Carlos the Crab-folder/Monologist

In April of 2001 Carlos Runcie Tanaka, a Peruvian sculptor, happened to be in Richmond’s Fan District for a few days. In case you don't already know it, Tanaka was/is a star in the international art world. Let me tell you, after watching the sculptor fold and crease pieces of paper in a local bar, I’ve got two words of advice for Tanaka -- "show business." 

Yes, I thought, and still think, he should combine the origami with his considerable talent for yarn-spinning and develop a routine to perform for an audience. Read on. 

*

Like so many tales, this one began with Happy Hour: The Baja Bean was a Fan District watering hole. It was located in the basement of what was originally a schoolhouse that looks like a stone and brick fortress. A typical crowd of mid-week regulars was assembled. 

There were some 20 of them situated around the three-sided, horseshoe-shaped bar. The group was maybe equal parts white collar, blue color and no collar. When then-chairman of Virginia Commonwealth University’s sculpture department (the late) Joe Seipel came in the room, with Carlos Tanaka at his side, twinkly-eyed Joe was smiling more broadly than usual. 

Seipel, who enjoyed telling a good story, also loved to present a cool visiting artist to his pals at Happy Hour. It was sort of a tradition left over from the Texas-Wisconsin Border Café (1982-99) -- a nearby eatery/saloon which Seipel once co-owned. Joe (who went on to become Dean of VCUarts) introduced Carlos to those of us in the room who hadn’t already met him. 

In his career Tanaka has done much traveling, owing to his acclaim as an artist. At an art confab somewhere in South America he had met and gotten to know Seipel, plus a couple of other members of the art faculty at VCU’s world renown fine arts school. Then they arranged for Carlos to come to VCU as a visiting artist/scholar. That’s how a Peruvian artist ends up in The Bean at beer-thirty.

Note: One of Tanaka’s grandfathers was British and the other was Japanese. Both men married Peruvian women. In 1996 Carlos was among the hostages taken by the Tupac Amaru in a bizarre incident in Lima, Peru, at the Japanese ambassador’s home. Nonetheless, his horrific experience as the hostage of hell-bent terrorists for 50 days apparently had done little to diminish Tanaka's sense of humor.

Eventually, someone in the bar asked him about the crab-folding thing. Bingo! Someone else promptly supplied Carlos with a blank sheet of paper. 

For the next 20 minutes the crab-folder told stories, made observations, ad-libbed and entertained everyone on hand. Nothing else was happening in the room for that spell. The product of the process was an intricate paper crab made from a single, ordinary piece of white bond paper.

Looking at the crab was fun; it almost seemed cute. For a crab. 

But watching the artist fold the paper, over and over -- each fold exactly where it had to be -- as he served up his colorful patter, was a rare treat. Then, to the utter delight of the guy who had supplied him with the sheet of paper, the crab-folder/monologist gave it to him.

Applause!

Of course, someone else had to have one, too. Then another. 

In that happy hour session Carlos folded four or five paper crabs. He never ran out of offbeat stories about drinking, playing practical jokes, making art, fools in high places, and so forth. 

Note: The upbeat Carlos Tanaka never mentioned the dark time in which he was a hostage. I found out about that later.

The next time I saw Carlos in The Bean, a couple of days later, he gave me a paper crab as a souvenir (as shown above). Soon afterward he went back to Peru. As he’d been away from his studio for months, traveling and lecturing, he said he was glad to be going home. I haven’t seen him since, but we've kept in touch, via the Internet.

Occasionally, I have seen his name associated with a big art happening in South America, the USA or Europe. Nonetheless, whenever Carlos is ready to take a break from the sculpture gig, I still say a lucrative career in show biz as a crab-folding monologist awaits.

*

OK, I’ve probably already spent way too many of my personal allotment of hours in bars. So while it’s easy to say many of those hours were wasted, every now and then something genuinely unusual has happened, out of the blue, that has prompted me to say -- “I’m glad I was there.”

If nothing else, such times have provided fodder for a story to tell at a subsequent Happy Hour. Like our ancestors who also gathered in pubs, we listen to stories and sometimes we learn something worthwhile. All so we can recount the worthiest of those stories about what seemed remarkable, or funny, or at least somewhat unusual. 

So, I've done my duty by telling this story. If you like, pass it on. 

Note: To see a gallery of Carlos Tanaka's work click here.

-- 30 --

The Head on a Pole Solution

Note: The first version of this piece was written several years ago. That was well before a certain bully began his first campaign to become president. So, this whimsical piece was not and is still not about one particular American plutocrat. 

*

OK, if I could show you, in just a couple of minutes, how to solve a good many of the most vexing problems society faces today -- without it costing the taxpayers a nickel -- wouldn't you be interested in hearing more about it?

Of course you would. Read on.

