“Please, tell me.” I didn’t know what he was talking about.
It seemed that when the profile on Solito was published, it wrecked his outlier status. He became a name. He spoke from deep inside some bubble of invulnerable obsession, locked in, unashamed. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m lucky, I know it. I live in airports. I eat out of vending machines. I smile in public and sign books. And they come up after and hug me and take pictures, and I wonder, How am I supposed to survive this? Like, how do you go back to work when people are hanging on your every word and pleading with you for whatever it is they want? Or they haven’t even read the book, just read about it and show up at signings and expect some kind of TED talk, something inspiring. Or they don’t care what it’s about, they want to debunk it, catch me in a lie, did it really happen this way, is it true, oh my God. Or, Hey, can you come to my fundraiser, for nothing, tomorrow at six? I get grumpy after five minutes, and every night there’s this huge line and I have to sit there and listen. ‘Great question, let me see if I can answer that.’ It was packed in Seattle. I have one more in New York before I fly to Amsterdam. It’s getting worse.”
A guy went by and said something to him in Spanish. Solito turned, waiting patiently until the man was done. His shoulders slumped as he leaned toward me and said, more quietly, “But it’s all so singular, my heartbreaking childhood, my continental trek. Like I had a choice. It’s not anything I can duplicate.”
People were leaving. It was time to head to class. A guy called out to him as he walked by, then someone else said his name. I held up a hand, like, Hang on, we’re talking. “I know what they want,” he said. “They want to congratulate me, but that’s not what I want. They want to touch it, share in it, get close, but that turns me into something, and I don’t want to be that.”
“Congratulate you for what?”
He rubbed one eye and then the other. “I haven’t figured out what all this attention is about. I have to go somewhere quiet and think about it.”
“Good idea,” I said. He looked relieved, then worried, then went back to making notes.
I tried to steady myself, eating toast, and felt something saintly come over me, felt myself to be a steadying force for him too, in that parental way, surrendering myself for his sake as I peeled my egg. Every night I ripped out the murky parts of myself and submitted, until I was filled with only light, a nurturing object for my son to hold, for my daughter to close herself into, and lay there pretending to sleep until whichever one was beside me would sleep, and in the process I always passed out too, and woke up hours later, fully alert, afraid to wake them as I crawled out and wandered around the house, wincing at every creak in the floor, wondering what happened to my life.
Solito could look forward to a bright and boundless future, unless he’d already shot his wad, at twenty-eight, in which case he’d be better off blowing his brains out right now or preparing for decades of self-imitation, honing his “talk,” hating himself for phoning it in, cursed by early fame, like Fat Elvis dying on his gold-plated toilet. He scribbled away at his lecture, talking some, less guarded, delineating his Aristotelian three-act structure. I happened to be free of all that, of cartooning passion and real ambition, and wanted to feel above him, safe from his artistic pain—but I couldn’t, because he had what I wanted, whatever that was: public approval, sycophantic praise, suffering, audience, sympathy.
He’d walked from Guatemala, following mule trails through northern Mexico among candelilla men in rags. They tried to buy him from his trafficker in exchange for drugs, but he never forgot their burnished faces, crucifixes hanging from their throats. The wind in Sonora, roughnecks and cowboys. He’d gone missing in the Arizona desert, hallucinated from dehydration, passed through Tucson like a ghost. He’d lived to tell the story, and found his voice, his own drawing style, and a thorny political issue, a rallying cry, and turned that whole miserable thing into art, so readers could pity him, or at least read the thing once, and slap him on the back and forget.
George, the oldest member of the class, had a portfolio of notes and sketches that went back forty years. He was tall and angular, with a narrow, ravaged face, a quaking voice, white stubble on his chin, and gnarled, trembling hands. He’d grown up on a military base, enlisted in the marines at eighteen, and was assigned to carry a thing that shoulder-launched rockets. There were capable drawings of old French forts, Russian and North Vietnamese artillery, and pages of old letters, photos, and official citations. It was a kind of bliss to inundate myself with the muck of other peoples’ lives and to address technical problems with simple, obvious fixes.
“I never killed any women or children, but a guy in my unit did. I saw him throw a grenade in a doorway for fun.” He stared at me. His eyes were blue and clear and ageless. Was he trying to absolve himself? Maybe. “My little brother went over after I came back and was killed in action.” He touched his eyeglasses. His hand shook. It was clear that the war had undermined his life. Maybe he’d come here to resurrect the brother. I knelt between desks to help him get some solid forms beneath the timid lines of his soldiers. We went back and forth, from his thumbnails to his notes. Someone sat on the floor of the helicopter. Blood dripped. Wind shot through the open cab. We inserted key details, excised others.
Mel, the elementary school art teacher, had a good start on a travelogue to the wilds of Borneo. The town witch doctor drove a convertible. The inn where she’d stayed employed a cook who slept in a tree like a gorilla and covered himself in leaves. She made cartooning seem painless and fun. There were movie-like action breakdowns. She used sophisticated camera angles. She knew her anatomy, she’d had training, and she’d produced two roughed-out pages of a working outline.
“Looking good there.”
“Thanks.”
Carol’s stalky red hair stood up and shined as though it had been waxed. She’d begun a feverish and disturbing scene featuring beer and snow and a carload of teenage boys. The scene took place in 1989. The interior of the car was nicely delineated, well drafted, although the sketches were dark, with spectral light coming out of the dashboard, the boys grimly drinking. I had the feeling something bad was going to happen.
“What’s it about?”