He had a knack for finding distinctive habitations: the Nobska lighthouse in Massachusetts, a tent in Massasoit State Park, a winery cottage in California, and now the cabin on the Ouachita oxbow. For a while he and his girlfriend, Blue, painted trucks and carousel horses and kiddie rides for a carnival, and sea creatures on walls for a couple of marine wonderlands. He spoke in an unassuming manner, his gaze often directed toward his bespattered boots. I asked what it was like to walk past and look up at one of his own murals, and he said, “I’m glad I’m still alive.”
When Indigo learned we were following the valley of the Ouachita, he began a story about a dream he’d had on a river sandbar years ago, but decided the telling was too involved for a sidewalk conversation. I asked him to join us for supper, and he nodded and started back up the scaffold, pausing to call down, “Have you got a place to stay?” Not yet. “Come out to the cabin. There’s a four-poster for you.”
At seven, we met him at a little restaurant not far from the elegant slippers of the fifty-foot femme fatale, and it was she who led us into talk about the difficulties in painting large murals: heights, weather, public constraints, distortions caused by viewers looking from thirty feet below the painting.
“On that first mural,” he said, “I struggled longest with how I should represent the black community here and its history. Do I put them in overalls and field dresses? Kerchiefs and shoeless? Are they picking cotton and walking behind mules? Does the mural end up with blacks in torn dungarees and whites in suits and dresses? What part of the past do I put up on a wall forty-six feet wide and three storeys high? I couldn’t figure it out until one Sunday. That’s the day people dress up down here — everybody, black or white. That was my answer — put some of every group in their Sunday best. I mean, who wouldn’t get into their best bib and tucker for their portrait?”
Q said, “That made people happy?”
“Not everyone. Some guy drove past in an old truck one day when I was on the scaffold and yelled out, ‘Hey! Why don’t you paint another nigger up there!’” Indigo paused. “That’s going to happen when a street is the gallery.”
We talked about public murals in a democracy as being an art of inclusion, how art in a forum demands inclusion. I paraphrased José Orozco, the great muralist of Mexico, who said of all the arts, mural painting is (I quote him now) “the most disinterested, as it cannot be converted into an object of personal gain nor can it be concealed for the benefit of a few privileged people. It is for the people. It is for everybody.” Great mural artists understand the power of the forum and use their work to instruct, inspire, remind, maybe amuse, and sometimes provoke. I could see Indigo’s murals doing all those things.
“I’ve never had this much fun with art,” he said. “I’ve earned more money but never so much pleasure. It’s almost performance art. Rednecks in pickups, church ladies in Buicks, guys on Harleys — everybody wants to join in some way. One woman stopped to tell me I was using too much pink and purple. I told her enough murals in Arkansas are green and brown. Besides, bright colors fade.”
I said, speaking of purple, the only thing on the first mural that wasn’t generalized was the Grapette delivery truck. (I noticed it because I might have won a footrace in 1949 had I not drunk that second bottle of Grapette soda pop just before the competition.)
“It was invented here in Camden right about the time we were born,” Indigo said. “Benjamin Fooks. He started out by selling brooms, among other things. You’ll be sleeping in his former cabin tonight. He was my uncle.”
That detail seemed rationale enough for me to boast I’d once taken the company slogan, “Thirsty or not,” to heart and drunk six bottles in a day, and Indigo said, “I did thirteen one time between breakfast and going to bed.” Q asked what the slogan meant, and he said, “You don’t have a glass of wine because you’re thirsty. You don’t drink coffee for thirst.” We both, I assume, were looking proud because she said, “Are you boys bonding over guzzling purple sodas?”
After we ordered sandwiches, he said, “Above the Grapette truck I painted a bright-yellow Stearman biplane, but there was something about it that bothered me. But I couldn’t see what it was. I kept looking, and it still escaped me. One evening when I was up working on it, the bucket slipped out of my hand and fell thirty feet — yellow paint went everywhere. Something didn’t want the plane up there. Right after the accident I finally saw how the Stear-man was flying directly at the bank tower in the mural. Shades of Nine-Eleven in the brightest yellow. The next day I went up and painted clouds over it. In five months, that yellow plane was the only real accident.”
