These are bittersweet images for me, even in their abstraction. I’ve gone back and forth over posting them, writing about them. Actually, in a way all these slides that I’ve been showing here the last week have for me an edge of melancholy to them. (I don’t presuppose that feeling comes over the ether-net, but perhaps for some of you it does). All were taken during a not-very-happy period of my life, which is a euphemistic way to say that they were taken during a time when I was suffering from the disease that dare not speak its name, depression.
It’s easy now to look at these images and enjoy the warm glow of nostalgia, and wonder to myself what the fuss was about. But that edge of melancholy lingers. Actually, as I reflect on them in hindsight, these images from my San Francisco days gone by evoke, perhaps more so than melancholy, a tranquility that belies the disquiet that was churning beneath the surface at the time. A murky tranquility obfuscating the thousands of dollars in therapist bills, the anti-depressants, the suicidal fantasies.
I didn’t talk about all this to most of the people around me at the time, choosing out of shame or embarrassment to instead project my own masked tranquility. But there was one person I did talk to, which brings me to these photos. I was once friends with a filmmaker living in San Francisco, and we hung around a lot together in ’93 and ’94. He was considerably older than I, and I suppose in some ways was a bit of a father figure to me, but the wonderful aspect of our relationship was that he treated me not as an acolyte or apprentice, but as an equal. He would show me the film he was working on or raw footage he had shot, and listen attentively as I gave him my thoughts on what I had seen, what worked and what didn’t, in my eyes. He was neither graciously dismissive nor patronizingly receptive.
We often went shooting together, he with his 16mm Bolex, I more often than not with my 35mm still camera. At one point he was interested in capturing the colors of neon as seen through the drops of rain falling on a car windshield, and on rainy nights he’d call me up on the phone and then swing by and pick me up in his car for a night of this kind of shooting. The two images above come from back-to-back nights of this in February, 1994. We’d shoot, or he’d shoot and I’d watch, and then we’d drive somewhere and park for a while and talk, then shoot some more. Sometimes we’d stop at Coit Liquor in North Beach and pick up some Italian grappa. Or we’d frequent a particular bar we sort of mutually discovered, and occassionally get mixed up in some minor adventures, like the time we ended up in a Mission District apartment smoking joints through apples with two Mexican transsexuals. Needless to say, it was a heady time for me.
I opened up to him about the crap I was going through inside, and he listened, and sometimes gave advice. But mostly he listened. In his flat, in his car, or on the telephone, he was what I needed most at that time, someone to talk to, untethered to 45 minute intervals or a $50/hour check.
But if there’s one thing you lose when you’re in a depression, it is perspective, the ability to know when enough is enough. At some point, reaching out to him during a particularly tough time, he told me he couldn’t help me, that he needed a breather, that he didn’t have the energy to help me at that point in time, that our relationship and my needs were draining. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I have no doubt that whatever it was, it was said in his usual gentle and loving way. But, it was not what I wanted to hear, it was not something I could hear, in my self-obsessed perspective-out-the-window state. And so naturally I punished him, which really meant punishing myself, by removing myself as far as possible from his life.
It wasn’t so much a falling out as it was a falling away. Around this time I stopped paying my phone bill, and the phone company disconnected my phone. I was not to have another phone for the next 6 years. And because my doorbell was connected to a phone that no longer rang, I was able to self-destructively isolate myself, and effectively close the door on our friendship. From time to time he’d send messages through a mutual friend, or even postcards, but I never responded. One of these postcards was for a screening of the film he had made from the footage of the neon-imbued raindrops and much other imagery he had shot on our excursions together. He made some sort of reference to “our film” on the postcard, and so I went. But this meeting, like subsequent times when I’d run into him at a film screening, or at the museum, was awkward in the extreme, and it was obvious that what once was, was no longer. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t get into the film, couldn’t get past the footage and the memories and associations, and the sadness.
In the late 90’s, my depression was over, 6 years after it had started. One day I realized something that had probably been true for some time prior — I wasn’t depressed anymore. No magic cure, no big revelations, no secrets of contentment, no saviors. Somehow, I had gotten through it, but at a price: I lost a lot of friends along the way. Actually, “lost” implies that I unwittingly allowed this to happen, when in point of fact, I threw these friends away. Their number stretches to both hands, it pains me to admit. It’s not something I view casually, but on the other hand I’m not so sanguine to think it could have been different. You don’t go through 6 years of a disease, any disease, without losing something.