This solution calls for one public execution a year. Its purpose would be to fund cures for diseases, to fund free educations for everyone, to even prevent wars, all the while also erasing America's daunting debt problem. To accomplish all that just one person would be put to death by the federal government each year. Although I'm ordinarily opposed to capital punishment, this plan is different from anything that we've seen before. 

Here's how this exception would work: First, we would make a list of all the American billionaires (This would have to include those living in and doing business in the USA). Each of their names would be put on a ballot. 

Each American citizen, 18-or-older, would get to vote -- free of charge -- for the person they see as the absolute worst citizen-billionaire in the USA. The ballots and ballot boxes would be put in convenience stores all over the country. 

The same ballots would be available online, as would virtual ballot boxes. Maybe we should make available to citizens 16-or-older. All year long, we the people, would all be eligible to vote once a month -- 12 votes per year. 

The billionaire who gets the most votes for being the most despised billionaire of the lot would be arrested wherever he or she is hiding by the head on a pole SWAT team. Upon the last second of December 31st, America's billionaire loser of that year would be executed by guillotine, somewhat as pictured above.

Chop!

Naturally, America's cities would bid on the right to stage the execution, sort of like the Olympics. The mammoth Annual Payback Party that would surround the event would mean big budget commercials would run in the live telecasts of the whole shebang -- cha-ching! Most of that money would go directly into the Social Security trust fund. Thus, the monthly payments to retirees could be increased.

The rest of the money generated by the event could go into a special fund to buy a six-pack of beer for the holiday season -- via downloadable coupon -- for everyone who participated in the voting process in December. As the blade falls, at midnight, millions of those free beers could be opened simultaneously to celebrate our ability to solve problems using democracy. Afterward, the billionaire's head will be put on top of a tall brass pole -- the People's Payback Pole -- for all to see, where it would stay for one year. 

Then, for the next new year the next billionaire's severed head would go up in a different city. Out of respect for the old head, it would be turned over to the billionaire's family, once its required year on the pole is done. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the American billionaires would feel more than a little inspired to solve their own dilemma. Accordingly, they would have a couple of easy-to-understand choices to prevent their own head from being picked to be on display next.

• Turn enough money over to the federal government or legit non-profits, to simply escape the list of eligible billionaires. The money given to the government could go toward building a fast-train national railway system.

• If they choose to remain a billionaire, then they need to use their money to do lots of good works to curry favor with voters. 

So, if you are a billionaire, let’s say you’ve got a cool $50 billion. Then you could choose to give away $49.1 billion to get off the hook. Or, you could take a chance on targeting a few billion to curing cancer. Or, you could throw money at feeding orphans, or on bringing peace to the Mideast. Maybe you’d pick all the musicians in a state and pay their rent for one whole year.

Smart billionaires would naturally buy lots of ads in magazines and newspapers, to tout what good deeds they’re doing, in order to increase their chances of keeping their own heads attached to their respective bodies. So, this deal could save our favorite inky wretches from extinction, too.

Accordingly, crime rates would plunge. The research for new green-friendly technologies would be fully funded. Better recreational drugs with no hangovers ought to be developed. Every kid who wants a new puppy would get one. And, last but not least, publishers would have plenty of money to pay freelance writers and artists decent fees for their work.

To sum up: Each old year would end with the execution of just one person selected fairly as the most deserving of a final chop. So, each new year would start out with a visible symbol atop that People's Payback Pole, showing everyone -- including billionaires -- why we should all strive to be good to one another. 

-- 30 --

Drake the Flake

On Nov. 8, 1992, the revenge-driven crime spree ended when the man I remembered as Drake the Flake blew out his brains with a .32 caliber revolver. In the 11 hours before taking his own life Lynwood C. "Woody" Drake III had shot and killed six people, wounded a seventh and beaten his former landlady with a blackjack.

It had been over 20 years since I last saw him in 1972. It was in the lobby of the movie theater I then managed, the Biograph Theatre. Still, when I saw the AP photo of him in the Richmond Times-Dispatch 33 years ago (in 1992), Drake was instantly recognizable.
 
More about Woody Drake later, but it should come as no surprise to most film buffs that sometimes there is a dark side to the business of doing business after the sun goes down. Some regulars saw the Biograph (1972-87) as a movie-themed clubhouse. Then again, movie theaters attract all sorts of people who are pretty much hiding from reality. 

*

Although nearly everyone who worked at the Biograph during my almost-12-year-stint as its manager was on the up-and-up, there were a couple of rotten apples. As I hired both of them, I have to take the blame there. But those are stories for another time. 

Some of my favorite people worked at that cinema in those days, but mostly at night. Then there were the customers. Plenty of them were fine, but this piece isn't about them. It's about troubled times. 

One man died in the Biograph. His last minutes among the living were spent watching "FIST" (1978), starring Sylvester Stallone. The man died in an aisle seat in the small auditorium -- Theatre No. 2.

