darkness” (Carolina Wren Press, 1980). I stumbled across (no, really I did… I’m a klutz) “Marstower” in 1996 on the discontinued/book sale rack of the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Public Library. Twenty five cents for a first edition. By the looks of the large, stapled paperbound cover, I was already sold. The cover was black with white letters in a computer inspired font that read “Marstower” up and down the front. The words inside sang as if by a choir, danced as Russian peasants loaded on vodka like Ginsberg, were monumental in scope like Patchen at his most unrelenting, mischievous and disarming like Brautigan inventing his own world with an entirely new language. It shattered me where I stood, how Liner shook hands with technology and industry, dissecting the misappropriations by man and his religious-political strongarming of society and how they dare call it “progress”. I have been a fan ever since.

I have only seen one photo of Amon Liner. It’s a group shot that consists of him and a smattering of other local poets that appears to have been snapped in a parking lot at UNCC sometime in the early 1970′s. In addition to that, there is a really nice pen and ink sketch of him in the back of his third volume, “Rose, a Color of Darkness”. He was gentle of stature and bespectacled, with thinning hair that fell close to his crown. In those days, at first blush, he looked like the quintessential, textbook nerd; the English professor who stayed home most nights grading papers and writing the syllabus for the next semester. In our current world where nerds and geeks have been elevated to sex symbol status, a cat like him would be getting more Carolina cream pie than the Avett Brothers. That’s just the way the ball bounces, I reckon.

“The Children of Ferocity” by Amon Liner

“That shit’s gooder’n HELL!!!”

Say you’ve been driving eight, maybe nine solid hours from Connecticut, Michigan, Missouri, or some godforsaken place or other. You are now in North Carolina and you just have a hankerin’ for something (hankerin’s is what’cha git when y’ pass thru them Smoky Mayntins an’ breathe thet good ol’ Carolina ahr). You are not quite hungry as all hell, but you just gotta smooth over that hole in your gut. Trust me, I know how it goes. Your pain is mine. It’s all good. No worries. You have been listening to the books on tape version of “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand and hate on what a selfish bitch she was, and how schmucks like her and L. Ron Hubbard are responsible for all the cracked-out whackjobs these days who think they know how the rest of us should live. That’ll get me going off on a tangent… just screw ‘em. So, the creature of habitual ceremony that you are, you yank the goddamn tape out of your old-school Pioneer deck that you received as one of your graduation presents back in 1986. The tape is what some glassy-eyed, hard-nosed Objectivist “friend” (whack. job.) gifted to you a couple years back because she was yet another who so kindly treated you like your life was going down the shitter and her universe was so friggin’ perfect. Fuck! Hell! There I go again! Okay. All right. Good. So, anyway, you pull that Fascist bullshit out of your sweet, coolio, rad, prized deck that still works and rip the oxide particle laden tape off it’s spools out of the cassette shell and toss that worthless garbage into the backseat of your 1971 Volvo 142 that belonged to your uncle who was the best damn shady tree mechanic and horse trader in the Carolinas and the Virginias. Pretty dang awesome, son. What’s this? Yes! That 90 minute TDK dupe of “About to Choke” by Vic Chesnutt and “Tomorrow the Green Grass” by The Jayhawks. It’s already cued up to side b. You pop that bad boy in, wait a few seconds, and the genius of Gary Louris and Mark Olson kick in. You keep driving. The hankerin’ has subsided to the power of great songwriting and tight, Everly Brothers like harmonies.

