Burkhart
Stories
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
All
Photos & Stories Copyrighted
Fred
Burkhart 2004 & assorted dates
DID YOU EVER SEE A GROWN MAN CRY?
"Joe had just been released from the Ohio State Penitentiary after serving eight years of an armed robbery conviction. And that was seven years and eleven months too long. All Joe had done was gone into the liquor store drunk and allowed his Jimmy Cagney routine to take over. He was teasing the man behind the counter, as usual, but on that day nobody was laughing..."
CLAUDE L. DENSON JR, THE THIRD... OUTPATIENT
"It was one of the worst days in my life, contemplating suicide from the roof of a four-story building I rented in 1979. Worse still I didn't even realize that I was attempting to kill myself. I imagined instead that I could lift myself gently off the roof, catch the wind and casually coast down to the grassy knoll some four stories below on the opposite side of the street, landing light as a feather, without incident, a brief hallucination that I didn't see any problem with implementing..."
JUDY HAYES
"What happened to me in the early 80's as I worked diligently at divesting myself of alcohol and drugs is as strange as any story ever told. I had lain for several days without food or water, alone, deranged, detoxing, dehydrating and definitely dying. When I finally came out of it I ran into Judy. We were no longer `betrothed' but the alcohol often kept us running in the same circles, or at least into one another. For some unknown reason, we went together to a cornfield where we began to argue. As usual. It wasn't one of those petty lover's quarrels though, but this time something more substantial. Crows began to form out of nowhere, collecting overhead and mimicking our yapping. In no time their screams became overwhelming, finally mixing with voices and shouts that were no longer coming from Judy or me..."
UNSAVORY LABELS: "PERVERT"
Not so for JoJo: "Burkhart, why don't you arrange your images according to subject matter. I'm not interested in looking through endless images of children and old folks and derelicts; I'm only interested in looking at pictures of perverts!" JoJo was becoming a famous club kid, cock-sucker, doll maker and super-star all rolled into one. But don't let the labels limit you: JoJo transcended all of the above!
VISITING WALT WHITMAN
"When I was 35 and nearing spiritual manhood I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca . The original journey had been made by Abraham, 3,000 years ago, upon his return from Egypt after being initiated into the mysteries of life. Unlike the brightly lit spectacle that passes for Mecca today, the original place that Abraham visited was a barren desert in Saudi Arabia , containing nothing but sand, stones and stars."
YOU CAN CALL ME ART
"Riding my bike west on Diversey Street one afternoon I spotted a derelict lying half out into the gutter, rush hour traffic rushing within inches of his limp body. Crossing the street haphazardly, I ended up crashing my bike and rolling into the very same gutter, our heads ending up within inches of one another. In so doing, I had defined a new intersection, a place where two lives crossed. The eternal proximity awakens."
JOHN WAYNE GACY'S GHOST
On any given evening, in addition to the lines of curiosity seekers that wander into my open studio, a group of college kids will emerge. It is amusing to watch them stare absently into the glossy surfaces of my difficult photos of dereliction. Without fail, one of the group will step forward, proclaiming triumphantly: "Dude! There goes me on Sunday morning!" And of course his sidekicks guffaw in agreement, as they walk on down the hall, looking for the bar or the bathroom. It only takes but a few seconds for one of them to pipe up: "Eh, dude. I think we stumbled into someone's house by mistake. I think the bar is next door!"
THE KILLER POET
"Looking back, I am happy to report that this Killer Poet - one Norman A. Porter Jr. (or Mister J.J.Jameson, as he had come to be known here in Chicago) - was the first poet I bodily threw out of the Burkhart Underground so many years ago!"
THE YELLOW SUBMARINE
"In September 1995 Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters set out from the west coast in an old school bus en route to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio . His troupe was taking part in the festivities of the newly opened museum. Along the road they stopped in a handful of cities, including Chicago , where I got on the bus with my nine-year old daughter, Trinity Valentine. It was as close as I'd ever wanted to get to a legend...."
STREETWISE
"Photography and drawing are worlds apart. They represent two different ways of looking at the same world. Before I met Sherman I had a limited concept of the world, like Beckett's disembodied voice before encountering Pim. I knew about comic book heroes and movie stars and even a little about my missing parents, but nothing in my experience paralleled Sherman's perception of the world..."
