Monday, December 29, 1997

Year-end inventory, the way my father did it in the sign shop on the last Monday of every December, counting cans.

On hand: one painter, forty-eight, medicated. Fourteen large canvases from the spring, stacked face to the wall. Nineteen small ones since August, face out, because they don't frighten anybody.

One son, engaged. Ben and Laurel told me Christmas night at their place, over a ham Laurel cooked for eleven people in a kitchen the size of a phone booth. A June wedding. I cried, which I'm told is appropriate, and which I noted with interest, because I don't do much of anything these days that isn't noted with interest.

One ex-wife, who called the next morning to ask if I was "okay about it," as if I might not be okay about my son marrying a kind woman who laughs at his jokes. I understood the question. She meant: are you okay. Lenore has been asking me that since 1981.

Lithium: three capsules a day. Last blood level: 0.8. Hands: shaky. Thirst: biblical.

I started this page almost a year ago, and I didn't know I was already climbing. You can read the whole thing below, backwards. I've thought about taking it down. I'm leaving it up. If somebody out there is standing at the bottom of the hill on a clear day, feeling the engine turn over, I want them to be able to see where the road goes.

Happy New Year. Drink water.

Sunday, November 16, 1997

The tremor. Three of you have written to ask about it, and it's what I think about at the easel instead of painting, so here.

It's fine, the way a sewing machine needle is fine. You don't see it when my hands are in my pockets. You see it when I hold a coffee cup, or a pen, or a number two sable loaded with alizarin that I want to put exactly there, on the lip of a white pitcher. "Exactly there" becomes "somewhere around there."

Dr. L. at the clinic says it's common with lithium, worse with coffee and with tiredness, and may ease up with time. He's a small man in a bow tie who looks like he ought to be selling me a pocket watch. I trust him more than I want to.

So I've gone back to the mahlstick. It's a stick with a padded knob on the end; you rest the knob on the edge of the canvas and lean your painting wrist on the stick. The old masters used them. So did my father, lettering FRESH KIELBASA on a butcher's window on Manhattan Avenue in 1958. Rest the wrist, and the hand steadies enough. I feel like an old man. I feel like my father. Those are two different feelings, and I'm having both.

I've also cut back to two cups of coffee a day. This is the real tragedy of the entry.

Thursday, October 9, 1997

Today I turned the big ones around.

Fourteen canvases, most of them eight by ten feet or bigger, painted between March and the first week of July. I made them in about a hundred days. I don't remember making some of them. I remember the smell.

I leaned them along the long wall and sat on an upside-down paint bucket and looked for two hours.

Four of them are the best things I have ever done. I'm reading a meter. There's the comet over the oil tanks on the creek, all blue-black and one long smear of white, and it hums. There's the East River at six in the morning, where the sun looks like it's coming up out of the water on purpose.

Six of them are garbage. Loud, fast, clever garbage.

And four of them I can't tell. That's the part that scares me. When I was up, I could tell everything instantly. Now I sit on a bucket and I don't know.

Arturo, the sculptor down the hall, came in and stood next to me for a while and then pointed at the comet and said, "That one." Then he pointed at one I'd already filed under garbage and said, "Not that one." So maybe the meter still works. It just works slower.

Sunday, September 7, 1997

I watched the funeral from London yesterday morning, like everybody, and then the coverage of the nun in Calcutta. Two women in white in one week. The TV people didn't know which face to wear.

What I noticed, and I'm writing it down because it's the first time in two months I've noticed something like a painter: the flowers outside the palace gates. Acres of bouquets in cellophane, and the cellophane catching the light so the whole field of them went silver, like standing water. I wanted to paint it. I didn't. But I wanted to. The wanting is new since the hospital, or it's old and coming back, and I'll take it either way.

Lenore called tonight and we talked about Diana for twenty minutes, which is twenty minutes more than we've talked about anything but Ben since the divorce. At the end she said, "You sound like yourself." I said, "Which one?" She laughed. Then she said, "The one I married," and got off the phone fast.

Sunday, August 17, 1997 — Where I went

Some of you wrote while I was gone. Thank you. A man in Ohio wrote three times. I'm back. Here's where I went.

I stopped sleeping in June. Not less. Stopped. I painted all night with the windows open and the radio on, and I felt like God's own house painter. By the first week of July I was talking so fast that the man at the hardware store asked me to write down what I needed. I'd bought more canvas than I could lift. I'd put about nine thousand dollars of paint and linen on two credit cards. I'd called Lenore at three in the morning to explain the connection between Vermeer and the subway map, and I thought she was being slow.

On the eighth of July my son came to the studio. The super had called him. Ben is twenty-five, and he stood in the doorway and said, "Dad, I need you to come with me," in the voice I used on him when he was four and had a fever. And some small sane part of me way in the back, a man sitting on a folding chair, is how I picture him, stood up and said: go.

We went to the emergency room. I signed myself in. I was on the psychiatric floor for sixteen days.

What it's like, since people ask: it's a hospital. Linoleum, a day room with the TV bolted high on the wall, plastic spoons, a night nurse who calls you "hon" and means it. They take your belt and your shoelaces, and you shuffle around like a man in somebody else's shoes. There's group twice a day. There's art therapy, where a lovely girl of twenty-three handed me a box of crayons, and I, the holder of a master's degree in fine arts, made the best crayon drawing of my career. I'm not joking. It's on my refrigerator.