Digging through a Tony Lama boot box of found photos and correspondence, I have become archivist and narrator of this mysterious body. My curiosity careens wildly for any relative truth, whether it is real or imagined. The people and moments are frozen in a period spanning decades. The charcoal mist, the sepia fog, the faded, peripheral colors champion the myth of what is collectively known as “The Good Old Days”. It’s an aggressive library of naïve spirits wearing lace bonnets, battle fatigues, restful gazes lost in shy laughter beneath the bridge in downtown Burlington, North Carolina sometime in 1929. The irony is that while many of these events were canceled by hand, they live on with a steadfast bravery that seems non-existent in modern polite society that shits its pants over anyone daring to breathe and sweat and speak with any such genuine life. No iBabysitters to collect the drool of the digitally shackled existed. Patience was understood as an absolute virtue. Pens were loaded with cartridges of ink or dipped in a well. Everyone used pen and paper to communicate across state lines and the seas. Those who stuttered appeared to have the elocution of Rhodes Scholars. Those who looked like they were beaten down savagely by circumstances came across as chivalrous leading men and sultry sirens from that strange new place called Hollywood, where the moving pictures were magically created with a mirror and a Tesla Coil… or, you could just pose with a cigarette dangling from your second grade face to tell the world that you were one tough little bitch. Trifling with you would be suicide for the unfortunate jackass. Right on, sister.

(“John Lennon – 1965″ Color Pencil on Watercolor Paper, June, 2001)

(“John Lennon – 1967″ Color Pencil on Watercolor Paper, August, 2001)

(“John Lennon – 1971″ Pen & Ink on Penny Sketch Paper, March, 2001)

For me, John Lennon has always been an iconic catalyst for ultimately doing the right thing, for carrying a beautiful, creative spirit, for having strong opinions that you can voice intellectually, for standing firm in your convictions while being willing to listen, for disarming the tense with a chuckle, for settling differences through art, for living and loving peacefully… for being a vibrant human being and a regular guy… who had one of the very best friggin’ rock ‘n’ roll voices, ever.

In December of 2000, I resolved to do several drawings of John Lennon in 2001. These are the only three I created. Bloody brilliant, they are.

The year was 2001. March, April, May, June, July, August, Sep…

(“Spangled Blengins, Boy King Islands. One is a Young Tuskerhorian, the Other a Human Headed Dortherean”
Collage, Carbon Tracing, Pencil and Watercolor by Henry Darger)

“Art, by its very essence, is of the new, we expect art to uproot us, to unhinge doors. When the pompous platforms of Culture are erected, and awards and laurels come raining down, then flee as fast as you can, there’ll be little hope for art. If art did exist here, it’s already gone by now, it hurried off for a change of air. It’s allergic to the air of collective approval.”

- Henry Darger

In 1972, the art critic Roger Cardinal brought forth into the culture a new, working English descriptor synonymous for Jean Dubuffet’s “art brut” (raw art or rough art) in his book, “Cultural Conditioning”. The new coinage became “outsider art” and would henceforth yoke the necks of untrained and self-trained artists alike as a wretched, dead, stinking albatross to be cheerfully lugged up mountainside while pushing a boulder. Such Sisyphean toil serves only as a crippling stigma to the artist who deserves to be treated as a brother or a sister in the community despite their lack of academic/aesthetic programming. This only benefits the so-called “Creative Class” who were already born into considerable wealth and monied tourists to throw their pennies at the freak show and laugh. It was no mistake that Dubuffet focused his art brut attentions on insane asylum patients. Dubuffet was the son of a well-to-do wine merchant and received his early studies at the prestigious yet revolutionary Académie Julian in Paris. As much as Dubuffet was a great champion of a more primitive, yeomanlike approach in his own work, he was afforded a certain position at the social expense of non-academic artists.

More to the point: if one artist is an outsider, then, we are all a bunch of outsiders. Welcome to the club.

(“Still a sorry saint…” One of only three known photos of Henry Darger, possibly the last. Late 1960′s, early 1970′s. Lincoln Park neighborhood. Chicago, Illinois.)

The exact month and day have been debated for years, but according to all reports, Henry Joseph Darger, Jr. was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 12th, 1892. On June 2nd, 1917, toward the end of World War I, Darger filled out a draft registration card for the U.S. Army. He listed his birth date as April 17th, 1892. From the time he was a young boy until he was aged seventy-nine years, he exhaustively amassed the great vernacular fantasy work, “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion”. At 15,145 pages, he collected volumes of his writings by re-using old telephone books which also displayed hundreds of his delicate illustrations depicting his asexual girl-boy warriors, The Vivian Girls. Henry Darger died the day after his eighty-first birthday on April 13th, 1973. His landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner came across Darger’s monumental work moments before his death. Nathan Lerner, himself, was a professional photographer whose images appeared in The New York Times for many years. Immediately seeing the profound depth of artistic merit in his volumes, the Lerners took charge of Henry Darger’s estate. Nathan Lerner died in 1997, making his widow, Kiyoko Lerner, solely in charge of both estates. The Artists Rights Society is the United States copyright representative for both Henry Darger and Nathan Lerner.

