Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

And behind me, Hobart Gurney took a noisy slurp of soda as he repeated, in the way of old men you find in every small town, “Yessirree, my Fella’s not shy anymore…”

I said good-bye to Gurney a couple of hours later, outside the adult day-care center and seniors apartment where he lived; without going in, I knew what his room must be like—single bed, with a worn ripcord bedspread, some issues of Reader’s Digest large-print edition on the bed-stand, and a doorless closet filled with not too many clothes hanging from those crochet-covered hangers, and—most depressing of all—no animals at all to keep him company. It was the sort of place where they only bring in some puppies or kittens when the local newspaper editor wants a set of human interest pictures for the inner spread during a dull news week—“Oldsters with Animals” on their afghan-covered laps.

Not the sort of place where suddenly-small men snuggle with litters of barn cats in a bed of straw…

With an almost comic formality, Gurney thanked me for the Pepsi and for “letting me see the kitties” in my album. I asked him if he got out much, to see the signs in person, but instantly regretted my words when he nonchalantly spit at his feet before saying, “Don’t get ’round much since I turned in my driver’s license… my hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, be it with a brush or with a steering wheel. Once I almost run over a cat crossing a back road and tol’ myself, ‘This is it, Hobart’ even though the cat, she got away okay. Wasn’t worth the risk…”

Not knowing what else to do, I opened the back door of the car and brought out the album; Gurney didn’t want to take it at first, even though I assured him that I had another set of prints plus the negatives back in my studio in New York City. The way he brushed the outside of the album with his fingers, as if the imitation leather was soft tiger-stripe fur, was almost too much for me; knowing that I couldn’t stay, couldn’t see any more of this, I bid him farewell and left him standing in front of the oldsters’ home, album of kitties in his hands. I know I should’ve done more, but what could I do? Really? I’d given him back his cats; I couldn’t give him back his old life… and what he’d shared with me already hurt too much, especially his revelation of the smallness fantasy. I mean, how often do even people who are close to each other, like old friends, or family, reveal such intimate, deeply need ing things like that—especially without being asked to? Once you know things like that about a person, it gets a little hard to face them without feeling like you have a bought-from-a-comic-book-ad pair of X-ray glasses capable of peering into their soul. Nobody should be that vulnerable to another living being.

Especially one they hardly know…

A few days after I met Hobart Gurney my vacation in the Midwest was over, and I returned to my studio, to turn lifeless sample products into… something potentially essential to people who didn’t know they needed that thing until that month’s issue of Vanity Fair or Cosmopolitan arrived in the mail, and they finally got around to paging through the magazine after getting home from work. Not that I felt responsible for turning the unknown into the essential; even when I got to keep what I photographed, it didn’t mean squat to me. I could appreciate my work, respect my better efforts… but I never gave a pet name to a bottle of men’s cologne, if you get my drift. And I envied Hobart for being able to love what he did, because he had the freedom to do it the way he wanted to. And because the now-defunct Katz’s Chewing Tobacco people could’ve cared less what he painted next to their logo. (Oh, for such benign indifference when it came to my work!)

But I also pitied Hobart, because letting go of what you’ve come to love is a hard, hard thing, which makes the lending of that creative, loving process all the harder to take, especially when the ending is an involuntary thing. What had the old man said in the TV interview? That he was too old to climb the ladder anymore? That had to have been as bad as him realizing that he couldn’t drive safely anymore…

And the funny thing was, I got the feeling that if he could have climbed those ladders, he would’ve still been putting those man-sized cats on barns, whether Katz’s paid him or not.

I honestly couldn’t say the same about what I did for a living.

I was in the middle of shooting a series of pictures of a new women’s cologne, which happened to come in a bottle that resembled a piece of industrial flotsam more than a container for a fragrance boasting “top notes of green, with cinnamon undercurrents”—whatever that meant, since the stuff smelled like dime-store deodorant, when my studio phone rang. I had the answering machine on Call Screening, so I could hear it while not missing out on my next shot… but I hurried to the phone when a tentative-sounding voice asked, “Uhm… are you the one who dropped Mr. Gurney off at the home a couple of months ago?”

“Yeah, you’re speaking to me, not the machine—”

The woman on the other end began without preamble, “Sorry to bother you, but we found your card in Mr. Gurney’s room… the last anyone saw of him he was carrying that album you give him under his arm, before he went for his walk, only he never went for a walk for a week before—”

The sick feeling began in my stomach and soon fanned out all over my body; as the woman in charge of the old people’s home rambled on, telling me that no one in the area had seen the old man after he’d accepted a lift from someone with Canadian plates on his car, which naturally meant that he could be anywhere, but maybe headed for New York. I shook my head, even though the woman couldn’t possibly see me, as I cut in “No, ma’am, don’t even try looking here. He’s not far away… I’m sure of it. If he’s not still in Little Egypt, he’s across the border in Kentucky… just look for the Katz’s Tobacco signs—”

“The what?”

I pressed the receiver against my chest, muttered You stupid old biddy just to make myself feel better, then told her, “He painted signs, on barns… he’s saying good-bye to the signs,” and as I said the last few words, I wondered at my own choice of words… even as my own artist’s instincts—instincts Gurney and I shared—told me that I had, indeed, chosen my words correctly.

Despite the fact that the woman from the rest home had gotten her information from me, she never bothered to call me back when Hobart Gurney’s body was found, half buried in the unmown grass surrounding one of the abandoned barns bearing his loving handiwork; I found out about his death along with all the other people watching CNN that late-fall evening—the network reran the piece about his last or next-to-last sign-painting job, along with an oddly sentimental obituary that ended with a close-up of the “little girls,” whose particular sign the old man’s body had been found under. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of Mish-Mish, with her patchwork face of mixed tan and gray and white, with that peach-colored blotch over one eye, and she looked so poignant yet so real that no one watching her—be they a cat lover or not—could fail to realize what may’ve been more difficult to realize during that warts-and-all initial CNN interview, which plainly showed how unsophisticated and gauche Hobart Gurney may have seemed to be on the outside (so much so, perhaps, that it made underestimating his work all the easier): that Gurney was more than a great artist: He was a genius, easily on the par of Grandma Moses or anyone of her ilk.

J. C. Suarès was the first person to put out a book devoted to Katz’s Cats, as Gurney’s creations were to become popularly known. Many famous photographers, including Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, and Avedon, took in that collection; I wasn’t one of them, but I did get on that other collection put together for one of the AIDS charities. Then came the specials on what Gurney would’ve called the “art-fart” stations, and there’s even been word of a postage stamp bearing his likeness, along with one of the Katz’s Cats.