The Man Who Lived in a Roll of Paper

A Story of Art and Abortion

The mansion’s doorbell didn’t work. I knocked, tightened my wool scarf around my neck, and after a short wait, I knocked again, louder. Fallen leaves lay in sodden patches on the lawn, their limp edges lifted up and stirred intermittently by random gusts of wind. Cars and city buses whooshed by, spinning water off their tires onto the street on the other side of the tall black-painted wrought iron fence that edged the sidewalk. At a 7-Eleven on a corner across the street, some young men were hanging around a pay phone.

Susan opened the door. After we said hello, I followed her across the worn oak floor of the spacious entryway and behind a grand but also-worn staircase to a heavily varnished many-paneled oak door with an ornate brass knob and hinges.

We passed through the door under the staircase into a dimly lit hallway that seemed to be from another uglier world. The narrow hall was lit by the glare from fluorescent fixtures embedded in the dropped tile ceiling. Several flat white painted doors with number decals pasted on them opened onto the hall.

The cheap chrome doorknob on door #1 turned, the door opened from the inside, and a naked man who looked to be in his early thirties stood framed in the doorway. He paused there for a few moments, backlit by the afternoon October light that filtered in through the bare dirty window behind him on the far side of his room.

When we didn’t shriek or titter at the full frontal view of his pale body, he turned around, giving us a good look at his equally pale rear end, went back into the room, and closed the door without saying anything. “That’s Bill. He’s the weirdo that owns this place,” Susan said. “He walks around like that sometimes. I think he thinks he’ll turn one of us on.”

She told me that the previous owner had chopped the aged mansion in that declining south Minneapolis neighborhood into fifteen 12 x 12-foot rooms. We reached the door labeled #5. She opened the padlock and swung the door open. “Bill bought this place for a song.” “Where did he get the money?” “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to do anything. Now he rents the rooms out to people like me.”

Susan was 22 at the time we met up that afternoon in Minneapolis. The June before she had graduated with a degree in Studio Arts from Moorhead State College, a seven-hour drive northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, across the Red River that is the border between Moorhead in Minnesota and Fargo in North Dakota.

I had been an art student in Moorhead too, before I had transferred to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis a few years before Susan graduated. Susan and I had gotten to know each other at Moorhead State because we both often worked late on our art assignments.

Nobody would call Susan beautiful. Nice looking, they’d say perhaps. She had youth and slenderness going for her. Her face was attractive, but slightly marred by light acne scars and oily skin. I don’t remember any of her facial features.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember any of her art either. I don’t know, but she might say similar things about me. It might be harder for her to forget my art though; the piece I was working on was a 4 feet x 6 feet photorealist painting of flat snow-dusted Minnesota farmland stretching out along I94 from a photo I took when I had been heading south from Moorhead and Fargo. I’d pulled onto shoulder and climbed into the back seat to take the shot.

The only trees in view from the open road were some cottonwoods that grew along and defined the outline of the Buffalo River in the far distance and some Russian olives and more cottonwoods that had been planted in straight lines around the farmsteads by the WPA in the 1930s. A blue semi-truck barreled towards the viewer in the left lane. The scene on my canvas was framed by the outline of the distinctive front window and dashboard mirror of my beat-up old second-hand Saab. The oddly placed rearview mirror on the dash showed only a sliver of blue sky, a wisp of cloud, and a slash of black, exactly as the reflection had been captured in the photograph I’d projected onto the canvas to guide the painting.

A sign on the right side of the road read “Downer Exit 1 Mile.” It was my little now-regretted joke on my marriage. I had taken the photo on the chilly April day before my divorce was finalized. The road sign actually read, “Sabin/Downer Exit 1 Mile.” I thought my modification was clever. I was exiting the downer, get it? Nudge, nudge. If I’d only known what future downers awaited me as a single mother with two small children, no family support, no money, no time . . .

