0.2 The funeral of bobo

In early-80s Seattle, status-consciousness was all but forbidden. The closest a Seattleite could come to snobbery was a smug sense that he or she lived in paradise. What I had regarded ten years before as intolerable complacency I now embraced as a virtue: Let the rest of the country consume itself in the quest for status symbols—we Seattleites were living in a place so marvelous that standard American joys (money, lavish wardrobes, new cars, massive homes) weren’t worth the effort it took to acquire them. Our down-at-heel clothing and down-at-payscale incomes were reverse status symbols, declarations of disdain for consumer comforts that paled in comparison with our God-given creature comforts.

Trying to work as little as possible, I found a ready supply of kindred spirits—overqualified and underambitioned labor—willing to ease my burden. I hired a part-time employee, Rick Herman, who liked to spend his time hiking, boating and writing, and preferred to work only as many hours as he needed to feed himself, pay a few bills, and keep his recreational machinery operating. “What I do most isn’t all that lucrative,” he told me in the conversation we had in lieu of a job interview one day. “But it’s how I prefer to spend my time. So I don’t want to spend too many hours working.”

Whenever I had a typeset book to paste up, I would rely on the services of Connie Butler, who had moved to Seattle with her boyfriend Rick Downing He loathed his legal given name, Frederick, which he truncated to the more pleasing “Rick.” some years before. Both were college-educated and literate, and Butler had been a successful artist in Chicago. But the two had come to Seattle more or less to drop out. They bought a little rundown house in Wallingford, a working-class Seattle neighborhood. Downing bought a small commercial gillnetter and fished for salmon a few months each year, doing woodworking and fixing up their house in his off-season, and Butler did design work and paste-up for small magazine publishers and little typesetting shops like mine.

Occasionally, someone from Chicago would track down Butler in her Seattle hiding place and cajole her into accepting a commission to do a painting. One day, over her protests, Downing took me back to the little room that served as Butler’s studio and showed me what she was working on. It was breathtaking—a softly hued, highly realistic and romantic picture of a young woman in a rowboat, looking at once dreamily and somberly off to one side of a languid river overhung with lush trees. It spoke simultaneously of life’s almost infinite possibilities and the odd comfort we can take in disappointment—a pretty nifty trick.

Stunned, I started praising it extravagantly, asking Butler why she didn’t devote any promotional energy to her art, and why she spent any time at all doing the kind of work she was doing for me instead of painting and drawing masterpieces for the world. But she seemed both burdened and embarrassed by my enthusiasm, and I never brought up the subject again.