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I havent seen anyone else asked this.
These queries were specific to me and my wife, Roberta Smith, also an art critic.
Weve made no secret of her battling cancer since 2014.
But people asked us about food and coffee for reasons other than these.
Namely, that anyone who has ever heard about how we eat and drink thinks we are insane.
I put them in the fridge.
I drink two a day, which I tell myself equals one big cup of coffee.
Foodies and the art world are aghast when I post myself drinking these.
Neither of us really cooks.
Roberta can but doesnt; I cant but do, in a manner of speaking.
We rarely go out to eat.
It takes too much time.
Honestly, being in public at all in those flaky states always seems hair-raising to me.
I havent gone to more than five sit-down art-world dinners in ten years.
and scraping over each others wrong ideas about shows.
We dont do takeout either.
It just seems like an invitation to overeat, which is something I worry about constantly.
I did this once in 1986, a month after Roberta and I met.
I wanted to show her how cool I looked with a butt in my mouth.
Do I sound like someone with food or possible substance-abuse issues?
But Ive white-knuckled it this far.
Premade pieces of non-breaded skinless chicken with a teriyaki-ish sauce.
The chicken is stored in the fridge in Tupperware containers.
We microwave one for lunch, one for dinner.
Ditto bags of greens.
I boil potatoes and steam Brussels sprouts or broccoli.
For breakfast, its scrambled eggs and toast.
I am a hunter-gatherer-microwaver providing for my wife, who is my eyes and mind.
We got these lives and learned how to make them talk.
We adapt to our environment with our shortcomings and survive.
At least, thats how I see it.
But I know that with food, as with everything else, I have acquired only partial self-knowledge.
At different times, I think of myself as a glutton and an ascetic.
(Bernie Madoff, actually, got dressed the same way.)
For me, that thing is looking at art and writing about it.
Everything else feels like a wind blowing dead leaves away.
I made that place for myself in it by being a puritan with an insane appetite for art.
I no longer know which is the pathology and which is the coping mechanism.
Except for my closest friends, it will shock most to know that I am unimaginably bashful.
Going out in public in anything but a crowd costs me emotionally.
Sometimes I get antsy for days before a nothing event.
I never pick up the phone when it rings.
As soon as quarantine began, I started to dread someday having to go back into the world.
This exile has been one of heaven for me a version of life that Ive dreamed of many times.
Many say my coffee and food ritual is disgusting.
Roberta says, Pleasure is an important form of knowledge.
And yet, by almost anyones standards but our own, we live almost at war against pleasure.
But were happy with what weve made together.
Could we have more pleasure?
But not more time.
Yes, its probably harder to eat in a pandemic when you cant cook.
But we dont feel deprived eating food stored in Tupperware.
So to all of you asking, we are eating fine, thank you very much!
So far, Ive dodgedthe big question of why I eat the way I do.
Its not all speed, efficiency, and deadlines.
I was raised by animals.
Or to eat like one.
I grew up in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago.
My life was fine.
You squeezed it, and it sewed and reattached buttons, mended seams, and the like.
There were self-closing venetian blinds, an envelope licker, and others that never panned out.
During the day, he and his four brothers owned a womans lingerie company in Chicago called American Maid.
It was an American Dream to me.
There were brand-new homes and construction sites everywhere.
I played baseball, ran around, played kick the can, rode my bike, and was happy.
There was no art in my life whatsoever.
I remember an art-history book where when my parents werent home Id search for nudes.
That was art to me.
I once masturbated to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingress 1862The Turkish Bath.I loved my life.
Then the bottom fell out.
I loved looking out the window as we drove.
I had never been to a museum before.
Bored, I started looking back and forth at a colorful little diptych.
The light in it was intense; the colors were like coral-reef fish.
Then it hit me: This painting was telling a story.
I looked around and realized everything here was.
I thought I could hear all these stories if I looked close enough.
My mind was blown.
A month later, my mother committed suicide.
The next day, my two brothers and I were dropped off at our house after Sunday school.
On the way in, I saw lots of cars parked outside our house.
That was strange; they werent there when we left.
We walked into our rec room through the built-in garage, where I passed my mothers blue car.
My father was waiting just inside the door.
He had never done this before.
He sat us down in front of him on the ersatz modernist couch.
He asked us how Sunday school was.
Then he said, Your mother has gone to live with the angels.
To me, the angels were a Los Angeles baseball team.
I asked, When is she coming back?
He said, Shes not coming back.
I asked, What will we do with her car?
He looked at me like there was something wrong with me.
I made my way upstairs to my bedroom.
I looked down from the third-floor landing and saw lots of old strangers in my living room.
When they looked up at me, they all went silent.
Like I was different.
