My latest memoir, KID STUFF, progresses slowly in between drawing for my TONALAMATL project, writing on other stuff, and seasonal gardening. (In that arena, besides the swaths of golden aspens on the mountains, we’re now well into autumn colors down here in town.)
Rocky Mountain Asters (foreground) Maximilian Sunflowers (background)
For the memoir, I’m now posting the second mini chapter called BIG BRO which covers my few relatively idyllic years between five and eight. They were years of minor traumas, dramas, and challenges, the most serious but least impactful being a concerted but unsuccessful effort by the Catholic church to indoctrinate my heathen little head.
Little Dick at Eight
The most traumatic but least important experience of that period was in the first grade when, like a naughty kitten, I lost my mitten and feared I’d have no pie. In fact, I got more pie than I needed and by eight had gotten downright plump. The most painful but least meaningful drama was my first time away from the family at Cub Scout camp when I was too shy to use the latrine.
The funniest adventure in those few years of empty-headed childhood was a snowy sleighride that went terribly wrong. On the other hand, the most serious and meaningful episode in those few years was being rescued from drowning by my heroic father. That was essentially our closest relationship moment in all the too few years of his life.
Check out BIG BRO for a few minutes of old snapshots and fond, if vague, memories of a childhood well before the age of reason, if such a theoretical age indeed exists.
Back in 2022, I wrapped up my sixth volume of memoir, GAY GEISHA, calling it quits at the half-way point in my eighty-some years. The first half of my life (1942-1982) was unusual and fascinating enough to recall, but the latter half (1982-2022) is way too boring to bother with.
Besides, all kinds of people have written reams about the plague years and the liberated lives of youths in this new century, and I know very little about either subject anyway. These past two good years of focused artwork are at last leading to completion of my Tonalamatl project and series of trecena blogs, and now I find myself slipping back into memoir mode again.
I recently picked up an old book-awarded memoir by a late gay author and read about his tormented gay life set almost in my timeframe. Suffocated by a suburban, middle-class upbringing and rigid religious environment of elite privilege, the author called his closeted youth an internal exile, imprisonment. This is of course exactly the kind of thing that commercial publishing loves because the righteous straight world thinks we gay folks deserve to agonize.
Dickie with Toy, 1943
Well, the comparison with my own young life couldn’t be sharper. I never lived in a closet—because I grew up “normally” (though saddled at first by an insane religion). When I “came out,” it was a natural evolution, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly—without guilt or opposition—and my gay environment was truly exciting, picturesque, and historic. Such a story is simply too positive, upbeat, and way too real for commercial publication. Not nearly enough angst.
That’s why I’m slipping back into the memoir frame of mind. We need us a good memoir of growing up normally, of a childhood without precocious agonies of sexual- or gender-identity confusion, without moral or social conflict. I need to write about the mind-boggling innocence of my childhood, dig deeper into the ancient material of MS YVONNE, The Secret Life of My Mother, and mine the primitive Arkansas years of my semi-fictional BAT IN A WHIRLWIND.
Already I’ve written several pages of an illustrated first chapter of KID STUFF called The Id-Kid, planning a clutch of half a dozen or more, and as usual posting each as it’s completed. Please be patient.
Just for reference, my other memoirs are DIVINE DEBAUCH, THERE WAS A SHIP, and LORD WIND. You’ll only find anguish of a sort in THERE WAS A SHIP. They’re all celebrations of gay life and so aren’t commercially attractive. Again, far too little guilt and grief.
Despite historic obstacles, 2020 turned out to be a very successful and productive year for me, both artistically and personally. It started with a celebration for completing Aztec Icon #18 – XOCHIPILLI, the Prince of Flowers on the last day of 2019. I’d first drawn this sun god thirty years ago for my book of days. The black and white icon, infinitely more complicated than this old four-color image, breaks all sorts of Aztec iconographic norms and conventions. Go to the link above to see this iconoclastic addition to the coloring bookYE GODS!
Xochipilli – The Prince of Flowers – (God of pleasure, feasting, and dancing)
On New Year’s Day, 2020 I posted the Flower Prince but still had much to do before adding his icon to my “travelling” exhibition YE GODS! Icons of Aztec Deities. In mid-January I mounted this show of large-scale banners at its seventh venue in a conference center—with the help of a tall French fellow I’d met during its sixth appearance.
