Clinton Crockett Peters

A Portrait of the Artist at His Home in Texas

Twenty-five miles west of Waco, where a man believing he was Messiah burned with seventy-nine followers, where the Bandidos bike gang warred with Cossacks, shooting twenty-seven at a Twin Peaks restaurant, where the prairie spreads between Austin and Dallas hosting indigenous grass and quintillions of bluebonnets, where as a child I road-tripped with my father the sportswriter on highways snaking through hill country, where the artist who once started wars bought sixteen-hundred acres of creeks and sage and live oak—there, leather-gloved, the artist weeds and chainsaws and poisons the mesquite clogging native evergreens in a hundred-degree cauldron, suited to the landscape, as was my father, as perhaps, with a squinty-eyed view, am I, and afterward the artist steps into his sunlit living room encased in glass, and raises a brush to touch the face of a man he once knew.

To catch the artist’s show in Dallas, I retrieve a ticket from a uniformed guard in a booth walloped by rain. He is drenched, slickerless, but jovial and kind. He makes sure I know where I’m going. I’ve just moved back to Texas, I tell him, after eight years away in Japan and Iowa, so in a way I don’t. Gears in my body and mind are only beginning to latch on to landscape and voices and faces I grew up with and grind in ways they haven’t since I left. There’s a language of Texas, one I’m keen to relearn now that my father died a few months ago, his life circumscribed by two rivers, which border the state. A man who resembled the artist in drawl, politics, and in that ineffableness that draws me to the artist’s work.

Inside, I follow a human gaggle—young, old, almost entirely white—into the cathedral-like chamber. Four stories above us are sky-lit windows that allow clouds and baby blue to fill in the room, pushing at the boundaries of space between us.

I’m expecting an art museum, but the guards and walkie-talkied attendants are more proactive in querying my gaze and note-taking. As I stand before the watercolors, they ask why I came, who am I, what I want to find? I say, “I’m from Texas, and I just moved back,” as if that explains something. By the look in their eyes, I translate that it does.

The artist’s home peaks above a hill of prairie grass forests, the walls’ limestone bricks dug from local queries, set at rustic, irregular angles. The house is dressed floor-to-ceiling in glass, surrounded by Indian paintbrush

es and bluebonnets. The artist reseeded his land with native plants, hoping to restore the landscape to earth tones, wildlife, and light. The ranch made the cover of Architectural Digest, and master naturalists lead photography trips here. It is perhaps his finest work.

During the eight years the artist was most famous, he made regular trips to his Texas home, staying up to five weeks away from the office. His escape, his grounding. On a typical day, the artist woke at 5:45 a.m. and brewed coffee. He let out his dogs to howl across the prairie. He carried a steaming cup to his wife. He then newspapered, ran four miles, and showered. He was briefed by the CIA in a communications bunker. Afterward, he muscled a gas-powered chainsaw to a secluded nook on his property and began clearing brush as the sun tilted overhead and his grass and flowers fanned in the distance. At the end of the day, he would fish, watch baseball, and, later, he would paint.

My Texan father straddled contradiction: a church deacon with a long-term mistress, a man who wrote and traveled college football but prohibited his kids from playing. He mushroomed with anger when he caught me with weed but had himself snorted lines off mirrors and even piloted a singleengine plane to Mexico to buy cocaine.

But then many Texans stew in contradiction. The artist was God-fearing but started wars; I’m a writing teacher who berates students for smartphone addictions, which I myself have. Maybe the gears of our mind gum up from experience and memory, what hypocrisy lubricates.

My father almost killed his mother. My grandmother gave birth on a road trip, and in the process of expressing Dad, blanketed in blood, she had an out-of-body moment, pulled in two directions by the tug of heaven and the bereaved faces of her husband and my aunts. She felt caught in light. She floated in limbo as a doctor below pounded on her body’s chest, jettisoning spittle on her face, her family crying for her to “come home.”

This in-betweenness, the liminal, this contradiction of real and unreal is something that strikes me as Texan, forever between two worlds. Both South and West, Southwest and Midwest, red-meat conservative repository and borderland. According to recent linguistic studies, most Texans are losing their accents in ways not concurrent with the rest of the country. We now sound like we come from anywhere or nowhere at all. Contradictions slide into the cultural thresholds, where they compost. Just like the artist cared for his 1600 acres of wild lands but reversed a campaign promise to address the earth’s greatest antagonist, climate change.