From that day forward, my mother was never mentioned again for the rest of my fathers life.
There was no funeral, no memorial service, no nothing.
I went to school the next day.
How did she die?
There was no injury, but I always wondered what happened in that moment.
The woman was shocked that Id never been told.
She told me that my mother jumped out of a third-story window.
That she thought she had female problems.
She might have been in a hospital.
That phrase and the word relapse have haunted me ever since.
Thats still all I really know.
That and the date: November 11, 1961.
The date mattered, not the event.
My life changed and didnt change at all.Why dont I feel anything?,I wondered.I cant cry.
Why should I cry?
Nothing has happened.If nothing happened, why did everyone treat me differently?
My friends treated me differently, but I couldnt say how; some stopped seeing me.
No one was asking me to play baseball anymore.
The girls in school fell silent around me.
Were these female problems?
Something else was happening, though: I grew invisible antennae to tell myself what I was picking up.
I was never sad about any of this.
I decided that I had no emotions.
I developed a protective grandiose mantra Id chant to myself: I am death.
It meant I was separate now, of another excluded order.
Like I said, a delusional doormat who picked up modulations in the subatomic psychic field around me.
Like many who live through trauma, all this was my normal, my story.
Having an older brother was bad; being a twin was worse.
Roberta always says, laughing, Who said anything aboutfair?, and my resentment melts.
No longer on my home turf, civil war broke out in my life.
My stepmother was a working-class Polish Catholic from Chicagos South Side.
My new brothers were what used to be called greasers: tough guys who picked fights, small-time troublemakers.
(All of this was a secret we were never to tell anyone.)
I had never done anything like this before.
We crawled out of our second-story window and lowered ourselves to the ground.
It was dark, thrilling, and quiet.
He had tools, and we went around our silent suburb in the darkness dismantling street signs.
After a couple of hours, we crawled back up the building and went to bed.
He brought a sign home and stored it under his mattress.
The next morning, my father walked past our room and saw the sign sticking out from Pauls mattress.
He asked, Where did that come from?
And then a new paradigm formed.
After a silence, Paul said, I dont know, and stared at my father.
I stared at Paul staring.
He turned and left.
This wasnt in the Jewish-suburban playbook, but thats the way it was from then on.
I was on the other side of the law, living in two different houses under one roof.
Enemies: parents versus children; children versus parents; brother versus brother.
It was survival of the meanest.
My life jumped the track.
I never did another piece of homework in my life.
I graduated at the bottom of my very large high-school class.
I developed chronic impetigo that made me scratch my scalp and forearms raw till they oozed clear liquid.
I never saw a doctor for it.
My stepmother said, What a neurotic.
Violence happened in that house, a lot.
He hadnt poured our Pepsi in the right way.
My heart broke hearing this.
I had no memory of it at all.
I never knew I was being cruel too.
That persecuted fury was the fuel of my inner locomotive.
A two-foot leather strap hung on the refrigerator door.
It was used for strapping us.
My heart grew cold, I turned mean.
Every time I look in the mirror, I see the ancient affront.
It was like some other god made these grand private palaces that were foyers of something enormous for me.
My high school was one of these.
Meanwhile, I think I hated all men.
There was no learning in my house.
Not even talk of it.
Anything you knew you picked up on your own.
This included cooking which meant no cooking.
I never had a meal with my parents.
My parents had a separate entrance, a different dining and living room.
We were never permitted to use the front door of my home.
This suited us fine.
We hated them; they hated us.
I have no memory of any hot cooked meals in our home.
Cooking wasnt something you did.
There was only eating.
Our refrigerator was stocked with Oscar Mayer bologna, corned beef, tongue, salami, and roast beef.
There was mayonnaise, ketchup, peanut butter, and other things I dont remember.
We had a large shiny bread basket filled with Wonder Bread.
This was home base for me.
The pantry had cereal, cookies, and crackers.
I pretended I was a carp snipping and snapping at the ball till it was gone.
It was placed in the fridge, and we heated it up anytime we wished.
We never went out to dinner as a family.
We all had do not disturb signs on our doors.
So did my parents.
I stopped eating regular meals and only drank Coca-Cola.
Or Id buy boxes of Wheat Thins and eat them by the baseball diamond near our house.
None of this seemed strange to me.
(Im still addicted to Wheat Thins.)
I won at track and field as girls watched.
I believe now that my growth was stunted in those years.
Recently, I realized that I am short I never grew an inch after ninth grade.
By the time I was a senior, I weighed over 200 pounds.
I worked at an ice-cream store and ate vats of vanilla ice cream.
It never occurred to me that this and all the rest had anything to do with my weight.
I never saw myself as fat.
I was called husky and told myself it was because our high-school football team was called the Huskies.
