The guy talking in this video is Richard Johnson, long time taxi driver, indie gallery owner (at the time), gifted storyteller, poker player, and self-proclaimed "fame-ass arteest." Richard's one weird and great character, and he offered me a uniquedeal back in 2005, because he needed someone to drive his taxi on the weekends. I took the offer, and wound up living in AAA Electra 99 gallery, where my creativity was reborn, and my Sharpie Scribble Style art technique was invented.
With the turn of the new millennium, in January of 2000, came a tough time in my life. After an injury, I quit my good paying, Hollywood lighting tech job, in late spring of 1999, and took time off to get a needed minor surgery. My insurance was all screwed up, I couldn't see a doctor, or get the surgery. I looked for a new way to make a living, without heavy lifting, and became a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach, California area. I was living three blocks from the ocean, in downtown H.B. at the time, and one of my neighbors told me, "Some taxi driver told me he makes $300 a day." "OK," I thought, "that sounds good, so I gave it a shot." I soon found out it was a really hard way to make a living. I learned you could make $300 on a really good Saturday. But you had to pay $115 of that to the taxi company, and spend another $35-$40 for gas. And that was the best day of the week for driving.
I scraped by for a couple of months, driving a cab at Orange County (aka John Wayne) Airport, working seven, 17 hour days, while dressed in black slacks, white shirt, and a tie.. I looked like a waiter, and made about $300 a week take home money, if I was lucky. I started hanging out at the downtown bar scene in Huntington Beach on weekend nights, to make extra money driving drunk people home.
I couldn't afford to pay rent anymore, after about two months. I wound up moving out of my apartment, putting all my stuff in storage, and living in my cab, in about October or November of 1999. I also quit driving at the airport, and became a "street driver." I could wear shorts and a T-shirt, and I had to find most of my own business, while paying the taxi company $600 a week to lease the cab. I also had to ante up about $300 a week, to pay for my gas. All my fares and tips blended together, and after I paid for lease and gas, what was left was my "pay." I made about $300 to $350 a week, but worked less hours than at the airport. I soon became an expert at "flagging" the local bars and nightclubs of Orange County, learning which bars were the best which nights of the week. I got really good at finding rides in places other drivers never thought of.
I switched to another taxi company, a new one, that had brand new Ford Crown Victorias, but they were natural gas powered. So I had to go to obscure places to refill, but I got free gas for months. Since it was a new taxi company, they had almost no business, but the lease was only $400 a week. I lived in that taxi, and easily made enough to pay my lease, but not much more. I was making about $200 a week, while living in my taxi, for six more months. Then the new company got the big O.C. Airport contract, and didn't have enough drivers for a month, as the drivers from the other company switched to our company. So I made insane money for three weeks, working back at the airport, and was able to rent a room in a house after that.
By that time, I knew how to make money in a taxi, and I switched to another company where I could rent the cab just on the weekends, for $115 a day, for three days. About 8-9 months into my taxi career, I rented a cheap room in inland Huntington Beach, I made about $300-$350 a week, and had four days off. Life was pretty good. Until Christmas 2000, when my driver's license got suspended suddenly, apparently from a clerical error at the DMV.
I wound up working odd jobs, and was homeless on the streets, while working a restaurant job for nine months. On Labor Day weekend, 2003, I was finally able to get my taxi permit again, and go back to taxi driving. Once again, I was living in my cab, and working 7 days a week, and taking showers at the gym as I kept getting fatter. It was around that time I met another cab driver named Richard Johnson. He was a long time taxi driver, a couple years older than me (I was 38, I think), and he was this weird, funny, driver I'd run into now and then.
At the taxi company one Monday morning, I saw a flyer by the window that said, "Taxi Driver Art Show," and asked the girl in the window about it. She told me Richard Johnson had a little indie art gallery, and wanted any taxi drivers who did artwork to do something for an art show. That's how I first heard of AAA Electra 99, and indie art gallery, museum, and co-op, or something like that. I rolled by the next Friday evening, and talked to Richard, checked out the gallery. Unlike traditional art galleries with their miles of cold, boring, white walls, Electra was crammed with all kinds of art. Artists paid $40 a month to rent a 4 foot X 8 foot section of wall space, and they could put up anything they wanted. There was no selection process, and only three rules, all begun because of Richard, himself. The three rules were: 1) No fire. 2) No live animals. And 3) No really bad smells.
I decided to do something for the taxi driver art show. I wound up drawing a hand made, taxi driver board game, sort of like the game Life, but with Matchbox cars as your markers. I can't remember what all was on it, except that one square said, "Party at Dennis Rodman's house, lose turn." I regularly picked up people at Rodman's Newport Beach house at the time, usually after the bars had closed. His and Carmen Electra's beach house was almost like an after hours club, so many people partied there. My board game got a few laughs, and I soon rented a wall, and put up prints of a bunch of my poetry, along with a poem written on a toilet paper roll. People would unroll it to read the poem, and then roll it back up. It was my homage to the great (and terrible) bathroom wall graffiti of the 1970's, where hand drawn dick pics and odd poems were standard in any public restroom. Before "graffiti" was spray paint tagging and colorful pieces, it was something we read while taking a dump in public.