My attempt at photorealism was inspired by a two-story close-up of Chuck Close’s face, a painting titled Big Self Portrait, that I’d seen hanging in the entryway at the Walker Art Museum. At 107-1/2 x 83-1/2 inches, Close’s painting was a lot bigger than mine, but mine was the largest thing in the art studio. I stretched the canvas myself, one skill I had been taught at the school, but I needed to figure out for myself how to plan the painting, how to use an airbrush, how to lay down and remove masking tape and layers of paint, paint, and reconsider, and repaint as I worked through problems as they presented themselves. The faculty at the school was into teaching students how to express themselves, and averse to teaching anything as prescriptive as technique.

A hip New York-trained young women artist who was at the college as a visiting professor was delighted that I was trying photorealism, and she exclaimed that the painting captured exactly what it felt like to drive through the landscape around there. If I ever finished it, she said, she would give it an A. It took me a year, but I got it done. The visiting professor had gone back to New York City by then, but the head of the department gave me the A and closed out my Incomplete when I told him what the professor had said.

I would see Susan around the art studios in Moorhead two or three evenings a week. After I made dinner, ate with my two children, and cleaned up the dishes, I would leave the kids with a babysitter, drive back to the art building, and work until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. Sometimes I’d also see another young student hanging around there too, a more than six feet tall bony blond guy named Sven.

I never saw what he was working on. But I was semi-aware that Sven was “into” pushing the limits of conceptual art. That kind of art is usually impossible to see, anyway. In case you have been mercifully spared exposure to this enduring fad in the art world, one prominent idea behind conceptual art is no actual work of art even needs to be created. The art is in the mind of its creator.

I didn’t talk with Sven much. He was as terse as just about all the rest of the men I met around there. I’m from the East Coast, and I found the local men to be frustratingly inarticulate.

On the topic of reticent men, here is an example from a Sunday dinner with my in-laws’ family. My husband’s parents took me and my husband and our two little ones to visit one of my mother-in-law’s sisters and her family on a farmstead outside of a small town forty miles north of Moorhead. Other members of her family came over for a get-together with them at dinner at the sister’s home. The women were in the kitchen, talking desultorily about the hot dishes and jello salads they had brought while they dished out the food.

My non-conformist husband was in the yard playing with the kids. I wandered out to the living room and found the rest of the men sitting, and I was amazed and amused that they were not saying anything at all to each other. I sat down and tried to get them to talk but I couldn’t get them going. They don’t smoke, and they don’t drink. They just sat there. At home, they would probably have the television on. But for politeness's sake, they don’t turn on the TV when there is company around. When the women announced the dinner, the men all rose together and went to sit around the table, where they ate what they were served in silence.

I did overhear Sven actually talking one night in the art department. He was reading to Susan the words from Yoko Ono’s “Snow Piece (1963),” from one of her “instructions” called Grapefruit.

“Think that snow is falling. Think that snow is falling everywhere all the time. When you talk with a person, think that snow is falling between you and on the person. Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.”

The phrase “snow job” popped into my mind. And the question arose, “Was Susan being snowed?” Or was Sven? Or were we all?

After she graduated, Susan moved to the Twin Cities to take a job as a secretary at a law office in downtown Minneapolis. I had moved there with my two children to escape the small pond of the small college and to try to find like-minded people in the bigger pond of the University of Minnesota.

The afternoon I visited Susan in the rooming house, I hadn’t seen her in a few years. It’s too big a subject to go into here in any detail, but I had changed in the meantime. I had peeled off my cynical artist intellectual atheist persona like a mask. In my miserable time alone trying to raise my kids in poverty and finish my college degree after my divorce, I stopped thinking my husband’s name like a mantra, which I had been doing since I took up with him ten years earlier, as if he could save me.

Gradually, I had been drawn back to the Catholic faith of my childhood. I said to myself that even if religion was said to be a crutch, there was nothing wrong with accepting help from the Creator of the universe. My newly regained faith meant to my great relief that I didn’t have to figure everything out all by myself anymore.

