So let me insist that however strenuously ideologues strive to “normalize” popular art, popular artists like Rockwell do not create normality. Governments, religions, and network statisticians create normality, articulate it, and try to impose it. Artists like Rockwell celebrate ordinary equanimity for the eccentric gift that it is—no less than the bodily condition of social justice in a society informed by forgiving rhyme and illuminated by the occasional shining hour. Because if social justice is a statistical norm, everybody at that jam session fell short of it—Magda, Butch, Ron, Julius, Mary, Diego, Dad, myself, all of us. Nor did we believe in statistical norms. We believed that social justice resides in the privilege of gathering about whatever hearth gives warmth, of living in a society where everyone, at least once, might see themselves in a Norman Rockwell, might feel themselves rhyming with Johnny Mercer as he sings:
This will be my shining hour,
Calm and happy and bright,
In my dreams your face will flower,
Through the darkness of the night,
Like the lights of home before me,
Or an angel watching o’er me,
This will be my shining hour,
Till I’m with you again.
PONTORMO'S RAINBOW
This could never happen today, so you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that I made it all the way into sixth grade before a bunch of people whom I did not know, who weren’t my family and weren’t the government, tried to deprive me of something I really wanted—for my own good. Up until that time, my parents had routinely deprived me of things I wanted, but they always deprived me for their own good, not mine (“No, you can’t go out. I’m too tired to worry about what you’re doing while you’re out there.”), and this tactic was annoying enough. For years, I attributed it to my folks’ bohemian narcissism. Now I suspect they were shrewder than I thought, because, finally, since my parents were always more concerned with my thoughtfulness than with my goodness, I grew up well assured that I could decide what was good for me—and maybe get it—if I could get away with it.
So I was shocked by my first encounter with communitarian righteousness—all the more shocked because, at that point in the life of our family, things were really looking up. We had just escaped air-conditioned custody in this lily-white, cookie-cutter suburb of North Dallas and moved to Santa Monica, to a house right under the Palisades, between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. The house was the quintessence of coolness. There was a big deck on the second floor where we could sit and gaze off across the Pacific toward China. There was a white brick wall around the house, low in front and high in back, covered with bougainvillea. There were hydrangea bushes and hardy hibiscus in the front yard, honeysuckles along the side wall where a small yard ran, a mimosa tree in the front and a wisteria in the back—and, because of the wall and the breeze off the ocean, we could crank the windows open and let the house fill up with colored light, cool air, and the smell of flowers.
Died and gone to heaven. That’s the only way to describe it. After creepy, prissy Dallas, the escalation of sensory and social information was so overwhelming that I would lie in bed at night, in the sweet darkness, listening to the trucks rumbling on the PCH and the murmur of the surf on the sand, and literally giggle! There was just so much, and it was all so cool! I had black friends at school, like my dad’s jazz buddies. I got to be the only gentile in this kooky B’nai B’rith Boy Scout troop down in Venice (Reformed). Whenever I wanted, I could just walk out the glass front door with my dog, Darwin the Beagle, and slog through the sand down to the ocean. Or we could turn left and stroll down to the Santa Monica Pier where there was a dark pool hall with surfer criminals in residence. Or we could wander past the pier to Muscle Beach where multitudes of semi-naked women loved to pet Herr Darwin.
About once a month, on Sunday afternoon, we would pile in the car and tool down to Hermosa or Redondo to listen to jazz music, and every Saturday morning my brother and sister and I would climb the concrete stairs up the Palisades (or scramble up, commando style, through the ice plant), and make our way over to the Criterion for the Kiddie Cartoon Carnival. There we would sit for three hours, happy as clams, communing with Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry, just fucking blown away; and this, it turned out, is what the three ladies wanted to talk to us about. They showed up at Santa Monica Elementary about four months after we got there and set up shop in the lunch room. There was a crackly announcement on the speaker in home room that said if we wanted to talk to them, we would be excused from class to do it. So, naturellement, everybody did.
When my time came, I was marched down the hall to the lunch room and ushered to a seat across from this lady wearing a blue suit and pearls, just like June Cleaver. She had a three-ring binder and a bunch of papers on the table in front of her, and, since the table was kid-sized, she looked really big, looming behind it like a Charlie Ray lady. When I was seated, she looked up with a big smile, called me Davey, and asked me if I liked animated cartoons. I knew then I had made a terrible mistake. But what could I do? I said yes, I liked cartoons, a lot—and that my name was Dave. She smiled again, not meaning it this time, and persevered. And what about Donald Duck? she asked. Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.
Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald’s relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did it bother me that he screamed at them all the time? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I couldn’t. I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn’t really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn’t. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.
Clearly, this lady wanted to know stuff about my parents, and since, in all my peregrinations through five states and thirteen grammar schools, I had never met any other adults who were even remotely like my mom and dad, I was dedicated to concealing their eccentricity. Because it had its perks. I had seen enough of my friends’ home lives to know this. According to their parents, my parents let me run wild. I got to do things that my friends never could, because my parents were weird. But they were not like Donald Duck! My dad was cool and poetic—like me, I thought (wrongly!). And my mom was not cool at all. She was serious, high-strung, and fiercely ironic, like Joan Crawford, always bustling around: painting bad paintings in the back bedroom and reading books while she cooked dinner (setting the occasional paperback aflame)—always starting up little businesses, and telling me stuff about Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx when she gave me my allowance. (Keynes and Marx, I should note, marked the poles between which my mom’s sensibility flickered on a daily, nay hourly, basis, for reasons that were not always apparent. This made things exciting, since you never quite knew if you were dealing with the sky-walking entrepreneur or the hard-eyed revolutionary. My dad was more reliable in the realm of fiscal theory. He thought money was something you turned into music, and that music, ideally, was something you turned into money. It rarely worked out that way, but, in this at least, we were of one mind.)
Anyway, that was my folks. Donald and Daisy they weren’t, but neither were they Ward and June, so I was scared and covetous of my perks as an outlaw child. I didn’t know quite how to respond, and then, amazingly, I did. I told the truth. Donald Duck, I said, was not like my mom or dad. He was like my dog, Darwin the Beagle, excitable but lovable. Like, whenever people would walk by in front of our house, Darwin would just explode, squawking and