Oh Deer, John!

John was an artist. He truly was. A sculptor with extraordinary energy and wacky ideas. He worked nights at a home for the mentally deranged, sleeping over with one eye open, and then bathing and shaving men (and women?) every morning before being let out into the world to do his thing.

John’s thing was a studio he maintained in the back of an old building that had been converted into small shops over time. A rock (geo) shop. A tie-dyed Tee shop. A small bookstore that sold incense and aromatherapy oils and posters of unicorns. A glassblowers outlet...

THOSE kinds of shops.

And in the one space that had no easy access to public meanderings, was John’s studio. John’s studio was basically the old loading and unloading area that ties into the big concrete loading dock.

Which was cool because it meant John could roll up the big roll up door and work on a big flat chunk of concrete out in the sun. It meant I could swing by if I had a few minutes to kill and see what he was up to.

And John was always up to something. He put goldfish in a TV set. He made dinosaurs out of collected animal bones, he had wire thingies in the works and clay thingies in the kiln.

The girl I was dating was best friends with the girl he was dating. I was therefore introduced, and besides him being a nut, he was- or had been- his college tennis champ.

The guy had a backhand that would have completed my game, if only... sigh...

John had too much energy. He was sometimes hard to be around for that reason. But he was fun to be around for that reason, too. Me, I’m one of those quiet, say what I need to say guys that only talk a lot when I get to telling a tale, usually under the duress of hops and barley.

Not John. John had energy that just blurted out of his mouth while simultaneously occupying his hands and keeping his feet shifting about as well. John was one of those hyper-active kids that never grew out of it. He grew up in Indiana on a farm, which was good, because it gave him lots of room to move around and talk a lot, which I am sure he did in bucketfuls.

When I was getting to know John, he had just proposed to Dee, and he was completely enthused about all the stuff he was going to make, for their “Sea of Love” themed wedding.

John had made about ten giant fish out of papier-mâché and was priming them all with white paint when I first stopped by his studio to have a look around.

“Whatcha gonna do with those?” I asked him.

“I’m making a giant mobile! Three tiers deep, and twelve feet across! I want these fish dancing on the ceiling for the wedding!” (Almost everything John said had an exclamation after it. John didn’t do periods much.)

“I hope it don’t break and fall on everybody. Those fish look heavy. Here. Let me see one.”

I picked up one of the five or six foot fish and guessed its weight. Maybe thirty pounds a piece.

“That’s over three hundred pounds you’re putting over your guests’ heads, John. You sure you want to DO that?”

“Oh! I never thought about that! That would be horrible, yes! Horrible! Good thing you’re here! Maybe you can design the mobile, making sure it won’t break on everybody’s head, and I can start doing the sea horses for the walls!”

“Seahorses?”

“Pulling the marriage carriage!”

“Oh.”

And that is how I got sucked into making John’s mobile for him. I made three “sticks”, all curved gracefully and between eight and twelve feet long. I laminated thin strips of wood to get the curve and make them light but strong. John’s future wife painted the fish beautifully and the day before the wedding, I found myself standing on a giant A-frame ladder, lifting six foot fish into the air while I climbed, and hanging them in perfect balance on a giant mobile that hung down from an auditorium ceiling and dangled just out of the reach of most of the guest.

If you were tall like me, you could reach up and bump the bottom fish, and they would all dance and swim for quite a long time joyously.

John was a country boy. I mention this because two weeks after the wedding, my girlfriend received a call from Dee and she was in hysterics. She was so over the whole being married to John thing, and she was sobbing in the phone. I didn’t know why, but the phone was handed to me, and I guessed it was my job, to calm this woman down.

“Hi Dee. It’s me. What’s going on?”

“He’s (sob sob sob) cutting it open out the back window. There’s blood everywhere. I DIDN’T KNOW HE WAS LIKE THIS!” Sob sob sob, cry cry cry...

“Hold it. Like what? What is he doing?”

“He cut the guts out right onto the ground. There is blood everywhere. My cats are going crazy. (Cry cry cry...) If I had known he was like this, I never would have married him.” Sob sob sob... cry cry cry...

“What is he cutting? What’s he doing? I don’t understand. You have to help me here, Dee.”

