Necklace

I went into the living room – it looked normal and comfortable. A couple of weathered sofas, a TV, a sideboard with scattered things on top and occasional chairs here and there occupied by two or three other people. I had been invited in by Jeff who asked me if I had anything to drink and urged me to get closer to the fire in the center. I gladly accepted as a freight train slowly rumbled past. A guy lying on a sofa sat up and yelled “Chicago!” and lay back down again. A woman in a dark corner that I hadn’t noticed gathered some bags together and said “See y’all” and disappeared into the darkness.

I was in Omaha, Nebraska. The place where if you stood in front of a map of the United States of America and tried to stick a pin in its geographic center you would find that within a few centimeters you had pinpointed Omaha, Nebraska. The Golden Spike would be within a thumbs breadth of your pinprick – the point where the railroad being driven west met the railroad being driven east in the mid 19th century. This turned out not to be true – but I didn’t know it at the time. The actual Golden Spike was ceremoniously driven home somewhere in Utah hundreds of miles west of Omaha. I suppose it depends on how big your thumb is, but I felt and believed that I was at the centre of the continent. If you habitually jumped freight trains, as my new companions did, you would inevitably pass through Omaha many times.

I had stumbled across this living room earlier in the day when no one was home. It was under an overpass that spanned a multitude of train tracks and open to the elements. It was laid out with furniture as if a family had left it in the morning to go to work and would return to it in the evening. There was a king-size bed, unmade, facing a huge smashed TV. The sideboard was off to one side and had a large and defunct electric lamp with a shredded shade. There was a refrigerator, minus door, standing on a sodden rug and in the center of the room the remains of a small open fire. The room’s interior corresponded to a domestic architecture delineated by the huge iron girders of the overpass that created imaginary walls and a privacy that didn’t exist. It was incongruous and beautiful. I returned late that night – and that is when Jeff invited me in.

As I settled he quizzed me as to where I had come from and I told him. In the patter of conversation I discovered that he’d been living there for three weeks but was thinking of moving on to Seattle to find his friend and that he had a sister in San Francisco who was a doctor. He told me that he had spent last winter in New York and would never do so again and that his dream was to settle in Florida where it was warm and the fruit grew on the trees. He had also been the drummer for a band that I hadn’t heard of – though I probably said it rang a bell – and then said that if I had money he would go and get us a beer. I did, so I gave it to him and he disappeared and I was left in the living room warmed by the fire and my thoughts. After about an hour, he hadn’t returned and I also wandered off.

My instinct was to displace the living room vertically upwards. Hang it thirty foot in the air under the bridge where everyone could see it. Hoist it like a flag and let the approximation of domestic normality waft in the wind. Obviously this is a problematic instinct – you can’t just take someone’s living room and move it.  Though it has to be said that it would not be without precedent – especially in Omaha, Nebraska that has a history of allowing its police force to break up the camps of the dispossessed as they pass through in search of the fruit that grows on trees.

Later in our acquaintance, as we squatted on the ground, Jeff asked me to look down and tell him what I saw. I remember looking down and being unable to say anything and I told him so. As it turned out it was the last time we met. I have no idea whether my inability to portray for him what I saw on the ground was a function of the end of our friendship or whether he had just moved on – catching the next passing freight train in search of his friend in Seattle. But to this day I regret being unable to voice what I saw – a tiny insect meandering along a blade of grass, stopping to nibble at something, and then adroitly catching another blade and meandering off.

I remained in Omaha, living and working in a studio provided by the Bemis Foundation. It was a highly energetic time and I had a lot going on in a warm and spacious studio – Omaha was unfamiliar and stimulating. While working on another idea I had dragged a mattress into the studio and shoved a curved scaffolding bar through it, head to toe, so that the mattress seemed to sit up on the studio floor. It had a presence – and when I slung it from the ceiling about 8 feet from the ground and walked underneath it became monumental and alive. I made a connection with the ‘living room’, the freight trains, the perspectives of the myriad railroad tracks, the guy who had sat up and yelled “Chicago!” and the wandering insect. A discarded mattress had sat up and moved on.

And that was the genesis of Necklace. Thirteen old mattresses strung in a line traversing, but not disturbing, the ‘living room’ and moving on.