Knowing is not acting is not being, and somewhere within the middle distance of knowledge and action, perhaps, lies my upbringing.

I first “met” the artist at a football game, one of the many I went to every weekend with my father, the sportswriter. The artist’s limousines stretched outside the thumping stadium in Lubbock, the announcer welcoming him. The artist sat behind reflective glass where they served cocktails and rooted for the visiting Texas A&M Aggies. I, of course, shouted with fifty-thousand people for our Red Raiders, who my dad followed with ardor and stories in the newspaper. That day, we trampled our ranked and heavily favored rivals, and the artist fled soon after. Meanwhile, I cried childhood tears with my father.

I don’t know if the artist was affected by this loss or by scheduling. But I know he grew up on Friday Night lights in Midland–odessa, the very place from whence the term was popularized, a short jaunt from my hometown. Sports monopolized my life from when I became conscious, something woven into childhood. Stats and brackets reigned over weekends and dictated the level of my father’s moodiness. He would spike into rages and tear his throat apart cheering at touchdowns. I grew to expect outbursts, yells so loud they seemed to fill the cavity of space that spread across the Llano Estacado.

West Texas topography—prickly pears, tumbleweeds, coyotes, and land so flat it seemed to mock the earth’s curvature—as well as my father, instilled within me a sense of foreboding. How far have I fallen outside my father’s shadow? I focus on him because he lives in my imagination stronger, died first before my mother, suffering long in the end. He’d figured out late in life he wanted to write, after ping-ponging between jobs, and was thunderstruck by cancer. I have abandoned his conservative politics and only rarely give football a thought. Still, my facial gestures, my gait, even the way I string my fingers across a keyboard, all bring me back to the candle I burn for him in some carnal way. Is this legacy? Do I choose how much I come from somewhere?

The artist’s great-great-great-grandfather Obadiah fought in the war of 1812. Obadiah’s son, James, rose to star athlete and brainiac, at age sixteen attending Yale, a first for the family. His son, Samuel, managed railroads, shifted all over the country, and in 1902 witnessed the dawn of steel, streams of golden metal, clouds of fine spray. His family summered. Samuel’s son, Prescott, nicknamed “Doc,” initiated in Yale’s Skull and Bones and stole into Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to grave rob Geronimo’s cranium. He later became a senator. His son George was one of the youngest pilots

to fly in the Navy at nineteen. George was shot down in the Pacific. He jumped with his crew, tearing his chute on the plane’s tail, hitting the water like a fly smashes a wall. He surfaced, vomiting sea water and was stung by a man-of-war. George paddled for three hours until he saw a mirage that melted into a U.S. Naval periscope. He later rose to director of the CIA, ambassador to China, and forty-first president of the United States.

If my father left me with a legacy of uncertainty, the artist inherited one of tenacity. It’s no wonder he was delinquent. How do you measure up to that history?

The artist, later known as a moralizer, earned his first DUI after a drinking contest with an Australian tennis star. On another occasion he flattened the neighbor’s trash, dragging the can as it sparked down the street. At a formal dinner, he asked his parents’ friends what sex was like for old people. At Yale, he coasted with Cs. He was elected president of his fraternity and organized its first toga party. The first time the artist was in the press was because his fraternity branded forty pledges with hot coat-hangers on their backsides.

When he turned forty in 1986, he racked up a massive bar tab with friends in Colorado Springs, chugging sixty-dollar wines, entertaining strangers, shutting the place down. The next morning’s jog was a blur, accompanied by a bullying hangover, a real asshole morning after. The artist couldn’t recall much. Halfway through his route, the sun hazy, his head snapped into reflection, comprehension. “The crosscurrents of my life came into focus,” he later wrote. God spoke.

My father himself nibbled in the shadow of his steamer truck-chested father. Dad developed a wry glance at the world, molded cynical by his daddy’s alcoholism. If his father drank quietly and alone, Dad tilted at debaucheries. One time on a trip to the prairie tundra outside San Antonio, not unlike the artist’s home, my dad left the group to urinate. He recalled this to me vividly because he wasn’t much for outdoors. The nightscape and prairie air impaled his lungs, and he sensed he was taking a fresh breath after free diving. He gawked at the universe’s pinwheel of flickers woven over cactus, the hill country shadows, and distant mewing cattle. He sat, transfixed. He recalled this moment to me when the family jaunted to state parks and redrock canyons outside Lubbock, places that seemed infinite in their expanse and unknowability, sites he introduced to me.

