from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #40

 for The Bats

If there was never any particular gleam in Bill Rosenblum’s eyes about us at the Highwire, it was for the simple reason that we’d inadvertently shanghaied the place away from him and his band. I’d given them a nice free ride in the early Aughts, but by the middle of the Aughts I knew I was onto something big and wanted to sell, and they didn’t. Bill was a trooper, however, and was happy to man the board for us for shows we did with musical acts, for free dope and whatever other treats were around. It’s just that Pete Lawson was a painter, and, as had been slow to emerge, Bill was a painter too. Semi-formalists, they both sought a happy medium between displays of technical prowess and a loose aesthetic which could find at least some place for abstraction. They both found Trish and Tob to be tight-asses, and, as was also slow to emerge, had a death-match attitude to the two ladies, going back a number of years. Turns out, Bill and Pete had a shady connection to a shared studio on the PAFA campus, where they really weren’t supposed to paint, but did. Trish and Tob spent many nights in those days buzzing from studio to studio, checking out the competition, making connections, or just getting merrily wasted the right way. One night, Tob stumbled on Bill hard at work, and decided to drop in on him. He knew damn well who she was. She looked at the mostly finished canvas and said, “You can’t leave half the canvas empty. Why don’t you…” “No, that’s alright. Thank you.” Bill was peeved. Tob made a characteristic moue and said, “Alright, well, what are you doing here? Do you go to PAFA?” The answer, typical of Bill, involved more complications than he felt like discussing: “Yeah, sorta. I mean, I do, but…” “I know which class you need to take.” At which point a number of other painters, all girls, shuffled in. “Listen guys, it’s nice to meet you but I am working here. So.” Tob sauntered out with the rest, but Bill was inflamed with animosity when he saw how technically grandiose she was. Yet even that wasn’t really the problem. Tob and Trish were in a sorority of sorts, which operated from PAFA. In time, all of them knew Pete, too, who also wound up doing the head-on with all of them. The sorority was always making lists of guys they liked at PAFA, and it hung heavy in the air for Bill and Pete that they’d never be on those lists. Bill and Pete were, arguably, shady about painting, shady about PAFA, and Bill went out of his way in other parts of his life to obfuscate what he was doing. They always felt that Trish and Tob’s sorority blocked them from showing in Philly. I didn’t think Trish and Tob were that cloak and dagger— Bill and Pete did. As of us our Highwire residency, John and I began to learn of these things. No surprise that when, at one of the larger shows, we rolled out one of Trish’s larger male nudes, Bill’s eyes rolled skyward. “Don’t put that anywhere near the board, please.” Not hard to humor, but I managed to convey to Bill that he should feel free to express whatever he wanted (Trish not having arrived yet, and Bill’s tutorial in my direction having begun). “I have nothing to say. Except to say that it’s conservative the wrong way. I’ve said that about everything she’s done from the beginning.” Ok. Beneath whatever else Bill was hiding, I knew that Bill was jealous— Trish and Tob were more technically advanced than him— but I also knew that he hated empty formalism backing up what for him were tired traditions. PAFA! It got even funnier when The Bats played at the Highwire, with Bill behind the board. Ha! Liz and Tob go around doing their everyone-under-our-thumb routine, but the buck (proudly) stops with Bill. Who was happy to tell Tob, “Um, we’re gonna have to do a whole soundcheck, OK? I’m having problems with the PA. And it has to be soon, please.” They did, it was fine, because Liz went with Bill. But Bill got weird and placed Tob higher in the mix than she usually was. He was right— she was the musical lynchpin holding The Bats together. And the spirit of the Free School dictated that, at the end of the day, we were all in the maelstrom together, and when it could be all for one, one for all, it should be, and pettiness was unacceptable. Bill’s rebuke to Tob that night was implicit.