I came to know Richard as a weird, old school punk rocker, artist, and funny storyteller guy, and started hanging out at the gallery a little bit on weekend evenings, before the bar business got going. He drove his taxi mostly in Anaheim and inland O.C. during the days, and I made most of my money from the H.B., Newport, and Costa Mesa bar scene fares at night. I hung out at the new Huntington Beach Hyatt during the days, catching a few rides from there, and sleeping when I could. Richard would roll by, and just jump in my cab and hang out, once in a while.
Soon after I started driving the cab in 2003, the company pulled our dispatch CB radios out, and replaced them with new technology, dispatch computers. Those computers totally screwed up the business, allowing the company to put more and more cabs on the road, mostly. So we had fewer calls, more cabs, and A LOT LESS business per driver. And we all had to lease the cabs weekly, so suddenly everyone was working 7 days a week. Before that, most drivers just worked weekends, and a few worked all week.
It got harder and harder to make a living. From Labor Day weekend 2003, to about the same time in 2005, I had 5 complete days off. Normal working people get two days off a week, I took five full days off in two years, and worked every other day. By late summer 2005, I was angry, burned out, and had gained about 150 pounds. When you drive a taxi, you either eat too much or smoke too much. I don't smoke.
That's when Richard made me and offer. He bought his cab, which meant he paid $200 less a week, but was responsible for all the maintenance. He drove mostly during the day, during the weekdays, and needed a good weekend driver to help pay for the cab. I needed a break from driving 14-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. The deal was that I would pay $270 a weekend, and drive his cab from about 6 pm Friday until about 4 am Monday morning. I made most of the money I made on Friday and Saturday nights, so I could make $200 or $250 to take home, after paying him, if business was decent. I paid him $50 a week for rent, and could live in his art gallery, which had moved to Anaheim, from Newport, by that time. I thought the deal over for a couple of days, and went for it. It's the location you see in the clip above, which is from 5 or 6 years later.
As Richard was helping move my clothes and stuff to the gallery to move in, only then did he ask, "Do you like cats?" I said, "Uh... sure. Do you have a pet cat in the gallery?" Richard said, "Yeah... well, technically, we have 8." Good thing I wasn't allergic to cats. They had a cat maned Pita, and then another stray female cat that just showed up, and started hanging out in the gallery most of the time. They called her "P.A.," for "Pita's Assistant." P.A. had just had a litter of six kittens, in the gallery a couple weeks earlier. So suddenly I had 4 1/2 days off, and lived alone in an indie art gallery, inside a typical small industrial unit, with 7 cats. By the time I showed up, P.A. had run Pita off, and it was me, her, and the kittens all week. The gallery was open on Wednesday nights, and then Friday and Saturday nights each week, when local garage bands played.
I moved in on a Wednesday, since Richard and his girlfriend were going on a trip to New Orleans for a long weekend. So I got a couple extra days driving his cab that first week. As it turned out, that was the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, so Richard and Michelle only made it to Chicago, and spent a weekend there, instead. Come Monday, they got back, he took the taxi, and I suddenly was surrounded by a huge room, jam packed with art from all kinds of local, unknown artists, and a couple from Europe who Richard knew. The bathroom was plastered with band flyers for shows at the gallery.
I slept for most of the first two days, I was completely exhausted from the two previous years of non-stop taxi driving. In the evening of the second day, I drew a little picture in pen, on a post-it note. It was the first creative thing I had done in about 2 1/2 years. The last place I lived, in 2002, I'd been playing around, doing artwork with markers. I had been making collages of BMX, skateboard, snowboarding, and rock climbing photos, with marker doodles in between. I was trying to find a way to shade well with markers, after trying to draw a big mural with them for my dingy room. Instead I made several huge collages.
The next weekend, while out in the taxi, I bought a roll of big, white paper, the kind cheerleaders use to make banners in high school. I also bought a cheap set of 12 generic markers. I started spending my days trying different drawing styles, looking for something I liked. I soon bought a 24 pack of regular size Sharpie markers, in all their colors. About October of 2005, sitting in AA Electra 99, just me and P.A. and the kittens, listening to music and the rain on the roof, my Sharpie Scribble Style of shading was invented. That link is a blog post telling how that all happened.
My creative drive, abandoned for over two years while I tried to do nothing but make money in the taxi, and get my life back on track, was reborn. I just started drawing for hours a day, trying whatever ideas came to me, on 4 or 5 foot long sheets of that roll of paper. I mixed scribbles of different colors over each other, seeing what I ended up with, and figured out how to blend the colors to arrive at the final color I wanted. At first I wrote some of my poetry real big, then did designs in the background.
