refracted
time, a stranger, and the healing power(?) of a headshot.
In 2013 summertime Chicago, it's dark, warm, and rainy outside at 2:35 in the morning as I spoon my wife in a tiny hospital bed, and there is no sound, except the infusion pump, the thing that glows, bleats, and hums, raindrops against the windows. Moans and whimpering, prayers from other rooms. Our door is closed, blinds drawn, and the cancer lies here with us, disintegrating our life. In this rare alone moment, we talk about our future — not the future where we leave hospice for an apartment downtown and I take care of her the rest of our lives. But the one where her people inexplicably lock her away and she dies without a kiss goodbye. The one where I get seated alone on the wrong side of her family’s church memorial, while the rent-a-pastor massacres her name. The one where it all falls to dust.
I want to go with her, in every way. She’ll have none of it.
“James! Don’t. Be. An. Asshole.” she says. “You have children — where are you going?!” I shrug.
She presses a button on the armrest of the bed to lift us into an angled recline and twists herself to face me. Takes a breath. Here it comes — the instructions: directions for me as if she doesn’t know better. Because, before me, all she did was boss. It takes a boss to boss a boss and while normally pliant, impending death emboldens her to push me around with authority. So now, with this shit. Bossing me:
"When this is done,” she says, waving her palm in a circle to encompass the room, “Stop, with the custody fight and just go back to Cleveland. Be with them. Raise those babies."
Mm Hm.
"Teach more — you like it — fuss less. You FUSS, Mr. Man. Please. Stop Fussing.”
Yes.
"Work on the comic book and finish the new novel. Write.”
Right.
"Get out of the NPR business, for god’s sake — start your podcast."
Sure.
"Watch your blood sugar.”
On it.
She lifts my chin to look me right in the face.
“Get lots of pussy — Lord knows you've earned it.”
>blinks<
“Start your record label — why not?”
Why not?
"James!”
Mm.
“PROMISE ME."
Yes, Bunny. Yes. Of course. Anything. Everything. I promise.
I owed her that much.
She took me from clay and fired me: made me up from a good idea into a man of my own. Touched her perfect, gentle hands upon my worthless face. When she dies, I’ll forget how to drive, my children’s name, my left from my right. I’ll wake, eat, work, and sleep, in the waking world, and you? You will all just be phantoms in my gilded purgatory, prying eyes on the pay-side of my horror-quarium, where there is light, and darkness, and everything is too much: too big, too small, too late, too early, or too good to be true. I can feel it all hurt, but I can not feel another single thing. Everything else, after this, will not seem real at all.
Down the hall, a mother calls after her dying son, as if it will save him. I hold my wife, as the bleater bleats and cancer and all her family, well-wishers, and hangers-on close in around us, and I wonder — how will I call us back?
—————————————————————————
Cleveland, Ohio 2015
I'm turning a screenplay into a comic book and I've cycled through illustrators — almost $5K in, lots of sketches, excuses but no comic. OKPANTS, aka Aaron Sechrist, an artist masquerading as a designer, and possibly the Last American Mensch, suggests I attend a conference he's hosting: Weapons of Mass Creation (WMC) Fest, a 3-day convocation for artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs, founded by Go Media's Bill Beachy and Jeff Finley in 2010, inspired by South By SouthWest in Austin, Texas.
"I wanted to bring together my favorite artists and get us together in the real world instead of online," says Finley by email. "We grew up here and took pride in being part of the Midwest. We wanted to 'put our city on the map' and do things our way." Grief isn’t shiva after two years —it’s pathetic. I could hardly leave the house. Until I did.
The lobby of the Allen Theater was three-fourths full of lots of Dickies, ironic t-shirts, tattoos, and your best black friends. I am a writer among visual artists who are hungry and expensive, and I was not going to find my illustrator. Lots of swinging dick, and not enough art chickery to hold my gaze. Ugh. Pants passed me on his way to take the stage to introduce a talk — he's funny-ish, so I thought I'd catch his schtick before I leave.
The theater itself is a brassy, romantic art-deco affair, and I walk in just as Pants leaves a guy center-stage who looks as if he sells bespoke trail-mix out the trunk of his Prius, in the best possible way. This Guy — bald, white, goatee'd, tatted, t-shirt and cargo short’d — starts into a presentation called ‘Fuck Your Function, Fuel Your Fire,’ and he's got me early in because of my weakness for t-shirt-ready alliterative profanity.
A Case Western Reserve University grad, he dabbled in used car sales, worked for his old man(RIP), flew to Singapore to meet his life-mate, and attempted a dot-com venture in California before returning to Cleveland. Along the way, he developed a talent for helping businessmen "take the music out of [their] heads and show it to the world [so] people would love it and write them checks." After that bottomed out, he turned photography skills honed on family flicks into work for Cleveland Magazine and pivoted from branding businesses to branding people, turning his hobby into Headspace, where he specialized in headshots and something he called the You Quotient (YQ), or YouJitsu — the distance between where you are and your "authentic self" — the one he would capture for your photo.
His process: book a shoot, sit down, and there's a conversation wherein he prompts you to choose three words that best describe the real you. You discuss those words, and then he takes your picture —- several pictures. You select the image that best captures your YQ, I guess — this is my oversimplification of his idea. You could just get the headshot and bounce. The headshot, however, is a byproduct of a process, and the process, in many ways, is the point. It's not transformational so much as revelatory. There's the 'you' that comes in and the 'you' captured in the picture.
mm hm.
