Sometimes I feel lucky that as cool as he was my father wasn’t particularly creative. It’s not an absolutely binding rule but it seems like a lot of the time the sons of extraordinary artists are either total fuckups or pale imitations of their sires – a shadow too large to ever find one’s self out from under it, a pair of shoes that can’t be filled no matter how much you stuff them with newspaper or how many pairs of socks are layered underneath.
It’s generally seen as an indicator of reliability when some technical trade like watch or shoe repair has been passed down through multiple generations and in the case of creative pursuits it certainly gets a toe in the door but the value of that creative output is immediately suspect. Does anybody really prefer the Brian Herbert Dune novels or Bob McKay Little Nemo comic strips?
I’ve seen a few pictures by Yumihiko Amano, son of the celebrated Final Fantasy illustrator and character designer, that I liked but there’s no denying that his work is both derivative of and inferior to his father’s distinctive style. It seems like there are many Marleys constantly performing at Reggae or marijuana themed festivals but are any of them carving out much of a niche creatively?
The three different Hank Williams would seem to be an exception to this pattern as each of them is celebrated both as a songwriter and for expanding country music as a genre but this piece isn’t really about making a list.
I was thinking more about the total fuck up than the pale imitation phenomenon – or at least the situations where the sons go through a total fuck up period on the rocky road to becoming a pale imitation. I wrote a little bit about spending the night in St. Louis’s City Museum in The Miss Rockaway Armada chapters but I can’t remember if I went into very much detail about meeting Max Cassilly.
Another point that is probably relevant here is that great artists often make shitty fathers especially when they have a tendency to reinvent themselves multiple times with new partners and families. John Lennon was undoubtedly a far worse father to Julian than he was to Sean and for whatever reasons made specific efforts to exclude his eldest son from his legacy.
As long as I’m on this topic I might as well as drop in a recommendation for the episode of This American Life about my brother’s biological father, Keith Aldrich, who was never particularly exceptional as an artist but is noteworthy for the sheer number of times he attempted this kind of self reinvention at the expense of family.
The episode is called Twentieth Century Man and is definitely worth a listen. I suppose I could just drop in an actual link or even an embedded player but I still have complicated feelings about that sort of thing. Anyway it’s not exactly the kind of thing where you would necessarily want to stop reading to listen to it at this very moment but it’s easy enough to type it into a search bar if you’re interested later.
I don’t necessarily know whether or not Bob Cassilly was a shitty father during the time that he was married to his first wife, City Museum co-creator and long term director Gail Cassilly, but when The Rockaway came through in 2007 he had moved on to a younger wife he had a much younger son with. It must have already been intimidating for Max to have a father who was essentially a real life Willy Wonka but his new stepmother wanted nothing to do with him and had gotten a restraining order that prohibited Max from visiting the new home they were building in Cementland.
I met the elder Cassilly a few times and had at least one extended conversation with him but my recollections are nowhere near as sharp as the ones I have of his business partner John Patzius. The phrase that immediately jumps up in my memory is “poker face” – I remember him being something of an enigma and always wondering what he really thought about the pod of junk rafts he had invited to his riparian doorstep. Cementland was planned to eventually become a complex of medieval castle style architecture and water filled moats but at this stage it was mostly piles of rubble and a few old planes, buses and other vehicles.
There was an area where Cassilly had built a fascinating little suspension bridge and there was also a bit of decorative glasswork that I believe was done by his new wife and may not exist anymore as I didn’t see it when I looked at photos. I can’t remember if it was a trailer or a free standing structure but the home he lived in with his new family was fairly close to this section of the old factory. I saw, and was seen by, the bride and child as I passed by one of the windows: Cassilly asked me to give it a wider berth in my future explorations.
Max Cassilly, Bob’s eldest son, lived in an apartment above the City Museum. I don’t remember him ever coming by the rafts or to the big Skarekrau Radio concert that eventually happened on top of the concrete pylon on the river – I’m not sure if this would have violated his stepmother’s restraining order as it was technically part of the Cementland property but displaced by a two-lane road and large public park from the rest of it. He did come down and attempt to hang out with us during the slumber party.
He had one of those mohawks that is grown out and not held up by any kind of product – kind of like circa-2000 Anthony Kiedis. I think he was wearing a black t-shirt, green blazer and fingerless gloves. He was noticeably out of his element – it must have been intimidating trying to socialize with people that were close to his own age but friends and associates of his father.
I hadn’t reached the stage of my life where smoking marijuana started to give me crippling anxiety and I happened to have some on me. A few of us were passing around a spliff and Max saw it as an opportunity to attempt to relate to and possibly impress us:
“I’ve got a six foot bong upstairs in my apartment…”
I told him that we were already getting high enough. After a long pause he took another stab at engaging us in conversation. He started this next bit with what I’m going to refer to as an “existential teenage edgelord sigh” and hope that my readers will most likely know the sound I’m alluding to:
“Yeah, I was in Amsterdam recently…”
I cut him off:
“Spare us.”
