Home (Sick)
The first stages of hepatitis seemed like a bad flu. The next month or so I didn't feel terrible, just weak. I remember having enough strength to go up a flight of stairs, then sleeping for 4 hours to recover! I have only one good memory of the couple months I spent lying around and sleeping. One afternoon I had my pen and ink and I was drawing a barnacle. I wanted to capture every detail. My line got shorter and shorter until it became a series of dots. Epiphany! I discovered stippling. I had never seen, or at least I'd never been aware of seeing a stippled drawing. Never heard the word. I just realized that putting tiny dots down allowed me to get a greater level of detail. In one afternoon I went from drawing with lines to drawing with dots. I went crazy (or should I say '''crazier"?) with the technique. In the next few years I did scores of drawings with hundreds of thousands of dots.
I hadn't studied much art. Grade school we cut paper and pasted stuff together. In high school I think I had one art class. As a freshman and sophomore at Central Catholic I studied Latin, History, Algebra, etc. After I transferred to Beaverton High I goofed off a lot and took one class that had something to do with art. By this time I really only cared about girls and tennis and fun.
As a freshman at the University of Oregon, I was an art major. I took classes in Art History, Painting and Drawing. My drawing teacher was a hippie who looked at drawing as sort of an extension of an acid trip. I loved my painting class and teacher. An old guy who used words like "circumferential light". My point here is that I learned more about drawing sitting in my dorm room than I did in the drawing class studio. Though I must say I enjoyed life drawing....
Back to my drawing career. So all of sudden I found something besides sketching with pencils that really grabbed me. Thank God. Life was really tough for me during this time. I had a certainty in my being that I was meant to be an artist. I had no clue how to get there from where I was.
I'm going to skip a bunch here. I mostly wanted to stick to travels in this narrative. So just a bit about a couple weeks when my older brother and I took a short trip to Mexico. After I recovered from the hepatitis, I regaled Dick with tales from south of the border. So he put a canopy on his pickup and we headed south. We went through the Nogales border station again. OK, here begins the fun story:
We parked and walked into the immigration building to get our visas. Some overfed Mexican guard came up and started asking questions. Dick let me talk since my Spanish was adequate. The guard asked how long we planned to stay and how much money we had. It was a few hundred dollars - plenty for the week we planned. The guard said, no, we didn't have enough money. I couldn't believe it. I tried to argue, saying I'd spent a month on the same amount, and it was enough. My arguments fell on deaf ears. I had no idea what to do. The guard walked away. Another guard came up and said the other was "malo" - bad. We then walked outside to go over our options. After a few minutes it all became very clear to me. Visas are to be issued free, but I realized this guy was looking for a bribe. "Mordita" is the word they use. It means "little bite". That was ok with me. A few bucks to grease the bureaucratic wheels. So we walked back in. The guard mostly ignored us, saying we couldn't have visas. We played along and just stood our ground. He finally sauntered up to the counter. Not very tactfully I asked him how much he wanted. He gets this offended look on his face and said he didn't need our money. Then he pulled out his wallet and opened it up for me to see. He flipped through twenties, fifties, francs, Deutschmarks, and pesos. He didn't need our money! But he warmed up a bit, and my brother (a gun nut) asked him about his pearl handled gun. Now he really opened up. He started showing it off as we oohed and aahed and pretended to be impressed. In the middle of our discussion he said "cien (100) pesos". At the time that was $8.00. I don't know what came over me, but I actually bargained with him! And I don't know what came over him, but he relented! Fifty pesos and we got our visas.
We spent the week driving down to Guaymas again to visit my friends. This was my second trip, mostly uneventful.