Lionel
By
Will Mayo
I first noticed Lionel when I was walking home from grammar school one
day and saw a bunch of police and garbage men gathered around a fellow cast in
an artist's smock, streaked with all manner of paint stains, shrieking in a
high voice, "My art! My art! You are trashing my art!" One of the
policemen turned to him then and said, "Mister, this isn't art. This is a
fire hazard." At that, I noticed the shreds of canvas scattered around the
crowd, each stretch of art piled high with inch-deep paints. I quickly walked
away.
The next time I saw him was at a formal dinner following my senior prom
and I didn't quite recognize him at first there at the local country club. He
had grown a thick black beard streaked with gray and was sitting across the
table from either his date or his caretaker, I couldn't tell which. He was
obviously at a dinner all on his own, well separated from the younger set. I
suppose what drew my attention to him there was that he was dressed in, well, a
dress. Like his artist's smock of years past it was covered with a variety of
paints. I wondered how he had made his way into this upscale country club set
but I noticed then that all the waiters and busboys coming back and forth to
his table gave him the utmost respect as he downed glass after glass of Chablis.
Somehow, in some way, he seemed to fit right in. As my thoughts at the time
were primarily on my date and the nights to come, I quickly turned my mind to
other things. Years passed, and Lionel faded from my memory as the challenges
of my own illness started to overwhelm me. I forgot about the little fellow I
had come to know simply as "the artist."
When he entered my mind again I was a student at the University Of
Maryland down the road a spell from here and watching the premiere of some
arthouse flick of obscure origin (French, I think) and saw this exquisite
figure climbing the stairs up and down from one end of the silent movie to the
other. He seemed to captured every mime imaginable from Charlie Chaplin to
vaudeville's Red Skelton all the way up to the Great Monsieur I was conducting
my film thesis on (dead now, sadly, from some obscure disease). It wasn't until
the final credits that I saw Lionel's name up there in lights and recognized
him as the artist I had seen sporadically since my childhood days. I was
entranced. The little man had become his own work of art.
One Day In The Course Of Things
by
Will Mayo
Too,
one long gone Spring day in 1986 during my graduate year at the University of
Maryland I was sitting in the Roy Rogers at the Student Union having myself a
cup of coffee when a young girl approached me with a sheet of paper on which
were written a handful of names.
"Hello,"
she said. "We're organizing a protest against the university's investment
in firms supporting the apartheid government of South Africa. We want them to
disinvest and disinvest now."
"Very
well," I said. "What do you want me to do?"
"We
want you to join us in building a shanty as an instrument of our protest. You
may very well be arrested, of course."
"Is
that all?"
"Yes,
that's it."
"All
right." I signed my name.
"Cool,"
she said and walked off.
I
downed the rest of my coffee and walked outside. There were a handful of young
people milling about on the campus mall carrying planks and nails and hammering
signs into the ground. One sign, I noted, read "Steven Biko. R. I.
P." Steven BIko being an early South African patriot who died in protest
against the ruthless South African regime. I joined the crew in helping to
hammer together a makeshift shanty, then seeing it nearing completion, I
hurried off to take an Anthropology exam. When that was done (I would
subsequently learn that I aced the test), I hurried back and joined the
protesters inside the structure as hundreds linked arms dozens of yards away.
Then as we talked to one another, passing the time, sirens began to roar.
Calmly, the police asked us to step outside. The protest was well under way.
I
was the last to leave there and then, automatically, raised my fist in a
"Power" gesture before the officer in question jerked my hand down
and, joining it to the other, handcuffed me. We were all placed in a paddy
wagon and then taken to the station where handcuffed to the bars of the cell we
remained until hours later the movement's lawyer fetched us bail. By then, it
was dark. The attorney dropped us each off at our homes, me last. Upon entering
my apartment, I turned on the television briefly, caught a fleeting image of me
making my "Power To The People" gesture on the 11 o'clock news,
then switched it off. Went to bed. It was just another day.
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