(“At Jennie Richee – Vivian Girls Are Sent By General (Emperor) Vivian Their Father To Seize A Certain Enemy Plan” Carbon Tracing, Pencil and Watercolor by Henry Darger)

To give an encapsulated overview of the life and work of Henry Darger would extend beyond a couple thousand words, and I don’t want to wear you out with my spin on all what has already been said in tribute songs by Sufjan Stevens and Natalie Merchant, a well-researched article on Wikipedia, and the extremely fine 2004 documentary, “In the Realms of the Unreal” by Jessica Yu. Nor will I bother to speculate on the layers of his eccentricity and mental illness. Preferably, I wish to give my interpretation of how his art affects me, and as I opined in the beginning, what an abomination of a title “outsider art” is in describing the work of impoverished, dormant geniuses.

During his lifetime, Darger, who worked as a low-paid hospital janitor for sixty-plus years had his manic obsessions. He combined his devout Catholicism with his defending love of children, Christianity, and The Civil War. For Darger, his novel was a true labor of love. He did it for only himself, though in the narrative, he leads the observer to believe that he was a protector of these children who were very real to him. Essentially, The Vivian Girls were his friends. Darger had no desire for financial gain from the adventures of these characters.

Henry Darger imbued his child warriors with what he perceived to be the Spirit of the Holy Ghost. It’s very effective, for the “girls” seem to levitate off the page, to float entirely on their own. They individually appeared to be capable of all that was miraculous… and were pretty handy with bow and arrow in mortal combat. I leave you here, my friends. Something to think about.

There I was in my rubber soled hiking boots shuffling backwards, on the safe side of the gravel-lined breakdown lane, facing the steady traffic of Hwy. 62. In my left hand was a cardboard sign that read, “Truth” with an olive branch drawn beneath the greeting. The thumb of my right hand pointed toward the western horizon serrated with Loblolly Pine trees. The ribbons of alizarin crimson that had scored the coral blue sky earlier in the morning had suddenly cleared, opening up the most radiantly beautiful field of periwinkle blue I have ever seen. I was headed west, hopefully California. This is Hwy. 62 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, my friends. I had just come down from Norris Dam State Park. I had no idea the Clinch River was so wide and proud and ran so thick with life. To hear that river breathe is an honor. Ideally, today I would like to make it to Memphis. If I make it as far as Cookeville, I will be satisfied.

Cars and trucks had been zipping by about a dozen per minute. I had settled on that patch of the berm for maybe less than half an hour of kids yelling obscenities at me, flipping me off, and scared old ladies looking at me, terrified of the potential voodoo my eye contact may level against them. None of it brought me down, though. The air was warm and breezy. I was well rested before the bacon and eggs hit the skillet. I was in no hurry.

Skidding to a halt on the gravel behind me was my first ride which came as a big surprise to me. It was a 1940′s K-model International Harvester bus painted cold gray with a jackrabbit stenciled on the rear and a Texas license plate with a passel of registration stickers keeping it up to date. The big surprise was the first impression of the driver, this old cat who cut his eyes toward the sun as he lowered the visor, approaching me. I thought he was yet another motorist on a mission to get somewhere, like so many others. No worries. No sweat. Now, here he was waiting on me. Sweet! The door swung open and revealed this skinny septuagenarian with a voice not unlike “Mule Variations” era Tom Waits, just a little smoother around the edges and understandably twangier.

“Git on in, son!” he growled with a gold-capped grin, shaded by his Asleep at the Wheel hat. “Plenty of room in this here spaceship!” Then the funk of marijuana smoke hit me along with the sight of the multi-colored Tibetan prayer flags strung along the windows. “This is gonna be a good ride!” I responded, nodding.