Blake Babies History Part 9
The tour behind Earwig left me exhausted and broke. I probably borrowed some money from my mom, and I doubt I paid it back. I did that as little as possible, but we weren’t making money on tour, so not making money at home or on tour with rent due is a tough hand. After I did my laundry and bought a few staples, I returned to Harvard Square in search of a new job to pay the bills before our next album and tour.
I found a job in the custom frame shop at the Harvard Coop in Harvard Square, on rare occasions, taking measurements for beautiful works of fine art, but far more often doing quick orders for dorm room beer n’ babes posters, cheap reproductions of French impressionist works, or stark Ansel Adams landscapes. So many landscapes.
Everyone on the order desk except the manager and me were former addicts in active treatment for the AIDS virus. Back then it was a death sentence. I found it so strange these folks could find any joy in life under those circumstances. They were living my greatest fear, our collective greatest fear at the time. The friendships I made with my co-workers made me think differently about my own mortality.
The head framer was amazing and not a former addict. Sluggo was smart and witty, an experimental proto-grunge musician in a band called Hullabaloo. He turned me on to Nirvana and a bunch of other cool music from the Northeast. He tried to get me to go to Nirvana’s first Boston show for about fifty people. At that show, Sluggo famously traded Kurt Cobain a functioning guitar for one he’d broken in half the night before in Hoboken. Decades later Sluggo sold that guitar at a Sotheby’s auction for enough to buy a nice house in Topeka.
Sluggo was covered in tattoos before that was common, and he wore his hair in long, unruly, bleached white dreadlocks, again, way before that was the stock look of the guy at the venue who could score weed. He was charting his own course and he did it with swagger.
Sometimes when our framing orders became complicated of if we had questions about whether something was even possible, I’d ask Sluggo to come out for an expert’s opinion. I loved the looks on people’s faces when Sluggo shuffled out from the back in full regalia. But he knew his shit, and they accepted him the moment he talked about custom framing. He did beautiful work.
One time at The Coop the print manager decided to do an art show featuring all the talented people who worked on the floor. People brought in serious works and priced them modestly. I took a scrap of dry mount and scribbled a cartoonish image of a rabid dog with a dead bird in its mouth and wrote “Bird Dog” above the image in a childish scrawl. I had Sluggo put it in a frame using scraps, then I hung it on the wall and priced it at $200. The manager didn’t like it at all—but I made some bullshit argument that it was about creative freedom and she let me keep it up since obviously nobody would buy it. She didn’t want it to escalate.
That night I had drinks with our lawyer and I told him about it. He went in the next day and bought Bird Dog for the full price. It’s the only piece of artwork that sold in the entire show. My days were numbered after that stunt.
