Day 21: Dawn in Alfred

Let’s play a game. Free association. I’ll say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind:

Alfred.

Did you think of Bruce Wayne’s butler? The mascot of Mad Magazine? What your best friend named their dog in 1972?

Well, you’re wrong.

I mean, you’re right in that there are no wrong answers in a free association. But none of you guessed my answer. Didn’t realize that’s the game you were actually playing? Too bad. Okay, so the first thing I think of is not a who, but a what— Alfred University. Or as some stubborn SUNY loyalist hairsplitters prefer, the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. (It’s a whole thing, or at least it was). Alfred is where I went to college.

Heads up, this post is going to be a long one. There’s a lot to reminisce about, reflect on, and add to. Emotional and challenging for me, might be for others too. Hard stuff is front-loaded, so skip down to picture of the street with the clock tower if you want to pick up on where the trip left off.

On the morning of Day 21, I left, uh… somewhere and drove east for a few hours to the college town of Alfred, NY. Yes, the town is named Alfred and there are not one, but two institutions of higher education also both named Alfred. You’ve never heard of any of these things. Unless you A). are one of the 800 full-time residents of Alfred NY, B). went to school there, or C). are a ceramics nerd. High-level ceramicists get excited about Alfred the way normal people get excited about Harvard or Yale. Within an incredibly niche audience it has a world-class reputation. To everyone else it’s, wait what? My neighbor’s dog in 1972?

So, of course, it’s to every ceramicist’s chagrin that I reveal to them that I never touched clay. Not even once. To them, it’s like going to a Five Michelin Star restaurant and ordering fries. At least that’s what their faces reveal upon making this sacrilegious admission. For instance, I was recently passed over for a manufacturing job and I honestly think my being a non-clay Alfredian was a factor (even though clay literally wasn’t any part of the job). Seriously, that’s how weird Ceramic people get about this stuff. My dear college friend Elliott, who is something of a ceramic guru, is on the other side of that coin enjoying a six-figure salary, publication in international ceramic periodicals, and rock star status at national ceramics conferences. Elliott was a voracious student of clay.

I made creepy Santa videos.

Not that that doesn’t also have its niche, apparently. The guy who I did the videos with actually took it pretty far— a performance at the New Museum, international exhibitions & residencies, and ultimately represented in Chelsea, NY (a big deal, fyi). None of which occurred for artistic merit, mind you, but because this guy’s an absolutely brilliant networker/bullshitter. I made this character (which, I still maintain would make a fucking hysterical Troma-esque B-movie horror/comedy) when during a gallery show I took a plastic Santa decoration our other friend Ben stuck an antler in and I made it into a mask. I then threw on a red union suit (you know, the old-style full-body pajamas with a butt flap), and voila, the Santalope was born. We three did a performance, and my college roommate and collaborator (the bullshitter) Andrew thought we should keep going by making videos together. So he and I did. Weird, gross, creepy, funny videos. Eventually, Andrew made his own Santalope character, Das Santalopa - the European cousin of the Santalope. So the Santalope and Das Santalopa had a run for a bit. But I became an increasingly unwitting character in a demoralizing play, got one too many donkey kicks to the spirit, and desperately needed to exit stage left. The humor had drained out of the charade and all that was left was darkness.

Christ, that’s bleak.

And like, the most emo thing ever.

But it was bleak and melodramatic. And pitiful. And incomprehensible. And, yes, some parts of it were (and still are) objectively funny. To be clear, pantomiming evil didn’t cause my troubles, but it sure didn’t help. What wasn’t clear to me then was that I was caught in a massive whirlpool of untreated depression and addiction; my life was spiraling downward and the things I latched onto (like this fucked up video project) were a reflection of my deteriorating mental state. Within two years I went from being at the top of my class, running three student organizations (two of which I founded), to drug addicted, isolated, impoverished, terrified and living in a garden shed. In Alfred, NY.

In the winter.

Without electricity or heat.

My parents thought I was going to die. I, however, wasn’t worried about dying, perhaps in part because, on some level, it would have been a relief. Such was the extent of my self-inflicted misery at that time. But I think maybe the ghosts of Great Aunt Harriet and Uncle Larry were looking out for me. Nadine certainly was.

One of the weirdest coincidences I’ve ever experienced was moving into the garden shed of the house that used to be a chicken coop that was the home of my great aunt and uncle, Harri and Larry. Not chickens. (In case that wasn’t clear). They were real live humans who bought a chicken coop on a piece of land and built a tiny home out of it before it was chic, circa 1950. A teacher and a metalworker, I think. No kids, so they sold it to the local Quaker Meeting to make a Meeting House (our equivalent of a church). The Meeting sold it to Nadine, a local Quaker. And the world of Quakers is oh-so-small enough that when we visited Alfred, stopping by to see Harriet and Larry’s (now expanded) tiny home, I recognized a face: Sarah, Nadine’s daughter. Sarah and I had attended a Quaker youth conference 6 years earlier in Philadelphia. One random weekend when we were 12. And now I find out she lives in my great aunt and uncle’s former chicken coop tiny house. Fast forward 4 more years and a lot of drugs later and now I’m living at Harri and Larry’s former chicken coop. In the garden shed.

