I was raised bohemian (and impecunious) and have remained bohemian (and impecunious) on and off for most of my adult life. With this brand of hardship there is some choice involved: I’ve been trying all my life to live off writing alone. My father tried all his life to live off painting. He succeeded. I have had occasional success as well as some thudding flops, but continue to strive. There are easier ways, but artists rarely choose them. Raised with the notion that struggle was noble, I often wonder if being penniless poses a strangely familiar comfort zone for me and that is why I persist in allowing my bank balance to spiral toward zero. Survivalist creativity, and more often times just survival, is simply what I know and do best. And it’s also a form of grand futility, because worrying about money is not creative and the pursuit of creativity is one of the most expensive things around. My favorite joke among friends is the line, “Hey it costs a lot to be a free spirit”—and I am living testimony to the exact cost by the end of each month.
By broke I mean down to the last of everything: shaking the coin jar for food money and occasionally selling the odd bit of furniture to make the rent. By broke I also mean regularly way off budget, shamelessly empty pocketed after returning from some harebrained voyage, and believing, always believing, that things will pull through, pick up, and take off.
I don’t drink, gamble, overshop, or use credit, but the cash I do have is always in use to its absolute breaking and vanishing point. I simply believe money should work as hard as I do as well as perform the occasional miracle. I suppose I was just raised like that. We lived on nothing but seemed to enjoy everything, everything that is except anything new. It has been a life heavy on romance and heavy on stress as well. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I do believe that the happiest people do the work they were born to do and hang the cost in the process of that pursuit. Even the supersensible and sage Suze Orman agrees with the notion of sacred vision. In her fun guide The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, & Broke, she counsels young people to go after a career they love rather than a job they don’t; because careers, like vocations, sculpt lives rather than just service them. But there are people out there who take this idea to the extreme, and that’s how I was raised. In 1969, when you could buy a mansion in Sydney, Australia, for a song, my parents, clearly oblivious to investment, bought four tickets to New York instead.
My father went to America to make it as an abstract painter at precisely the wrong moment. Conceptual art was at the fore, the return of the superstar expressionists was seven long years away, and the family had to be inventive to survive. Mum ran a funky vintage clothing store in Chelsea, sold tickets at a revival cinema, and joined a food co-op to fill the house with produce from upstate. My brother and I believed our parents could make anything after Dad built a dollhouse and Mum painted the entire interior by hand. She also made me a velvet dress shaped like a kimono for Christmas. Dad painted and was our hero in his struggles. We believed in Henri Matisse instead of Santa Claus and were told Vincent Van Gogh’s astounding misfortunes as a regular bedtime story. “Vincent never saw a nickel … but he believed!”
There was an unspoken awareness that we were broke because of the painting, yet we were all complicit to Dad’s dream—and, naturally, painting would save the day! We were raised on Buster Keaton, Muddy Waters, Mark Rothko, blind faith, and curry. Our Disneyland was an herb shop on Carmine Street in the West Village called Aphrodisia, which held pungent curry spices in vast wooden kegs and was open very late at night. Everyone in New York in the early seventies seemed to be talking about authenticity: the real garam masala, the true Bessie Smith blues, the first Woody Guthrie bootleg. Intuitive, homegrown, underground, frayed, hand-dyed, and free, those were the values. And unlike today you could be broke back then without quite the same shame or sense of risk. Rents were lower, dreams were wilder, and I guess my parents were very, very young.
Saturday, every Saturday, we decamped to Fanelli’s, an original twenties speakeasy that had become an artist’s bar where they still kept a depression-era baseball bat behind the counter and the walls were covered in nicotine-stained pressed tin and pictures of heavyweight boxers. My brother knew their names by heart. When Fanelli’s closed we’d trek up to Max’s Kansas City, a rock-and-roll cult bar where they served free fried chicken at dusk. I once argued the toss for a drumstick with Andy Warhol at Max’s. I was seven. It seemed utterly normal to grow up in a bar drinking Shirley Temples and talking to women with feathers threaded through their hair, to spend full days in a darkened cinema on old velvet seats, and to spend Halloween in sequined dresses that had hung from the ceiling in Mum’s shop. “Children in suburbia,” my parents said grimly, “watch TV all day, eat frozen hamburgers, and have to go to bed at seven P.M.” We shuddered in our Indian sandals at the very thought. And as a result we never assumed we had it rough.
“Aesthetics,” my father said through a plume of Marlboro cigarette smoke, “are more important than good taste—aesthetics mean you have a point of view.” From an early age I realized that “aesthetics” provided the lively distractions that concealed our obvious but very inventive poverty: a rustic kilim covered bare boards and the patch of depression-era ripped linoleum, a poster of the Matisse red studio covered the bathroom door with a great big crack down the middle, a massive fern dominated the kitchen and detracted from the fact that the ceiling of our rental nineteenth-century house was no more than a wooden lattice and a sagging panel of sheet rock.
We moved to Australian suburbia in 1978 to soften the edges of seven hard years spent in the urban heart of New York City. In a flash we were the shame of the neighborhood. Mum’s attempt at renovation was halfhearted at best. She painted the side of the house that we rented half Indian red and half chocolate brown. No one in the family can remember if we ran out of paint or if my mother decided she hated the neighbors sufficiently to halt all works. Our poor next-door neighbors: elderly relics of the 1950s whose lawn looked like Astroturf and whose stucco house had walls as thick and clean as a fresh marzipan wedding cake, had to weather many nights of loud heavy blues.
Gradually I came to realize that we were uncomfortably different. And living against the grain started to feel like ignoring some very fundamental law, like gravity. Broke, as well as always just a bit scruffy, the practical obstacles of being raised bohemian felt perpetual. Not owning an iron until I turned thirteen and learned to sew, I attended school in a uniform that looked like a crushed tea-towel. Not owning a blow-dryer, my hair was one huge wisp held up with a rubber band. My mother covered her obvious financial stress well by getting us to cook, make clothes, and enjoy music together, and by telling me that the perfect prissy girls in Seventeen magazine were just made of printer’s ink. She said store-bought fashion was “square,” so we bought cheap fabric in Chinatown and made Boy George dresses without a pattern on a nineteenth-century Singer sewing machine. The bathtub was often full of vintage clothes being dyed red. When you’re young and busily absorbed you don’t feel odd until others judge you as such. Encountering the censures and snobbery of high school was like waking from a dream in which you are nude and everyone else fully clothed … and ironed.
Happily the stalwart creativity, mess, sacrifice, and devotion paid off. Three decades later my father, and my older brother, are both acclaimed painters, my mother has a vast collection of textiles and a big Regency table instead of the old farmhouse plinth, and a fancy Italian vacuum cleaner now lives in a small discreet cupboard beneath the stairs. The day’s of beating our kilims on the side of our back fence with a broom may have passed.
Because their fairytale of art as salvation came true, my parents now live inside a Matisse painting: gorgeous ancient rugs, bizarre Russian candlesticks, lace from Istanbul. But no ironing board. Forty years without ironing strikes me as incredibly intelligent. Now I have my own small child and I guess his style is also drip-and-dry. He wears girl’s overcoats and odd socks, he sleeps beneath a broad ribbon of Laotian silk embroidered with wild animals—and trails a crayon line on every surface he passes. His face is clean but his hair is long and wild. He is not allowed to listen to the Wiggles and prefers to dance naked to the Stones at least once a day. Unlike me he has a piggy bank and chooses his toys according to price on his baby budget, but that’s the only real improvement on form. He’ll probably grow up to be a musician, a career choice riddled with instability, sacrifice, and sexy squalor. Perfect. Welcome to the family.
