I stood dazzled in the foyer underneath suspended planes of war and amongst two centuries of guns with my sunglasses on, spinning in circles. D.Cam lit from sign to sign taking in as much information as could be stolen from them. D.Bob was whispering about how weird everybody was inside this museum of death.
We set up shop in a little classroom that was out of sight on the second floor. The suitcases opened to reveal the many pieces of our beloved beater. D.Cam walked me through the assembly process. He took a Sergeants care in pointing out the different pieces and illuminating the process of how they came to be this working thing. Soon she was ready.
The boys had brought fiber with them because this was not a full workshop. We didn’t have participants that could bring things in. We were merely exhibiting the process. Soon the room was obnoxiously loud with the sound of our lady consuming her feast, her metal teeth clanging together abrasively. She was an infinite loop of consumption.
While she processed her lunch I set a card table up on the balcony that was under the WWII plane mobiles, right next to the cockpit of a bomber. I remembered the time that Laura and I had sex in the show bomber outside of a VFW in Wisconsin. It made me smile. Then I remembered the rest of Laura and I’s story and the smile faded. I grabbed D.Bob’s typewriter and began to type.
It has has been a long standing tradition of ours to constantly create and shed work in every place that we go so that we leave behind us an archive of whimsical writings, doodlings, prints, photo’s, stolen goods, etc. etc… Everything that was typed during this week here was set to float out into the world, as free as its author.
I had never actually pulled a sheet of paper before. I had cut the tip of my finger off the last and first time that I had the chance and because pulling sheets of paper entails dipping your hands into tubs of water and pulp over and over again I could not participate in the fun on account of how I would get blood in the water.
I found it fitting that I pull my first sheet of paper this place. Nothing like getting over the memories of war while inside a house built to detain the steel archive of the things that we have made to kill each other.
In a tiny room on the top floor there was a tiny wing dedicated to the art that had blossomed around war. I was disappointed to find that there were only paintings and drawings and sometimes photographs of people dieing in the field. I wanted Abstract Expressionism or Dada or something at all that called to mind the absurdity of our species manifested so poignantly in our addiction to armed combat. This stuff was boring. D.Cam was soaking it all in with his usual vigor. D.Bob was making fun of our hosts and giggling at the random things which shouldn’t seem funny. No matter how serious the subject, D.Bob will always find something to laugh about.
You have to keep yourself light at heart with work like this. It gets real heavy real fast when you’re hanging out with vets.
After our first day in the museum we decided that we couldn’t stay in the Circus for another day. D.Bob was getting sicker by the hour. He was coughing and looking miserable and he kept saying that it felt like his neck was swelling. We went out that afternoon to find another place to stay. The search took us hours but we finally found a smaller hostel a few miles away where we could have a room of our own.
The new digs were sublime compared to the clamor of the Circus. On our first night we went out for a walk. Comedy ensued when I tried, for the second time, to buy some weed from kids on the street and got burned. As soon as I had put my money in the one kids hand everybody disappeared. I was left standing there like a fool while the Drews laughed at me from across the street. I changed my mind on vices and decided that while I was in the UK it was much easier to be a drunk than a stoner.
D.Bob went back to the hostel because he wasn’t feeling well. D.Cam and I went for another epic walkabout. We got a few bottles of wine and stumbled around town talking about the history of veteran artists and the sentiment of their work, trying to complete the bridge between them and us. Were we the new breed of philosophical resistance to the horror of war?
Back at the Museum we were introduced toa few old men. I met one of them outside while he chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. He was in his eighties. He was still lean and intimidating. He glowered out at the world from the steps that led to the Museum’s piece of the Berlin wall and an enormous canon which had been on a Royal Navy war ship. He had fought in WWII. He was wearing a suit.
In a rare moment of camaraderie he told me that it made him sick to see how the world turned out. He told me that he never would have sacrificed as much as he did if he knew this was the way things were going. He hated the banks and the coffee shops and the way the money was being spent. He told me about his struggle to make ends meet after the war and how this struggle had continued until the death of his wife. From his cloud of smoke I could see his resignation. He was just waiting for the end.
Inside he sat down in front of a small audience with a few other veterans to tell war stories. They did this every week as an attempt to keep an oral history of Her Majesty’s wars alive. The old man that I had been speaking with detailed gruesome stories about running through vines in Italy with his bayonet equipped and how, for the first and only time, he had to use his bayonet. He seemed removed from the moment as if it had happened to someone else. He talked about the man he had killed in the same tone that one would talk about an old friend who had passed away years ago. I drew a picture of him from the balcony.It floated away. Just another leaf in the Fall.
Inside of our paper laboratory we were finishing making our last batch of paper. We had to stand on the stack of sheets to press the water out of it. Usually there is a mechanical press to do this job better than a few humans holding a trash can, but we were short on resources. Later we would discover a better technique. The excess pulp proved to be a problem. When the room was empty D.Bob and I poured it down the sink. Of course it clogged almost immediately so we took turns standing over it to keep people from seeing the damage that we had done until the nasty scene was over. We’re kind of punk like that.
Over the course of that day D.Bob’s sickness took hold of him completely. His neck swelled so extensively that he looked like a loon or some other kind of fish eating bird which has a huge gullet. His face was puffy and he could barely speak. He coughed a lot and it obviously caused him a great deal of pain. The city had been plagued with fear about the latest epidemic: Swine Flu. It was hard not to suggest that maybe Drew had a case of it himself. It didn’t need to be said.
It got so bad that he had to go to the hospital. I was out looking for weed. I came back successful only to find a short note on the table that told me that they were going to the emergency room. I spent the rest of the night putting lino prints on the wet paper which turned out to be ideal for the job because the water soaked the water based ink right up. The boys didn’t get back until early in the morning.
Seeing him like he was was like standing on a firing line. Both D.Cam and I knew that this horrible bug would come for us. The only thing to do was drink whiskey and prepare ourselves.
The Paper Trail 