Mostly there's waiting for the medicine to find you. They started me on lithium again. I first took it in 1981, when I was diagnosed, and I quit in 1985 because I felt fine and the paintings had gone gray. Now they took blood every few days to check the level. In the second week I slept eight hours straight and woke up and cried, not from sadness exactly. From the quiet.

In the day room we watched the pictures from Mars, the little rover nosing up to rocks. A man who hadn't said a word all week said, "It's looking for somebody." Everybody agreed with him.

I came home July 24th. Since then I've been drinking water and sleeping and going to the clinic and not painting. I'm writing this sitting in front of fourteen enormous canvases I'm not ready to look at.

That's more than I meant to say.

Thursday, July 3, 1997

FIVE A.M. and the light over the creek is doing the thing again, the pink that isn't pink, and I've got it going on three canvases at once, walking from one to the next like a short-order cook working a grill. Haven't slept since Monday and don't need to. Sleep is a habit, like smoking. I quit.

Tomorrow is the Fourth and they're landing a robot on Mars and I'm going up on the roof with the ten-footer to paint the fireworks WHILE THEY HAPPEN, no sketch, straight down, the way Pollock would have done it if he'd had any sense.

Lenore called and said I sounded "up." UP! Everything's up! The whole city's going to be on the roof tomorrow night!

Ben's coming Sunday. I'll show him everything. Twelve canvases. No, fourteen. I keep counting wrong because I keep making more.

Write to me. I'm awake. I'll answer before you finish hitting Send.

Sunday, June 15, 1997 — Father's Day

Ben called at noon to say happy Father's Day and asked what I'd been doing, and I told him for forty minutes.

Canvas count: eleven big ones. On Friday I bought a roll of Belgian linen that cost more than my first car and carried it up four flights on my shoulder like a man carrying a rowboat. I'm stronger than I've been in twenty years.

I'm painting the East River now. Not views of it. The river itself, the brown-green weight of it going out to sea and coming back twice a day. I stood at the end of India Street for three hours watching the tide turn and I SAW it turn. I saw the exact minute.

Ben got quiet on the phone toward the end. Then he said, "Are you sleeping, Dad?" I said, "Like a baby," which is technically true. Babies are up all night.

Saturday, May 10, 1997

Bought lumber Thursday and built six stretchers, eight by ten, in one night. Arturo came down the hall at two in the morning to complain about the hammering and ended up holding the other end. He's a sculptor. He understands two in the morning.

The work is coming so fast I keep one canvas going while the last one dries. I haven't felt like this since 1980.

I know what some of you are thinking, because a woman in Oregon wrote to say it, very kindly: Theo, be careful. I appreciate it. I do. But this isn't that. That was chaos. This is focus. I'm eating (mostly). I'm sleeping (some).

The painting I started Tuesday is going to be the best thing I've ever done.

Sunday, March 30, 1997 — Easter

Every clear night this week I've been on the roof in my overcoat with the French easel and a clip-on lamp, painting the comet until it goes down behind Manhattan.

If you haven't seen Hale-Bopp, go look. Go now. Even here, with the whole city pouring light up into the sky, you can see it plain: a smudge of white with a tail, just hanging there, not moving, the way a hawk hangs. My father would have said it looked like a thumbprint on a window. It looks like a thumbprint on God's window.

I did six small studies on board and then came down at two in the morning and stretched the biggest canvas I own and started it. Blue-black. Prussian blue and ivory black and a little burnt umber so it's warm underneath, like a night that used to be day. The oil tanks on the creek down at the bottom, just the tops of them, like knuckles. And the one white smear.

Easter. I haven't been to church since 1966, but I get it this year. Things come back.

Friday, March 14, 1997

Forty-eight yesterday. Ben took me to the Polish place on Nassau Avenue and I ate everything they brought and some things they didn't.

Something's loosening. It happens every March, a little: the ice going out on a river. But this year it's more. I'm sleeping five hours and waking up with my head full, and not full of dread for a change. Full of pictures. I started a big canvas Tuesday, first big one in two years. I stayed up till four with it and felt fine in the morning.

I know my history. I'm watching. I'm just saying it's nice to be warm.

Sunday, February 9, 1997

Took Ben to Star Wars last night, the new fixed-up version. The first time I took him he was five and wore a towel as a cape, and he held my hand when the big ship came over the top of the screen. Last night he's twenty-five and paid for my ticket and we both jumped anyway.

Otherwise, February. The gray part of the year, and the gray part of me, and they're holding hands. I paint a little in the afternoons. Small things. A pear. A radiator. I've had worse winters. I've had better.

I built this page with a library book and Notepad, and I liked picking the colors more than anything I've painted since Thanksgiving. That yellow is cadmium yellow light, more or less. It's the color of wanting something.

Sunday, January 12, 1997 — Hello

My name is Theo Ruckert. I'm forty-seven, a painter, and I live and work in a studio on the fourth floor of an old box factory near the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I live in the back room, which the lease pretends not to know about.

In 1981 a psychiatrist told me I have manic depression. The newer name for it is bipolar disorder, which makes it sound like a problem with the North Pole. What it means, in my case: some years I go up, and some years I go down, and in between I'm a regular guy who paints pictures and owes money and paints apartments when the other kind of painting doesn't pay. I took lithium for four years and quit. I haven't taken anything since 1985 but coffee and advice.

Why this? This fall I found other people's journals out here, including The Glass House, and I read them at two in the morning and thought: people are telling the truth in public, on purpose. I can't keep a paper diary. I paint over them. So I'm going to keep track of the weather inside, here, where I can't paint over it.

Right now the weather is: January. Gray, not black. I'll let you know.

— Theo