When my father was basking in the world’s expanse, a police caravan rolled into the campsite, rounding up the teenagers. Dad watched his friends be handcuffed and wheeled away. He spent the next twenty years of his life

lifting one bottle or another, sometimes a mirror with drugs, more often than not dialing a telephone to hear a voice that did not belong to his wife. And at fifty, five-sevenths of his life vanished, Dad discovered he wanted to write and began taking his children camping, two kinds of liminality that I have inherited from his life. My mother agreed to move with him to the stormy, dust-blasted dunes of Lubbock so he could write about young men enacting wars in arenas and we could caravan to the sandstone rocks that appeared as tones in a sunset.

The artist’s parents showered in Greenwich privilege. When they moved to Midland to work oil, West Texas existed as a stepping stone, a pit stop, an icky spot in the progression to triumph and return. For the artist, the wide vistas and dust and tornados and pungent whiff of manure were a way of being, as they are for me.

The artist attended Sam Houston Elementary School, named for the very man who sublimated Texas’s freedom. His sister died from leukemia at age four. I’m not sure what psyche these events lasso together in a young child except maybe one expecting disaster while growing up in a landscape that promises inhibition.

As an adult, he leaned into his upbringing. He told reporters, “Remember, I’m from Midland, not DC.” He honed his smirk and sarcasm as a survival strategy among preps at Andover and Yale. At Harvard Business School, he wore a flight jacket and cowboy boots and munched chaw in class. He evolved a propensity for malapropisms, which could fill calendars. He seduced his wife, Laura, a librarian and Democrat, who owned a cat named Dewey after the decimal system. She was won over by his comedy, his irreverence, his dark charm. What is love if not nonsensical, contradictory, liminal?

For George’s part, he thought Laura had stunning cobalt eyes. She centered him, a stabilizing ground wire. After dating two months, they were married on November 5, 1977. In their wedding photo, an event with no ushers or bridesmaids or groomsmen, the artist appears as a curly-headed Warren Beatty with a too-big, used-car-salesman smile. Laura is oval-faced with a stoned, faraway look. Despite political differences, they campaigned together for the artist’s run at Governor.

Their first marriage car, which they spent a year inside of campaigning, was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, which is the same model of car my father’s mother willed to me when she died.

There’s something that hamstrings my whimsy toward the artist, my nostalgia and longing, identification, sympathy, and transference of a father

figure. It’s obvious, but it must be said: the artist initiated a war that cost 288,000 lives. He wiretapped Americans without warrants, tortured foreign nationals without due process, helped avalanche the American economy into its second-greatest recession.

I did not vote for him and wouldn’t now, but that doesn’t stop me from hearing my father in his voice, an agave nectar sweetness tinged with sand. I see my father’s belated words in his artistry, the preternatural language of tumbleweeds, football, dust devils, and redrocks and cotton and aquifers. The artist is West Texan, and in his voice and blood lie something of a legacy I can’t help but unearth because it is a part of me and what I try to remember to hold dear.

My father crunched accounts at a thankless bank job for fifteen years, meanwhile scribbling, before quitting to write full-time. Likewise, the artist kept his art a secret. As soon as his foot was out of the White House door, he began watercoloring in earnest. He hired an art teacher who instructed him for two years. He practiced at home in Texas, the rays spilling across the native grasses and the flowers that are called paintbrush into his home, suffusing his canvas. The artist began circumscribing what he knew: world leaders whose hands he shook and veterans who fought in the wars he started. He tried not to replicate their faces, nor did he have the requisite skill, but he gestured toward them, captured an essence, a mood of what it was like to be around them.

In 2013, a Romanian hacker, Guccifer, exposed his art, hoping to embarrass the artist. To a degree it worked; many critics guffawed, including Alastair Sooke, who described the portraits as containing a “folksy, homespun, plain-speaking tone, with just enough ham-fisted strangeness and bungling missteps to keep things interesting.”

But lampooning morphed into acceptance. The word was out, the art public. As he had with his Texas upbringing, the artist leaned into his creations. Public showings appeared at his presidential library in Dallas, and then he toured. He attended morning talk shows and published two books of his craft. He came to paint late in life, just as my dad came to writing, and for both, their art seemed to grant them a kind of peace that only rural Texas wildlands had before.

