Andrew Kenny
John Henry dwelt in apartment stairwells and lived by sketching the tenants. He’d tear them out of his beat-up brown book and sell them, ten cents to the tenant, and five on the street to strangers.
Now, some folk used to say, ‘John Henry, you ought to go down to the factory and get yourself a real job with some proper pay so you can quit those stairwells and lay down in a bed.’
John would just say, ‘Stairs keep my back straight.’
So he’d sit on them in whichever building opened its doors to him for a month, week, or night, and anyone who unlocked the door or was buzzed in was offered a portrait for ten cents. Not one day didn’t see John Henry’s fingernails black with graphite, and not one evening saw him with a sketch he hadn’t sold.
Then he would lie down with his head on his shrinking book and his feet six stairs below so that anyone on the stairs might go past him easy. He’d face the peeling wallpaper and, by the lights of passing cars, trace the pattern where it had disappeared. He’d smell the diesel streets under the front doors, and listen to the voices living above him.
Stretching the day’s cramps out of his hand, he’d fall asleep.
‘How is it sleeping on stairs, John Henry?’
‘I dream I’m climbing.’
When John Henry was finished with a building, he’d leave it with only the portraits and his unwashed smell would leave a few days later. He’d carry that smell with him as he walked up the streets, his toe coming out of his shoe. If the commute was going out, he was going in. If it was going in, he was against it. His pencil and book his only companions, he’d keep on until the sunset came, beamed down onto him by the buildings.
If he couldn’t find a friendly block or hostel, he’d stay walking. Now and then, he’d be beat up for being a bum, but he never carried so much to be beat up for more. If he got himself a split lip or black eye, John knew where he could get a night in free and a damp cloth.
‘Cross the street, John Henry.’
‘Streets weren’t made for crossing.’
John Henry was not acquainted with charity. He never drew the same face twice, unless asked. Trouble was, nobody ever asked. Sometimes, though, someone would stop him on the street and introduce him to a cousin or mistress and commission their portrait from him. He’d sit down in the gutter while they stood between parked cars to wait.
John would rest his book on his knees and make his references and lines. Then he’d tear the page and raise it, and they’d take it and pay John, and congratulate him and move on. John Henry would squat between cars and count out his coins in his palm. When his drawing had been lost in the crowd, he’d stand and move on the other way. He kept his cap low and, even then, wouldn’t look up to see it.
‘Watch where you’re going, John Henry.’
‘Crowd me and I will.’
One day came and they called it 1963 and Kodak called it Instamatic. The cost of a portrait and an empty stairwell was twenty-five cents. The first camera John ever saw, he was invited into a landlord’s rooms. The man showed it to John Henry and John said it looked very designed. The landlord smiled and took the boy’s photograph and offered it for John to take one himself. John Henry went to the window, raised the camera to his eye and looked through it at all the people.
He’d never had to squint to see a face before.
The Instamatic felt cold and smelled cold. John Henry only ever took that one photograph.
When John had moved on, the landlord took out a new roll and took photographs of all the portraits he’d drawn. Then those pages torn out of the starving boy’s starving book were left to fall apart.
John Henry spent a lot more nights walking. He bought himself more split lips. But now when he’d show up in the kind peoples’ stairwell, they’d tend him and tell him a camera had been moved in. They’d want to take his picture, so they could put him on their shelves and not worry they’d never see him again. They’d tape his portraits, but they’d frame his photographs.
Some days, John wouldn’t rest in a stairwell if he knew a camera was behind one of its doors. He stopped sleeping faced to the walls.
‘Time to buy working boots, John Henry.’
John Henry would just reply, ‘Glass can’t never see.’
A cab came up next to him while he slept on his feet one night. The driver’s window came down, and a friend’s face came out.
John sat in the front seat of Ann’s cab as she sailed over potholes and under streetlights, bar lights, and starlight. When she wasn’t working that night, he’d look out the dusty window at the flashing bulbs, listening to her talk about how she’d been and how she would be. When she was working, he was too, drawing the drunks, the workers, and the sleepers Ann was ferrying to whichever corner or curb. He worked with her rearview mirror. John Henry reached the last quarter of his notebook that night drawing for people crying, smiling in their dreams, and scanning the sidewalks.
Ann offered her apartment’s stairwell as she counted out her coins, but her boyfriend had bought the Instamatic. She counted three coins into her hand and asked how many portraits that would buy her. John Henry looked down at the papers in his hand. He could spend the day matching the torn edges to his gasping book.
He gave her the stack. He had no use for them. He had no place for them.
‘Trouble with you, John Henry, is you have no boots to pull their straps.’
‘I’ll stand on my toe, then.’
The book was now so thin that John Henry’s cap had more thickness than it as a pillow. He’d fold his book up and put it in his pocket to see if it might do something for his leg against the stairs.
It was getting winter, and John was taking more to alleyways than streets now to keep out of the wind. Not many people that knew him found him there. The last quarter of his book was going slowly.
A couple of days, John Henry went without eating, but he never went without drawing. If he couldn’t find a subject, he’d take a newspaper or food wrapper and sketch the other side of the street. His book he saved for people.
John Henry kept Ann’s coins in his cap until, one morning, he stood outside the great glass doors of the Daily. Then he took them out, went inside, laid them down, and took out an add, big as he could buy. He wrote it down.
