Triptych Interviews
Tony
Saturday, July 2 (After Chapter 18 of Diva)
aroslav: Hey, Tony, thanks for taking time to talk to me while you are traveling.
TONY: Sure. It’s not like we don’t talk every day.
aroslav: Yeah. I really appreciate that.
TONY: What’s up?
aroslav: Where are you now?
TONY: Camped at Indiana Dunes State Park. We’ll get to Nebraska tomorrow.
aroslav: Well, I’ve got this new idea and I wanted to run it by you.
TONY: Who is she?
aroslav: Hey, I’m not just in the business of throwing women your way. This is serious.
TONY: So?
aroslav: So we tell the story from your perspective, right? But there are some pretty cool people involved. We don’t really get to hear from them much. So I was thinking that I’d like to interview your friends.
TONY: You’re not going to stalk them are you?
aroslav: Not unless I have to. I thought you could arrange introductions for me and give me a list of who to talk to. Well, let’s be honest, I’ve got a list. Your fans are pretty much writing that script.
TONY: Okay. So who’s first?
aroslav: You are.
TONY: Shit. Don’t we like lay all my dirty laundry out for everybody to see in every chapter? Who wants to know more about me?
aroslav: Well, here’s the thing. There’s lots of stuff we don’t know about you that will never be in the story.
TONY: So put it in.
aroslav: It’s your life, but not all of it is relevant. Sorry to break that to you.
TONY: Don’t go easy on me. I can still wipe up a racquetball court with your ass.
aroslav: How well I know. So first off, we found out in Diva that you started drawing when you were about ten years old. Hadn’t you done any drawing before that? Did this just come out of nowhere? What were the clues?
TONY: Which question do you want an answer to? Never mind. I’ll play along.
So to start, it wasn’t that I never drew until then. The refrigerator in our kitchen had as many drawings on it as anybody else’s and I always got good compliments on my drawing. The significance of that day wasn’t in starting to draw, it was in becoming lost in the drawing. I guess that it was when I discovered I was a little CDO.
aroslav: ???
TONY: That’s the same as OCD but the letters are in alphabetical order, like they should be.
aroslav: Cute.
TONY: No, really. You have to be a little OCD to be an artist IMHO.
aroslav: Are we texting this interview?
TONY: To the point. I’d sit down with my classmates, or with crayons at the kitchen table and draw pictures that were really pretty good. I drew a duck on a pond in kindergarten. It was complete with ripples on the pond and the reflection of the duck in the water. Technically, I guess that’s the inborn talent thing. I can draw.
What changed that day when I was 10 was the relationship with the paper and pencil. That day, they filled my head. There was nothing else in the world. I saw them and I had to draw. I think I may have had impulses like that before, but this one hit when there were no other obstacles. I picked up the paper and pencils, walked out of the house, got on my bike, and went to the creek. I had an image in my mind of a rock and tree that I had to draw. I saw it and drew it about a dozen times. Then there was this chipmunk sitting on a stump watching me. I scarcely turned my head to look at him. He was busy with some nut he’d found that he was chowing down on and just sat there while I drew him. He was bigger than life in my eye. It’s like I couldn’t see anything else. And I looked at my other drawings and I could see that he’d been there all the time. I’d hidden him near the rock, next to the tree, in the grass. I’d draw one thing and the chipmunk would be hidden in the scene.
aroslav: Slow down, Tony. You’re panting.
TONY: Yeah. You know how I get. Just talking about this stuff makes my fingers itch.
aroslav: So you felt the—what’s Doc call it?—connection?
TONY: I made the connection. You know, feeling it is something that came later. I think feeling implies something conscious. Making the connection is subconscious.
aroslav: Have you noticed that sometimes you talk like someone much older?
TONY: Oh. You mean I’m pretentious?
aroslav: That’s not what I meant...
TONY: I suppose I am. It was almost a game when Dumpling and I started talking with a real vocabulary instead of grunts. It’s her fault. She’s got a vocabulary like you wouldn’t believe. She made me use mine. We’d sit in the loft and I’d say, “Shit!” and she’d say, “What does that mean, Tony?” Of course, it wasn’t enough to give a definition and say “excrement.” She wanted to know what I meant when I said it. It didn’t stop me from using common swear words, but when I was talking to her, she made me explain what I was thinking when I said them.
aroslav: Was it hard growing up in Nebraska for an artist?
TONY: Nebraska has a lot of fine artists.
aroslav: Like?
TONY: Joyce Ballantyne.
aroslav: ???
TONY: Okay. I can tell you don’t know who the hell I’m talking about, but every truck driver in America in the 1950s had a pin-up calendar with pictures she painted. Then she created one of the best-known advertising images there’s ever been—the Coppertone girl with her swimming bottoms being pulled down by a little dog. Of course, she also did a huge number of portraits of celebrities, too.
aroslav: Any artists I might actually know?
TONY: Gutzon Borglum.
aroslav: You’re making names up. What did he paint?
TONY: Sculptor. Mount Rushmore.
aroslav: Okay, we’ve gotten off-track. The question was about growing up in Nebraska.
TONY: Hey, don’t blame me. One of Bychkova’s final papers was on an influential American artist. I aced that one by using Borglum as my subject.
aroslav: Did you always think you’d grow up to be one of the famous Nebraska artists?