Susan looked especially nice in a bohemian chic way the day of my visit. Her long wavy brown hair was held back with a leather clasp, and she wore jeans, suede boots, a loose navy blouse, and a necklace made of colored wooden beads.

“Seeing anyone?” I asked. “Well, sort of. I’m sleeping with a guy who lives here.” “What kind of work does he do?” “He collects welfare.” “How can he collect welfare? Isn’t he able to work?” “I don’t think he wants to work. He’s on General Assistance.” “What does he do since he doesn’t work?” “I don’t know. I guess. He has a motorcycle. He keeps it in his room. Sometimes he takes it out, and we go for a ride.”

She showed me a picture of him, I don’t remember his name. He was a big blonde bearded man with a belly who was wearing a tee shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots, sitting on the edge of the mattress and box spring that was on the floor of her room and grinning for the camera.

At that time, amazingly enough, a healthy young man could get on a form of welfare called General Assistance. That was a loophole that has long since been closed.

As I was listening to her talk, I was fuming inside about how a no-good freeloading bum like him, who was not smart, handsome, or creative, could get a smart attractive creative girl like Susan when he was without any virtues of his own to offer, no education, no ambition, no job, no love, no hope of commitment. I wondered what her parents would think of the way their beloved little daughter was living now she’d grown. She had been raised well. How, I wondered, could she could sell her precious self so short?

I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but she told me that she’d had an abortion.

It turns out that sometime after I moved away from Moorhead, Susan and Sven had drifted into one of those noncommittal affairs that became so common in those decades. He had made no promises, and she had not expected any.

He had made up his mind that he didn’t want to ever make a commitment to one woman or to have kids. He needed to be free to pursue his Art. Artists didn’t have to live by the rules that applied to other people. Being an Artist wasn’t tied up with anything as mundane as needing to get out of bed every day when it was still dark in winter mornings, scrape the snow from the windshield, and start the car so it could warm up by the time he needed to drive to work so he could support a family.

After they started to sleep together, after an awkward start, they experienced together all the sweet transports of love that had traditionally been reserved for the honeymoon, with a certain holding back on her part due to the lack of commitment on his, but they scrupulously avoided the 20^th-century sin of being possessive, and it was important to them that they did not use the name of love for what they were experiencing together. Susan had read enough advice in the women’s magazines that she surreptitiously enjoyed, which warned not to “scare a man away” by mentioning commitment.

Sven, for his part, had practically memorized The Playboy Philosophy columns in which Hugh Hefner preached that women could now be enjoyed as independent playmates, without any need for even a pretense of courtship, love, or commitment. The intimacy that had traditionally been reserved for marriage could be treated as carefree play. The Pill was supposed to free women from so-called slavery to the demands of their biology, and free them to enjoy uncommitted intimacy as if they were men.

All the women had to do to enjoy that twisted ideal of freedom, according to point of view, was to castrate themselves by suppressing their bodies’ fertility, which is the full expression of their sexuality, and by stifling their natural desires for love, marriage, and the nursing and rearing of children. Some women, as I learned along my way, were much better able to suppress those disdained desires than I was.

Sven was dedicated to his Art more than she was to hers. He took the idea of making art out of one’s life a lot further than most. He first decided to make his life into a Work of Art by being intentional in every single action he performed. Walking home in snow from the college to his apartment in Fargo across the Red River of the north, he would examine every footprint he made with his big boots. He pondered every word he uttered and savored every feeling he felt.

Then, he decided, simple awareness was not enough.

Somehow he got a hold of a huge roll of printing press paper and maneuvered it into his apartment. He slept on it, he ate on it, he drew on it, and he wrote on it. He did almost everything imaginable on it, although he still made use of the bathroom to take care of a few basic needs. Every morning, he would roll up the paper with the traces of his life from the day before on one side of the room, and unroll fresh paper onto the middle of the floor on which he would create the art of that new day. In the back of his mind, he hoped that someone would discover his Art and showcase his genius. I have no idea how he imagined that could happen. Until Sven was discovered, he would doggedly continue his labor of love. For a time Susan joined Sven in his roll of paper every night.