We’d hung the show by January 18 (for my mother’s 101st birthday), and I turned to our trip for the New Orleans Opera premiere of my new translation of Tchaikovsky’s heroic opera JOAN OF ARC on February 2 & 9. My clan gathered for the occasion at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre, and I enjoyed their acclaims, as well as those of appreciative audiences. I believe my linguistic work has turned the composer’s simply inspired piece into a masterpiece.
By Monday, February 11, I was gratefully back in Santa Fe for my comfortable retired life in my eyrie apartment, my Casa Arriba penthouse high above the world. With a gratified sigh of relief, I slipped back into my splendid routines of writing/drawing, gym, dinners out, and especially the ecstatic dancing on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.
Casa Arriba
After a couple leisurely weeks, I started on my second memoir, picking up my sordid tale of after marriage when I came out for the second time. Covering the next two traumatic and extremely sexual years of my fourth persona (the HIPPIE POET, footloose and feckless), I pretentiously included my own poetry, a device stolen from “Dr. Zhivago.” My routines and retrospective writing trance held me nicely right up almost to the middle of March.
In my Mesoamerican fascination, I consider Friday, March 13, 2020 or the Aztec day Four Rain to have been the emphatic end of the Fifth Sun, the Sixth Sun starting on Saturday. Suffice it to say that Friday the Thirteenth brought enormous turmoil into my life when my gym closed down due to a virus they were already calling a pandemic.
On March 14, 2020 everything locked down (my show as well), and since then I’ve fortunately been living safely and comfortably in Casa Arriba. The loss of gym, dinners out, and ecstatic dancing has left me with only the splendid routine of writing and drawing. Right away I replaced my gym workouts with walking/running around the nearby track, but I could do nothing about the sauna except miss it miserably. Cooking simply, I didn’t miss restaurant food—just my regular companions at meals. I was driven to solo dancing to radio reggae and salsa in my living room and to sorely missing all the young bacchantes at Paradiso.
I joked about going into solitary confinement but didn’t really feel that way. I deeply appreciated being made to step away from the world’s sound and fury, to take care of my physical needs simply in solitary peace, and to do my work on my natural schedule without distractions. I found it fascinating to watch my hair grow, now longer than it’s ever been, and I rather like it. Perversely, I didn’t feel lonely, isolated, or confined at all, but instead felt blessedly secluded, a secular anchorite. Six decades later, this new Sixth Sun feels like a confirmation and redemption of my solitary youth in backwoods Arkansas.
Staying snugly at home (except for walks at the track and to grocery stores), let me focus on the memoir, which I titled LORD WIND, alternating between writing it and drawing on Icon #19 – TEZCATLIPOCA, The Smoking Mirror. By mid-May I’d finished and posted the icon, which went much deeper into the god’s story than this old drawing for the book of days.
Tezcatlipoca – Smoking Mirror – (Lord of the Night Sky)
And by early June I’d finished the memoir. Rejoicing, I posted LORD WINDon the web as individual chapters or entire text.
On the urging of my French friend, in June I began conjuring up visions of Tlaloc, the God of Storms, and at the same time started the third volume of memoir, soon entitled GAY GEISHA, about my stylish gay life in Washington DC in the 1970s. Once again, for sanity’s sake, over the next months I switched back and forth between creative processes.
Meanwhile, a few important things happened in the solitude of October. First, I rode my bike to the Convention Center and voted early against the scumbag, whereupon I put it and its filth out of mind. Next, I finally struck my icon show after nine months’ lockdown—with the kind assistance of my tall grandson. Then, accepting that my life was utterly changed for the foreseeable future, I gave him my little red car and happily became a true pedestrian.
In mid-November I started posting chapters of GAY GEISHA serially and by mid-December had published eight covering about a quarter of the decade. The switch then back to the icon was for a final push, aiming to finish it by New Year’s. I didn’t quite make it though. Only the other day, almost two weeks into 2021, I finally wrapped Tlaloc up, though he doesn’t look much like my first fanciful drawing of him for that old book of days. Still, that goggle-eye and fangs are standard features.
