THE GEE-O

“These black-and-white pictures were another thing he worked on with his endless blaze of creative energy.”

When I was around 17, my former stepfather told me that in order to become a writer, you needed to leave your hometown. This was a man who grew up on a tiny ranch in Wyoming and made his way, eventually, to New York City, via St. Louis and Chicago. I immediately knew he was right. He was right about most things, even though his wisdom and enviable writing skills were not enough to keep him from dying of alcoholism at the age of 59. 

He was, in fact, one of my favorite writers. You’ve never read him; his screenplays were never produced, though one floated around Hollywood for a time. If you ever received a letter from him, however, you’d remember: the hilarious stories, the impossible characters he invented. He was aware of the brilliance of his letters and kept a copy of every one, in a filing cabinet that was one of the first things I thought of when I found out about his death; they were probably the first things to go when his apartment was emptied out. My mother and he had been separated over ten years by then; I’m not even sure who did the emptying.

The feelings I have for my former stepfather are complicated. Just as he prescribed, I did eventually leave my hometown and become a writer. And because of him I learned that brilliant people can be miserable, that miserable people can be brilliant, and that you can live your entire life with enormous talent and few actual accomplishments. His own father had died of alcoholism, and not even an escape from his hometown could keep this from following him, and ruining him. The longest job he held—the last one, the one for which he was ridiculously overqualified—was editing classified ads for a well-known magazine. 

One way I like to remember him is a scene in a 1977 episode of Kojak in which he played a character called “Banjo-eyed” Benny Parsons. He is young and skinny, wearing a long wool coat and bellbottoms, washing his hands in a public restroom when a guy comes in to talk to him and ends up grabbing him by the lapels and slamming him into a wall. How vibrant and alive he was, how his dark eyes shined with mischief! I watched the scene dozens of times after he died. It was on YouTube, but dubbed in German, which made it more poignant for me. I didn’t need to hear his voice to hear his voice. Eventually it was taken down.

And then there’s this piece of art, which he gave me a few years before he died. These black-and-white pictures were another thing he worked on with his endless blaze of creative energy. He called them Gee-os, as in geometric figures, and he made them by slicing shapes with an Exacto knife out of sticky black paper and pasting them onto white cardstock. This was the basic Gee-o, the original, but there were dozens more, some rather large and detailed and funny, many personalized for the recipient. He once had a bunch made into greeting cards, but I don’t think many sold. 

I like to think about the Gee-os that made it out into the world, that are hanging framed in people’s living rooms, as mine is, the art that reminds us how hard he worked creatively, having come so far from his hometown and never ending up quite where he wanted to be.

—Reyna Eisenstark

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Reyna Eisenstark is a writer and editor living in upstate New York.