"Pollution (Tumor City)"

Derided and chastised on a daily basis. Taught guilt and fear. Imbued with images of blood atonement and an all powerful God king in a celestial cloud city. An infallible authority, the great mastermind/omniscient other whose contradictions and mistakes could not be questioned. My prayers in the 80’s sometimes went something like this: “Dear Lord God, and Jesus please don’t let the Russians destroy life as we know it. I want me and my brother and my Mommy and Daddy to live.” Other prayers begged the lord God to intervene whenever the nuns punched me in the face or beat my hands with a wooden ruler.

Outside the classroom window a few stories down on the street was the AL-AN club, a place where people went to try and overcome their addictions. Often they’d go there hammered on some distilled muck or another, stumbling, sometimes sitting on the sidewalk vomiting on themselves, a fruit and carpet cleaner scented bottle bag in hand. One nun gave us some good advice: “Don’t end up like that guy.” But the nuns were something worse as violent, repressed, mean-spirited pie-in-the-sky authoritarians. They took their sick issues out on the kids. “You’ll never get away with anything. Jesus is watching your every move.” What could be more dystopian than a nun filling a young child’s mind with such a ridiculous lie. The celestial surveillance was on. But somehow I could not stop my compulsion to draw and write sexually tinged and violent imagery. I would pray for forgiveness to the point of absurdity, yet my recidivism seemed uncontrollable. The pedagogues of despair chose the course of confiscating my works. No nurturing critique in the spirit of aesthetic guidance, instead they enlisted my classmates in a type of vindictive romper room pogrom. The little bastards raided my desk for what they saw as scandalous, Anti-Christian art atrocities.

At one point a Drawing contest presented itself. We were all to try our hands at adoration of the Monsignor in portraiture. I really wanted to do the guy justice, and beset my imperfect skills on the quest for obsessive detail. I didn’t really think about the color choices, just the line. The teachers were mortified. They thought the devil had really got into me that time. The ring leader/provocateur of the bunch yelled her pedestrian head off, “did you see what little Jonathan Allen has done? He’s blasphemed the Monsignor! Made him look like Freddy Krueger! Look at this garbage! First it’s the naked women and pentagrams, now this! Oh, you really have a lot to answer for in the confessional booth!” At the time, I didn’t know what Freddy Kreuger looked like. I was just trying to render the old Monsignor’s wrinkles and worn pink/reddish flesh (he had high blood pressure and anger problems). Too much red precipitated disastrous consequences. Or was it really that bad? Now I look back and think the piece certainly shared visual kinship with the grotesque paintings of Dubuffet, Kokoschka, even some of the more primitive drafts of Otto Dix. It was expressionism. I was sent to meet with the Monsignor who was not upset at all by the portrait. He knew something of art history. What peeved him was a stack of drawings and text I had worked on which described various ways in which my fellow classmates could be murdered and mutilated. Alienation had led me down avenues of mordant catharsis. However, I was taking it out on pen and paper. It was therapy.