In Montana in the Sixties if you amused someone or they were a little exasperated with you, they'd exclaim, "You character!" When Bob said it, he would tug the hair on the top of my head. I don't know what "MeToo" would say about that. I liked it, though it was a little like being a puppy dog. Later one could argue that I had become a bitch, but at that point I was pretty much a puppy.
North of the bridge over Cut Bank Creek which runs just west of Starr School, there is a sweet spot where geology has created a swimming hole with a small beach alongside. In the Sixties we used to go there, often lingering after dark around a small fire to tell stories and toast marshmallows. There never seemed to be other people around. There were far fewer people than now. White people didn't go there. Tribal people gave us a lot of space. Bob was the City Magistrate and the Justice of the Peace, known to be favorable to the tribal people. There was a second JP, also white, who saw himself as an arm of the police.
We were swimming and enjoying a place where a big flat boulder a few feet under the surface made it easy to slide off into the deepest part of the pool, a sort of natural water slide. I was repeating this, along with Bob and the grandkids, when I did something wrong and ended up underwater out of control. One could even say on the edge of drowning. Then Bob grabbed my hair and pulled my head up out of the water. "Are you doing that on purpose?" he asked.
He was just passing fifty. I was exploring my twenties. His daughter was a year older than me but died of cancer. She grew up with her mother, a brother, several half-sibs. In our relationship, which was focused on work, the generations were confused and also haunted by Bob's former lover, a little blonde I considered much younger and trashier. She came to Bob when she was barely legal for sex, not for money but for protection, a pattern she repeated all her life. She was three years younger than me.
In those years was teaching all day and then helping in the sculpture and taxidermy shop all evening. I slept with Bob until 3AM, then went home for the rest of the night. There were no rules because there was no precedent. People pretended not to know and said, "they're characters." A few mocked us.
In the shop while Bob worked, I took advantage of the materials to make a series of hand puppets, elaborate and appealing but made of papier maché which was so heavy that they couldn't be operated. Also, I used P300, a latex-based substance that could be cast in a mold to make small flexible objects -- in my case, little figures. Bob never objected. I was learning skills. He never praised what I made. I was like a child working in the presence of a parent who was safe but not interfering. I didn't reflect on this at time.
My birth family was "good enough" and tried to give me airs and graces without really knowing how they worked. For instance, I took ballet lessons from Mr. Oumanski on NW 23rd. I was awkward and unfocused, living in the fantasy instead of my own body. At some point I wanted a set of pink satin toe shoes and I vividly recall the shoe store that served dancers -- "Knights", I think. I had no business even thinking of toe shoes and Mr. Oumanski tried to discourage the idea, but my parents didn't understand what was happening and bought them.
Carefully, I sewed on the ankle ribbons and wrapped my toes in sheep's wool. I couldn't even balance on my toes, much less dance. The shoes were never broken in, but I kept them for many decades. My mother would urge me to practice, but didn't know what that meant or why it changed a body -- even that it WOULD change a body. She got me to the theatre so that I saw Margot Fonteyn and Maria Tallchief dance, but didn't go herself. I went to the "big" library downtown and read about ballet, how it was devised and what role it played in the lives of the sophisticated. I even tried to read the books about ballet that were written in French. I bought a few books and still have them. But I didn't understand in a deep "felt" way.
It was the same for Bob. No one, least of all his parents, understood the impulse to make these sculptures or how to judge them. They didn't know about virtual worlds that live in imagination and creation. His mother once exclaimed in praise, "Oh, Robert, you've even put the buttons on his shirt!" -- missing a step between little replicas and genuine artistic insight into form and meaning. He came closer about the time I arrived, when Warren Baumgartner, a very fine painter from NYC, had given him lessons in composition, pulling the abstract out for consideration and using concrete reality to capture it.
In our search for understanding we spent hours talking. There was no one to mentor us so we mentored each other. I brought my book-reading and what I had just learned at Northwestern in the theatre department. But still I hit that wall, that failure to move into claiming my own body and a related "feeling". It's like suddenly being able to read, the brain is ready and just does it.
Bob pulled me into all the things that were like ballet to him: horseback adventures, Blackfeet lore, the actual people -- who were then more like full-blood than not. The assimilated and white people belonged to his family and he evaded his family. A big part of his inner life remained music and though he didn't have the embouchure to play his cornet much anymore, he unwound in the evenings by playing the piano and singing with it. I tried to sing his Forties songs with him but ran into that same blocking pattern: lack of deep pattern insight or the muscle control to use my voice. He would get disgusted with me so I joked and mugged to escape.
These are patterns and problems of immaturity but even now that I can talk about the virtual, the meta, I see people around me that don't even know they exist. These folks are "good enough" and sometimes better than most at what they do, but the abstract "ur" world is invisible to them. They are "lightweights." To them, and even to Bob until his death, I am a "character," but I don't think people say that much anymore.
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