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Non-fiction Creative Essay 1 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 2 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 3 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 5 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 6
Non-fiction Creative Essay 7 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 8 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 9 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 10 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 11
"There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own."
"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde
I grew up in a home surrounded by art. Both my parents were artists. My father attended night school at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, on the GI Bill, after he returned from his service in WWII. Of his many assignments in art school, he painted two diametrically opposed self-portraits. In both paintings he dressed as a clown. Not like Bozo or Ronald McDonald, but a hobo clown with a crushed down hat and a polka dot bow tie. The paintings capture the spitting image of my father as a young man, though I did not know this as a child of four. Charlie has a very special talent of painting in photographic realism, which leaves me daunted as to how he can do this. As a child I recognized the face in the portraits as familiar to me subconsciously.
In the first painting the hobo dressed in brightly colored clothes and laughed with an ear to ear smile. He had a wide smile with yellowed teeth from smoking. The eyes of the person in the portrait gave away the identity of the poser. My father's eyes always squinted down tight as he laughed. When he laughed, his facial features were similar to an Asian man laughing.
The second painting represented an evil twin. The second portrait consisted of very dismal colors; dull grays, blues, and blacks. The colors would fit right in with the Manchester movement or the New York underground music scene sometime during the early eighties. Again the subject dressed as a hobo clown, but the mask of the face vastly differed. The mouth turned down as though in mourning, deep sorrow or disappointment. The jowls were lax, not tight and firm as in the laughing portrait. The portrait haunted and terrorized me for years in my nightmares as a child. The eyes caused all my distress. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the visions within these eyes would make Jason and Freddy Kruger look like Ronald McDonald. The eyes reflected formlessness, disappointment, despair, and deep rooted anger that drove down to the marrow of your bone. As a child of four, the eyes chilled me to the core.
At this tender age I shared the large upstairs bedroom with my brother of fifteen. My bed resided against the wall next to the bedroom door. The stairway existed on the other side of the wall. The painting originally resided in our room just across from my bed, but due to my howling protests, the painting was removed and hung at the bottom of the stairway.
Many nights the painting tormented me. In my nightmares, as I slept I would hear the crash. The painting would leap off the wall and hit the floor on its edge, but would remain standing. Then rotating from the left bottom corner to the right bottom corner, it would hobble up the stairs. I could hear each clump it made as it came up the stairs and I would whimper and cry because the portrait wanted to return to its rightful place.
It didn't matter if the door remained closed or not. The painting would get to the top of the stairs, stop, and then kick the door open. The portrait would wobble back and forth on its corners, as it made its way to the wall where it had originally resided. It would then give one tremendous heave and jump up, landing right on the hook where it originally hung. Then the sad clown would just stare at me all night with his eyes filled with pain, formlessness, anger, hate, and sadness. I would wake crying, heart pounding and in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming with a blood curdling scream.
Today, my brother has the sad clown portrait. The portrait captures the spitting image of Charlie in almost photographic quality. He's a young man in the painting, no more than twenty-four, but the eyes define the poser. It's fascinating that no matter how much a person's body and facial features change with time, the eyes remain the same.
Even as an adult the eyes chills down my spine, but the portrait now stimulates my analytical mind to inquiry. I wonder what happened to this man? What caused all the pain and disappointment? What made him so deeply hateful? What happened to him as a child? All of these thoughts remain a mystery to me.
My mother provides some enlightenment to my inquiry, but not much. Through conversation with my mother I have learned that Charlie's biological mother died when he was thirteen and his father remarried his first wife's best friend. I also know that his father worked for the Schaefer Brewing Company as a driver and suffered from alcoholism, making my father the child of an alcoholic. Lastly, my mother was not Charlie's first choice in marriage, but second best. My mother represented a girl from the wrong side of the track. The girl that turned down Charlie's affections represented the right side of the track. Charlie's father and stepmother found Miss Right Track a more palatable choice in marriage. The rest of my father's past remain ambiguous.
Sunday was bath night for us as a child. I sometimes remember my father walking to the bath in nothing but his briefs and he had the terrible scent of the ocean canals at low tide. He wore a St. Christopher medal around his neck. Maybe due to an over-saturation of religion for the day; Sunday, attending church, and the St. Christopher's medal caused me to think, "Do all Catholics smell that way?" At age four, I could think of all kinds of illogical things. I know better now his odor was from a lack of showering.
