In 1992, Everett bought a ranch in the Banning Pass, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where he grew more than a hundred varieties of roses and tended to horses, donkeys, and mules. Neighbors were always bringing injured animals to his doorstep. One day, he found a baby crow that had fallen out of a tree. Everett cared for the crow until it was strong enough to fly, but the crow would simply fly in a loop, land beside him, and start to walk. When Everett tried to drive to town, the crow followed his truck, flying in tandem with his moving face. Everett built a perch out of PVC and stuck it in the cab so that they could travel around together. “I kept trying to get him to go out and have crow sex,” Everett told me. “I said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to get much satisfaction here.’ ”
At the time, Everett was working on “Erasure,” and the crow would shuffle down his arm and peck at the keys. But then he went on vacation, and the bird disappeared. Everett eventually assumed he was dead. He’d named him Jim. Jim Crow.
Everett’s influences are various—Wittgenstein, Chester Himes, Bertrand Russell, J. L. Austin, Robert Coover—and he keeps them front of mind. But, when I asked if he was interested in their personal lives, he seemed to find the idea inconceivable. So I was surprised when he suggested that we go see “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s film about the composer Leonard Bernstein—another one of Everett’s heroes—and his vexed relationship with his wife.
We went to the Egyptian, a gaudy theatre in the style of a pyramid, complete with hieroglyphs. Onstage, an attendant introduced the film as a “great love story,” but by the end it seemed a great tragedy. Cooper’s Bernstein, absorbed in his work and in multiple affairs, had lost his wife; their love found its strongest expression during his performances, when an orchestra was between them.
As we drove home, Everett seemed more pleased by the film’s artifice than by its insight. The early scenes, rendered in black-and-white, were bold, bombastic, spectacular—conversations turned into dance sequences at the drop of a hat. “I liked that the movie accepted that it was a movie,” he said. “I liked that it wasn’t pretending to be real life.”
Like Bernstein, Kevin Pace, the protagonist of “So Much Blue” (2017), is an artist with a wife and children. At the novel’s start, he’s working on a large abstract painting that he allows no one to see, and which his best friend has agreed to burn if he dies. The painting is a secret, but it’s inspired by secrets, too—by an affair with a French woman nearly twenty-five years Kevin’s junior, and by a pair of encounters on the eve of El Salvador’s civil war. (“A picture is a secret about a secret,” reads the novel’s epigraph, from Diane Arbus.) Kevin’s feelings, like Bernstein’s, are hidden from his family and expressed obliquely in his art. But what begins as an ideal quickly morphs into an indulgence. “There is a cruelty in abstraction,” Kevin reflects near the novel’s conclusion. “My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula.” Kevin never tells his wife his secrets, but he does, in the end, show her his painting. Ignorant of its meaning, she can read only its distortions. “So much blue,” she observes. “Now you know everything,” Kevin says.
The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.” A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from. An elliptical expression of Black life, jazz refuses to be decoded as such. James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is the story of one boy’s escapade down the river that divides the country into East and West. Huck, having faked his own death, is fleeing his alcoholic father. Jim, a father himself, is fleeing Huck’s guardian, who plans to sell him downriver. The two become an unlikely pair, their plights strangely symmetrical. But Huck, in Twain’s treatment, is the hero: Jim’s liberation is his ultimate adventure. In the book’s final chapters, Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer hatch a plan to set Jim free, a process that they protract by requiring Jim, who’s trapped in a cabin, to pen a “mournful inscription.” They instruct him to carve it on a rock, but the rock, just outside the cabin, is too heavy for them to carry alone. They let Jim out, and he carries it with Huck. Then they lock him back up, his freedom a procedural figment of their fantasy.
Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family. At times, they get split up, and the book follows Jim, who’s both unsettled and emboldened: “I was also sick with worry over Huck and ashamed to feel such relief for being rid of him.” And yet he returns to Huck again and again, their reunions exalted and sickly sweet. “You need me,” Huck tells Jim, who hates “that what he said was true.” Their association has the cold determinism of biology, or addiction—it forces Jim into a cruel decision, a decision that seems to contain the promise of a final release but which, once made, pulls him further into the current of their impossible love.
“I’m not correcting anything,” Everett once said. “That would mean I know enough to correct.” And yet it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.
Everett is transfixed by rivers, and finds some so stunning that he can’t look at them directly. One day, I proposed that he teach me how to fish. Everett wasn’t sure there were fish to be had. It was the end of fall, and Los Angeles hadn’t seen significant rain for months. As we drove into the mountains, things looked bleak. The reservoir was low, the yucca plants were going to seed, and discarded Starbucks cups blew across the road like tumbleweed.
At the riverbed, we set our gear down near the ashes of a fire. Everett showed me his fishing flies, displaying them like a jeweller fingering his gems. There were zug bugs, damselflies, jassid beetles, woolly buggers. Everett enjoys catching fish but is equally enlivened by the process of mimicking their prey. He compares it to writing: once you’ve attracted a reader with what they think they want, you can get them hooked on what you have.
I thought we would fish for hours. But after fifteen minutes Everett suggested that we smoke cigars. We found a rock that looked like a chair and took turns sitting on it. In the distance, the mountains were an unlikely gray. Senna, Everett’s wife, had told me that they’d toyed with a move East. I asked if he would miss the landscape.
“I’m a real Westerner,” he said, gazing at the mountains. “But they would still be here.”
Everett handled his cigar like a cigar. The river was a river. Presumably, it contained fish, even if they refused to make themselves evident.
The following week, Everett returned to the river alone. I’d sensed that he had seen in it something I couldn’t. Over lunch, he relayed what he found. A few miles north of where we had tried to fish, there was an undercut bank; from its ledge, he had been able to see trout slicing through the water.
Because I had failed to observe Everett catch a fish, I suggested we do an activity that might let me observe him read. After we finished our meal, I shuffled a deck of tarot cards and asked him to pose a question.
“How can I help my family be happy?” Everett asked.
I split the deck into three piles. Everett chose a pile, and then I drew three cards from the top of it: the Six of Pentacles, the Magician, and the Five of Cups. In the Five of Cups, a robed man stands alone by a river. Three toppled cups sit before him; two, still upright, are at his back. I asked Everett to tell me what he saw.
“You said the cups are emotions,” he said. “Well, the posture is one of dejection. But there’s a light around him, so it’s maybe not dejection as much as introspection. He’s looking at a river, so the river is time. There’s red and green coming out of those cups. . . . The red would most obviously have to be blood. . . . He’s standing in front of those two cups, protecting them.”
“Do you think he’s looking at himself?” I asked.
“I think he’s looking at the river,” Everett said seriously. “I—I have depression. I suffer from depression.”
“And this feels like a depressive card?” I asked.
“That’s my first thought,” Everett said. “What’s going on in your head while you look at these? That’s what I’m interested in.”
I told Everett what I saw in the cards. While we spoke, I checked to see whether the narrative was resonating. “We’ve made it resonate,” he said. And he was right. A few hours after we parted, I sent him a photo of the cards laid out against the red stain of a wooden table. The next day, he sent me a detail from one of his paintings in progress, a rust-colored expanse with three rectangular figures travelling across it. I wasn’t sure if the painting was inspired by the cards, or if, in my image of the cards, he had seen his painting. ♦
