Nehaveigur

My stepfather, a sensitive, alcoholic, intelligent, paranoid, articulate, chain-smoking, erudite and irresponsible artist, had an atelier on the ground floor of an old apartment building in Vienna. It was a large space, but he had accumulated so much over the years that getting from one side to the other was no easy task. My step[father didn’t bother with furniture. Instead he had put cushions, blankets and furs in one corner, building a nest where he spent most of his time smoking, drinking wine and tea, and occasionally working. There were a few old tables, but they were all covered in papers, half-used tubes of paints, penknives and other art supplies. There was a collection of hundreds of rare snail shells that he had accumulated over the years. In one corner he had stacked African drums, and Asian kites shaped like dragons were hanging from the ceiling. There was a large printing press from the late 19th or early 20th century that took up a lot of space. The were two cats and a bird cage with canaries. There was an air rifle and a much heavier bolt-action rifle from World War I, which he sometimes fired at a target at the other side of the room until a neighbor called the police. They arrived promptly arrived and took it away, resulting in him grumbling about the neighbors not minding their own business for years. There was a collection of tobacco pipes as he was a dedicated smoker. The empty Erinmore Mixture tobacco cans were everywhere, holding screws and other small items or serving as coasters for dozens of halg-empty tea cups. And there were hundreds of books, many of them high literature like Schiller, some of them on art history or the natural world, and some of them containing conspiracy theories. Reading through them as a kid, I learned about the Count of St Germain, The New World Order, the Waco Siege, Rosicrucianism, that nukes are a fiction perpetuated to keep us living in fear, that there oil companies are suppressing knowledge of zero-point energy technology, that the far side of the moon is covered in lush vegetation and, naturally, that aliens are real and that the government knows about them.

Even though the atelier itself was large, there was no private bathroom. To go to the toilet, it was necessary to exit the front door and walk down a corridor. There was a kitchen, but it didn’t have any windows and was barely larger than a cupboard. It had an oven, but since the door didn’t close properly, when baking someone had to sit next to it and hold it. Most evenings, he cooked dinner, and the result was generally terrible. As Jim Harrison has observed, cooking requires a specific humility, and he didn’t have it. The key to his failures was arrogance and perhaps too much alcohol.

A few months ago, my mother, reminiscing about the time we both spent there, told me that she regretted that I had to go through this. “Being around him was not a suitable way for you to grow up,” she said. I disagree.