I think the one thing most people would unanimously agree that Charles Henry Paul would go down in infamy for would his creative usage of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. As a child my mother taught me not to use these words, but I had no idea what any of them meant. I only knew that when I heard my father or anyone else utter them that only vulgar, obscene, profane people use these words to express themselves. Some of the sentences Charlie strung along possessed no curse words, but contained meanings that would have made a sailor blush. Phrases such as, "Hold your water!" were frequently hurled at any unsuspecting motorist who dared to honk their horn. My mother would absolutely cringe from the vocabulary that emitted from Charlie's mouth.
When he retired from Simon and Shuster Publishing in the mid-eighties, at the ripe age of sixty-five, his co-workers were in their late 20's and early 30's. Charlie became the seasoned veteran in the trenches of commercial art warfare. When it came to problems in advertising art, the youngsters, as he called them, came to him for advice and resolution. On the last day he worked, his co-workers presented him with an award plaque they had especially made for him. The inscription read, "This is to award Mr. Charles Henry Paul with the lifetime achievement of the most colorful usage of four letter words not found in Webster's Dictionary." When I read it I laughed to the point of tears and almost peed in my pants. Award? He could have published a dictionary on the meaning of the words. His second publication could have written a handbook on correct grammatical usage of Anglo-Saxon words not found in Webster's Dictionary. For his third and final publication he could have written a Strunk & White "The Elements of Style for Creating Sentences in Four Letter Anglo-Saxon Words not found in Webster's Dictionary."
His fluency absolutely amazed his co-workers and me. He never repeated the same word in any sentence he constructed. He had created rich and complex syntax from curse words. I had no idea words such as "bloody" and "bleeding" are syntactically used differently. This lovely-undocumented language became the "Paul" legacy, passed down from father to son, tracing far back to his ancestors' clans from Scotland before A.D. 1000. I have broken the legacy for I have no children and never will, plus no one has ever heard me express myself with these words.
When I was a child he wore the typical clothing of the time. The boring red or blue conservative ties with dots or some other pattern. Charlie always wore a tan trench coat, but not a double-breasted coat like Humphrey Bogart, but single button types like Peter Falk's character, Detective Columbo. "What did you pay for those shoes?" Hearing Columbo ask that question always made Charlie laugh to the point of tears. He wore a hat similar to Bogart's in charcoal gray and hard, polished, black shoes typical of the forties.
Today, no one would recognize him as the same man. Charlie now wears bandannas around his neck, dresses in denim shirts, and wears Indian moccasins that he stitches together himself. He has this thing of getting back to his Indian roots. Somewhere in his family tree Charlie had a Native American mother, which accounts for his high cheekbones and his eyes when he laughs.
Seared into my memory, I can still hear Charlie say in an angry tone, "Money in your bank account is the only thing worth a damn in this world." As a child of the Great Depression this most likely accounts for his philosophy on life. He made misers look like spendthrifts. When George Washington came out of his wallet, Old George squinted from the light of day.
Later in life, my ex-wife met a young man who worked in the bank where Charlie maintained his savings. During the conversation, my ex-wife, Conni, and the banker exchanged names. The banker asked if Charlie Paul was her father. Conni said Charlie was her father-in-law. The banker replied wistfully, "I admire a man with a six digit bank account!" Charlie built his bank account at a cost.
My father only came home on weekends. During the week, he spent late nights in Manhattan working overtime. On the weekend, Charlie worked on his personal projects. My father was a workaholic. Psychologists say that workaholics have a disease similar to alcoholism and that workaholics use work as a method to avoid their feelings. Not only did he fear his feelings, but he also feared poverty. He never took the family anywhere if it cost money. We never went on vacation other than camping.
As an adult, I would love to say, "You were wrong. The only thing that matters in this world is family," a privilege I will never have. Today, at forty-eight, I long for a woman who feels strongly enough about me to marry, but children? My time has long passed. I will never have my own family.
The only talking marathon I care to sit through with Charlie would begin with the question, "What made you so angry and depressed in your past?" Unfortunately, he closed his heart and will allow no one in. The answer my friend will remain, blowing in the wind.
"There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own."