One day Susan told Sven she got a job offer in the Twin Cities with the help of a friend of her father. She would prefer staying around Moorhead and making art too, but she needed to find a way to make a living since her parents expected her to move out on her own after college. She hoped he would ask her to stay with him, but he didn’t.

When Susan found out she was pregnant, soon after she moved, they both were surprised. She took the Pill regularly, at the same time every day. People back then didn’t realize that a fairly high percentage of pregnancies occur when a woman is using the Pill perfectly. From charts I’ve seen directly from Planned Parenthood, 6 out of 100 women get pregnant every year, even when they take it exactly as prescribed. The next year the same odds apply again. Planned Parenthood, of course, is always there to “help” with aborting the babies of the 6% who fall victim to contraceptive roulette each year.

Relying on the Pill was, as the saying goes, a crap shoot. If the dice landed against them, people trying to live the bogus promises of sexual freedom who found themselves about to become parents didn’t realize that they were simply part of the cohort of statistical failures of contraception. They would blame themselves. Quite often the man would blame the pregnancy on the woman.

A blessed event was no longer seen as such, but as a trap, a failure, a punishment.

Many a man taking advantage of the “free sex” zeitgeist secretly or not so secretly believed that if a woman got pregnant, she was trying to trick him so she could get him to marry her. She was trying to possess him, which was evil. And for that duplicity, which was often just in his own mind, many men felt they were justified in getting as far away from the believed-to-be-entrapping female as possible.

Sven was, Susan told me, not like that. He was very supportive. He “helped” her a lot, she said. For one thing, he helped pay for the abortion.

It was her choice he told her. Nobody should force her to carry a child that wasn’t wanted. He didn’t want to be a parent. But if she did, that was her choice. If she didn’t, well that would make things easier.

He also “helped” her by coming down from Fargo to take her to Planned Parenthood for the abortion. She was surprised by how much like a cattle call it was when they got into the big waiting room. Everyone was told to arrive at the same time, and then they had to stand in line to pay. Each woman was called into an abortion office in order of when she had paid.

Sven had forgotten his credit card, and so he had to go back to her rooming house to get it while she sat and waited and watched, and he had to go to the back of the line again. She was also surprised that so many of the women were in tears. She could hear one woman wailing in a recovery room.

And wasn’t Sven good because he stayed in the waiting room, helped her into the car, and patiently comforted her afterward?

I was surprised to hear she needed comfort. She had been so matter-of-fact.

She told me that she never expected what she felt afterward. Her whole physical being convulsed for days with feelings of intense grief. She told me that even though her pregnancy had been only ten weeks along, her breasts leaked milk, her hormones were raging and she felt an intense craving for her child. As I tried to tell her, it seemed to me that even though she thought she “knew” that she did the right thing, her body seemed to know better what she had done, and what she had lost.

Susan had been deeply ashamed—not because of having killed her child in her womb, but because of her unexpected sorrow. But, she said Sven was very good to her even so. She was betraying her own resolve not to be weak, clingy, or dependent, but he took it in stride. Sven stayed with her for three days afterward, until she was able to get out of bed, take a shower and start to eat again. He kissed her goodbye, gave her a lingering hug, and went back to Fargo, back to his big roll of paper.

Modern romance. No, not even romance, I thought. God help us all.

We talked about some other things, and I excused myself after a while to go pick up my kids at their after-school program. As we walked back down the hall towards the front door, door #1 opened just a crack, and then closed again, and to my relief I was spared a second sighting of her flasher landlord.

Dark had descended onto the late Fall afternoon. The young guys were no longer hanging around outside near the 7-Eleven’s pay phone. When I got into my car, I used the wipers to push off some damp leaves that had fallen on the windshield, and I drove off to the parochial school to pick up my kids.