Yes, the movie was bad, but was it really THAT bad?

At the time I was 30 years old. The dead man was about my age. His eyes were open. As the rescue squad guys shot jolts of electricity into his heart, his body flopped around on the floor like a fish out of water. Meanwhile, down in Theater No. 1 "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was on the screen delighting its usual crowd of costumed screwballs. The juxtaposition of the two contrasting scenes was surreal.

There was the night someone fired five shots of high-powered ammo through one of the back door exits into Theatre No. 1. Five bullets came through the door's two quarter-inch steel plates to splinter seats. This all happened just as the crowd was exiting the auditorium, at about 11:30 p.m. 

No one was hit and it seemed no one even caught on to what was happening. Later the police were baffled, leaving us to speculate as to why it happened.

Another night, a rat died in the Coca-Cola drain and clogged it up. Not knowing about the rat, and thinking I knew what to do to clear the clogged drain, I poured a powerful drain-clearing liquid -- we called it "Tampax Dynamite" -- directly into the problem.

Soon a foul-smelling liquid started bubbling and backing up all over the lobby's carpet. A flooding mess ensued. The disaster ran everybody out of there on a busy Saturday night. We had to replace the carpet. Oops.

*

Back to Drake: The 1992 news stories reported that Drake, who fancied himself as an actor, had compiled a long list of people he intended to pay back, someday. Drake wore theatrical grease paint on his face when he committed his murders. As the cops were closing in on him Drake punched his own ticket to hell.

From what I found out, Drake's childhood was straight out of a horror movie. Apparently he was always a problem to those around him. The photo above -- it was a publicity shot he used to apply for work as an actor -- ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on November 16, 1992. What follows are excerpts of a piece I wrote for SLANT a couple of weeks later.

...The November 16th edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch carried Mark Holmberg's sad and sensational story of Woody Drake. As usual, Holmberg did a good job with a bizarre subject. In case you missed the news: 

Lynwood Drake, who grew up in Richmond, murdered six people in California on November 8. Then he turned the gun on himself. His tortured suicide note cited revenge as the motive.

An especially troubling aspect of Holmberg's account was that those Richmonders who remembered the 43 year old Drake weren't at all surprised at the startling news. Nor was I. My memory of the man goes back to the early days of the Biograph Theatre (1972). At the time I managed the West Grace Street cinema. So the unpleasant task of dealing with Drake fell to me.

Owing to his talent for nuisance, the staff dubbed him 'Drake the Flake.' Although he resembled many of the hippie-style hustlers of the times, it was his ineptness at putting over the scam that set him apart. Every time he darkened our door there was trouble. If he didn't try to beat us out of the price of admission or popcorn, there would be a problem in the auditorium. And without fail, his ruse would be transparent. Then, when confronted, he'd go into a fit of denial that implied a threat.

Eventually that led to the incident in Shafer Court (on VCU's campus) when he choked a female student [Susan Kuney] who worked at the Biograph. That evening he showed up at the theater to see the movie, just like nothing had happened. Shoving his way past those already in line, the cashier-choker demanded to be admitted next. I told him he couldn't come in at all. 

An argument ensued that became the last straw. Drake the Flake was physically removed from the building, tossed onto Grace Street, and banned from the Biograph.

The next day, Drake made his final appearance at the Biograph. He bolted in through the lobby's exit doors and issued a finger-pointing death threat to yours truly.

Although I tried to act unruffled by the incident, it made me more than a little uncomfortable. In spite of the anger of his words, there was an emptiness in his eyes. In that moment he had pulled me into his world. It was scary and memorable.

Using a fine turn of phrase, Holmberg suggested that, "Whatever poisoned the heart of Woody Drake happened in Richmond..."

If you want more evidence of the childhood poisoning, take the time to look him up in his high school yearbooks (Thomas Jefferson 1967/68). I did, and right away I noticed that same empty expression in his eyes.

Looking at a couple of Drake’s old TJ yearbook photos reminded me of a line in the movie 'Silence of the Lambs.' In reference to the serial-killer who was being sought by the FBI throughout the film, Dr. Lechter (a psychiatrist turned murderer himself) tells an investigator that such a man is not born; he is created.

A process made Drake like he was. So while we can avert our eyes from the painful truth, we basically know where the poison is administered to the Woody Drakes of the world.

Yes, we do. The assembly line for such monsters runs through their childhood homes. 

The story went that Drake liked to beat up women. After I literally threw him out of the Biograph and he disappeared, 53 years ago, several people came in and told us stories about various females the future serial killer had hurt.

Shortly before Drake ended his wretched life, he woke up a 60-year-old woman by smacking her in the head with a blackjack. She scrambled to hide under her bed, and she lived to tell the story.

-- 30 --