"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde
I grew up in a home surrounded by art. Both my parents were artists. My father attended night school at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, on the GI Bill, after he returned from his service in WWII. Of his many assignments in art school, he painted two diametrically opposed self-portraits. In both paintings he dressed as a clown. Not like Bozo or Ronald McDonald, but a hobo clown with a crushed down hat and a polka dot bow tie. The paintings capture the spitting image of my father as a young man, though I did not know this as a child of four. Charlie has a very special talent of painting in photographic realism, which leaves me daunted as to how he can do this. As a child I recognized the face in the portraits as familiar to me subconsciously.
In the first painting the hobo dressed in brightly colored clothes and laughed with an ear to ear smile. He had a wide smile with yellowed teeth from smoking. The eyes of the person in the portrait gave away the identity of the poser. My father's eyes always squinted down tight as he laughed. When he laughed, his facial features were similar to an Asian man laughing.
The second painting represented an evil twin. The second portrait consisted of very dismal colors; dull grays, blues, and blacks. The colors would fit right in with the Manchester movement or the New York underground music scene sometime during the early eighties. Again the subject dressed as a hobo clown, but the mask of the face vastly differed. The mouth turned down as though in mourning, deep sorrow or disappointment. The jowls were lax, not tight and firm as in the laughing portrait. The portrait haunted and terrorized me for years in my nightmares as a child. The eyes caused all my distress. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the visions within these eyes would make Jason and Freddy Kruger look like Ronald McDonald. The eyes reflected formlessness, disappointment, despair, and deep rooted anger that drove down to the marrow of your bone. As a child of four, the eyes chilled me to the core.
At this tender age I shared the large upstairs bedroom with my brother of fifteen. My bed resided against the wall next to the bedroom door. The stairway existed on the other side of the wall. The painting originally resided in our room just across from my bed, but due to my howling protests, the painting was removed and hung at the bottom of the stairway.
Many nights the painting tormented me. In my nightmares, as I slept I would hear the crash. The painting would leap off the wall and hit the floor on its edge, but would remain standing. Then rotating from the left bottom corner to the right bottom corner, it would hobble up the stairs. I could hear each clump it made as it came up the stairs and I would whimper and cry because the portrait wanted to return to its rightful place.
It didn't matter if the door remained closed or not. The painting would get to the top of the stairs, stop, and then kick the door open. The portrait would wobble back and forth on its corners, as it made its way to the wall where it had originally resided. It would then give one tremendous heave and jump up, landing right on the hook where it originally hung. Then the sad clown would just stare at me all night with his eyes filled with pain, forlornness, anger, hate, and sadness. I would wake crying, heart pounding and in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming with a blood curdling scream.
Today, my brother has the sad clown portrait. The portrait captures the spitting image of Charlie in almost photographic quality. He's a young man in the painting, no more than twenty-four, but the eyes define the poser. It's fascinating that no matter how much a person's body and facial features change with time, the eyes remain the same.
Even as an adult the eyes chills down my spine, but the portrait now stimulates my analytical mind to inquiry. I wonder what happened to this man? What caused all the pain and disappointment? What made him so deeply hateful? What happened to him as a child? All of these thoughts remain a mystery to me.
My mother provides some enlightenment to my inquiry, but not much. Through conversation with my mother I have learned that Charlie's biological mother died when he was thirteen and his father remarried his first wife's best friend. I also know that his father worked for the Schaefer Brewing Company as a driver and suffered from alcoholism, making my father the child of an alcoholic. Lastly, my mother was not Charlie's first choice in marriage, but second best. My mother represented a girl from the wrong side of the track. The girl that turned down Charlie's affections represented the right side of the track. Charlie's father and stepmother found Miss Right Track a more palatable choice in marriage. The rest of my father's past remain ambiguous.
Sunday was bath night for us as a child. I sometimes remember my father walking to the bath in nothing but his briefs and he had the terrible scent of the ocean canals at low tide. He wore a St. Christopher medal around his neck. Maybe due to an over-saturation of religion for the day; Sunday, attending church, and the St. Christopher's medal caused me to think, "Do all Catholics smell that way?" At age four, I could think of all kinds of illogical things. I know better now his odor was from a lack of showering.
