August 21, 2017

Flotsam & Jetsam

In September, my friends, Lou and Di Stovall, will be receiving an award from the Historical Society of Washington for distinguished artistic achievement. But they had some other skills that I described upon leaving as their next door neighbors

Sam Smith - One of the saddest parts leaving Washington’s Cleveland Park in back in 2001 was that I wouldn't be living next to Lou and Di Stovall anymore, which had gotten to be a 28 year habit. Lou, black from Massachusetts, and Di, white from Georgia, were both artists but they also served as the magnetic north of the neighborhood. Follow the compass and that's where you'd end up. Our friendship endured even though Lou, who had done silkscreen prints for over 70 artists, no longer asks my advice on art. That ended after I wandered into his studio while he was working on a print of a seascape and he recklessly inquired what I thought of it. I pointed to an empty piece of sky and suggested that a plane towing a banner would look nice there. Nonetheless, when we moved to Capitol Hill, he still had my cartoon posted in his studio, showing a Lou type character saying, “Art is what I say it is.” And next to him was a dog grumbling “I know Art and he won’t like that.”

And I did get into one of his works. Outside his Newark Street house one day, he explained that he was working on prints for the Equal Opportunities Commission and needed some quotes to use on them. "Got any quotes, Sam?" he asked. "Look Lou," I replied, "writers write things and then they get quoted; they don't just write quotes." But for him, I thought of one anyway and he used it: "God is an equal opportunity employer."

Nothing was too minor not to give it an artistic or literary spin. Once Di asked me to feed their dog Ruby while they were away. I left her a written report that read in part:

I went outside and said, “Ruby, upstairs.” We stood eyeball to eyeball. She flinched. I pointed. “Upstairs,” I repeated in a voice fraught with meaning. She lifted her lanky buff frame and with a frantic kick of her left hind leg she hightailed it to the bedroom faster than a hooker with a high roller from Dallas. . . Trouble is my business but as I walked out into the sultry Cleveland Park night I thought there must be more to this than that.”

Lou and Di also provided the neighborhood young with counsel, refuge, laughs, food, a badminton court and their own box of art supplies in the studio. Back when the street wasn't as busy as it became, Lou even painted home plate in the middle of it for whiffle ball, the required afternoon activity for anyone between the ages of 6 and 16. Since there weren't enough kids to staff two full teams, every game involved innumerable "ghost men," imaginary creatures whose precise accomplishments and locations at any given moment were a matter of endless, loud debate after every play. Among other services, Lou and Di provided advice on anger management. And one year, four of Sidwell Friend School's starting nine were graduates of the Newark Street field of screams.

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Some years later, Lou and Di's own son went to Sidwell Friends and, faced with having both Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore Jr as schoolmates, rebelled in one of the few ways available to a black 7th grader under such circumstances: he became a Republican. This revolt, mercifully brief, included playing golf and arranging to have me sent a membership in the GOP Gold Club complete with a welcoming letter from Haley Barber, as well posting a Dole-Kemp sign on his bedroom window that looked directly down into our living room.

Lou and I conspired on a number of matters, including one of the city's first neighborhood crime watches. He designed the signs and hosted meetings, while I served as crime statistician. Some of the watch's efforts didn't work out all that well. At one meeting, Bishop John Walker complained that a wanted poster drawn by a neighbor seemed racist to him. I told John that he just didn't understand the difference between racism and bad art. John, the black bishop of the Washington National Cathedral, had a sense of humor good enough that Lou once loudly transmitted one of my recent jokes, from one crowded supermarket checkout line across to another, and John, in the latter, had the grace to laugh. The joke was that Moses had come down from the Mount and told the people, "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is I've talked him down from 100 to ten. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them."

On another occasion, someone called the police around ten pm to complain about people shining flashlights into their house. It was the neighborhood watch on patrol, albeit a bit counterproductively. Then, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, the alarm went off at the house on the other side of ours. The police responded, with Lou and I there to assist. Noting that the kitchen window was unlocked, the officer pulled his revolver and announced, with what struck me as excessive hubris, "Stand back, I'm going in." He opened the window and crawled through, waving his revolver. A few minutes later, he reappeared, announcing with even great import, "Stand back, this could be dangerous." In his right hand he still held his revolver, but in his left was a saucepan out of which all the water had boiled, leaving only one perilously overheated and smoking egg.

On another occasion, I returned to find Lou in his front yard. "Doesn't that car look like the one they're looking for in that rape case?" he asked, pointing to a decrepit vehicle up the street. We went to take a look, nodded thoughtfully at the decrepit contents, and then returned to call the cops. Afterwards, we stayed on the sidewalk talking for about twenty minutes, until Lou said, "Let's go take another look." After our inspection, we returned to Lou's fence and our conversations. Some while later, Lou said, "Where are those cops? I think I'll call again." When he returned outside, he reported that the officer on duty had told him, "We have the car under surveillance, sir, but it doesn't help much if citizens keep looking in the window. Which one are you, the big white guy or the little short bald black guy?"

"I resent that," said Lou. Replied the officer, "We're paid to be observant."

It's was going to be rough not having Lou close at hand for help in such matters. But then, maybe now he would be able to get more art done.
 

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