Our waitress came to the table, cast a sweet eye on Indigo, a man now of local renown, asked whether his (full) glass needed refilling, and sashayed herself off again. Q asked, “Are you married?” Not now. “Do you have children?” No children. “How about when you were one? Were you a little artist?”
“I liked toys that worked,” he said. “That operated. Things I could assemble and disassemble and reassemble in different ways — Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets. But those toys were all based on angles, and I wanted curves and circles. When I got older I built little flying things, but I always dreamed of machines that could be totally versatile to move in all the elements — land, water, and air. I guess I was more mechanical than artistic. A screwdriver instead of a crayon. Later, when I worked for the company that makes Transformers, I had to design instruction books, but I wanted to do the figures. I didn’t stay there long.”
The waitress brought our supper, simple fare, nothing to distract the conversation. Indigo said, “When I was about sixteen, I saw in a Popular Mechanics plans for a small boat. Eight-feet long with a nineteen thirties–style racing hull. I made it out of spruce and marine plywood. At my mother’s suggestion, I covered the bottom with fiberglass cloth, a new material then. I got an old Mercury outboard racing motor and rebuilt it. It’d do about forty miles an hour on the water, which is a little fast for the Ouachita. You know, bends and barges, snags. But I was a kid. One evening I was going full-bore up the river and hit an out-of-control ski boat which didn’t survive. But the fiberglass hull saved me. My mother’s idea. What did she know about boat construction?” We toasted his survival, and he said, “Maybe I should never have named that little racer Miss Fit. But I heard it’s still out there somewhere, running the river.”
Q said, “This afternoon you mentioned a dream you had about the Ouachita.”
“Not about the river — on the river,” he said. “It happened in August. I’d gone up the Ouachita alone. Stopped on a sandbar to get a little sun. I was a teenager. Nineteen fifty-four, a time of lots of talk and books about UFOs. I fell asleep, I guess. For how long, I don’t know, but I dreamed a spacecraft came in above the water and hovered over me and blocked the sun. I can’t remember it all now, but I do remember the ship spotted me, and three beings — willowy females — came down and took me aboard. I was helpless. All I could do was look back and see my body sleeping on the sand. The airship was like a chameleon — it kept changing colors, according to mood, it seemed. Inside, a huge vertical-axis gyro was turning. I don’t remember what happened on the ship, except I can see now certain ideas got planted in me that began sprouting years after. The three females might have been expressions of yin principles — art, grace, and beauty. Who knows? Then I got returned to the sandbar. When I woke up in the hot sun, I had no sunburn, and my skin was aromatic. It was like I’d been under a big shadow the whole time.”
Did he ever dream of the ship again? “Once, about a year later, in a fever. That time the thing — or the dream — was scary, but I don’t know why. Something had changed.” He shook his head. “Now I don’t know whether the dreams were a blessing or curse.”
Q asked whether he dreamed much about flying — body flying without mechanical support, that wonderful free-floating stuff. Indigo said, “Not enough.”
11
Architect of Phantasmagoria
SOON
AFTER DUSK, we followed Indigo Rocket across the river and into the low backcountry to the Fooks cabin where he lived on the woods-fringed oxbow fed by cold springs he could feel rising when at night he swam the dark water. His uncle built the retreat in 1946 on proceeds from Grapette and its sister drinks: Orangette, Lemonette, Limette. I felt a kind of proprietary interest in the place: my boyhood nickels must have bought a shingle here and a nail there.
Benjamin Tyndle Fooks (rhymes illogically with Cokes), after many months of experimentation, created his signature drink with real grape juice and cane sugar, and the resulting excellence of his beverage caused it, over the following decade, to reach from little Camden across the nation. (An early slogan: “Particular Folks Drink Fooks Drinks.”) After the family sold the company, Grapette eventually ended up in the hands of a rival that let it decline until yet another group brought it back and returned it in a small way to certain areas, one of them its natal town where once again you can find it in the little clear bottles.