Riiiiiiight here:

Okay, so it’s probably worthwhile to mention how I didn’t die. In the uninsulated, unelectrified, unheated garden shed in the middle of Upstate winter. It’s actually kind of clever.

But some more backstory first.

At the end of every academic year, there are Senior Shows: a culmination of the four years of artistic training displayed as a series of indoor/outdoor art exhibits. It takes over the whole art building, a bunch of campus, and parts of town too. The art, I mean. The people are everywhere. It’s a joyous combination of experimental spectacle, artistic homecoming, and a parent’s weekend. It used to be one of my very favorite annual events.

For my own Senior Show, I built a wooden structure, about the size of a small bedroom, “powered” by a small windmill I’d constructed from instructions found in an issue of Make: Magazine.

Another one of the dark things that I had latched on to during this time was a particular film, The End of Suburbia. Which is a fantastic, albeit very heavy, documentary. Produced in ‘04, it painted a fairly hopeless picture for the high-energy input globalized system. Specifically, that our fossil fuel supplies would soon enter into irreversible, terminal decline (ultimately true) and that in a system predicated on endless growth we are wholly unprepared for this (also true). The film left me dumbstruck. As if witnessing a trainwreck, my gaze was transfixed in horror. I watched it on repeat, like Putin watching Gaddafi’s roadside capture; petrified of the implications, convinced of its imminence.

Again, this was almost entirely about my mental state at the time. My life was falling apart in slow motion, so, of course, I fixated on a terrifying externalized narrative of things falling apart. I couldn’t handle my own collapse, I was in too much denial. So I dressed up like satanic santa, sold my soul for drugs, and lived in terror of impending global doom.

But even in my deepening dysfunction and debilitating anxiety, I still had some initiative. Maker’s gotta make.

We were going to have to learn to live with less energy inputs, less electricity, less heat. So I’d get a head start. I’d tear down my homage to civilizational collapse and, aptly, reuse the materials to build a small, insulated bed-box (think of it as a roomy coffin) to sleep inside of. No power, just heated passively with my own body heat while I metabolized throughout the night. Very on-brand with my world-falling-apart panic. Plus I was saving money. Plus it was just weird enough to be something I would do. So I did. In Nadine’s shed.

I lined the floor of the bed-box with large wood shavings (a good natural insulator) from the school’s woodshop. Since shavings settle, I stuffed the walls loosely with plastic bags I got from the reuse bin at the nearby Wegman’s (anything that traps air will suffice). And then around the whole thing, I put an external layer of hay bales. I put the bales into thick contractor bags to keep their dander outta my face, and hopefully to protect them from ambient moisture. It all fit very neatly into the garden shed. Oh, and I bought like 60ish brightly colored t-shirts that I envisioned stitching together into covers to go over the bagged hay bales. Never happened. Instead, the t-shirts went into the box. And I just kind of slept amongst them.

It all worked surprisingly well. I mean, I didn’t suffocate or freeze, though both were distinct possibilities. I had some heavy blankets and I’d sleep in my clothes. I’d shiver for the first hour or so, but then my body heat would bring it to a reasonable temperature and by morning it was kind of cozy. Kind of.

No clear pictures exist of the setup. None that I could find anyway. There is only this one of Nadine and me in front of the shed, and you can barely see a corner of the structure poking out from behind me. Perhaps if I wasn’t wearing such a comically large hat you could see more of it.

Oh Nadine, bless you.

Given the dearth of imagery, I’ve drawn you a schematic of the box with cutaways to show its construction.

The only thing I would have done differently would have been to make it longer. Unthinkingly, I didn’t factor in the pillow, so I made it only an inch longer than a shoe-less me. Add a pillow and suddenly I’ve lost 6-7 inches of leg room. So bent knees. Not bad, just annoying when I wanted to stretch. Didn’t matter to my long-distance girlfriend at the time, she was a shorty. I might have missed making it comfortable for me, but I didn’t miss making it for making out. Hey, priorities.

I lived in Alfred in a garden shed for one full year after graduating. I felt completely unprepared to join the working world, really the world at large. I wanted to hide from everything forever. To be clear, this was my rock bottom; my own personal hell. One that I scraped along for another year until I finally had my last debauch. I’d moved away from Alfred, I’d dried out for 9 months or so living and working on a Quaker ecovillage across the state, but like a moth to a flame, I went back to get burnt one last time.

