Alex was one of the hangers about at Champagne Taste during the late sixties. He would come in during the late afternoon, with a slight buzz on, and pontificate on design points, decorating ideas, and clothing styles. Mostly people ignored him as an innocuous drunk. For some reason, Rita really liked him. I think it was his connection with New York. He had gone back there twenty years before (just after the war) to work for the NY Met Opera Company. He worked with all the greats and spoke with the greatest reverence about Maria Callas.
He had been a set designer, just a grip when
he started, but by the end he painted backdrops for opera and thus, had a touch
for styles and periods. He had returned
to San Francisco after … … Nonetheless, when I met him, he was painting murals
around North Beach in exchange for meals.
Some of those old Italian places would put up with him for months, as he
proceeded to paint their entire place with surround view paintings like out of
a Puccini opera.
My sister gave away two of Alex's paintings in a garage sale, for $5 each, while I was living in England. Today they would fetch between $5,000 and $10,000 from collectors. One was a painting of Abbey (above) while she was a tender teenager. This picture, I would love to still have and I'm sure Abbey would too. Having your family immortalized in oils is an especial event. The other was the boat scene on the right That’s Rita and me.
The first was a portrait of Rita, which captures her completely. There is no photograph which can do justice to her purity as this shot on the right. But this pales in comparison to the painting itself.
I also sent off a family portrait, with Rita
in the center and everybody hugging everybody else.
The final one I still have is a portrait of Rita, which captures her completely. There is no other picture which can do such justice to her purity as this candid shot. But this pales in comparison to the painting.
So, I used to hang out with Alex, which meant drinking with him, at his little
back street, North Beach, basement apartment which someone gave him for
nothing, or in the bars if I had money to pay for drinks. I loved his stories
and would pay to keep him going up to at least my limit.
One day he approached me saying that he was
leaving his minimal abode because he had been to the eye doctor and had had an
accident. He had lost his left eye in a
freak accident. Could I help him to get
home to Sonoma County? And of course I
could. I rented a truck for the weekend and went over to his apartment on
Saturday morning. We loaded up all his
stuff, including a baby grand piano, which to this day I can't remember where
came from. We took two hours to get to
the Russian River area.
His eager anticipation was catching and when
we got to his house at 5956 Anderson Road, he was ecstatic -- however, he
feared his mother. She directed us to
the area where I could unload, and I proceeded to disembark the load. It didn't take too long. The first thing off the truck was the piano
and we moved that off onto the patio which looked over the Forestville plain,
now the site of El Molino. Alex began to
play various opera and other classical rifts.
It soothed the afternoon. I
proceeded to quaff a bottle of wine and Alex continued to play. All was right with the world with Chopin
Nocturnes wafting over the Russian River Valley.
That's the last I ever saw of Alex.
Ironic Post Script
I bought my house in Sonoma County in 1998,
fully moved here about 2002-3. Rita and
her friends visited me here in those early years. I never gave a thought to Alex, 25 years on;
I didn’t draw the correlations.
Rita opened a shoe shop (?) in downtown Santa
Rosa, circa 2004-5. Alex hung out there
and badgered the customers, as always. I
didn’t know of either’s presence, until
it was long past.
Rita eventually moved in next door to her daughter,
Abbey, in Sturgeon Bay where she spent her remaining years - into her nineties.
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