I think the one thing most people would unanimously agree that Charles Henry Paul would go down in infamy for would his creative usage of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. As a child my mother taught me not to use these words, but I had no idea what any of them meant. I only knew that when I heard my father or anyone else utter them that only vulgar, obscene, profane people use these words to express themselves. Some of the sentences Charlie strung along possessed no curse words, but contained meanings that would have made a sailor blush. Phrases such as, "Hold your water!" were frequently hurled at any unsuspecting motorist who dared to honk their horn. My mother would absolutely cringe from the vocabulary that emitted from Charlie's mouth.
When he retired from Simon and Shuster Publishing in the mid-eighties, at the ripe age of sixty-five, his co-workers were in their late 20's and early 30's. Charlie became the seasoned veteran in the trenches of commercial art warfare. When it came to problems in advertising art, the youngsters, as he called them, came to him for advice and resolution. On the last day he worked, his co-workers presented him with an award plaque they had especially made for him. The inscription read, "This is to award Mr. Charles Henry Paul with the lifetime achievement of the most colorful usage of four letter words not found in Webster's Dictionary." When I read it I laughed to the point of tears and almost peed in my pants. Award? He could have published a dictionary on the meaning of the words. His second publication could have written a handbook on correct grammatical usage of Anglo-Saxon words not found in Webster's Dictionary. For his third and final publication he could have written a Strunk & White "The Elements of Style for Creating Sentences in Four Letter Anglo-Saxon Words not found in Webster's Dictionary."
His fluency absolutely amazed his co-workers and me. He never repeated the same word in any sentence he constructed. He had created rich and complex syntax from curse words. I had no idea words such as "bloody" and "bleeding" are syntactically used differently. I think it wasn't until age twenty eight, I actually understood the meaning of the word "frigg," "to frigg," or "frigging," describing the action a woman performs when manually stimulating her genital area with her hand. This lovely-undocumented language became the "Paul" legacy, passed down from father to son, tracing far back to his ancestors' clans from Scotland before A.D. 1000. Funny, anyone who knows me would tell you that they never heard me use four letter words to express myself other than in the bedroom.
When I was a child he wore the typical clothing of the time. The boring red or blue conservative ties with dots or some other pattern. Charlie always wore a tan trench coat, but not a double-breasted coat like Humphrey Bogart, but single button types like Peter Falk's character, Detective Columbo. "What did you pay for those shoes?" Hearing Columbo ask that question always made Charlie laugh to the point of tears. He wore a hat similar to Bogart's in charcoal gray and hard, polished, black shoes typical of the forties.
Today, no one would recognize him as the same man. Charlie now wears bandannas around his neck, dresses in denim shirts, and wears Indian moccasins that he stitches together himself. He has this thing of getting back to his Indian roots. Somewhere in his family tree Charlie had a Native American mother, which accounts for his high cheekbones and his eyes when he laughs.
Seared into my memory, I can still hear Charlie say in an angry tone, "Money in your bank account is the only thing worth a damn in this world." As a child of the Great Depression this most likely accounts for his philosophy on life. He made misers look like spendthrifts. When George Washington came out of his wallet, Old George squinted from the light of day.
Later in life, my ex-wife met a young man who worked in the bank where Charlie maintained his savings. During the conversation, my ex-wife, Conni, and the banker exchanged names. The banker asked if Charlie Paul was her father. Conni said Charlie was her father-in-law. The banker replied wistfully, "I admire a man with a six digit bank account!" Charlie built his bank account at a cost.
My father only came home on weekends. During the week, he spent late nights in Manhattan working overtime. On the weekend, Charlie worked on his personal projects. My father was a workaholic. Psychologists say that workaholics have a disease similar to alcoholism and that workaholics use work as a method to avoid their feelings. Not only did he fear his feelings, but he also feared poverty. He never took the family anywhere if it cost money. We never went on vacation other than camping.
As an adult, I would love to say, "You were wrong. The only thing that matters in this world is family," a privilege I will never have. Today, at forty-eight, I long for a woman who feels strongly enough about me to marry, but children? My time has long passed. I will never have my own family.
The only talking marathon I care to sit through with Charlie would begin with the question, "What made you so angry and depressed in your past?" Unfortunately, he closed his heart and will allow no one in. The answer my friend will remain, blowing in the wind.
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