After that, I never had any real fights or a falling out with my parents.
We all pretended everything was great.
We acted that way for the rest of their lives.
It struck me as normal that I would go many years without seeing them.
I dont think I ever saw my stepbrothers more than a handful of times after that night.
None of that part of my life had happened as far as I was concerned.
A couple of years back, I Googled my stepbrothers after not thinking about them for decades.
From what I could gather, at least one of them is dead.
He didnt graduate with the rest of the class.
I guess I won that battle.
I got a job in a paper-and-drafting-supply factory and worked as a doorman.
I lost 70 pounds.
I was free of everything that had happened in the past.
All of that was forever behind me, dead.
In high school,I had noticed that the people having sex were either in theater or art.
When I was 19, I chose art.
It never helped me with sex, but I felt like a freedom machine.
The next ten years were the best years of my life up to that point.
I never shopped for or cooked food.
Looking back, I dont think I knew where the grocery store was.
Then, my long-silenced subterranean demons rose up and spoke to me all at once.
I started having panic attacks.
The first one was over breakfast, coffee, and cigarettes with friends at the corner diner.
These attacks made me afraid to be with anyone.
Or go into public, or at least too far from home.
I became all but cut off.
As for eating, I had no kitchen, only a hot plate.
I stopped going out to eat with friends.
All my meals came from fast-food places and takeout any place I could get into and out of quickly.
It was a battle to get this done.
I did it three times a day.
All the rest of the time was spent trying to calm myself down.
I took my pulse obsessively, counting my heartbeats.
It was then that I stopped making art.
Every second since then Ive felt its absence.
I actually never had a drivers license before that.
My parents just said, Go take the test.
You need a license to work.
In my house, of course, failing the test didnt mean not driving.
I owned cars, drove them everywhere, without a license or insurance.
I only knew forward and reverse.
I drove the whole time in first gear.
My girlfriend and I got out and hitchhiked to Communist Warsaw.
I mention this because it connects, I think, to cooking.
No one ever showed me about how to use a stick shift or told me about changing engine oil.
Since I didnt know how to learn, I didnt know how or what to ask.
Driving a truck was a romantic dream of mine.
Only none of that ever happened, so I never got to tell a single story.
Maybe some bags of chips or Fritos.
The chicken was on my night table and got me going in the morning.
But I couldnt meet anyone.
Anything I said to anyone produced almost no reply, just looks.
I sat in booths reading the only thing I ever read on the road, my atlas.
Turns out maps are one of the systems I love getting lost in too.
I can still tell you the distance between almost any two cities on the East Coast.
A young woman was standing about 20 feet to my left.
After a minute or two, she looked over at me and asked for a cigarette.
I walked over, and she said, You want a date.
All the blood left my face and my penis, probably.
I ran back into my room!
And I blew it!
But the lords of trucking knew what I was made of.
I never met, spoke to, or slept with a woman in the entire time I drove trucks.
Boy, though, could I drive!
Six hundred miles or more at a clip.
Back then, I couldnt go much over 65 mph.
I dont want to give the wrong impression about what I was carrying.
I wasnt delivering steel, meat, or plywood.
I wasnt driving an 18-wheeler, either.
Im Jewish; I delivered art and drove a ten-wheeler.
My CB handle was the Jewish Cowboy.
Id get on the CB and say Shalom, partner and make a run at make conversation.
They had me marked as much as the women I saw in the bars.
No one ever responded on the CB.
Mostly they talked about cops and spewed racist shit.
I felt like I was listening in on my stepmother and brothers again.
Did I see America?
Not really, unless you count either side of all the interstates in the Lower 48.
I was pretty switched off.
I had no curiosity.
It didnt occur to me.
Except once, in Arizona: I drove about an hour north of the highway to the Grand Canyon.
I parked the truck and walked to the canyon ledge.
I thought,Cool.People didnt carry cameras back then.
I got back in the truck and on the road.
Another time, in Miami, I threw out my back lifting crates of Carl Andre steel plates.
I didnt secure the art; a lot got banged up.
If someone asked me how something was damaged, Id learned from Paul to go stone cold and lie.
It must have been that way when I picked it up.
Sometimes Id just throw stuff in the truck and cover it with blankets with no strapping at all.
In the end, I was fired.
I eliminated being an art adviser because I dont know anything about money.
I decided to become an art critic.
I had never written a word in my life and had barely read any criticism at all.
As anyone who has ever written anything knows, writing is really, really hard!
It still is to me.
I remember starting to feel part of the world again by the simple ritual of eating in public.
I was taking baby social steps.
The painter Eric Fischl did me two big favors.
I was paid $1,000 a month.
I had it fixed before she came back.
Roberta tells me she remembers thinking how cute the drivers neck looked.