THE MOANING LISA
"...That first year in the middle class proved to be my undoing. Not only did I have to start playing a part other than the one I knew by heart - that of hermit's protégé - I was also deprived of my birthright. Because of a power play by my new parents I was forbidden to visit my grandfather except on special occasions, one being the Christmas of 1949. He was a poor man, but he managed to bring me one small gift that year. Nearly blind he couldn't clearly see the paint-by-number kit he pulled off the shelf to bring to me. Imagine everyone's horror when I unwrapped my gift to find the gaudy Reclining Nude inside. Grandpa had of course meant to select The Lord's Supper..."
THE MUTED ASSHOLE - 1959
"After reform school had exhausted the possibilities of a traditional college education I sought out alternative teachings from behind the closed doors that I knew fronted forbidden streets. Even a stranger could see the depravity leaking from within the shuttered windows of the racially mixed apartments and rented rooms at the dead end of Elm Street. It was in such a set of grim rooms long before the days of political correctness that the Muted Asshole held court over a young, fierce pack of queer, black deaf mutes..."
STREET LIES
"The black man Carl sits in a populated doorway along the route to Wrigley Field, plying the young white drinking-age college kids and yuppie fanatics with a dollar bill, clenched between his eternally decaying teeth. It's easy to imagine the dollar bill laced with a disease like anthrax and him defying death like a circus sword-swallower. On other occasions he props his beaten carcass up against the corner intersection of an alley and the main street, with its overhead train tracks sheltering his parched skin from the smoky sun. Even in the shadows he remains highly visible, continuing to entice strollers off of the beaten path into unlikely and forbidden encounters with dereliction..."
EAT SHIT & DIE... NO GOOD COMMIE PIG!
"The Revolutionary Communist Party was planning to march on downtown Cincinnati as part of their annual May Day Celebration. Only a month earlier they has managed to secure a storefront for the purposes of opening a bookstore. Traditionally they have done so here in the good old USA as a front for their nefarious deeds. But this time they made the mistake of settling into the ground floor of the very building wherein I had maintained three floors of living art ecstasy for the past several years. Ironically, the building also housed the Baskin and Robbins ice cream parlor. How American can we get here!"
John Water's Autograph - circa 1989
"The first time I met John Waters I was still somewhat of a smart ass, and rather than personally interact with him, I chose to tear the icon down. It was common knowledge that over the years John had attended various trials involving members of the Manson family cult. Because of my own illustrious past, which at one point overlapped Manson's, I figured I would put John in his place. You see, one of my own trial dates had been postponed by the Santa Monica court on the very day Charles Manson and Susan Atkins were being arraigned for the Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles . So I not only attended the trial - I too was on trial! Yes indeed, I felt entitled to a little smugness."
The Librarian - Santa Monica, 1969
"In my twenties, instead of going to college, I decided to pursue an education. Outside, under the stars, it was the Sixties. I lived in the streets, or in alleys and gardens and stairwells, constantly running parallel and keeping pace with the tides of the Pacific Ocean . On occasion I rented rooms, to house the artworks I was producing; at the same time amazing friends with the eclectic interiors that resulted. At other times I amazed them with LSD, as I practiced an unorthodox and definitely unlicensed psychiatry upon them, setting psychological traps from which they were encouraged, but rarely able to escape. Drug-induced paradoxes of the mind, split into pieces and reinserted into the psychiatric text books I was reading, reliving in the flesh the captivating studies of Freud and Jung, Adler and Maslow. But for me, Lawrence Kubie said it best: it's all nothing but neurotic distortion of the creative process."
HONEY BARE
"One of my wizened friends from the street told me it was really a cloning center. Maybe she was right. When I look around and observe all of the new condos being erected on all sides, I can understand the need for a steady supply of identically programmed and determined occupants to inhabit them. Every block the same: a Starbucks, a bank or two, a handful of sports bars to further anesthetize the credit bearers. A nest of eyes, a crest of fears, a baby's cries, a child's tears, a pack of lies, a peer's leers, fewer men to make room for the queers - so says the bard."
"IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD..."
"Early One morning before dawn, towards the end of a 28-year drunk, I found myself on a grassy knoll overlooking the University of Cincinnati, sitting on the wet grass staring blankly at the big red four-story Baskin & Robbins Building across the street. I had arrived at this spot by rote early one morning before dawn. The saloons had all closed down for the night, and although I was no longer allowed in any of them, I could still have a good time just hanging around the perimeters, panhandling and fighting off the arrogant college kids who accosted me on a regular basis..."
