Living in an Art Gallery: Cats

This man is Richard Johnson, taxi driver, fame ass arteest (in the hippest of SoCal circles), owner/benevolent dictator of the AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery (& Museum), and the guy who gave me the opportunity to actually live in an indie art gallery.  That gallery is where my Sharpie scribble style of drawing was born.

I had about two weeks of peaceful sleeping on a couch, then they finally got to me.  Every morning after, I would wake to several tiny claws poking me in different places.  It wasn't a horrible way to wake up, but it could be startling, especially if the claws were in my eyelids or face.

It started on August 24th, 2005.  I remember this because it was the weekend that the massive category 5 hurricane known as Katrina was barreling down on the gulf coast.  I had been working as a taxi driver for two years straight, from late August 2003 to August 2005, based in Huntington Beach, California.  I began driving a taxi in Orange County, CA after an injury, what I thought was a hernia, in 1999.   I drove a cab until losing my driver's license, due to a clerical mishap at the DMV, in December of 2000.  I worked odd jobs after that, and ended up homeless, in late 2002.  Then I got a job at Stone Creek Cafe, a weird deli/restaurant/mini mart/sushi/wine bar combo in the food court of the ultra upscale, Fashion Island Mal,l in Newport Beach, California.

For those not familiar with Southern California, Los Angeles, the city, is the center of the huge SoCal metro region of over 13 million people, 18 million people if you include San Diego and thedesert cities.  L.A. is the main city in Los Angeles county.  Right below L.A. county is Orange county, known for being a suburban and mellower than L.A., and, until, 2016, Orange County was a Republican stronghold in the Democratic state of California.  Newport Beach is the Beverly Hills of Orange County, that's where the concentration of the big money is.  In 2002, I somehow ended up living in the bushes next to the Newport Back Bay, in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S., and working in the restaurant at Fashion Island (known as Fascist Island in punk circles), the outdoor mall that looked out over the Pacific ocean, on one side.  The mall was so rich, that there were "mall rats," people that hung out there every day, who were in their 50's, 60's, and 70's.  It was a really weird scene.

It took me nine months of living in the bushes, taking a bus to the mall, "showering" in the sink at the bus stop restroom, and working at Stone Creek Cafe, to save up enough money to get my license back, and my taxi permit, and go back to taxi driving.  I started driving a cab again on Labor Day weekend 2003, and for the next two years, my life was about nothing but money.  I didn't do anything creative.  I didn't ride my BMX bike.  I had no life outside taxi driving. 

I only had 5 complete days off in those two years from August 2003 to 2005.  I worked 7 days a week, 15 to 18 hours most days, and slept in my taxi in parking lots six nights a week.  I took showers at the gym most days.  Technology had changed the taxi industry, and I was just struggling to pay my $600 a week, to lease the taxi, and $300 in gas, and then make a little for myself. For those two years, my "day off" was working from about 7 am to 3 pm in the taxi, then getting a cheap motel room, a $6 pizza, a bottle of Diet Coke, watching a couple hours of TV, and sleeping for ten hours.

By August of 2005, I was 374 pounds, bitter, pissed off, burned out, and struggling to find a way to escape the taxi lifestyle and make a living some other way.  That's when fellow taxi driver, Richard Johnson, made me an offer I couldn't refuse.  Richard is one of the craziest characters I've ever met, and I mean that in a good way.  He owned his taxi, the actual car, and worked within the same company I did.  That meant he "only" paid the taxi company about $335 a week, but he had to pay to maintain his cab.  He liked to work days, mostly driving old ladies to doctor's appointments, and that kind of thing.  He rented his taxi out to another driver at night, and that paid most of what he owed the company every week.  So his taxi life was much less stressful than mine.  It also meant he could hang out in the small industrial unit where he owned the AAA Electra Art Gallery (& Museum) at night.  In fact, Richard and his girlfriend Michelle lived there.  But Richard's mom's health was getting worse.  Richard and Michelle moved into her condo nearby.  I had rented a wall at the gallery earlier, in 1999 and early 2000, at the previous location.  Richard and I became friends, and shared jokes and crazy taxi stories when we ran into each other while driving.

So I came to mind when he needed a new weekend driver, AND someone to live in the gallery.  The deal was, I would drive pay Richard $270 for his taxi, and drive it from 4 pm on Friday afternoon to 4 am Monday morning.  I was a night an weekend driver, specializing in driving Orange County drunks home night after night.  I usually made $200 to $250 each night, on Fridays and Saturdays.  So $270 for 2 1/2 days, and having 4 1/2 days off, was a good deal for me.  The other part of the deal was, I could live in the gallery in Anaheim during the week, and I'd pay Richard $50 a week for that.  At heart, I was a creative guy.  But for two years, 2003 to 2005, I completely set my creativity aside to focus entirely on making money, to dig myself out of a financial hole, and get back on track.  Instead I wound up fat, pissed off, and burned out. 

I took the deal.  That particular weekend, Richard had planned to take Michelle on a trip to New Orleans.  So I got his taxi to drive a few extra days, while they were gone, as a bonus.  I moved into the gallery on Wednesday, August 24th, and drove Richard and Michelle to the airport.  They flew to Chicago, planning to catch a flight to  New Orleans for a fin weekend.  But Hurricane Katrina had other plans.  So the two of them wound up having a long weekend in Chicago as they watched Katrina annihilate New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on TV.  I drove his taxi that weekend, and slept on one of the couches lining the walls of the gallery.

As he was driving me to the gallery that Wednesday, after dropping off my leased cab, Richard asked, "By the way, do you like cats?"  He made sure not to mention it beforehand, until I was committed to the move.
"Yeah, I guess," I said, "Do you have a cat at the gallery?" I asked.
"Yeah," he replied calmly, Well... technically... eight."  That's classic Richard Johnson.  The lifelong taxi driver in him is a shyster at heart.  He likes to get the best of you in some way, even if it only means something like charging you a dollar to hear the story of why there's a back door from a taxi in his section at the gallery. 
"Wait, what?  NINE cats?"
"Yeah.  We've had Pita for a year or so.  Then this other female cat started showing up, we called her Pita's Assistant, or P.A..  And P.A. just had a litter of six kittens.  So technically, there's eight cats.  We haven't seen Pita in a couple days, though."

So that's how I came to live in an indie art gallery in Anaheim, California with eight, actually seven, cats.  P.A. ran Pita off after she had her litter, so Pita never came back.  Being fairly streetwise, we assumed Pita found a nice home somewhere in Anaheim.  P.A. and her kittens were in a box, in a corner by the glass display cases.  I slept on one of the couches across the width of the industrial unit, about twenty feet away.  P.A. and I became friends over the first couple of days.  But the six kittens were only about three weeks old, and barely left the box at first.  It took about 2 or three weeks until the kittens started waking up and going exploring around the gallery in the mornings.  That included climbing up, on, and around me, and the couch I was sleeping on.  From then on, for maybe a month and a half, until we sold the kittens, they would climb all over me every morning and wake me up.  Nothing like a tiny claw to the nose, ear, or eyelid to startle the fuck out of me in the morning.

After two years of nothing but working around the clock, focused entirely on money, I was suddenly sleeping as much as I wanted (well, almost), I had a place to chill out, a refrigerator, a microwave, and crappy TV, a place to make art, and was woke up by marauding kittens every morning, and was surrounded by walls full of independent art.  It was a pretty cool way to live, actually.