In between limo stints, I was back in the trucks.
But thats where I taught myself to be a critic.
I bought stacks of the art-world school paper,Artforummagazine.
I would read them at night in the motel rooms, over my chicken barrel.
Not only did I feel like an outsider; I felt like an idiot.
I was also trying to hang out with some of these people.
But even though we were around the same age, I was sort of an odd duck to them.
I thought I was a loser.
I was 40 years old!
I didnt have 20 years to go read all the theory.
My reading skills werent up to it anyway.
One summer, I tried to read some of the standard texts of the time.
I dont think I retained a single thing.
It was like people writing about a toothache who never mentioned teeth.
Then two beautiful things happened.
It cast magic that her loft had once been home to 1970s art-world legend Gordon Matta-Clark.
Also, the Paula Cooper Gallery was then in the same building.
I was in the right place at the right time.
She was insatiable, curious, and brilliant.
I met everyone there.
Mostly it was all the unknown people whod go on to become the art world of the 1990s.
John Cage said, Always be around, and I was.
All that allowed me to finally see the sun.
That, of course, is Roberta.
When I met her, I had not really started writing reviews.
Roberta had recently been fired from theVillage Voice.She wasnt writing anywhere.
She was going out with a guy in Japan.
I knew of her but had never read her work.
I asked her to write the essay for a crapola book I was doing at the time.
It was like two orphans found one another.
Really, we were never not together again from that moment to this.
(Except when I had to throw a fit about her also wanting to see the Japanese guy.)
When we fell in love, she was pretty clear about not wanting to be with another critic.
Her attitude was like what Roger Angell said to other baseball writers: Leave it all to me.
I thought she was going to praise me.
Instead she said, If you dont get better, Im going to kill myself!
That put the fear of God into me fast.
I learned on the job like all people.
And I saved Robertas life and my own.
She still bristles when were in galleries and sees me wanting to write on certain shows.
Shell say, This is my show.
I want to write on it.
Heres a secret: I always agree.
I love my work madly even when I hate it.
She paused and only said, We need to talk.
Meet me on Park and 81st Street.
I seemed to know right then what the next six years might look like.
Roberta had been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
Everything changed, and nothing changed.
She has had three big operations, two recurrences, and one near-cataclysmic extended emergency hospital stay.
She is doing well under treatment today.
We have gone through cancer without ever looking up or Googling her disease.
We never ask questions about the odds, chances, prognosis, or the future.
I do not think that this amounts to denial and incuriosity.
Dr. Sabbatini told us where to go, what to do, how to act.
I stopped taking notes after another doctor looked at me and said, I see.
You are trying to maintain control by taking notes.
And we found a way to deal with them together.
It saved us that night.
It saves us today.
We had built a fortress of work so total even cancer couldnt get it, not really.
I put it on my shoulders and walked home.
We loved this; it streamlines our looking and writing time even more.
Our restricted diet became more restricted.
We were told to serve only the mildest, blandest foods; the color white was favored.
This suited us fine.
Weve since added more greens and other meats.
But microwaving it all from our already prepared food has allowed us both to write our way through this.
For weeks leading up to leaving, I began to see the same American unraveling as most saw.
I kept nudging Roberta.
Now!I showed Roberta the email; she wanted to keep going until no galleries were open.
We packed and left late that night.
Which brings us back to eating.
The Greek definition of catastrophe is an overturning, an end to the status quo.
It is how everyone else does these things.
I get our coffee from the local gas station.
I do all shopping and errands; Roberta hasnt been more than five miles from this home.
But going to the grocery store now is like a journey under the volcano.
I sense solitude of self in every eye.
Were all in this together but alone, facial expression disappeared beneath homemade or fancy face masks.
The ways we used to communicate across space are gone.
Uncertainty and disjunction reign.
It reminds me of my life after my mother left.
I feel a witheredness of spirit in public, not any shared yearning to be among one another.
Movement is awkward, hesitant.
This is our sleepwalking universe of death at the grocery store.
Its a psychic sorcery where imaginary spells dwell and questions linger: Did that person cough?
Why isnt she wearing a mask?
That older man is walking too close to people.
Are you my enemy?
My voice is theirs.
We are cobras coiling through aisles, allowing space for the other.
Unsure, we stop, eye one another.
I turn, that person walks the other direction.
Someone in a line snaps at the person behind them, Im not done.
We wonder,Are my consecutive days of seclusion undone by this package of green beans?Everything intensifies.
Every errand is apocalyptic.
My new internal software hasnt reprogrammed and retrofitted my external hardware how to do this yet.
Amid this overturning, I lose my defensiveness and embarrassment about the way I eat.
I am no longer overcompensating with excuses, self-pity, guardedness.
I couldnt be happier.