He didn’t say anything after that and must have gone back upstairs not too long after because I don’t remember seeing him again that night. I was mean – the kid was only twenty one and in an unenviable position socially but I can be extremely unforgiving in matters of aesthetics. I wasn’t expecting him to be his father but I did expect him to have more of a personality than just “weed”. I’m sure he does and I just caught him in a bad moment – I’ve said this before in another situation where I was making a half-handed excuse for another person I didn’t really like but “we’ve all said stupid shit while attempting to fit in”.
When Bob Cassilly died from rolling over his bulldozer I heard a rumor that Max had been non-lethally shot a week or so earlier as a warning to pay off some significant cocaine debts. I only learned recently that a second autopsy concluded that the bulldozer accident had been staged and Bob was actually murdered – beaten to death. I can’t remember where I even heard the cocaine thing, relegating it to hearsay, but I did get the vibe from some of the “St. Louis Party Girls” that Max was always down to party and generous with the drug.
I wonder if there might be some larger connection between the two incidents but I’m not really close to the situation and don’t know anything solid. Max seems to do quite a bit of work at the City Museum now, along with some other projects, and generally appears to have moved past the total fuck-up phase. I can’t say that I would have done any better if I’d ended up with such a culturally iconic father I could never escape being negatively compared to – I really can’t even imagine what that’s like.
Regardless I didn’t start this piece to talk about Max Cassilly – I wanted to talk about this kid from the clique of nerdy film, comic book and video game enthusiasts I hung out with for my last couple years of High School. This crew convened, with the addition of one Peter Pan-like middle aged school teacher, at the La Mesa house where Ben, Chris and James Pearce lived. This corresponded with the time that my friend Tim was in the USC film program and along with a constant stream of improvised camcorder movies everybody worked on his black and white Super 8 films and one full color claymation short.
Spencer’s father wasn’t especially well known as an artist but their North County home was saturated with his paintings. He had a singular vision – every canvas I ever saw featured colossal nude women made of bricks and stone in the form of buildings. People, mainly men, looked out from windows set into the heads and torsos while most of the doors were in the same predictable place. His fascination clearly had a sexual element but none of the works I ever saw were especially lewd.
Having lived in Tijuana I wonder if Roger, Spencer’s father, was ever aware of or had the opportunity to visit the example of this particular architectural folly known as La Mona de Tijuana. I used to take buses to the dilapidated neighborhood by the border to visit this structure but was often run off by packs of wild dogs. In fact LaPorsha and I had met with Armando Muñoz, the sculptor/architect, to discuss holding our wedding in a second, mermaid shaped building he’d built in Rosarito called La Sirena.
His proposed fees were outside of our price range so instead we held the ceremony in the base of a seventy-five foot tall sculpture of the Christian Messiah called Cristo del Sagrado Corazón. We actually probably could have even done things for free in La Mona if we’d really wanted but ending the ceremony next to a beach and sand dunes with ATV rentals sounded more appealing for our guests than a depressing poverty-stricken neighborhood patrolled by aggressive canines.
On the topic of La Mona it might interest any readers planning to visit it or merely glancing at the attached photo to learn that the distinctive pose in which the female figure holds her arm is intended to be symbolic of Tijuana itself: the uplifted appendage is roughly the shape of the state of Baja California and the raised pinky corresponds with the city’s position in the northernmost corner against the International border.
One of the last times I went to see it I ran into a resident of the neighborhood who seemed to have a heavy case of what is referred to as malinchismo: a cultural inferiority complex against Mexico and in favor of the United States. The phenomenon is named for Malinche – the native woman who was instrumental in Cortés conquering the Aztec Empire.
La Mona has fallen into significant disrepair and is covered in hastily scribbled spray-paint graffiti. He demanded to know, in English, why I, an American, would go out of my way to look at something he viewed as an eyesore overdue for demolition. I answered him in my stilted, overly formal Spanish:
“A veces las cosas destruidas tienen una belleza única.”
For those who don’t understand the language – “sometimes destroyed things possess a unique beauty”. Without a moment’s hesitation he answered back, once again in English:
“No. No they don’t.”
It didn’t feel like there was anywhere left for our conversation to go. Like La Mona herself it had found itself on the precipice of a border rendered uncrossable by custom and circumstance.
Anyway back to Spencer’s father Roger:
I only met him a couple of times and he sadly passed away from health complications while Spencer and I were still in High School. I was able to locate his obituary and a small profile on a database of American artists but I couldn’t seem to dig up images of any of his paintings.
When I moved back home from Chicago to San Diego in the Winter of 2001 I got an unexpected call from Spencer. We had never been particularly close but he had heard through the grapevine that I had gotten into drugs which remained taboo, or at least a subject of disinterest, for most of our friend group. I wasn’t doing much beyond hanging around my parent’s house so I took a sequence of buses up to Clairemont or whatever it was to hang out.
Spencer would have been twenty at this point in time but his entire personality was like the bravado of a fourth grader with a stolen beer or cigarette. He’d just gotten some wisdom teeth removed which always netted a small bottle of Vicodin in these days before the stricter sentencing guidelines. I had never taken the stuff, having jumped straight to heroin after getting some Tylenol with codeine from Canada, and I didn’t think too much of its effects.