Senior Shows 2009. Told myself I wasn’t going to drink or get high. I’d been getting help for that. I understood it was a problem, that I was wired differently than a normal person, and that the only thing that works for me is total abstinence. But there I was, I still knew people, I was still (mostly) welcome. And, of course, they were all drinking and getting high, because college.

There is a strange mental blindspot, a temporary amnesia that comes over people like me. Without protection, without support, we get too close to a drink or a drug and a mysterious mental fog rolls in. It clouds out all reason, all of the pain of the past, every mistake, every violent hangover, every destroyed friendship, every insulted employer, every chronic habit of self-harm, and we relent to its dark injurious gravity. Sometimes there’s a fight. Sometimes it’s “fuck it.” Sometimes it’s watching ourselves like an outside observer, knowing, and being utterly powerless to resist. It’s a brutal form of insanity. I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Most of us don’t make it.

By the grace of god I did.

That night, May 13th of 2009 was the very last time I ever had to take a drink or a drug. As my last drunk, my last high, it wasn’t especially remarkable or even the worst. I didn’t blackout, and I remember most of the night. I had spent it making out with as many women as I possibly could, though maintaining some sort of backwardly prideful boundary when one of them invited me to bed. Because I still had a girlfriend. That same long-distance girlfriend from my days in the garden shed. I will never forget the compounding shame of waking up hungover on May 14th and calling to wish her a happy birthday.

I’m skipping over a lot from those 3 years. There’s no good reason to recount all of the shameful, embarrassing, sad, outrageous and harmful things I did, said, and experienced. Suffice it to say that for many years to think of Alfred, was to unearth and relive some amount of that pain. But I still longed for this place. I even visited it every now and again in my dreams, wandering around an empty campus with great curiosity about what had changed architecturally. Despite the protracted faceplant, I love Alfred, and I miss what was wonderful about it.

Before it got bad, it was amazing. The first two and a half years were some of my happiest, most aligned, most creative, and most productive. It’s always been important to me to be able to one day visit this treasured place on my own, but to do so safely. Enough healing and growth had happened that now was that time. I could finally return to Ground Zero unchapperoned. I didn’t need to be afraid or ashamed anymore. Instead, I could feel lighthearted and free. Because I am.

The route that Google maps brought me was peculiar, but perfect. Before I knew it I was on Nadine’s street, passing her house, and down to the Rogue Carrot, Alfred’s premiere natural grocer. Sadly, closed at whatever-time-it-was on a Saturday. But I pulled over anyway because I needed to orient myself and figure out what was happening next. School was out, was anyone around? Nadine wasn’t, she was in Delaware visiting her parents.

Then came an excited laugh, like a sparkling comet of giggles headed straight for my wagon.

It was Dawn.

A big hug. Such a joyous and wonderful welcome from an old friend. Dawn was a grad student when I was in undergrad, she was my very favorite TA in my very favorite class, Skin Tight, with my very favorite teacher, Diane Cox. That’s the class I had with Bland. That’s the class that did a guerilla performance in the Dia Beacon that swiftly got co-opted by none other than Merce Cunningham. This was the absolute high point of my time at Alfred.

One of my favorite memories of Dawn was her introducing herself to our class. It’s customary for the TA’s to do a slide presentation of their work to their class at the beginning of the semester. What stuck with me was this one piece she did where for days on end she ate nothing but garlic and then took a bath in bright pink Kool-Aid; with her freshly stained skin, wearing all white, she then proceeded to work up a hefty sweat on a treadmill. A bright pink sweat that stank of garlic. She recounted all of this with what I would come to know as her signature, highly amused, and infectious laugh. OH MY GOD YOU WEIRDO. Instant fascination, awe, and respect for this fellow kindred wackadoodle artist.

Dawn’s work often walks a provocative line between amusing and insulting her audience. Like when she and another grad student, Patrick Renner, made a sculpture that required the audience to sit on a see-saw, which slowly pulled a string embedded in the wall, revealing the words “you are fool.” On April Fool’s day, of course. Ever the prankster, miss Dawn.

True to form, she exclaimed in laughter “quick hide!” We ran inside the closed* Rogue Carrot (her store) and ducked behind some shelves. “That guy,” she giggled “thinks I have his pie.” She pointed to a befuddled old man wandering around the store front, nose to the glass. The phone rang, “don’t pick it up, it’s him!” she exclaimed with laughter. And this point I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing and took a picture of her hiding. Which just made us laugh more.

*Dawn wants to make sure that it’s clear that the store was very much closed, and that this particular guy is confused and comes by sometimes thinking that he has a pie (when he doesn’t).

I had no idea whom I would encounter in off-season Alfred. Most professors live elsewhere for the lower cost of living and, presumably, work/life separation. In the lottery of chance encounters, I’d hit the jackpot.

