Get a rope, part II (Page 1 of 1)

These things, don’t they always fall out this way? I hem-hawed around Jetta’s apartment all morning, muttering something like, “How’d I get myself into this?  How do I always end up helping people move? I’m not gonna go. Hell with it. But if I don’t go…?”

I’d had a few McSorley’s Darks the day before — I couldn’t remember, exactly: Had Gregory said we were just moving a few tables? Eventually Jetta tired of my whining, so she handed me a Metro Card and shoved me out the door.

I got off the subway at Astor Place and shuffled down to 7th Street.

I stood on the corner for a moment. I could go to the bookstore instead. Just turn around and grab a coffee and a book and…

But then Gregory emerged from the soon-to-be demolished school building. “Hey, Ben! Just in time, my friend.”
I looked to the curb. There sat the familiar orange-and-white moving van.

And, as I said, don’t these things usually shake out this way: We tossed three round tables in the back of the truck, and Gregory slid the door shut and clamped the latch.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“You wanna grab a quick beer?”

I followed him inside McSorley’s. The place was empty except for the prepping bartender.

Surely, I thought, we’ll be stopping along the way to pick up a waterbed, which will, of course, require disassembling... I hate waterbeds…

“OK, buddy. Let’s get on the road.”

“Huh?  Oh, yeah, sure.”

We smacked our beers together and turned them up before leaving the bar to return to the moving truck. And that was it — three round tables. We never pulled off on a side street to pick up a couch or a bookshelf. We drove straight to Long Island City, backed up to a cargo elevator, unloaded the 20-pound tables and then rolled them off on the seventh floor and into Gregory’s studio.

The walls were covered with incredible paintings — portraits so realistic I could imagine the people in them stepping down from the canvases and joining us. I wandered around with my mouth open.

“You hungry? Let’s grab some lunch.”

Now fast forward three years, after numerous McSorley’s pop-ins each time I came to visit the city (Gregory once slid a sandwich and a beer across the bar to me: “It’s on me. Part of your McSorley’s writer’s scholarship”). I called him on my spring break drive up I-81.

“Ben! Dude, I was just thinking about you. No shit, man. I was just looking at your phone number and wondering what you’ve been up to.” I told him I was on my way to Brooklyn. “Ben,” he said. “You gotta come by the studio. I’m having my horses delivered Wednesday. Can you make it?”

It had been a little more than a year since I’d been to his studio. In that time, his wife had gone back to work at McSorley’s (She’s the first and only female bartender in the long history of the place.), leaving Gregory more time to work on his magnum opus. When I arrived at his studio, the work that hung from the walls revealed the pay-off of his newly gained ability to focus primarily on his art: The paintings were spine-grabbing, in-the-gut quality.

On one of the tables that I’d helped him haul three years earlier was a rendering of his son sitting on a rocking horse in a blazing orange landscape, a stallion reared ominously over his right shoulder. Surfboards covered with crawling female nudes hung from meat hooks on the walls. On another of the round tables, his son stood, staff in hand, gazing quizzically at the same rearing stallion. The work was primal, as if Gregory had shoveled and chiseled these scenes from the mud of a prehistoric  site.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for years, Ben. I can’t wait to see these horses. It’s cool that you’re here,” he said.

I circled the studio, drop-jawed, studying the paintings and tossing out compliments that felt half-priced because I couldn’t say exactly just how much I felt this art.

Gregory, though, was lion-in-the-cage. His attention span was pacing and thin.  He could hardly stand the wait for his horses: two white mares and a strapping stallion, all three coming from an upstate taxidermy, all three part of the installation that goes with his paintings, a few provocative photographs and a craps table, among other things.

Finally, Gregory’s cell phone rang, and we went downstairs to meet the truck.  The driver rolled up the cargo door, revealing the stuffed horses tied down and positioned carefully for the transport. We spent the next hour unloading them with two other guys. Once inside the studio, we had to rebuild the mount-boxes, and then came the awkward task of lifting the beasts onto their poles. Their weight was clumsy, and it took several tries to get the boxes to hold them up.

The stallion stood on its hind legs far above my head, nearly touching the high ceiling, and the two mares lay submissively on their backs.

The images of this installation had been bouncing around behind Gregory’s eyelids for years, and the horses’ delivery and stance meant that he was that much closer, inches away maybe, to realizing his vision.
It was time to leave him alone in his studio.

He drove me to the subway station, and as I got out, he leaned over to the open door: “Ben, man. It was really cool to have you here 
for this. Thanks.”

On the Brooklyn-bound G-train, I sat with my notebook open in my lap. The pages before me lay blank for the entirety of the ride: I didn’t have the imagination to fill them accurately. My brain was fuzzy — the way it gets after I wander around the MOMA all day. I was tired and droopy, but most of all, I was glad I’d stumbled over to McSorley’s that day to help the bartender move a few tables out of the closing-down school building across the street.

To take a look at some of Gregory de la Haba’s work, visit www.delahaba.com.