Underbelly Archives

My first step in seeing the world was moving to New York to go to college at an art school called Pratt Institute.

All through college and upon graduation, I still wanted to see the world, but a conflict arose in me was that, at that time, put a crimp in my travel plans. I had another desire in me that was stronger than wanderlust. That desire was to continue ahead and forge a career as an artist. I dreamed of being a film maker, a writer and illustrator and it was my understanding that such aspirations where not to be easily obtained and would require training, focus, and commitment, and it wasn’t necessary to go anywhere else, as I already was living in the place I wanted to build that career: New York City.

Though I took a couple trips to Europe in those early years, and intended to return often, I haven’t returned since my twenties. New York became my universe for many years and I rarely left for pleasure except to visit out of town friends and family for long weekends. I had a job for a while that required me to travel often throughout the United States on business, but I basically became a person who was much more about where he lived than about where he visited. I really believed that I was blessed to be living in, what by my own definition, was the greatest city in the world, and traveling, though still desired, was triaged down to a minimal priority behind my career and life in New York.

I had never really considered living anywhere else, with the exception of Northern California. I had been to California a few times on business, and I had a friend from college who, after graduation, had moved to Half Moon Bay, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco, and she had been pestering me for years to visit her there. When I eventually did visit, she made her best pitch for me moving out there and gave me an incredible tour of San Francisco and the coast. So convincing was she, I quit my very good day job in New York six months later and moved to Half Moon Bay where I then lived, on her living room couch, for seven months unable to find any significant employment, before returning to New York a beaten, and very disappointed man.

Once back in New York, I easily found another day job, and with it the feeling that, though I couldn’t make things work in California, New York always seemed to provide for me and I was meant to return. I had never been jobless very long in New York, and began to view it as the only place that offered guaranteed opportunity.

So, back in New York, with a new found love for the city, and employed with a good day job, I resumed my struggle as an artist.

I had decided at that point that I though I still loved California, I, and the universe, was not yet ready for me to live there. I resolved that I would return to live there someday, perhaps when I was a successful artist and I wouldn’t have to worry about building a life from scratch without any money, connections, or an established career.

Years then passed by, and though consistently employed, my struggling as an artist intensified. As my career stagnated, I began to feel as if I had, back when I was twenty five years old, blinked my eyes, and when I opened them a second later, found myself to be in my mid thirties. Ten years had seemingly passed Instantly.  I was now working primarily as a teaching artist in very rough schools in the NYC public school system. I had never wanted to be a teacher. I wondered how that could have happened, as if my life had been directed and manipulated b some unseen force.

My own work as an artist was so far on the back burner I was wondering if I should just turn the stove off all together. It seemed as if I was destined to live the rest of my life, and then die in New York, with nothing more to show for it than what I had arrived with at nineteen years old: unfulfilled hopes and dreams of being a successful artist.

I was tired. Living in New York City can be tough. Living in New York City for years, as a struggling artist can be brutal.

During most of the time I have struggled as an artist in New York, I have had friends, mostly other artists, with whom I have relied on to share my struggle. One of these friends is a former neighbor who used to live across the street from me. He and I would meet on his front stoop many mornings and have coffee and talk about our lives as artists and how we always were having so much difficulty getting the things we wanted in life, whether it was a good relationship with a woman, success with or work, or simply, peace of mind. One time, when our conversation turned to how living in New York affected all these things, and we began speculating whether it was best to stay in New York where there seemed to be the greatest amount of opportunity for artists, or whether it was better to leave New York to a place that may have less opportunity, but a place you felt you would rather live in for all the reasons other than opportunity, such as it being a place of great natural beauty, or that it may provide a life of greater ease and peacefulness. We both pondered the question for a moment, creating a pause in the conversation. He took a sip of coffee and then looked at me as if he had just had an epiphany, and said, “You have to go where you want to build your life”.

My problem at that point was that I was less concerned with choosing a location to build my life than I was salvaging what was left of the rest of my life, and the best way to do that seemed to be to avoid more upheaval. Moving just seemed to be a giant step backwards, or at best, a giant step sideways, and what I wanted was to take a giant step forward.

As time went on, and as things didn’t improve, I wondered what I could do to change my fortunes, change my life, quickly and certainly. I then started to believe that place might, in fact, matter. It HAD to matter. people often say that insanity can be defined as doing exactly the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. At that point, I had been living in New York for the most part of 20 years, and year after year the rersult was the same: struggle. Life outside New York had to be easier, and I began to fantasize about moving back to California, but though I now had much more work experience under my belt, I did not want a replay of my earlier attempt to live there years earlier when I had just replaced one kind of struggle with another.

It was around this time an old friend whom I had worked with in New York years earlier, called me. She was now a Dean at The California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco, she knew I had been teaching in New York and wanted to offer me a job teaching cartooning and animation with a summer program the college was offering on the Oakland campus  to middle school aged students. It was called the Young Artists Studio Program or “YASP”.

