Survivor by Marc Brandel

Author:Marc Brandel [Brandel, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780380009534
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1976-06-15T05:00:00+00:00

☸ TWENTY ☸

DECEMBER, 1939–MAY, 1940.

It wasn’t long before Paul was broke. He spent his last few dollars shipping his suitcase with the carefully rolled canvases and his paints and brushes to Angela Anson in New York.

For the next few weeks he worked the bars along Bourbon Street, offering tourists quick crayon portraits for fifty cents. There was avid competition for the tourists’ money; the French Quarter was littered with men and women who would do anything for a few cents; but Paul found it easy enough to earn a living. The trouble was it was too easy; too many of his sitters showed a personal interest in him; they offered him drinks, a ride along the Gulf, a shared hotel room. He always refused. Ever since his second year of art school, he felt, he had been living, trading on the effect he had on people. It wasn’t that he had any moral guilt about Nigel, Eugenia, all the others who had been so eager to help him. He was obsessed by the conviction that what other people saw in him had become an impediment to his own vision.

He left Bourbon Street; he hung around the docks, huddled out of the wind in the pale sunlight, watching the fruit boats unload, sketching the longshoremen at work. There were occasionally ripe bananas to be had for the asking; he slept at the city mission on Rampart Street. The price of shelter and a bowl of oatmeal was an hour and a half of hysterical accusation. Destitution was a proof of sin; any man who pleaded guilty to this indictment, groveling to Jesus for forgiveness, was rewarded with a bunk for the night. Paul slept on the chapel floor. His clothes were soon too soiled for any furtive laundering in a public toilet to help. He was on the bum and he looked it.

Vagrants were like men in uniform; no longer individuals. Making the rounds of groceries, back doors in the suburbs—“Have you got any work I could do for something to eat?”—Paul found he had lost all identity except to himself. The shopkeepers and housewives, handing him odds and ends of food, saw nothing but his stained and shapeless clothes.

Paul had succeeded in disfiguring himself at last. He had become faceless.

He had never known such a sense of independence. Or of estrangement. He was fascinated by the experience; he spent hours in the public library reading any books he could find on Eastern philosophy. “If others can’t see me,” he scribbled in one of his sketchbooks, “what am I? Free? Or only misplaced?” His only regret was that he had no one to talk to about it. His fellow vagrants were no help to him. They had no interest in the mystic nature of their condition. Among themselves they had little solidarity, no group awareness, no life style. Their only concern was to “make it,” to climb back into the class above them, the employed.

One night at the city mission Paul

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