As I drew, P.A. and the kittens roamed the gallery. There was a stage at one end, and old couches on both walls. I slept on one of them, and once the kittens hit about 4 weeks old, they would venture from their box to my couch, and I usually woke up each morning with kittens climbing all over me. P.A. became my best art critic. She would jump up on the table where I drew, and sit on my drawings, while I was drawing them, in typical cat fashion. But she only sat on the good ones, and somehow avoided the crappy drawings.
We had a refrigerator and a microwave, and early, dial-up internet, at the gallery. I spent a little time trying to surf the web, but mostly I drew pictures, and read some art books that were there. At one point I drank some mini whiskey bottles, and then took photos of the kittens when they fell asleep in weird positions, with the whisky bottles around them. It looked like they had passed out at a party. I also start taking boxes and making a kitten amusement park. I made all kinds of little things for them to crawl through, play with, and explore. And I just kept drawing and playing around with my "scribble style" technique with Sharpies. Back then I was drawing things by hand, then shading with different colors, seeing what colors blended the best with the scribble style.
My sister had taken me to see the movie Rent when I visited them in North Carolina, during the time I lived in the gallery. She loved the play and the movie, and was friends with Anthony Rapp, the filmaker guy in Rent. So I did a huge RENT logo drawing for her and my niece and nephew, about 2 1/2 feet high and 5 or 6 feet long. I put a bunch of quotes from the movie, handwritten in the background, which is something I still do today in many of my drawings. I had a 4' X 8' section of the wall in Electra, which was part of the deal of living there. So I kept doing drawings to hang up, and changing them out when I did new ones.
As time went on, the kittens grew up, and were sold off or given to people who came to the gallery to watch bands play. P.A. had another litter, 4 kittens that time, after the first litter was grown and gone. She would go out, and just wander outside, for one or two days, then show up at the door again, and want back in. Obviously she met some male cats while out and about.
On Wednesday nights, the gallery was open for 3-4 hours for The Spinning Head of Big Prizes, which Richard called "An open format poetry game show for people who hate poetry." Basically, each person would spin the big wheel (visible in the video above), and do what the wheel told you to do. It may be to sing or act something out, to tell some weird story of your life, read a poem, or to "tax Matt." Matt was a life size dummy in coveralls, made of wadded up paper and duct tape. "Tax," was supposedly an old jail term for beating up someone who disrespected you, or broke a rule. So when you hit, "Tax Matt" on the wheel, you had to attack and beat up the dummy, which was lying on the floor most of the time. That got pretty funny, at times. Most of the people coming to the gallery were in their late teens or early 20's, usually friends of one of the local bands playing. And artsy kids usually aren't big on violence, so some would barely hit Matt, while others would just go berserk on him like it was WWE wrestling. After doing what the wheel said, you got to pick a prize from a box of dollar store stuff.
Spinning Head Wednesday nights usually wound up with Richard telling crazy stories (for $1 each), the taxi driver in him felt people needed to be charged for everything. He'd also break into a closet of his albums, and play really obscure punk bands, like Nail, and other bands I'd never heard of, loud as can be. Since the whole business area was empty at night, no one cared how loud it got.
Richard, his girlfriend Michelle, and few others were also big into playing poker. The whole Texas Hold 'em craze was in full swing then, so Wednesday nights usually ended with me falling asleep on my couch and a few artists smoking and playing poker around the main table. Michelle usually walked away with most everyone's money, she was the sleeper poker shark in the crew.
I just kept drawing every day, and walking a bit, so I lost some weight while there. But I ordered way too many pizzas, since there wasn't a stove to cook, and I got sick of microwave food. But my health improved quite a bit, which was good.
After about three months of drawing the scribble style, I moved to the smaller, ultra fine point Sharpies, which worked much better, allowed me to do much more detail, fade colors well, and they lasted a lot longer. I lost some weight, walking a bit every day, and was feeling a lot better just because I was being creative, and not as stressed out from working 7 days a week. But I wasn't making much money, and couldn't make enough to actually rent a normal room, or my own apartment, and get back to "normal life."
So in June of 2006, I went back to working full time as a taxi driver, but this time I had a 12" X 18" art pad, and my Sharpies, in the cab, and would draw while sitting in front of hotels, or waiting other places. That helped a lot. I never could make a decent living in the cab, but I was less stressed out, generally, since I was drawing a lot.
I left a bunch of my drawings at the gallery, when I moved out. I also lost two sketch pads worth of drawings that I left on a bus about a year later. While they were all in my #sharpiescribblestyle, they were totally different types of drawings then I've done since. But I invented, and then learned the basic color combos, of my scribble style, while living at Electra. I kept drawing on and off since. Then in 2015, while living in North Carolina, I started drawing people, leading to the drawings I've been selling for the last 5-6 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment