3

 I start going to readings at the Rose City Book Pub. The place used to be a mediocre Irish pub, but now it’s a bar slash bookshop and they seem to hold a lot of events. Aside from the addition of stacks of books everywhere, nothing much has changed. The tables and old wooden booths are comfortably dilapidated, and the walls are still festooned with Harp and Jameson signs.

            One night, a poet I know reads his poetry, backed by a jazz trio. I do sketches of them but I’m really rusty. I still draw every day but I don’t sketch from life much, and it requires a totally different skill set from my usual doodling.

            The following week I see a guy from Eugene read stories about his local watering hole and the various barflies and weirdos who frequent it. The stories are okay but they all sort of run into one another, the way nights at a bar tend to do. He is accompanied by an acoustic guitarist with a bald head and a long white goatee. The music exudes warmth and grace. I doodle in my book but don’t do any sketches. When they are done, the guitarist comes over and looks at my work. “Do you do commissions?” he asks. I say I can draw him right now if he'll sit still, but he balks at this, so I tell him I can work from a photo. He fiddles with his phone for a while and eventually pulls up a black and white photo of him holding a guitar, emerging from the blackness like a wraith. He throws thirty bucks onto my book and tells me he’ll email me the photo. “That’s just an advance,” he says. “Take as long as you need.”

I figure it’s the last I’ll hear from him but he surprises me by emailing me the next day, saying that actually he has a concert in a couple of weeks and would love to use the drawing for the poster if I can get it done in time. I draw it during a slow day at work, and then I have misgivings and do a second one. I scan them and send them to him and don’t hear anything. A few days later I write back to ask if he got the drawings, and to tell him that it’s okay if he doesn’t like them. I’m used to people not liking my work; I’m not a great portraitist. But these drawings are actually quite beautiful, I think, with dense crosshatching layering into something almost sculptural. He does not get back to me.