In an era of presidential chaos, sometimes I forget that a place is more than politics. It is the birdsong whispering under the wind, the grasses and flowers at my ankles, and the way the sunlight cuts across my face and hints at presences beyond horizons. There’s a certain sweep to the landscape, and even something as basic as rain smells different. There’s a sourness in

Texas’s air: sage, bluebonnet compost. This is another language, one I speak with the artist whose politics I abhor.

But isn’t this also what it means to be neighbors? To have bedrock differences but still be of a kind? A human animal, one bound by ecosystems hoping to make them better? I’ve never understood the urge to escape, maybe because I’m privileged, but also perhaps because I see and hear Texas in the memories of my father and in the canyons where we scattered his ashes.

When the artist finished his portraits, he allowed them to show at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, near where I happened to be living. Like many, I’m entranced with the Putin, his hawkish, cartoonish stare, furrowed brow, gleaming forehead, a planet in massiveness.

I’m saddened by the portrait of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-maliki, knowing his government would end in shambles, ISIS gnawing away at Iraq, the globe consternating for his removal. The watercolors seem to manifest a tear crawling down his face toward the hurricane-like beard. But the portrait that drags me to an emotional welling of my own is of the artist’s father. He is red-cheeked and seems ancient, carved by the ruins of time, his eyes receding into folds, a jaw that is hammered on. The eyes peer out from bags, soft and sure. They are my father’s eyes when he lay dying, his body bloated, his vision disguising presences. There’s almost a glimmer in those pupils that he knows what person he’s encountered even if he can’t quite see them, a preternatural sense of complicity, of resignation.

I read in newspapers recently that the artist doesn’t make it out to his ranch much, and I’ve moved on as well. The artist bought a three-million dollar home in Dallas. When asked recently about a favorite memory though, he recalls his daughter Jenna marrying on the ranch. Not inviting any political friends, the artist’s family preferred the quieter, windswept, hand-cleared hills of their art to any church or ballroom. The artist had tears in his eyes. The guests stayed up until one a.m., the carnival of a Texas sky above them, the spicy concoction of prairie flowers and cow dung on the wind.

On the Thanksgiving after I moved back to Texas, my wife and I drove out past the checkerboard of cotton-fields that border the canyons where my father wheeled our family to on weekends when football didn’t reign. Yumiko and I arrived late, erecting our tent in clear moonlight, sandstone monoliths disappearing into purple-black, creating shadows in the stars. We ate freeze-dried foods and slept fitfully as a windstorm, not uncommon, drove grain through the tents’ seams and zippers and into our teeth. We

woke up, our throats raw, vowing to never return. Why had I frequented such inhospitable land?

Unzipping our broken tent, I saw the light cresting and the sandstone burning and the cactus carpeting the desert like emeralds. Dawn is cathedral-grand in the Caprock Canyons, it’s almost worth it to sleep the rest of day, just for magic-hour light. We charged ourselves up with tea and jaunted over a winding trail to a cliff’s rim, hurrying so we didn’t miss the sunrise. We topped a ridge, only a few-hundred feet above our camp, my wife carrying her mug, I carrying a small jar with my father inside.

We sat at the edge, Texas spreading before us as the sun basked us in warmth, the sand shimmering. We released my father. Only a fistful of his ashes were in this jar, the rest were scattered across the grass of the Texas Tech stadium, fitting for a man who glowed for sports, who found his writing and calling in the geometry of forward passes and field goals, but who, before he died, whispered to me alone that he wanted a part of him in the canyons, his ashes to mix with the remains of aoudads and coyotes, the geologic marvel that slowly carves its way into the panhandle uplift with every flash flood, veins inside the rivet punched in the earth’s skin. He wanted to be here, as do I, in some way, because when I look out at the Texas light well before it becomes harsh, before it becomes political, or reminds me of all the damage it can do, I ache with wonder because it is me, my father, our former, terrible president, something that isn’t just chaos but isn’t a god, an unknowable thing but something visceral, just as tangible as the sandstone beneath my shoe and as real as my father’s ashes that wave goodbye in the wind, the harshness and the succulence, the cactus spine in my ankle, and the crimson rock in my eye, the liminal space of memory between what I carry and what I let go.