YASP took place in June and August. Though I would be responsible for providing my own airfare, the College would provide a free faculty apartment for me, for the entire summer.

This began a very enjoyable yearly commitment for me. I would teach in the insane new York City schools all winter with it’s crabby teachers, falling apart schools with metal detectors in the entrance, and out of control students, some of whom would yell in class, “I hate drawing! I don’t want to do it! I’m not gonna do it!”, –and then, as if carried by the fresh, breezes warmed by the sunlight of spring, my invitation to teach in California for another summer would arrive in the mail with a contract, that appeared to me, to be printed on magic paper, out of which emerged a gentle invisible hand that, caressed my face when I opened the envelope, like an old, dear friend welcoming me home. Home to the bucolic campus and the sweet, smart, gentle little children of hippies and dotcommers. Kids who wanted to be in my class because they were really interested in cartooning and animation, who would often say, “I love this class! I want to take it again next year!”

And so it went on for a few years. I would get beat up by New York all winter and return to California in the summer, to the Club Med of teaching gigs.  Upon arriving in California, I would always feel as if a two hundred pound sack of stress, pinning me to the ground, was removed from on top my chest and I could breath again. I was often given a beautiful sunny apartment across the street from campus, which was much nicer than any apartment I have ever had in New York. I spent the summers hiking in the hills, and along the coast, making new friends who had a different, laid back California perspective. I did yoga, ate the best Mexican and Thai food I ever tasted, and fell in love with the quirky, lovable, City of Oakland, and it’s gorgeous, sophisticated, sister, San Francisco.

This arrangement allowed me to view the nine months I was spending in New York differently. I became a better teacher and I began to understand the New York kids better, and actually appreciate them more. And because I was a better teacher, because I understood my students better, they liked me more.

I was fairly content with my bicoastal life. I was still a poor struggling artist, but felt like I was living like someone with much greater means. I had become so content, that I actually started doing my own work again, keeping cartoon journals in a very disciplined way. A sort of spiritual practice, observing the world around me and writing and drawing cartoons about those observations.

My contentment, however, didn’t prevent me from aging. I was now about to turn forty. A book deal I was offered and had long sought, fell through, and I was lost about how to proceed. I was having troubles in my relationship with a woman I was then living with, and things were about to get much worse. It was September 2001. On the eleventh day of that month, my life, and the life of all New Yorkers changed, suddenly, and dramatically.

I lost all my work on 9/11. There was no freelance work to be had. No teaching work available. The city was paralyzed. Shortly after that, my relationship ended. I was broke, homeless, and living on a friend’s couch.

In January of that year, my friend, the Dean at California College of the Arts called. She had a small apartment in the basement of  her home in Oakland. She said she realized things in New York had been difficult, and that she knew I always fantasized about living in California, and that the apartment was mine if I wanted it, and she said that I could stay there rent free until I could get enough work in California.

By this time, I had started to get work again in New York, and it looked as if I would be able to claw my way back to reestablishing my life there.   I was genuinely torn. Even with all my struggle in New York, even with all the hardship I experienced there, I loved New York. But I also loved the idea of having an adventure, and starting a new life in California.

I liked the idea of moving to a place that was less familiar to me. I had come to know New York so well. Even with all it’s diversity, I felt as if I knew what was to be found around every corner of the city. I felt like I knew every street, every building. I felt like I knew what to expect from the people, the weather, the food, the music, the art. I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect from myself in that environment. Though I wasn’t born there, it had become my home town. I had lived there since I was nineteen years old, and even with it’s immense scale, all it’s millions of moving parts, and it’s frantic beehive quality, and it’s similarity to a giant living, morphing, organism, it no longer held any surprises for me. It’s insanity, it’s diversity with all it’s infinite unpredictability, had become, itself, predictable.

I considered the Dean’s offer. It was a situation where I felt evenly divided. I was not wanting to give up my years of investment in New York, the city I loved, which was now, battered and beaten down, and needing people to keep the faith. But I also felt like an opportunity was being handed to me that I may never get again. A place to live in California rent free, until I got my feet on the ground.

I literally could have flipped a coin. I decided to seek advice from two people. A New Yorker, and a Californian. I called a friend in California, a very spiritual yogini, who used to live in New York and who I had known for may years. Her advice, which she said was paraphrasing some Buddhist concept, went something like this, “When struggling to make a decision, and your feelings are deadlocked, and you are faced with choosing between a course in your life that will mean making a change, or choosing to stay your course, and not making a change, always choose change, because therein lies the greatest opportunity for growth”.

When I asked my New York friend for his advice, the same friend I used to meet for coffee on the front stoop, he just repeated what he had said years before, “Go where you want to build your life”.

I moved to California that April.

(to be continued)