A year later, Susan met a more decent man at the law office, who had a regular job as an accountant. She didn’t go completely traditional by any means. After a few months, she moved in with him, but, then, to my relief, they started planning their wedding. I asked her if she had told him about the abortion. She said he understood and that he respected her choice. Later on my two kids and I attended the wedding at the First Methodist Church. When we went to the reception in the church basement, we ate the typical wedding reception sheet cake and Jordan almonds and drank the Kool-Aid punch at a table by ourselves.

Susan and I never met again. I don’t know what happened to her after that. It’s hard enough to know what had happened to her before that. I pray that God has changed her mind and her heart. May God grant to her and the men in her life and all of us, true repentance for the sins of our youth, and may He give us His pardon and His peace.

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People inherit the society and the social graces that were crafted and polished by generations before them. We also inherit beautiful buildings that were built according to a set of ideals that the younger ones have rejected. We take what we inherit and in the process of living out our own impoverished set of ideals, we defile what was once beautiful and turn it into something tawdry and base and ugly—like the once beautiful mansion is now a rooming house, with traces of its former beauty.

Let’s pause here and try to answer the question, who were the people like Susan and Sven? The time was the mid-1970s, and Susan was the first member of her family who had gone to college. She and others like her were the first generation of college-educated children from middle-class families who lived in small towns and farms around northern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. Their parents were usually one generation off the farm themselves, unless, of course, they still lived on a farm.

The parents as a whole were skilled at fixing things and making do with what they had, unsentimental, no-nonsense, hard-working, and stoic. The fathers who had left the farm worked as janitors, auto mechanics, or car salesmen, owned small stores, sold greeting cards or sundries, bought and managed rental properties, or they followed one of the hundreds of other ways of making a living that was still available back in that time and place to high-school-only graduates. Sometimes the mothers worked outside the home after their two or three kids started school, in hospitals or offices.

Although it sounds almost unbelievable now, on their relatively small often single-earner incomes, they were able to afford to own snug little homes, well-insulated against the frigid winters, maybe even have a second home on one of the area’s thousands of lakes, a cottage that they would fix up a little bit more each year, where the husbands would go fishing for walleye and scale them, and the wives would cook the walleye, and the families would eat together on picnic tables on their screened porches. And after dinner in the long summer evenings, they would ride together around the lake on pontoon boats, during the brief and pleasant summers.

They were mostly Germans and Scandinavians, Lutherans, and Methodists. Some of the Germans and almost all the Irish were Catholics too. As was true for many Americans by that time, their religious affiliation for most of them was similar to a sort of club they had belonged to from birth, a sign of their identity, their economic standing, and place in the community. Most of the parents were regular churchgoers and generally at least superficially upright in their morals. Their children were much less so.

Raised more by the television, the music, the films, the books, the magazines, and the general zeitgeist of the era than by their parents, the children did not absorb much of the veneer of values and mores that their parents had inherited and had lived off as a kind of patrimony of virtue and common sense from their religious forebears. Nobody seemed to notice what had happened to these children, but they were the first generation who carried the full force of the existential dilemma on their shoulders, and that responsibility took its toll on them.

Alienated from religious belief, they had to figure out for themselves how to create meaning in what the society was telling them was a brutal uncaring universe. The world was assuring them that religion is a crutch, only for the weak, that love is just a romantic fantasy, and that sexual morality is repression.

Another message coming through loud and clear was that artists and intellectuals, poets, writers, and musicians were the only ones leading fulfilling lives. The attitude of the French Revolution towards the bourgeoisie had penetrated even to the middle of the U.S.A., where they absorbed the notion that the salt of the earth citizens that raised them were an inferior class of mindless consumers and conformists, whose lives were tedious, and whose example was not to be emulated by any self-respecting educated person.

Since the parents of children like Susan were comfortable enough that they were able to afford college, their children’s training in the zeitgeist was finished off by their liberal professors.

