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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer
His art will not likely hang in the Louvre, the Bodleian or any other big museum, but I’m sure his work has touched as many if not more lives than any of the old masters. He doesn’t live an eccentric lifestyle, spend time in stylish neighborhoods, or go to wild parties.
Like all artists, though, he has his moods.
“I don’t know if I’ll do it next year,” Mert will grumble, his fingers stained with ink and his cuffs spotted with colors. “My hands hurt. My eyes – I can’t see like I used to. The people ain’t coming like they did.”
But every spring, Mert’s back, and this year has been no exception.
I don’t see Mert – better known as The Amazing Star –as much anymore; Miss Rhonda and I don’t spend as much time at White Lake as we should, what with work and church and critters and gasoline being more precious than gold. Still, I run into my old friend from time to time at the grocery store or the gas station.
Mert is a tiny man; it’s hard to see him as a boxer, or a fresh-faced soldier who doesn’t talk about what he saw and did at D-Day. Most people don’t see him as anything but the funny little man who draws three- and five-minute caricatures at Goldston’s Pavilion every summer.
I got to know him when my commute home required a stop for a cup of coffee at White Lake. He’s always quick with a magic trick or a joke, simple little things designed to do what he likes best, make people smile.
“I don’t like seeing people wander around all glum,” he says, stretching an opened hand across his face and drawing the wrinkled skin down in a dramatic frown. “What’s the good in that? Be happy, I say, be happy.”
Mert has a certain stubbornness I admire, even if it frustrates those who call him their friend. He refuses to quit smoking ,“This? Hah,” he says, and lights another Marlboro, or eat more than enough to get by, “Nothing tastes good, so why should I eat it? You tell me that.”
Mert takes pride in having drawn pictures of people from just about all 50 states, as well as people from other countries.
“That makes me coast to coast and around the world,” he boasted one day, laughing at himself the whole time.
I think one reason I like Mert so much is that he is the last of the old time carnies, those sideshow performers who made a hardscrabble living from county fairs, circuses, and beaches where families spent the money and time they saved up all year to fill up the stationwagon and See America First. Back when my father worked for a circus – and that’s a column for another day – I got to know a goodly number of carnies. Some were saints, some were sinners, but all were people with a simple, strong outlook on life.
Mert’s a good one for expressing his opinions, although sometimes those opinions sting.
The war in the Middle East? “Either let our people come home, or let them kill all those bums.”
Welfare? “If somebody won’t work, why let them make babies? Send’em to prison and make’em work. I’ve always worked. It never hurt me.”
Drinking? “If a man wants to take a drink, that’s fine. If he gets drunk and hurts somebody, that’s stupid. Why waste time and waste money being stupid?”
Mert is devoted to his sister Rhoda, who lives in a Florida retirement community. His face lights up when he talks about her, how Rhoda was a dancer when they were children in New York.
“She was bee-yoo-ti-full,” he says, his accent still pure Noo Yawk more than half a century since he left the Empire State for the carnival circuit.
Mert also has a loyalty of the kind most folks seem to forget these days; he hasn’t seen his friend and former partner “Cholly” in years, but he stills writes to him – actual letters, with paper and stamps and everything – since Charlie loves getting letters from friends.
Like hundreds if not thousands of other people, Mert’s drawn my picture time and again. Sometimes it’s been on a coffee napkin, or a sheet ripped from my reporter’s notebook, or even on the special-ordered and cut drawing paper he uses day and night during the busy season.
Miss Rhonda and I have one on the living room wall, one of his “expensive” portraits showing me relaxing on a beach, while my beloved stands nearby in a scandalously tiny bikini. Mert’s cartoon bikinis got him kicked out of a street fair in Virginia one time, but that’s a story I’ll leave him to tell.
The day my mother died, Mert had just completed a poster board sized cartoon portrait of me; I didn’t see him that evening, but in the days prior we’d talked about her declining health, and how dementia had slowly taken away what little Parkinson’s had left behind.
When Mert heard from a mutual friend that I wouldn’t be by the coffee shop that night, and why, he changed the legend he’d written across the top. Rather than a message to my mother, it was a reassuring note to me.
He explained later that he made the picture to “make your mom feel better
“Now maybe it’ll make you feel better,” he said. “She ain’t hurtin’ no more. She’d want you to be happy, so be happy.”
And as long as Mert keeps on drawing caricatures that end up on filing cabinets, refrigerators, and desktops, there ain’t no reason to be all glum.
Just spend a few minutes with Mert, and he’ll put a smile on your face – he’ll draw one on your picture, too.
Show me a Van Gogh that can do that.
Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He can be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via email at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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