Back in early 2017 I had Vistaprint make 50 copies of a 1950s Diego Rivera painting, Glorious Victory. Like a mural, though painted on a vast long canvas that is usually rolled up. Like a political cartoon, though too colorful and heavyhanded in the Rivera way to be haha-funny: about as subtle and ironical as Picasso’s Guernica. It’s a commentary on the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, which led to the tragic and humiliating exile of Jacobo Arbenz and his highly cultured family. They were not Communists, not quite, but wokey and Left-leaning and easily manipulated by the Reds, and there were indeed Reds in the Arbenz government. The Eisenhower government, with the Dulles brothers leading the way, organized a bloodless coup, which should have been a happy ending, but wasn’t. Guatemala was in thrall to a succession of unstable dictatorships forever after, pretty much.
Two or three years ago I was looking around for the remaining stack of prints. I’d kept most of them, I thought, and certainly didn’t recall throwing them away. Vaguely I thought they were in the black file cabinet, probably at the bottom of the top drawer. I cleaned out that cabinet a year ago and moved the contents elsewhere. Glorious Victory was nowhere to be found. Vaguely I recalled having taken out a print in 2018, with an eye to enclosing it with a letter to Brian P. Burns, who at that point was again speaking to Moki and had begun to pay our rent in quarterly checks. (I had paid the rent for most of the preceding year. Prior to that, Moki’s brother Johnny was paying, but Johnny died in March 2017.) We were being extra-friendly and obsequious to Britain. He sent us books by friends of his, Bill van den Heuvel and Barbara Amiel, copies of his overproduced volumes on his collection of Irish Art (world’s largest private collection; he sold half at Sotheby’s the year before he died), and a framed blow-up photograph of himself with Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-A -Lago around 2016 or 2017. We sent him the oil portrait of his father, which had been decorating our hallway since Michael took it out of storage, and fawning book reviews and letters from me.
In the end I didn’t send a copy of the Rivera painting. It made no sense in the context, and was an odd size. I enclosed my letter with a large, more conventionally shaped greeting card, probably one of those promotional ones fro Departures or Travel + Leisure that I’d rescued from the trash at American Express Publishing.
Reflecting on all that a few days ago, I thought maybe I’d put the stack of prints (about 10″ x 5″, on heavy card stock) in one of the shoeboxes where I saved interesting postcards and some greeting cards and small museum prints that I might use for correspondence. My eye went first to the sturdy black Jil Sander box on the living room floor. I hadn’t looked inside this for literally years, though I’d moved the box around. And there at the bottom, underneath my postcards of the Hayes Well Spring, pictures of Willie Rushton, and assorted greeting cards and 19th century stereoscope views, was the stack of Glorious Victory.
[ERRATUM: The prints and cards were not n the Jil Sander box but in the Powerhouse Museum box. 3 June 2025.]
Another find in the box was something that was mysteriously new to me. In a wax paper envelope there was a carte-de-visite of Lord Palmerston, circa 1862. I don’t recall acquiring this, but I probably bought it impulsively from eBay, about 2012.
I put a bid on two ArtPens on eBay, but lost the bid the other day (Sunday). Good for me. I could not afford the $30 or so, and they merely duplicate the two nib sizes I have.
One outstanding item remains missing: the toenail clippers I bought for Moki in 2022, and used once.
The past two weeks have been very cold in the morning, temperatures in the 40s and 50s with occasional winds. It feels more like March than May. Yesterday I went off to Brooklyn for my “training” at Anchor Health, and wore the quilted black Barbour. I expected a 45-minute journey, but ended up spending over two hours. Not only was it a holiday (Memorial Day), there were extraneous delays on the J and M lines that kept me waiting at the Essex-Delancey station for 45 minutes before giving up, going back uptown to 14th Street, and taking the L to Metropolitan-Lorimer. Then a 20-minute walk south and east to 46 Cook Street. I intended to get there at 9am, arrived after 10. Doing reconnaissance beforehand, I saw there was no straightforward way of getting there. I could take the BMT to Canal, then the J to the Lorimer stop, which was a few short blocks away. Or I could take the F to 14th St. and then the L, but suffer a long a long walk. In the end I did a third option, F to Essex-Delancey, which didn’t work at all.
In the end it didn’t matter, Most of the dozen other attendees were already in place, having filled out their forms on iPads propped up on rubberized easels around our trestle tables. Half were nogs or deminogs, the rest orientals or whites. Some real prole ladies from Staten Island, and a fat but pleasant-looking Russian lady. We gave our IDs and SS cards (or numbers), filled out applications on the iPads, then did a dozen multiple-choice modules with questions about how to deal with difficult patients, and what to do in an emergency (usually: call 911, a doctor, or the RN). Pizza at noon, and meetings with a nurse in a hijab in a tiny room around the corner. She took blood pressure (mine was 128 over 83, not as bad as I’d feared) and drew a vial of blood, asked a few questions. In the afternoon we went downstairs and were shown how to give a bedpan to a dummy, how to wash him, how to get him into a wheelchair.
Two nurses demonstrating this, sister, of an ancestry I could not fathom. Bird-like and diminutive, seemingly oriental but not identifiable. Possibly some of those Filipinas with a lot of Malay in them.
A lot bearded Hasidic Jews, it seems, around there. Do Hasids run the place? I doubt that. Will have to look into it.
Most of the student-carers will probably be assigned to strangers, probably working 35-40 hours a week. Or more. Somebody upstairs had been talking about overtime. A nig girl said you should never book more than 27 hours of overtime because you wouldn’t get any more money, thanks to taxes. That would be 67 hours in a week. I can’t imagine how one would do that, unless one were a young resident. I’m not expecting more than 25-30 hours per week, and that would be entirely with Grimm, who proposed this terrible job to me. I must contact him and let him know it’s gone smoothly so far. It will be a few days before I pass background (criminal) check and get set up on the system.
Scrubs? Yes, Anchor does provide scrubs, if yu want ’em. Those I think would be mostly useful if you’re accompanying someone to the ER or operating room. I foresee mainly taking walks and making him see doctors and dentists.
Some photos on my way back up Lorimer and Union Streets, in south Williamsburg:
