October told me she’d worked at Ribble for over a year before Phil knew she was anything other than one of his designers. But she’d invited him to her first Living Exhibit, VooDo, and he was so taken by her that he pledged to fund and promote her Living Exhibits for as long as she continued designing his Ribble scribbles.
“Basically, I’m a Ribble scribble whore,” she sighed.
For VooDo, October had rented a small gallery in the Tenderloin. She wrapped her body in thick felt, crudely stitched it together at the beginning of the performance, and then stood on a pedestal while gallery visitors were invited to stab her arms and legs with extra-long, colored-ball pins she’d made especially for the exhibit.
“A human voodoo doll,” she explained, as if that needed explaining.
The video footage she showed me was hard to watch. But what shocked me more than the performance itself was the way people reacted to it. I had assumed the visitors would be gentle with the pins or refrain from using them at all. Quite the reverse, they were overly aggressive, laughing and looking at one another as they stabbed October’s limbs. She was a bloody mess by the end, and still has a few pinprick scars on her arms to show for it.
“Most people didn’t understand,” she said. “The audience seemed to think it was a game, some kind of S&M nonsense. They missed the point.”
I didn’t miss the point. As someone who has tried myriad ways to diminish and avert his own pain, I felt like I understood on an intuitive level what October had been attempting to do. It seemed similar to the reason I had liked working in construction. The physical struggle distracted from the emotional one.
The Living Exhibit I’d been hired to work on, 365 Selfies, was October’s fourth in the series, and despite its timely nature, she claimed it was, deep down, a tribute to one of her favorite artists, Frida Kahlo.
“Frida was the original selfie queen,” October explained to me during my first day on the job. She pulled down one of the big art books from her shelf and showed me dozens of Frida’s paintings, stopping to make sure I got a good look at each image. “Her portraits tell stories, see? Sometimes they tell true stories and sometimes they tell fictional stories. She shows us her dreams and her nightmares. Her joys and her sorrows. Her birth, her life, and her death. That’s what I’m trying to do with 365 Selfies, only I’m using video and photography instead of paint and canvas.”
We typically filmed two to four days a week, depending on how involved her ideas were. Once a clip was edited, I cataloged it and uploaded it to the website. However, the website wouldn’t go live until an entire year’s worth of clips were ready, at which point October would post one selfie a day for 365 days; then they would live on the internet in perpetuity.
Some of the clips were simple: October would tell a story, share a dream, or talk about an experience she’d had. But often the selfies were weirder, like the time she dressed up in a giant pink bunny costume and tried to hitchhike on US 101 in the rain, screaming the word “flux” at passing cars. Or the time she dug a grave in her backyard, had me film her in the grave, and then had me film her covering the grave with dirt and flowers so that once it was cut together it looked like she was burying her own body. Occasionally she would say one word and tell me we were done for the day. Once she sat and stared into the camera for three hours without saying anything at all. One day she washed the dog. One day she shaved her legs with a straight razor. One day she had a phlebotomist come to the studio and take blood from her arm, and then she painted a self-portrait with the blood. Another day she spent twenty minutes making and eating a piece of toast, and trust me when I say it was the most compelling video of toast making and eating you could ever imagine.
I never knew what I was going to get with her, and in spite of how strange it sometimes seemed, I looked forward to going to work.
The shoots rarely took up more than a few hours, but October had numerous projects going on at once, including the Ribble cartoons, and the remainder of my time was spent helping her with whatever else she had coming up, plus more routine things like building and prepping canvases, mixing paint, running art-related errands, updating her website, sending out newsletters about upcoming exhibits and events to her mailing list, and researching other topics she wanted to explore in her work.
For the first time in a long time, I was doing something inspiring. But beyond completing my tasks to the best of my ability, I stayed out of October’s way and didn’t interact with her outside of work. I figured that was the way she wanted it. She was pretty reclusive. Not shy, per se. One-on-one in the studio, we talked often as we worked, and I found her to be open and warm. But out in the world she was easily overwhelmed. For example, we went to Hog Island to film a clip of her shucking oysters for a selfie she’d had all planned out, but it was absurdly crowded when we got there, filled with tourists, and she wouldn’t even get out of the car. She just turned around and drove us home.
Like Rae had explained to me early on, October needed a lot of space. Occasionally we would film a selfie and afterward she would shut herself in her little office for a while, or she’d wander off with Diego for a hike, and they’d be gone for hours. Sometimes she would show up in the morning, give me my tasks, and ask if we could work in silence. Then she’d put on some music, and we wouldn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the day.
None of that bothered me. The way I saw it, October put so much of herself into her work that she found it necessary to withdraw in order to come back recharged the next day. And being around more than a few people at a time made her uneasy. She had friends and associates who would stop at the house now and then, particularly Mr. P. and his husband, Thomas. They usually brought food and wine, or they would take October out for dinner. And she went to yoga class a few nights a week. But that was the extent of her social life that I could see, and Diego and Rae seemed to be her most trusted companions.
My first month at Casa Diez went by pretty routinely. I went to work and left work and minded my own business in the meantime. During my off hours I hiked and hung out at Equator Coffee, the little cafe in the town square.
That all changed one Friday morning when I showed up at the studio and noticed October seemed anxious. I assumed I’d done something to upset her, but before I could ask her what was up, she said, “I need to get out of here. I’ll see you Monday.”
She left the studio and then, not long after that, the property.
I spent the next few hours finally cleaning the skylights and then walked down to town for a beer.
When I returned home later that evening, I found a note taped to my front door, written in what looked like an architect’s handwriting. It said:
Joe,
There’s something I need to tell you. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since we met, and I don’t know what to do about it. Please text me when you get this so we can talk.