After we both swallowed a couple of the pills Spencer wanted to try ingesting it in the stupidest way imaginable – crushing a pill down to powder and smoking it on top of marijuana which obviously doesn’t work. Hanging out with him felt like looking at a pair of sunglasses on a puppy – drugs were a self conscious accessory to come off as “bad” and “cool” in a way that just didn’t click with me. We went outside to smoke a cigarette, prompting this piece of deep philosophy:
“I like to call it a pack of moments…”
We didn’t hang out again. Besides the weed and Vicodin it sounded like he’d mostly been using and selling acid – I didn’t introduce him to needles or anything harder and he eventually found at least the second one of these things himself. In the following years I got prescribed Vicodin at least a couple of times when my own wisdom teeth came out but I was already back to injecting heroin at that point and didn’t notice much of anything from it this time either.
In early 2010 I did a cold water extraction on some Vicodin that I’d gotten from a neighbor and finally discovered what all the “buzz” was about, as it were. An oral dose of around 60 mg of hydrocodone combined with a tolerance that had returned to near baseline levels after six or more months of abstinence led to an intoxication that shines brighter in my memory than my first time injecting heroin. The pills that had been the major gateway drugs for most of America’s opiate epidemic only revealed their charms to me at this relatively late stage and I spent the next few years periodically chasing after them in a variety of inventive ways.
I heard a story about Spencer a few years after our 2001 meetup. The Pearces had a grandmother they referred to as “gramonster” because she was evidently scary. She lived alone and spent all of her time between a kitchen, bathroom and couch in front of a loud television without apparently setting foot into the bedrooms toward the rear of her home for years. This allowed Spencer, who’d presumably been kicked out by his own mother, to utilize a rear exit and squat inside her home with her undetected for a significant length of time.
I can’t remember who I heard this story from but I missed a lot of details most relevantly who eventually caught him and whether there was a confrontation. The story was that he was “selling drugs out of her house” but I don’t know how true that is. It seems unlikely that he would have served a constant stream of customers through the back door as that would have dramatically raised the risk of discovery but I suppose nothing’s impossible and it certainly makes for an entertaining mental image.
I did a bit of digging around and discovered a 2017 article in MovieMaker Magazine about aspiring but incarcerated film makers. I’ll drop a link underneath this paragraph but apparently Spencer eventually got into counterfeiting money which caught the attention of the FBI and earned him some prison time. I wonder how much overlap there ended up being between our stories although my own criminal career was made up of arguably “victimless” offenses and never got me into serious trouble.
One of the last Super 8 short films that Tim and I worked on, and the only one to feature Spencer, was a piece called Two Plus Two Minus. It centered around two “good” and two “bad” characters in the most Boolean possible morality. I portrayed one of the evildoers as the self styled “King of the Bums” with a banana peel crown and the aforementioned older teacher as my sycophantic toady. To really cement our moral alignment we violently robbed one of the good characters who was attempting to raise money to help the homeless.
I wouldn’t exactly call the role “prophetic” but I did end up homeless for several years and often wore what could be called “loud statement” outfits during this period though I never aspired to represent any kind of royalty. I did spend a bit of time standing by freeway exits with a cardboard sign for money – an activity that is briefly represented in the film albeit with a very different sign.
“Homeless Hungry God Bless” usually gets the job done. It would have been an interesting experiment to see what kind of reactions the sign from the movie, “I’m the King of the Bums. Pay me tribute!”, would have garnered in contrast but because I needed to maximize my earnings and retain the good will of wherever I’d found myself I never tried it.
I can’t exactly remember what Spencer’s character was like in the film besides being one of the good ones. If my memory serves correctly our friend Gerry, who happened to be Mexican-American, was the other bad character as a house burglar. The creation of the characters leaned heavily into negative tropes and stereotypes but it’s understandable that Tim didn’t detect any inkling that Spencer would be better cast as the future crook. Even looking at more recent photos there is an goofiness and innocence to them – more like a kid playing out ideas from movies of what a criminal is than an actual danger to society.
I don’t know if I even understand anymore what point I was trying to make when I first started writing this piece several days ago except that I hadn’t written for some time and had lost the momentum that kept me churning out pieces on a near daily basis earlier this Winter. According to the above article Spencer still aspires to creativity and it’s not like I’ve spent the majority of my life as a creative dynamo myself but it felt like he spent some time embodying the total fuckup archetype and I wondered if having a creative father might have played some role.
Mostly I’ve done a lot of talking shit and putting other people’s business on blast. I’m reminded of an incident in New Orleans – a city with an above average share of the dress in black, play in a rock band, work as a bouncer and get into fights over bullshit subculture. Somebody I knew from San Diego had become a key figure in this cohort and some of his droogs overheard me referring to him as a “tweaker”. They went to grab him in eager expectation of watching him deal out an ass kicking in retaliation for the insult. When he saw me he laughed:
“This guy? Last time I saw this guy he was so fucked up on heroin he was practically passing out in the gutter!”
What can I say? It’s nice to be remembered.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 