John Callahan interview, part 2

Here is the second and concluding part of the interview I had with the late John Callahan, Portland cartoonist, in the summer of 2005.

Q: So describe your weekly work schedule: When is your deadline, and how do you pace yourself?

CALLAHAN: I draw a lot of the cartoons on Wednesday. I do a lot of work at home, in the morning, and then I get out of the house in the mid-afternoon, early afternoon, and then I kind of go around either a cab or by wheelchair, and just have a good time. And think . . . and things come to me without much work.

This culture is becoming more like a cartoon all the time anyway. The mainstream news has the nerve to call itself news; it’s a joke, you know. And the infomercials that they call the news. How do you make a cartoon out of a cartoon culture? 

Q: What’s it like when you’re nearing your deadline and you don’t have a fresh idea in mind?

CALLAHAN: Well it’s not a problem, you know; I thrive on pressure and deadlines. When I used to be in the London Observer, they used to tell me to come up with a special cartoon half an hour before. It’s no problem; I like that. It doesn’t bother me, I get really good stuff out of that. The pressure, I think it’s kind of fun. I love being in London, because they have such a strange, sick sense of humor -- they love my weird cartoons.

Q: You were raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools growing up; and after the car crash that left you a quad, you recuperated in a nursing home run by Benedictine nuns and took classes at a monastery in Mt. Angel, Oregon. You do lots of cartoons about nuns, priests, and Jesus; do you still consider yourself a Catholic in some sense?

CALLAHAN: Yeah, they get you so young, it’s kind of a James Joyce experience. It’s unfair, how young they get you. Eight years of Catholic school and you know, I was sexually abused by a nun when I was a child. Which makes it really difficult. It had such an effect on my life that what do you do? I look at it as all spiritual; the only thing that’s important is the spiritual walk that you have. And religion doesn’t really enter in too much.

Q: Now, in your book, you talk about a long succession of caretakers that were dysfunctional in one way or another, or really weren’t ideal. With fame and that sort of thing, has your quality of caretakers improved at all?

CALLAHAN: Well, with maturity, a little bit of stability, a little bit of AA, a little bit of Eastern mysticism [chuckles], these characters have improved. You reflect the people around you, you know. And so I’m starting to reflect different people ’cause I’m different now, I guess.

I was an addict and an alcoholic at the time, and the people around me were the same, and it was just really a circus. But it was always coming from me. Never a victim. So I have a higher class of reflections around me.

Q: In one of your books, you said you primarily work at night. Is that still the case?

CALLAHAN: Well, I work drawing ’em at night a lot, but lately I’ve been writing songs more at night now. I’ve been enjoying that, ’cause, you know, everything dies down, it’s quiet; at two, three o’clock in the morning, just you and Hoss Cartwright, and that’s it, you know?

Q: You have a keyboard or something?

CALLAHAN: Yeah, I have a Casio keyboard. My fingers are really impaired, I’m trying to learn to play the guitar again. But I write the song, I can play like two-finger chords on the piano, and then one-finger chords on the Casio. I have a big piano at my house. I write a lot of songs simply by melody. I remember the chords from when I could play, and in my mind, you never forget the chords and how they work. And you can imagine how they sound behind. 

Q: So the last I’d heard, you’d made a CD for yourself.

CALLAHAN: Yeah. I sent it to different people, that I know from a certain context. I mean, like I send my songs regularly to Tom Waits; he thinks they’re dark, but he says I’m a good songwriter. And that I should make my own CD. And one time he sang one of my songs onto my answering machine! I saved the recording of his singing the song. It was really a proud moment. Things like that are more precious to me than any cartoon achievement or something.

Once I got a call from John Prine, out of the blue, and I didn’t know him. I loved his work, I was a big fan. He sought me out to do an album cover for him, which I did, and then became friends with him. Something about music is really where my heart is. But I never write funny songs, really.

Q: Where would you like to go with these?

CALLAHAN: Well, I guess I enjoy other people singing my songs, but I wouldn’t mind getting a little group together and I’m gonna learn to play, I’m sure I will. If anybody knows how to teach a quad how to play the guitar again, it sounds like a real challenge. But I think I’ll prob’ly just do open tuning, you know. With slide guitar. Maybe a baby Taylor.

Q: You’d sing?

CALLAHAN: Yeah, I’d sing the songs, I have a good voice. I have a weird voice. It’s unlikely. Really dark lyrics.

Q: I wanted to ask you about sex. You said in your autobiography that you thought it was all over for you after the car crash. But a nurse at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in LA where you initially went for rehab disabused you of that notion. So you can still have erections; do you feel anything? Do you orgasm?