Eventually, the old dotard wandered off and we could make our escape from the cold-rolled oats section. We jumped in the truck and headed for Harder Hall, where we’d studied a decade and a half earlier. Dawn had lots of questions about the truck and trip, I had lots of questions about Alfred and how things were with her. Dawn caught me up on 15+ years of Alfred’s ups and downs. Who was still teaching, who wasn’t. Changes to the body politic. The effect of the pandemic on a decidely non-remote form of learning, i.e. artistic training. Dawn, in addition to owning and operating a grocery store was also teaching part-time. So, she had all the dirt and a key card to boot.

We parked next to the metal shop and entered through the glass shop. It was eerily empty, just like in the recurring dreams. Never had a tour guide in any of my dreams, not that I needed one, but it was nice to share the experience with someone. We wandered for a bit, Dawn talked about some of her performance pieces, we found some creepy art, and continued to catch up.

Most of the facilities were just as I remembered them, but there were some big differences. The old wood-fired kilns had gotten a serious upgrade. But the biggest difference was the expansion of Harder Hall toward the street. Many a hacky-sacking student shed a single collective tear for the removal of their favorite gathering place— the courtyard of Harder. Precisely the spot where my ode to dystopia once stood. Incidentally, that very same wooden structure was almost torched by, I kid you not, some hacky-sackers hacking with a flaming sack. Right next to my very flammable artwork. I told them to fuck off. Politely.

Instead of a courtyard, there is now a seriously upgraded, two-story Turner student gallery. And a bunch more classrooms and studios, spanning multiple floors. Sadly, the Moka Joka, the student-run coffee shop and a staple of the art building, seemed to be entirely gone.

I was very surprised to see the graffiti wall was still a thing. I remember when Adam Jones first proposed it, the Ceramics faculty was dead set against it. He came to me and asked for advice, I walked him through how to sell it. He came back to me later, said he followed what I outlined and it got approved. There’s a particular satisfaction in being able to give helpful advice. Many student-led initiatives never stick, especially beyond their founders, so it was surprising that it outlived him. I wondered who was responsible for it now. I wondered if anyone had documented all the art it had held over the years. There were some cool murals that made it up there. And some really lame graffiti. I can understand why the Ceramics faculty wasn’t thrilled.

I invited Dawn to dinner, she said she’d rather make food, plus her brother Shawn was in town. I took her back to her car, I think she also had some things to grab from her store. I took the long route to her house, doing a slow drive down Main street. I love love love all the charming little gingerbread houses, with their terra cotta roof tiles. So wonderfully Alfred.

A rush of memories came flooding in.

Johnny Cunningham’s slow waddle, his idiosyncratic obsessions, and his curious drawings.

The Ninos’ fiefdom. How weirdly entertaining John could be, and how talented his son was.

That time I casually puked at the telephone poll and Dave Ashley thought it was the funniest thing ever.

That one game of spin the bottle in an upperclassmen’s apartment where I kissed the boys too.

Or when I helped build this bus stop under Bland’s leadership. And how macho and unnecessarily competitive the Alfred State guys were about every act of physical labor involved. But then, counter-intuitively, how they would stand around and do jack shit between bursts of activity.

Or the year that Art Prom was here.

Or the time I dressed up like Günther for Alexa’s birthday party at the Hillel House.

Or the bandstand where, rest his soul, Matt Underwood and I camped out on my first overnight visit to Alfred.

The floodwaters of memory were a brackish mixture. But the overarching sentiment was a deep and abiding love. For all of it. Good and bad.

I made my way to Dawn’s and she directed me to parking. Thankfully her property is pretty big, so there was plenty of space to park. Her brother and son both came out to see the wagon up close. Dawn’s brother, an engineer, was pleased to see the cross-tensioning I used on the frame.

It was wild to see Patrick, Dawn’s son. He was a literal baby the last time I’d seen him. Now a young man, taller than his mother.

I was struck by how beautiful Dawn’s home was. A master builder, she’d been slowly renovating it over the last 20 years. Renting out rooms to other grad students, now complete with an Air BnB. Considering how late it had gotten, she offered that room to me. I was happy to take her up on it, the thought of a proper room, and not sleeping in a uhaul, was pretty appealing. I had planned to drive back that night, but the moment compelled me to stay.

We ate a delicious taco dinner and watched Napolean Dynamite. Twenty years later and it still makes me laugh till I cry. I’m so glad that I saw the movie before the hype, when no one knew anything about it, and it was not being quoted endlessly. Seeing it with fresh eyes, not even having watched a preview, just going based on a coworker’s recommendation. It was perfect. I think I saw it with my dad. We laughed SO much. And so did Patrick and Dawn.

Which was the perfect way to bookend the day, with the infectious giggles of a friend.