SAGA OF THE ONE ARMED BANDIT
"I first met Eddie Balchowski in 1963. At the time I has just gone 'underground,' to mourn the death of my grandfather, moving into the ground floor of a soon to be condemned building on the edge of Chicago's Old Town. The move paralleled my life in a striking way, as I moved into secondary stages of an alcohol and drug addiction that would drag me even deeper underground as the years turned into one another..."
THE BRIDE OF CHRIST REVISITED
"In the summer of 1988 the controversial movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" played in theaters across the country. By the evening of the first day, the line of protesting Christians at Chicago's Biograph Theater had reached a thousand strong. At curbside, the police had cordoned off a two-lane corral to restrict the flow of Christians, who they deemed to be violating the speed limit of light. At the sight of this I was moved to throw in my lot with the Chosen Ones, jumping into the fray with my crucifix-shaped-like-an-ordinary-camera."
ARTIST AND MODEL
"I nearly killed the Dracaena Marginata, one of the plants that live with me in a room that was vacated by everyone else years ago. I was only reaching over to adjust one of Heather's nipples, as she lay naked for me, posing on the bed for a drawing I was making, as I sat there beneath her body on a tiny chair my daughter left for me. Heather's touch proved so electric that it knocked me back onto the table where a dozen candles burned, in fact, upsetting them onto the plant, which dripped red with wax from its leaves, like my cock dripping hot and red as I fell backwards onto the floor while she laughed at me. I was only trying to maintain my 60 years as an artist, I suppose, perched precariously beneath the wilting leaves of Adam and Eve's deceptive tree called knowledge..."
"STAY BACK 3OO FEET"
"My portrait of the firefighter known as "Stash" is unique in that I not only didn't know him but it was also my first night in town and I didn't know anyone else either. That lonely combination produced a picture with a lot of my own personality in it..."
"SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW"
"The phone call came on Sunday evening. I was hosting the open mic at my studio; maybe 50 people were listening to me as I was preparing to introduce the next performer. "It's for Ruby," the person handing me the phone was saying. Ruby had showed up a week earlier, looking for work and a place to stay. I offered to house her in the loft until she could get on her feet. She was from Pittsburgh, on the run from her family, and, I came to find out, on the run with heroin..."
"FIRST FLIGHT "
"I'll never forget my first plane ride - or let's say, I'll never remember it. I was flying from L.A. to Frisco, a trip that would require less than an hour in the clouds. The year was 1967, approximately, and I was headed up the coast again, possibly in search of the self I had left there on a previous trip."
"DEER EMO "
"I first met Emo Phillips in 1989. A young model and I were standing in front of my Lakeview studio considering art when Emo casually strolled by. "Oh my God. it's Emo Phillips," said she."
"Who the fuck is Emo Phillips?" is about all I could say to her. She might be a hip young thing, but I was 50 years old and from another space and time. I had no idea who she was talking about. I deduced Emo must be a movie or TV star, and since I didn't use either medium, of course I was in the dark.
"It was 3am and I hopped on my bike and headed up Halsted to visit my old friend Mickey. He owns the fetish store -- 99th Floor -- at the nucleus of Chicago's Boys Town..."
THE LOVER OF SLUM - A FULL LENGTH NOVEL
Chapter Onelin
"To the Venice Beach of the 1960's, Eddie and Freddie were a Beat Version of Batman and Robin, wearing their blankets by day like capes hung loosely from their shoulders. At night the same blankets served to stave off an occasional rough draft of cold air blowing in from the mighty Pacific, as the men sought shelter under a stairwell or in some invisible niche in an alleyway. Indeed, these men slept wherever they could: under fig trees, in gutted automobiles, on the porch of a designer of Lear Jets. everywhere that is, except under the same blanket."
THE LOVER OF SLUM - CHAPTER THREE
"...as they traveled inland, venturing deep into the brown bowels of smoggy Los Angeles to visit an old friend Vincent at the Los Angeles County Museum. It was to be a surprise visit, in they hadn't told him they were coming. But they wouldn't miss this gala event for anything! This was to be Vincent's largest art showing to date, a first-time collection of virtually all of the artist's oils, water colors and sketch books created during a ten-year output. It was too bad that Vincent had been dead for nearly eighty years and would miss out on his own festivities, this at once illustrious and infamous Van Gogh..."
Appointment: 1228 N. Noble St. (coach house) Chicago, 60622 (773 348-8536)