CALLAHAN: Yeah, well, I don’t feel it in the normal sense, the sensation. [He asks the waiter:] You guys have a Kleenex or anything, for this one eye? I always start crying when I talk about sex. [I burst out laughing.] Actually, I splashed my eye with some coffee or something just now.

Anyway, I don’t have normal sensation from the waist down, but I can get erections. It’s perceived in a different way. You learn to read the sensations in your body as the years go by, more uh . . . more clearly. And so there’s a response there that’s more emotional than -- you have to kind of line up with the feelings of a different system, part of your body, to sort of perceive things. It’s very pleasurable to the partner, but I had to sort of relearn the language of sex. I guess put it that way. As orgasm, yeah, kind of an orgasm; it’s sort of a, not like a fake orgasm, like a fake orgasm like a woman has, but more like a. . . .

I like that saying, you know: A woman can fake an orgasm, but a man can fake the whole relationship. [We both laugh.]

Q: Some of the letters that complain about your cartoons will say “they’re badly drawn.” I think it’s easy for some readers to think your cartoons look the way they do because you can’t draft them any better. But you have worked to achieve that style. In your autobiography, you wrote, “I can draw beautifully if that’s what’s called for. But it almost never is.” Can you explain why that’s the case with your work?

CALLAHAN: Well, you know, I really break my neck to . . . come up with a good drawing. [He cracks up.] No, I just think it’s funny to have a lousy drawing style. That that’s funny in itself. Plus I’m lazy as fuck, so . . . I used to draw really nice drawings, and then I thought, oh, piss on this, you know.

Q: Have you ever considered doing a Callahan drawing with exquisite craft?

CALLAHAN: No, because the people who don’t have good ideas do that. It’s all about the concept of the cartoon. I think it’s funny that, the more profound the concept that you can come up with, the more it’s fun to draw it in a childish way. I like the way that tears people’s minds in half. You know, this double message of this really strong, ball-busting concept, and then you have this really kindergartnerish-looking drawing. It’s something kind of nice about that, you know?

It reminds me of why I like folk singers and little spare, acoustic live songs that are so simple that it’s just an acoustic kind of thing or a piano.

Q: The Miami Herald actually spent $45,000 to kill an entire print run of 530,000 copies, because some editor thought one of your cartoons shouldn’t be seen.

CALLAHAN: And then they cut me out. They fired me, you know.

Q: They should have just paid you $45,000 not to do a cartoon, too.

CALLAHAN: Ha ha ha, that would have been a good severance package. The cartoon was one of those misunderstood ones again. It was about Martin Luther King, who is one of my main heroes, one of my great heroes is Martin Luther King. But sometimes a cartoon falls on ground that’s not even that well appreciated by the author himself. But it was like, I drew a cartoon of Martin Luther King, age 13. Martin Luther King is standing as a teenager next to his bed, which has kind of a stain on the sheet, and he’s explaining to his mother, “I had a dream.” [I start laughing.] 

A lot of times, I regret these cartoons. ’Cause it’s better to think ’em and then just not draw ’em . . . ’cause, you know, I’m a little grown up now, thank god.

Q: I was gonna ask that. If you’ve ever done a cartoon that you look back and say, oh, I wish I hadn’t done that.

CALLAHAN: I think when I was angrier, when I was newer at this, I just . . . you wanna use your talent to lift up people, I think, more than to bum people out. But I didn’t really, I was just working something out, I guess. I don’t feel like doing many mean cartoons anymore.

Q: I think we’ve pretty much covered what I wanted to get.

CALLAHAN: It was good. That was really good. For a short interview, that was a really good one. It’s such a pleasure to do a good interview.

*      *     *      *      *

Afterwards, in an “afterword” Marc and I recorded in his studio, I commented:

My favorite Callahan cartoon shows a security guard dog in a cop hat, who has stopped another dog at the entrance to an event and is telling him, “I’m sure you’re probably who you say you are, but regulations require me to sniff your butt.” You can tell Callahan has been a longtime dog owner.

For years, I had seen Callahan motoring around Northwest Portland in his electronic wheelchair. His craggy face and in-your-face cartoons led me to fear he would be gruff and prickly in person.

So it was a surprise to find in person that Callahan is polite, gentle, and pleasant. Funny, yes, and occasionally wicked; but thoughtful and in fact genuinely regretful about some of the actions fueled by anger that resulted in wild behavior, and, on occasion, cartoon mayhem. As they say, the art is not necessarily the artist.

Read part one of the John Callahan interview.