I’d started to think of the kind of “relationship” being practiced after the “sexual revolution” took hold as “guy sex.” Women were told they were being liberated. when they were actually being brainwashed into thinking that they would need to act like the worst of men. To act as if they were men, they needed to curtail the full biological expression of their desires, and live as if they didn’t have wombs for carrying babies or breasts to nurse or desires for the permanent exclusive love of a husband or a way to express the affections that bonded them to the men they slept with.

Only genital sex was allowed, so the full spectrum of women’s sexuality was truncated. The full expression of intimacy followed by the creation of a child out of the partners’ love, followed by the joy of birth, of nursing, of dandling and petting, and loving and delighting in the growth of a child, all that had to be denied. The idol of Moloch, the god of free sex demanded that any children who were somehow mistakenly conceived were to be sacrificed.

If a woman became emotionally attached, and they almost always did, she could be shamed into stopping her clinging with a few scornful reminders of what everyone knew, that love is just a biological urge, and that intercourse was really no more significant than a pleasant game between two equals out to enjoy the experience, each for his or her satisfaction. As I heard one hip radio show host say one time, Sex is the absolute indoor game.

The way they played the game, what they were feeling wasn’t love unless both of them decided after a long time to call it love, similar to how a conceived child in its mother’s womb was not a child unless both parents wanted it.

Flashback: One of the heretical thoughts I had after I had my first child and watched him change and grow was that there is nothing more creative than giving life to and raising a new human being. My ambitions to be an artist were well and good, but what could be more completely creative than being a mother?

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The notion of conceptual art itself had its roots in the time near the end of the 19^th century, when artists started exploring the nature of the art materials themselves rather than trying to represent anything with the materials. Conceptual art started to take its present form in 1917, when Marcel Duchamp, who was quite an accomplished artist capable of painting sublimely beautiful canvases, submitted a signed mass-produced urinal to an art exhibit. This is about ten years after Pablo Picasso and others started the Cubist movement.

Duchamp claimed that since he had signed the urinal (although using the pseudonym R. Mudd), and since he was an artist, the urinal was, therefore, a work of art. The urinal was rejected by the exhibit, but the idea of it was embraced by the art world. Artists then continued to move further and further away from representational art, beyond exploring the materials of art to exploring the making of art without materials. Yoko Ono published a book called Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in 1964. The instructions were considered to be a conceptual work of art in themselves, whether or not they would ever be followed.

So somewhere along the way, the idea of art necessarily having a form and a purpose was stolen away along with the idea that life had a form and a purpose too.

The notion that art should be beautiful was rejected too. I remember that in a sculpture class at UMINN MPLS, we attended a talk by a visiting New York artist, Robert Irwin, who told us about how he had recently accepted an invitation to install a piece of his at an art gallery. Irwin showed slides as he talked. His work of art consisted of plain grey concrete poured into wooden frames that were placed directly on the gallery’s polished wood floor.

Irwin seemed pleased as he recalled the barely concealed horror of the gallery owner as he watched the destruction of his beautiful and expensive floor. Irwin mused aloud, almost to himself, that he had to carefully watch out to make sure that the attractive moire patterns that would naturally form during a pour like that would be avoided.

Just think, this is what they taught us in art school, even in Minnesota far away from the centers of the art scene; that art should shock and cause chagrin and that beauty and meaning should be avoided at all costs.

This attitude towards art kind of goes along with what society assumes about relationships, that sexual relations between couples have no intrinsic meaning, and that sex can be enjoyed with consequences. Falling in love with your insignificant other must be avoided at all costs too, unless of course after a long time of trying each other out, you both agree that what you have together is love. And if you conceive a child along the way, in spite of religiously using contraception, society tells you that it isn’t a baby unless you both want it. Otherwise, you should be free to dispose of the inconvenience of a baby by any means at any time. In the way we live now, the beauty of a loving married relationship between a man and a woman and of the children they might conceive has to be denied at any cost. The cost is vaster than most of us imagine.