TONY: No. I was pretty lost in high school. All I wanted to do was draw. But who can make a living doing that? I’m not so naive as to think I can earn a fair wage drawing pictures. Nobody I knew in Nebraska did that. I figured I’d have to have a career. I still kind of think that way. That’s why I’m going to study criticism at SCU. I figure that if I can’t earn a living painting my own pictures, maybe I can earn one criticizing other people’s. Bob Bowers does.
aroslav: Still, you went to PCAD to study painting. The whole SCU thing started later.
TONY: It was against my better judgment. If I’d been acting rationally, I’d have gone to Lincoln and studied to be an art teacher. That was my first choice.
aroslav: That’s always been a curiosity to me. Why did you move all the way out to Seattle to study art?
TONY: There were two reasons. First, they really recruited me. The final offer from UNeb was a Stafford loan and the name of a banker in Omaha. My folks could help me a little, but they weren’t going to pay for my whole college education, and I couldn’t see coming out of school in four years with $80,000 in loans over my head. This really nice woman at PCAD called me about every other week with a status report on some loan or needs grant that they thought they could get me. Even though tuition there is like double UNeb, I ended up with such a good financial aid package that I could do it on just my Stafford loans and about $5,000 from my folks.
aroslav: Makes financial sense. What was the other reason.
TONY: Beth. You know, she’s really a phenomenal friend, and I’d do anything for her. Yes, I mean anything. We were in the loft of her barn, sitting above the horses with bales of hay stacked all around us. That was our meeting place. We had all my school offers stacked around us. I got accepted to four different schools. PCAD was my “reach” school. When I applied, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that I’d even get accepted, let alone get recruited. But Beth started quizzing me about each one. Why UNeb? Well, it was easy, close to home, familiar. Why Clarkson? Visual arts program that is close to home. I could live at home and commute and maybe afford to graduate. Why University of Colorado? It’s pretty. Why PCAD? Great school, good finances, and they want me.
Beth wasn’t satisfied with any of my answers. She started eliminating them. Clarkson was strictly a fallback if I couldn’t make it somewhere else. I wanted to be away from home as much as I wanted to be at college. UColorado was out because I hate snowy winters. UNeb was a cheesy copout and I really didn’t want to be a teacher. What was left was PCAD, a school that wanted me to do what I wanted to do and would make it financially possible for me to do it.
aroslav: Then why such angst when you got there?
TONY: We drove out there with my stuff in the back of the car. You know how much stuff you can put in the back of a car when there are three people in it? Not much. As soon as we crossed the Rockies, it hit me that I’d made a huge mistake. I’d let Beth convince me that I was really following my dream by going to PCAD like she was following hers going to Wellesley. I realized that I didn’t really have a dream that was worthy of this kind of commitment. She wants to change the world and I was going to paint pictures. She left for school a week before I did and I was already feeling like I was going to be abandoned to my own devices. I honestly just didn’t think I could survive on my own.
aroslav: Then came the girls.
TONY: Kind of a last minute rescue. I still don’t understand why so many good things happened to me in the past six months. I don’t think I did anything to deserve it.
aroslav: What makes you so irresistible to all these women that are gathered around you? Beth, Melody, Lissa, Kate, Allison? Even Bree and Wendy and Sandra. I’ll leave Amy off the list because she’s gay and Sonia because she has a boyfriend. What makes Tony so irresistible?
TONY: You think I know? I didn’t even know girls existed until six months ago. Not diminishing my relationship with Beth, but we were friends and we just never considered each other as boy and girl. I’m still trying to grasp it.
aroslav: But there must be some secret ingredient.
TONY: I’ll just say this much—I try not to do anything to anyone that will hurt them, either physically or emotionally. I’ve been through that shit. I just won’t do it to other people. Other than that, you’ll just have to read the story.
aroslav: Makes sense. Just a couple more things. Birthday?
TONY: September 18. I’ll be 20 this year.
aroslav: Year in school?
TONY: I’ll be a sophomore this fall.
aroslav: Favorite music?
TONY: I listen to everything that has tonality. I don’t usually like hip-hop because most of the artists are just trying too hard to be cool. Just doesn’t do it. We were raised on country music out here, so I listen to that some. Love the classics because they aren’t distracting. They lift you and carry you effortlessly and you don’t have to listen to understand it. And, of course, I like rock. Dad listens to a lot of show tunes. Broadway stuff. It’s okay, but not my number one. New age can be pretty inspiring, though. Trance music. Dub-step. Anybody else?
aroslav: And if there was an artist, living or dead, that you could meet, who would it be and why?
TONY: You mean besides Borglum? [laughs] I think Picasso. I know I don’t paint anything like him, but when you look at his canvasses, you can see the connection. That’s what people don’t get about cubism. All they see are distortions—trying to see every angle at the same time. But it doesn’t make a difference. You look at an eye that Picasso painted and you can see the passion with which he painted it—you can see how in touch with...how in love with his model he was.
aroslav: Painting is what you love most, isn’t it.
TONY: No. Painting is how I express my love. I think there’s a difference.
aroslav: Life philosophy?
TONY: Leave the world a better place.
aroslav: Who should I call next for an interview?
TONY: Obviously you should talk to Lissa and Melody, but probably start with Beth. She’s known me longest.
aroslav: Thanks Tony. We’ll talk again soon.
TONY: Yeah. Every day.
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