“Let me go in first,” Indigo said as if he needed to open a safe passage for us through a lair, and he disappeared inside the cabin. Suddenly the dark windows took on an unearthly glow, and we heard him call out for us to enter, and in we went, Q keeping so close behind me I heard her mutter her grandfather’s strongest oath, “Cheese and crackers!” As I looked about, mine came out stronger.
Our eyes had to adjust to the dimness and shadows, but before that could happen fully, Indigo, nowhere to be seen, must have hit another switch because the room seemed to change. Cheese and crackers indeed! It was a phantasmagorium!
Entering Indigo’s parlor was like stepping into the back of a vacuum-tube radio of the same vintage as the first Grapette: the space was full of inexplicable objects, some glowing and others only seeming to glow from reflections; shapes curvilinear and right-angled, bulbous and boxy, yet all in a complex order it would take a schematic drawing to explain; the lower objects were ostensibly attached or anchored or plugged in, while the upper things appeared airborne. A chamber aloft, a room in hover.
I’d never seen so much light — particles of light — in a dim room; it was as though they were little bungs and stoppers to keep the cool darkness from leaking in and extinguishing everything. Clobbered by surprise, I saw two or three sparklings where perhaps there was only one. Yet the effect wasn’t a banishment of darkness but a shivering of it with fractured radiance: glistenings, glisterings, gleamings, glintings, glimmerings, glowings, refractions and refulgences, candescence and luminescence, little shining beacons, small shimmering bulbs, twinklings and blinkings, lamplets and lanternlets bespangling the walls in a carny of luminations. It was as if a cut-glass prism full of entrapped sunbeams had fallen and shattered, each brokenness still shedding its wavelength of spectral light. A color wheel spun so fast the pigments had flown off to bespatter whatever they hit: ceiling, floor, Q’s head. Her flaxen hair now magenta, now vermilion, and, with another step forward, orchid, heliotrope, cobalt blue. A student of chromatics could go mad. “Your face!” she said. “You’re a chameleon. A redskin. No, now you’re a green man from planet Quoz.”
I said, Let it be like this when I cross over, and she said, “Maybe you just crossed. Maybe you’re there.”
Where was Indigo? Not the color, the man, because the color — and a hundred others — fluoresced everywhere.
Did I hear music? Was sight turning to sound? A little night music? Light music? A true chromatic scale sung sotto voce? A chorale of colors? Was I seeing radiance or hearing ragtime? The disassociation of synesthesia. Where the devil was Indigo?
Ah! Of course we couldn’t see him, because we were inside his kaleidoscope skull where he’d transformed his imagination into light and color splattered all over constructions made from hundreds upon hundreds of found objects: buttons, beads, baskets, bottles, Christmas ornaments, saucers, seashells, vases, candlesticks, small brass horns, stalks of river cane, gelatin molds, twigs, a fly-swatter. Look long enough, and somewhere there’d be green cheese and crackers, shellacked and polished and reflecting light like the evening star. He’d turned the place into a loom where he could weave a two-dimensional world of murals into a three-dimensional warped and wefted tapestry seeming to have movement, and that meant he’d embraced the fourth dimension.
The chamber, although large, seemed full, almost claustrophobic, as though it could hold nothing more, not so much as an exhalation, yet I could walk through it, along narrow aisles and alleys and avenues leading into little piazzas with chairs under long, thin, cut trees, decurved into leaning bows hung with bright picked-up objects, small arbors decorated by a magpie, all of it under a beamed sky of a ceiling — the only thing keeping me from floating off into some fifth dimension.
The nature of quoz is synergistic. Like stardust lying over the planet, quoz is potential recombinant energy seeking union with an open mind. A crevice is all it needs. Ready your emotional membranes, and it enters, passes through. To the implicit force in quoz, any idea that’s ever crossed your brain is a latent zygote. This wasn’t psychosis — it was zygosis.
And then Q came from someplace, her hair chrome yellow, her face puce, and she said, “Where’ve you been, Little Boy Blue?” Under the haycock, fast asleep.