Tlaloc – (God of Rain)
Please allow me to count Aztec Icon #20 – TLALOC, God of Storms, as an accomplishment for wretched but productive 2020. (I’ll post it very soon.) I’m tremendously gratified by creating my three icons, memoirs of gay liberation, and the operatic masterpiece.
What with increasing urgency in the Corona virus calamity, it has become clear to me that I’m going to have to change my mode of operation in writing my memoirs. Before, I always waited until a volume was complete before publishing (posting) it on my website—in order to have the luxury of skipping back to earlier sections to add, delete, or tweak the material.
Now that I really can’t predict how long I’ll hang around on this planet, I’m going to post chapters serially as they’re completed, adding them to the Table of Contents for individual access. Too bad for second-thought revisions, but that’s how this wretched Covid cookie is crumbling.
While writing on Chapter 6 of the current volume, I found the appropriate title for this memoir. It’s the registered name for a spectacular variety of iris I used to sell at the Farmers Market a long time back when I was the famous Iris Man:
GAY GEISHA
As I told a dear friend, these two words are the most cogent description I can imagine of who and what I was in the 1970s in Washington DC. My third real memoir (actually the sixth volume in the story of my unique life), GAY GEISHA covers 1972-80, a time of glorious gay liberation, when I lived and graciously entertained gentlemen in a grand Victorian mansion at historic Logan Circle.
GAY GEISHAprovides the dramatic and often lurid details behind that old summary of my fifth persona which I prophetically entitled “Courtesan.” As possible, I’ll keep adding chapters and hopefully live to finish this volume. (As of 2/20/22, I’ve now posted twenty-four chapters covering through September 1980.)
It’s been a couple (few?) months since I raised a big whoop about my show of black and white Aztec icons (for a coloring book), and that’s what mostly has occupied me lo that many moons.
Richard Balthazar at opening of YE GODS!
Actually, June and July at my show were splendid! YE GODS! opened on June 1 with a wonderful crowd. There was delicious food (catered by my old Backstreet Bistro and spa buddy David Jacoby and his wife Melanie as our lovely “soda server”) and a marvelous group of female dancers, Danza Azteca, who blessed the icons (and me) and danced ceremonies around a big Aztec drum (the huehuetl). They even got some in the crowd to join in a friendship dance.
Throughout the run of the show I spent a couple hours each afternoon at El Museo Cultural (de Santa Fe), just to be there and talk to visitors—but also to give the inexhaustible Maria Martinez a bit of a break from staffing the gallery to attend to her many other duties around the nearly 2-acre cultural facility. She is the peaceful animus of the Museo, and I am deeply grateful for all her help and encouragement.
Entrance of Danza Azteca: David Jacoby and Maria Martinez on left, Concha Garcia y Allen center
By the way, the above photos are to be credited to my friend Seth Roffman, who is editor of “Greenfire Times.”
Visitation at the show was steady, even without publicity during July. I greatly enjoyed meeting folks of all walks—and bending their ears about the icons, their mythology, and elements of history. In particular, I stressed that only one icon in the show was actually a genuine Aztec deity (Huitzilopochtli). The rest were from long before the arrival of the Mexica (Aztecs), who simply adopted the culture, mythology, and cosmology of the peoples living there already.
What I enjoyed most of all was the series of 15 lectures I slapped together and delivered off the top of my head. Half were about the Aztec codices (picture books), showing pages and discussing their mythology, iconography, and social implications. The other half were focused on cultural and historical subjects that went from Aztec-specific through general Mesoamerican to all the Americas and then into probable interactions between those societies. I was blessed to have a corps of several interested listeners who came to most of my talks. After the finale on Codex Vindobonensis, six of them took me out to dinner, and we had a long, leisurely chat about our lives—and of course, some follow-up questions about the whole Aztec thing.
Now that it is over and the icons are stored in my garage, I’m intending to approach many places here in NM and around the country (and internationally?) about hanging YE GODS! It’s a fantastic educational (informational) show, after all, and I’d offer it to presenters free (charging only for the minimal shipping). I’d also be available to do my scalable series of lectures (for expenses), and presenters could sell the separate prints for coloring. WHAT A DEAL!
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Meanwhile, several other things transpired. Most must wait for later posts, but I’ve totally got to let you know right now about another BIG DEAL! My memoir THERE WAS A SHIP can be reached by clicking here.
Richard Balthazar 