THAT DEEP FEELING OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
It’s the next night at the high school, the night after Na-Na has hipped me to both the Hawaiin weed and the incredible voice of Etta James…and now we are ready to make our dream a reality.
Na-Na and I meet at the school again that night, me with my LOOK magazine in tow. We go through our herb ritual, he hips me to Al Green, another master of soul, on the boom box, and we get down to business. The business of transforming our creations into a full-scale reality. Me working off the Raquel picture to unleash my Esperanza, he on his scene.
It’s six in the morning again, and I extract myself from my labor of love, to come down to check out what I’ve done. A deep feeling of satisfaction runs through me. Not too bad. There are definitely flaws, no doubt, but I could see Esperanza up there. I had caught in pencil, in charcoal, a good deal of what I wanted to.
I exhale.
I amble over to Na-Na’s side of the room, where he, too, is taking a well-deserved break.
“Holy shit, Na-Na!”
My body goes cold – then frosty.
That face. I immediately recognize that face. It’s the one that was in my sketchbook the morning after the night at The Savoy. The one I have no recollection of. Except this one is way more vivid. Deadly vivid.
It’s not only that it’s that guy’s face, but his whole body is crumpled to the ground. With a pencil in his neck. Another guy, a pimp, apparently, is standing right over him. Victorious. Like a linebacker. Like Dick Butkus standing over a fallen running back, after he had just made a game saving stuff at the one-yard line. There’s another guy, too. Crouching next to him, who’s jeering at the guy on the ground, or maybe exhorting him to get back up. The thing is, the detail in the fallen guy’s face is freakin’ chilling.
He did it, Na-Na did. He had captured that netherworld look of a dude in the last couple of milliseconds of his life. As it’s ebbing away. Brutal.
Just as intense, is the almost blank, yet satanic smirk on the face of the pimp, who had apparently just offed him. He knew he had won, but it was almost like it didn’t matter, either.
Na-Na’s form was still kind of crude though, I think. Rough. I definitely have technique up on him. But the thing is, I think he might have totally just nailed that expression of the guy. The essence - maybe better than I have done with Esperanza. I feel both a sense of jealousy, and admiration, running through me at the same time. It’s hard to take your eyes off it. This is what happened that night at The Savoy. Whoa. Spooky.
As I step back to take it all in, I’m struck by the contrast in our styles. His characters are smaller than my full-length portrait, kind of representative type art. Exaggerated features – bodies, muscles. Sort of tribal. African. The same style he had shown me in his sketches before, only even more pronounced now. But the whole thing works, somehow. We pack up and leave…both feeling, I’m sure, like, we had definitely accomplished something here. One more night to go.