Holly Moe

Holly Moe

          One of my life-long pleasures has been (generally) to interact and (specifically) to joke around with people I run into behind counters and desks and cash registers and so forth. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s relatively painless. And in this way I made friends with a razor-thin young woman taking money at one of the registers at the UTSA cafeteria when I was going to teacher training there in 1983. Her name was Holly Samson and she was a graduate student in the art department, working on an MFA.

          She had a husband, Curtis, who was an officer in the Air Force. He’d joined up because he’d wanted to be a top-gun pilot, but as things turned out he was prone to air-sickness, and kept barfing all over the inside of his cockpit. Pilot trainees have to clean up their own yuck when this happens, so Curtis had washed out of pilot training. He still owed the Air Force some time, though, and since he had a BA in psychology, they assigned him to psychological testing, where he was supposed to be writing multiple-choice items for psychological tests. His quota of items to be produced was, well, small, so he read novels most of the time. I directed novels to him through Holly — at the time I was really big on Harry Crews — and Curtis sent me some strange books back.

          And Holly and Curtis and their MFA friends interlocked with the Chris-and-Florence circle. I started going to some nifty art openings and similar social events. I remember in particular one opening at a new gallery in a run-down formerly industrial area south of downtown – by now I’m sure thoroughly gentrified – at which someone put a few handfuls of magic mushrooms on a plate on the snack table along with the traditional water crackers and brie. Whoopie!

          Holly’s artistic medium was carpets. A glance at the entries about her on the internet indicates that it remained so. By carpets I mean cheap, short-pile carpets, such as a company mindful of costs might install in the offices of its lower-paid clerical workers. She cut it into shapes and used unfiltered ready-made cigarettes to burn lines into it, as if a platoon of clumsy smokers had dropped their smokes onto them and been too lazy to pick them up. She composed these burn-lines into drawings of ordinary things. Fairly recent reviews of her exhibitions reveal that she has taken to using gunpowder, in addition to cigarettes, as a way of burning art into the cheap fibres. To this day I have a Holly Moe runner, into which she had burned a picture of ceramic pots, needing vacuuming on my kitchen floor.

          It was about the time that I started hanging out with Holly and Curtis that I started making hanging sculptures out of flotsam and concrete poured into moulds scooped out of wet sand. I remember the first one I made, in a flat plywood box back by the shed behind Chris’s and my duplex on Claremont.

          Chris and Holly and Curtis stood around as I rummaged around in the sand to see if the concrete had set. It had. Holly reached into the sand to feel how it was and said, “Oh, Richard! It’s hard!”, as concrete is. Amidst general chuckling at the double meaning, Chris offered Curtis a large, evil-looking garden hoe — his favourite weapon — to use if he cared to deal to me. But that wasn’t Curtis’s way. He had a mild-mannered, almost spaced-out, way about him, not what a person would expect from someone who’d wanted to be a fighter pilot.

          Holly and Curtis moved into an apartment over a brake shop on the light-industrial northern fringe of central San Antonio. Major parades, such as the Rodeo parade and the Battle of the Flowers parade, mustered on the street below, which made their easily-accessible rooftop the place to be on such occasions. Getting in was a bit tricky, due to having to go a short way through the brake shop — and the brake shop’s guard dogs, which made it tricky — to get to the stairs to the apartment, but there was a way and people were okay if they followed the procedure. The apartment often stank of cigarettes burning lines into cheap carpets.

          Then, in late 1983, Holly, Curtis, and some of their artist friends took a lease on a nightclub, which they re-did in punk and called the Bone Club. A couple of my concrete sculptures had the honour of gracing the place, one of them over the table where people had to show their IDs and pay the cover to get in. The club had formerly been a gay bar, and they joked about all the AIDS dust they raised when redecorating it. A spaced-out artist lived and worked in the loft overhead. They had a problem, however, in that there was yet another gay bar next door, and the punks and the queers got along poorly, and in the end — after less than a year, I guess — the gay bar bought out the Bone Club’s lease and evicted them. I was getting ready to be a teacher at the time, and didn’t attend the club as often as I would have like to do.

          Apparently feeling on the underprivileged side artistically, Lt. Curtis got stuck into making amateur, artsy-fartsy videos. Chris told me that Curtis dug doing the camera work while Holly frolicked in various bizarre and erotic ways with artist friends in the altogether. One evening I was up there over the brake shop visiting, sharing a toke or two, and a fellow MFA person named Margaret was there also. It was in the summer of 1984 and I had just finished teachers’ college and was looking for a teaching job. Curtis got out a camera and started shooting tape of Margaret and me. Soon Margaret was naked on a chair and I was down to my Levis chewing on the chair leg. Holly stood to one side, making suggestions.

          Unfortunately, I decided that my upcoming career as a teacher didn’t need any video evidence of my moral turpitude, so I decided not to take the plot any further. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t had such an attack of the straights.

          Holly and Curtis were drifting apart. They moved, along with a few of their art-world friends, into an old victorian mansion on the southern edge of downtown that had formerly been the headquarters of some Nationalist Chinese organisation. A semi-circular sign over the front door read, “Chung-Kuo Kuo-Min-Tang”. They rented the place’s ballroom to Sandy Dunne, a friend of ours who had a modern-dance company, for rehearsals. Holly and Curtis took separate bedrooms, but remained friendly.

          Then Holly got a girlfriend: a somewhat hard-faced blonde woman named Judy Bankhead, a not-all-that-distant relative of Tallulah. Judy was much more demonstrably affectionate than Curtis had been, which, as my new wife pointed out to me after they’d been by to visit, Holly seemed to appreciate. Holly and Judy then adopted an extreme high-garlic diet and became detectable by even the weakest nose from several metres. They, however, claimed not to notice the aroma themselves, at least not in regard to each other. Meanwhile, art continued to be created, shows and galleries continued to be opened, and fun continued to be had.

          Curtis finally finished doing his time and left the Air Force. I missed most of that party. He made an effigy dressed in his uniform and burned it. I saw the remains later. The Corfam^® shoes had been almost totally unaffected by the bonfire. He showed me the photos.

          Just before we left San Antonio there was an art opening out at the McNay followed by a bit of a retreat at Chris and Florence’s house in Terrell Hills. Curtis and Judy were getting along all right. My daughter Ruth crawled around under everybody’s chairs. Holly was being Holly, smiling and taking everything with at least one grain of, if not salt, then dried garlic.

          It was after I left San Antonio that I heard that Holly had broken up with Judy and had taken up with a man, who Chris told me was a good sort. Just what Holly needed. Holly and I got back in touch with each other in the mid-90s. We really didn’t say that much in the two or three letters we exchanged. She sent me invitations to her art-show openings. Apparently she’s now living in Bandera, in the Texas Hill Country a bit of a distance from San Antonio. I’m sure her place out there is extremely hip. I’ve read some reviews of her late-90s exhibitions on the internet, noting that she’d taken her work in carpets in new directions, but she seems to have evaporated from digital view some time around the turn of the century.