“He’s got a SKUNK! He tied it to a tree and he’s cutting it. Oh God, HE’S PULLING THE SKIN OFF! (Yelling to John). Get out of here. YOU FREAK!!”

“He’s skinning a skunk?”

“He’s mutilating it! He’s carving it all up. He’s MURDERING IT!” Sob sob sob... Cry cry cry...

This isn’t going to end well, I thought. And sure enough. Six months later I met up with John in a hardware store. He was single again, and he gave me his new number to get together for a game of tennis.

It seems the two had gone to counseling over John’s “art”. John was an old farm boy, and he scooped dead things off the road, brought them home, skinned them, made cool things out of the pelts and then let the bugs eat all the meat off the bones and then he wired these together to make his miniaturized dinosaur fossil replicas which were really really awesome.

Dee picked a new-agey councilor who was a Vegan and this did not bode well for John’s side of the dilemma. John had trouble understanding the evil in something he had been taught to do as a young boy by a favorite uncle, and that was that.

I tell you all this because THERE IS A GREAT DEER STORY HERE, on Steve G’s blog. When you are done with me, go read it. His story reminded me of a 911 call that is hilarious, and he has the link there for that too. It also reminded me of a story John told me, the day I met him in the hardware store, right after his divorce was finalized or annulled.

John was coming home from his night sleeping with the mentally deranged (I know, I thought so too!)

On the side of the road was a fairly big buck. It had been struck and was quivering in its final death throes when John pulled over. The buck was definitely dead, and John dragged and lifted and pulled and tugged, and finally got it into the back of his sedan on top of a painter’s tarp he always kept in the trunk.

Picking up dead things is illegal in California. You are not allowed to pick up dead things and take them home and skin them or eat them or whatever. (I think this is to stop people from putting big bumpers on the front of their trucks and hunting the roadways for freezer meat. Maybe disease plays a part too.) John knew this. He was always careful and picked up his road kill in a hurry and then he’d split.

This time, however, a city cop had happened along just as John was trying to tuck the legs in and he pulled in behind John, and this is what followed.

John went straight to the cops window before the cop had a chance to sort things out--

“Oh man, oh man am I glad you’re here! You’ve got to help me! Somebody hit that deer and I am trying to get him to the vet. There’s a vet down there a few miles and I need you to escort me! We’ve got to hurry. He’s dying and we’ve not got much time!”

The cop--

“Can you back away from my door please.”

“Oh sure! Come out. Take a look! Hurry! We’re wasting time! That deer is dying and I’ve got to get him to the vet! Can you radio ahead and tell them we are coming? Can you get me an escort? Officer, hurry! WE can’t let him die!”

The officer calmly got out of his car and checked his equipment, straightening his belt the way cops do- especially chubby ones. He calmly walked over to John’s car while John prattled in his ear--

“Hurry! He’s dying! We don’t have time for this! Somebody just hit the poor little guy! We’ve got to save him!”

The cop looked stoically into the open door of the car and eyed the carcass up and down.

“Oh God!” said John. “It looks like he’s not breathing! We’ve got to hurry!”


“That deer is dead.” said the cop matter-of-factly.

“Oh no! Oh no! You can’t give up that easily! He’s not dead. Not yet! You’ve got to let me take him to the vet! We’ve got to save him. Can you do mouth to mouth resuscitation on a deer? What are we gonna do? Oh my!”

“That deer is dead.”

“Oh no! No! Don’t be so negative! We can save him! We can DO this! What if he was your deer? What if you knew his mother? What if you were hit by a car and laying on the side of the road? You can’t give up. That deer NEEDS us!”

“That deer is dead.”

“No! No! He’s NOT DEAD! He was moving a minute ago. He was! He was! Come on! Take me to the vets! Please! You are wasting time!”

“That deer is dead.”

“No! NO! John started sobbing and carrying on and the cop just shook his head. He reached in the car and grabbed the deer by the hoofs and pulled it out in a big heap onto the ground. John went into hysterics and the cop just calmly dragged the deer off the roadway, went back to his car, and radioed in for animal control to come pick up a carcass. John shifted into “anger” mode and blamed the cop for the death of the buck, and then got into his car, and drove away unticketed...