Now Kodak thinks they made a way of making,
That lead is dead and paper’s obsolete.
But I looked into the face of our pavements
And I know it takes more than instants to see.
At 9, Friday at Stone Mansions we will meet.
You can use your film
And I will use my skill
I earned it working on our streets
In Stone Mansions, Friday, 9, we will see.
And he signed it, ‘John Henry’.
Stone Mansions was six stories tall, four apartments each. John Henry spent that night on the swings across from them, watching their lights turn out. The chain squeaked softly under his light weight. His shoes and toe brushed the concrete.
‘How’s your dreaming, John Henry?’
‘I’m sharpening my pencil.’
John Henry watched the sun clear the lenses of apartment windows and saw their shutters snap open. A crowd gathered along the sidewalk under it. At a quarter to nine, the camera rounded the corner. John crossed the street to step into place.
The crowd split for John Henry to approach the silver Kodak at the front door of Stone Mansions. The boy with the book raised his head to look into its lens and offered it his hand to shake.
It showed John Henry the dark room arranged in the janitorial closet. He was shown the tub, the fluid, the light and the line. He showed it his tree pulp.
At two to nine, the first-floor tenants reported by their doors. John Henry and the camera reported by the front, and John Henry opened his book.
Twenty-four apartments. Four and up, four and up. Quick as a click, John Henry.
The landlord called nine.
The camera started its turning and clicking, capturing with no release. Ten seconds was too long for it to spend by any door. John Henry wasn’t off the first floor when the camera rode the elevator down from the sixth. He stayed in his book, finishing his sketch of an old invalid tenant’s nephew while it disappeared into its dark room. John tore out the page and moved on to the next door.
‘Pick up the pace, John Henry.’
‘A man ain’t nothing but a man.’
John Henry didn’t so much as look at that elevator, but took up the stairs, taking them one at a time as they’d been designed. He stretched his fingers on the rail as he went, and the book was reopened by the time he reached the first door of the second floor. The tenants had gone back inside, so John Henry rapped and waited, feeling as if the brew below was winding its metallic way behind him.
Each line and arc he drew was as an inevitability of the previous. They fell onto the page as if out of air, and as if tied with fishing wire that a cheek could not exist long before bringing with it the ear and the eye. Some tenants only met John Henry’s eye that one first time he saw them as he worked on their portraits.
The elevator chimed, and the camera came out. John Henry looked over his shoulder and scraped his pencil across the face he’d drawn. He turned the page. The photographs were drying. John Henry left both the second drawing and the ruined first and climbed the stairs, massaging his palm with his pencil. The camera followed, flashing its reflections up at his back. But when they reached the third floor, it was John Henry ploughing on with the portraits, breaking lead and shaving wood. He kept his cap close over him so his hair didn’t drip on the paper.
Apartment eleven told him to relent and make back down to the streets with his dignity. He was a business type in pinstripe, checking his watch but staying in the door frame. John Henry tore out his page and gave it to him. It was in the wastepaper when its artist was taking the stairs again.
At floor four, the camera rode back down to one, to check the film. John Henry just untensed his shoulders, nothing more than that, and the tenants didn’t see it.
Floor five, the Instamatic was back, having taken the stairs to hand out the photographs of those the artist had passed. Apartment eleven kept his on the kitchen bench for a fortnight before mailing it to his mother. The camera waited by John Henry as he drew and, while he tore, the photograph would reach his subject first.
At the bottom of the last flight, John Henry started slowly, and at the top of the sixth, he stopped. The artist turned and sat down. The camera stood below him, turning on its strap, as if some other boho might be coming up behind.
‘Is that you crying, John Henry?’
‘That’s just my pencil baring lead.’
Then John Henry stood up on the sixth floor and knocked on the last four doors. Apartment twenty-four took a long time coming. She was a late-twenties woman with undone hair and tired eyes like a dog’s dropped ears.
John Henry was on his last page. He drew slowly.
The camera came and leant by the doorframe, grinning between the artist and his last subject. Such a shining thing, it seemed to think a man like John Henry, struggling to buy lead and paper, should be glad of its easing him up in the world. Here, the instant relief, the flashing metal herald of equality.
John Henry spent the most of his time drawing her chin. For all its gears and glass, the camera never asked why. It just waited by its print and waited while John Henry tore out the page. John Henry gave the woman her portrait. She took the photograph too. She stepped back.
The camera had taken one more photograph. John Henry had no more pages. The Instamatic stepped inside, and John Henry stepped in with it. In a crib, there slept a baby, with curling hair just shading his shine. The photograph went tucked into his muslin wrap, and the camera left, its glass lens gleaming.
John Henry knelt down by the child. He took the card covers of his book, with the torn paper ridges all down its spine. He set his last portrait on those inside covers. He worked while the mother watched and, asking her for more time, drew her child twice. He drew on the opening and the closing.
Then John Henry stood and placed his book by the infant with the photograph. But when the child grew up, he never asked who developed the film.
John Henry left down to the streets with no crowd, no book, and no coins. His pencil was too short to grip. He left it under his bootheels.
He left the stairwells, the streets, and Ann’s cab.
‘Where did you go, John Henry?’