But where the hell is Indigo? And then he was there too, coming into the room on a boy’s bicycle painted in carny colors, nodding hello, and again out of the room, and soon again back into it, slowing to say, “Want a ride?” And my wambled brain thinking, Just had one, thanks. And here he came around again. “Thirsty or not?” And that time I got out a real answer: Thirsty!
I sat down in a chair under one of the tree limbs in front of a large fireplace, the chimney sided by a mural of half-mad Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” I was fit to dance by the light of the moon. Q asked if I was all right, and later she alleged I said a candle has no opposite because if it did, you could take a couple of sticks of darkness into a lighted room and extinguish it.
Sans wheels, Indigo reappeared carrying a tray of three ice-cubed glasses and three bottles of Grapette, the old-style little fellows, and he poured us a round of Uncle Benjamin’s secret formula in the very room where inventor Fooks used to take his, and Q asked again, “Are you okay?” and I said, For a minute or two, I think I transitioned.
Indigo may have smiled. His art had succeeded.
Sitting, sipping, collecting myself, I could see the room now more clearly. It wasn’t airborne, but I still felt it could be if my attention wandered, because it was deliberately fitted out to permit the ordinary to transmogrify into the alien in an auxiliary cosmos where the immutable laws were those of fancy, and the goal was to unhitch a visitor from the mundane and the presumed in order that he might flitter like a bat through the darks of imagination. An emporium to disorient one’s sensorium.
At the center of the Great Parlor, for that’s what it was in its lodgelike setting, were large wooden tables topped with spired towers made entirely from found objects gathered by an artist on jolly terms with that elusive chimera of the late last century, one’s inner child. But the craftsmanship was from experienced hands. If you know Erastus Salisbury Field’s huge painting Historical Monument of the American Republic, you’ll have an idea not of the architecture but of the folk vision inherent in Indigo’s world of spires. Or perhaps closer is the fabled Watts Towers in Los Angeles, structures Indigo loved. Nothing was pointless or daffy, although everything was whimsical.
On the far side of the room was a four-by-eight-foot spacecraft, airborne except for a small, hidden pedestal. A compact person could board it. Oh, to be again nine years old! Cross a hydroplane with a jet fighter, add in a few details from a Formula 1 race car, paint it in harmonious metallic pastels, tip the nose with small nodules of stained glass, and you’d have Indigo Rocket’s rocket-ship, a piece of sculpture waiting for its gallery. He said cryptically, “A transition between air and water and land requires certain metamorphoses in design — for efficiency.”
I interpreted that to mean rotors for flight could metamorphose into propellers for water, sails could change to wings, wheels to pontoons, and maybe even the machine into man — or woman.
He called it The Mother Ship — driven by imaginative fire through dreams of earth, air, and water — the ur-craft spawning three much smaller but more intricate dream ships he brought out and held aloft one at a time to demonstrate their capacities to “transition” from element to element, from physical substance to the ether of one’s dreams.
The vehicles functioned according to four guidelines: they were stressed like a bow, pressurized like a pneumatic tire, charged like a storage battery, and articulated like a skeleton. “I call them creature ships because they have a certain life force.” Rotors on one craft had the shape of a well-turned feminine leg, and a fuselage on another had the body of a porpoise. They were devilishly clever, like da Vinci’s drawings of machines. But if Leonardo conceived contraptions that one day would indeed exist, Indigo built deliberate impossibilities.
The ships belonged to his world of spires atop the tables. “It’s all related,” he said. “It’s a family.” Within each object was a consistent and continuing unity of vision, something often visible in the best folk art, and sometimes on beyond. “When I start building a tower, all I know is that it’s headed for the sky.” Q, who had been looking at a sketchbook of his spires, said, “That could be your epitaph.”
Indigo constructed his towers from what he happened upon and could bring home: a rattan cornucopia for the body of a building, a belt buckle for a door, a woody vine became a spiral ramp, a goblet a tabernacle dome, a piece of costume jewelry for a cathedral window, a gourd turned into a house; all the constructions bright and airy and transformable into other shapes. He said, “I like to dream of building one I could live in.”