Psychos. Defn: People who cross
the line between being merely
averse to having their picture
drawn, to being downright hostile.
There are fewer loonies of this stripe than one might expect, lucky
for me.
When I was a student at School of Visual Arts and commuted from
Midwood (Brooklyn) to Chelsea (Manhattan) on the D train five days
a week I sketched every day. In four years, only two people
attacked me. Well, actually, they didn't attack me, they
attacked my sketchbook.
I was drawing an adorable three year old girl next to her Dad. Dad
gets up and looks over my shoulder. I wait for the inevitable
comment -- that's good, that's bad, that doesn't look like her --
but instead his arm sweeps down and, in one swift motion yanks the
page from the sketchbook: pulls it right out from under my
pencil.
"Are you crazy?" I demand in shrill astonishment. I'd only gotten
as far as the feet up to the knees.
"Are you krezzy? he demanded in return. I couldn't quite
place the accent. East European?
"I see what you do! I see what you do!" he cried. "Looking
down" he gestured. His wife scowled.
They think I'm ogling their little girl, I realized. That's nuts.
Scoping out two young guys who'd witnessed the whole scene, I
twirled my index finger near my ear in the "crazy" sign and pointed
at the foreign man. They shrugged sympathetically. Before moving to
the next car I addressed one last comment to the man, his wife, the
witnesses. "Never happened before. This is a once-in-a-lifetime
happening." Wrong.
Same train, different day. I'd decided to fill the bottom half of
a page with a head-and-shoulders of this girl. Behind her chair,
behind a glass partition, a tall, thin black man faced me. A good
perpendicular to fill out the page. I started on him immediately,
and immediately, he glared at me. I lightly sketched a front view
of his face but he turned in profile. Fine. I switched to drawing
his profile. Then he started coming towards me.
"So you want to draw a black man?" he demanded, antagonistically.
Great, just what I need, a racial incident. He reached towards my
book; instant flashback. "Don't you dare touch my book!" I snarled,
slamming it shut. But he was too fast. His fingers were already
inside; he pulled out half a page.
He retreated behind his glass partition, clutching the ball of
paper, the try-that-again-you're dead look in his eye. "He wants to
draw a black man," he muttered.
I re-opened my book. Ironically, he'd left his face behind. That
ball of paper in his fist was blank.
Not that I let him know that.
I turned and started drawing someone else...
Return to 
The
M&M Segall Home
Page
© 1996 Mark Segall for Thinking Cap Productions
Address email to 71341.501@compuserve.com
