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Full Circle with Artis the Spoonman on Route #22

The night before last I ran intoArtis the Spoonman.  It's our second conversation and so I've picked up some of his recent history.  His daughter died a year and a half ago at thirty-four from a rare flesh eating virus from getting her weekly nails done.  She left four children.  His sobriety left. He's got hep C, cirrhosis of the liver, and after a heart attack he got a MRI and found out his brain was shrinking. 

He says, "I'm still famous around the world but that says nothing of my local popularity.  People don't show up to my gigs. I do very well in Sweden.  In Tokyo with Shoe Horn we were a smash. Here, I'm impoverished.  No one knows I disappear into a bottle every night."

'Well, what do you do to get up then?'

'I take 222's, the Canadian codeine, caffeine and aspirin.  Then I go downtown to the Market and manage the Buskers Foundation and maybe play a little.'

I am driving the #22 bus across the West Seattle Bridge, Artis stands by my side.  Here I am with the Spoonman.  The full moon breaks through wispy winter clouds as we crest the bridge and I say, 'Here's the moment, my moment with you and the full fledged moon."

We chatted like that over the bridge and on up First Avenue. His friend Patrick got on at First and Lander so they went to the back of the bus and talked. The bus filled with Starbucks employees.  Everyone looked good, healthy and strong.  Artis handed me his business card as he left, 'Here, sweetheart, keep in touch.'

Later that night I was heading back downtown from Ballard and picked up Artis again.

"I knew I'd get you on the way back! I knew I'd get you again!"  He handed me a promotional CD, or rather dropped it on the floor at my feet, then he apologized and tossed it over the steering wheel where it landed on the other side of my feet on the floor.

"The wine, I've had too much wine. I apologize for that.'

I'm driving the bus perfectly, codependently, accommodating his condition.

'Here I want you to have this too." And he handed me a video.  "I really didn't want to seem so flippant earlier.  I'm sorry for that. Your face. You're a face I remember.  I know that sounds awful but I do remember you."

"Yeah', I said, 'I remember you coming into town one time, maybe 1976, with a pretty blond girl dressed head to toe in buckskin clothes. I knew then I'd only be a face.  But I always stopped to see you perform and I always waited to catch your eye and let you know I was there.  I was always amazed and enchanted that you'd found even more you could do with two spoons.  You always brought something more to your act. Took it to another level. I was never disappointed."

Artis says, 'I really don't remember the buckskin girl." 

He later informs me the girl was a very sensitive soul who had been gang raped the year before and he spent one night with her as her first lover since the rape. So sad.  But she was as pretty as a delicate moth caught by the warm glow of the Spoonman performing beneath the clock at the Public Market.

I say, "Then one time we were both sitting in a stone shop across from the crumpet place and you had just got back from some trip to the ocean, or some gathering, and you had found a wormwood stick.  You sat there and spoke of this stick like it was a very significant find."

"Yes, it was and I still have the stick out in the Bus. I remember that."

The whole trip into town Artis is standing lecherously close to me but I don't say anything. I'm two steps off the ground floor so it is as if we're both standing close, hip to hip, him facing me while I drive a sixty foot coach, talking together.  The three Mexicans are about to flip with their gestures towards Artis who has no idea that they've been trying to shoo him off and away from me all the way into town.  To them Artis is a derelict, and from what Artis says that's what people think of him.  I'll have to contend with that next week as they are my regular paying customers.

As for the video; it is very well done and has footage of Artis over the last thirty years and it is the best gift a buskers groupie could ever hope for.   That was my life in the seventies and early eighties: hanging out at the Public Market making eyes at musicians and buying produce and books on herbs from Tensing Momo.  I longed to go with them, travel the road, sit in their company and maybe learn to sing and play guitar.  But I chose safety, I chose to stay near the big city, to keep my job, get educated and now drive a bus.  Full circle?  I didn't take the needle, go hungry or cold, yet I did cross a bridge on a full moon night with the Spoonman right beside me.

November 24, 2005

Subscribe to TravelBlogs Posted by Kim Cramblet on November 24th, 2005 in Articles.