Standing in the back, before I can catch myself, I am lost in what he's saying — dazed, blacked-out, without words of my own then or now to tell you how or why — taken up short, almost knocking me about and onto the floor. Something came over me in a room I'd rarely been, from a man I'd never met.
And then, he wrapped it up.
"Trust your passions. Be bold. Embrace detours. You can't have it all, but you can have what matters most. Connect with powers, passion, and purpose that belong to you. Make a conscious choice daily for opportunities to be the best you."
There was raucous applause as he took a modest bow.
I limped towards the backstage door, visibly teary, mumbling to myself. Pants, standing just offstage, eyes squinting, suddenly looked very concerned, like George was concerned about Lenny: like, a little 'should-I-tackle-jimi-to-the-ground?' concerned. The Guy came offstage, and I shook his hand, thanked him, and asked for his card. He was polite, but yeah, he looked nervous too.
When I got home, I speed-read his website and scrolled through pictures on the landing page and none of them looked like me. I’m sure he plays great hackey-sack but the last thing I needed was another anybody picking through my mental tchotchke — particularly someone who maybe—aesthetically— Did Not Know From Black People. That, and trust that a candid of some kind didn’t season the potential trauma of what would just be me, seeing myself … without her.
I kept The Guy’s card in a safe place nevertheless.
——————————————————————————
Mentor, Ohio - October 2022
The Platinum Real Estate Building is short and gray with mirrored windows and an emblem at the top: newish construction, looks to be made of money, with a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a G-Wagon parked outside. WTF. Inside, it's clean and bright and to the right a bit, his logo in the lobby gives Michael Jordan early product branding so much to where I have to stand and stare at it because this kind of blatant derivation truly gives me the shits. (He'll later tell me it's a coincidence, and I'll make a “yeah right” face he won’t catch.)
The Men's is right there with an exquisite Toto-esque shitter, so I squeeze out a quarter-pounder, wash the mitts, and stand midway down the hall facing an opulent tangerine maple door. I look up and down the hallway, feeling like maybe I’ve done all the business I should do and if I take a left, he'd never know I was here.
I stand, hand flat against the orange door like it’s fucking Lourdes because I’m expecting something impossible from a stranger who said something once that I honestly can't remember. I am here to ask someone to move the stone from my tomb of despair and from here I promise nothing makes too much sense anymore.
—————————————————————————
The Guy looks over smiling, maybe too glad to see me.
"Jimi! Welcome. Have a seat …I’m in an email. Be with you in a minute."
Michael Cavotta sits at his desk just right of the entrance —still bald, still white, with a single white braided beard now, managing to have aged much better than me. Huh.
“You want one of these?” He says, pointing to a bowl of orange candy.
What is it?
“Not sure, but aren’t they good?— I order them off Amazon.” They are too good to imagine, really, and straight away, they taste like a cutoff number and then I’m laughing at the lies we tell ourselves. At this rate, I’ll never get my blood sugar right.
There’s work in progress around us— electric, maybe. Two workmen on ladders to the left are deep in the paneled ceiling. Clean, warm, Buddah’d and honorably sinophile with a sense of reverence and devoid of fetish, there's a sitting area with a faux fireplace, a TV screen and the bowls of sweet orange evils on the end tables, and a simple camera set up to my right where he takes pictures, allegedly.
In the corner, there's a sexy chef's kitchen with all the stainless steel, a 220-inch executive cinema screen with a 17,000-watt sound system and couches in front, a sitting counter, and a well-stocked liquor shelf in front of a long window on the other wall for no good reason. This is not Olan Mills — it's funky-hot, high-end photo-branding — even in another city, this would be impressive. By phone, I told him what I needed, and as I sat down, he had some ideas.
Early in, he suggests we invite his friend and partner Jen Margolis—a trained coach and social worker — which seems either paranoid or prophylactic but understandable, as he'll tell me later, I looked so clearly fucked up (my words, not his). I won't explain why, despite conventional wisdom, two strangers in my head won't be better than one. I declined this approach, and we scheduled three sessions with just him and me— two to talk, one to shoot a photo, that I am sure I will just skip. This is an ala carte approach that isn’t cheap, but the money doesn’t matter — it feels as if it has to be the last stop. No, Hari Kari’s not on the menu — I got kids — but the way I’m living? Yeah. I can’t do much I enjoy.
It Isn’t a Life At All.
Sitting there, it’s like going to an amateur chiropractor or abortion hobbyist —ironic. Necessary. Dangerous on its face, for all the reasons. For years, there’ve been well-wishers, thoughts and prayers, folks with Ph.D and EBTs giving all the best advice. This guy has a BA in Asian Studies, a minor in English and Anthropology and no therapeutic training whatsoever. I have to find my way back. He too wants to know what he said, lo those years ago (Go Media owns all the tape of the WMC event), to where it occurs to me that maybe the bar here is too high for everyone involved.
But what's the worst that could happen?
_____________________________________________
Judy Weiser is, according to her website, a Psychologist, Art Therapist, Consultant, Educator, Trainer, University Adjunct Faculty, International Lecturer, and Author — and one of the earliest pioneers of PhotoTherapy, Therapeutic Photography, Photo-Art-Therapy, VideoTherapy, and other related techniques. YQ, very explicitly, isn't that.
Over Zoom, Weiser is rightly skeptical but decides Cavotta's method sounds ethical and responsible. He's probably a good guy, she says, even if she's concerned about his lack of therapeutic training. "[Therapists] go deep because we know how. If it gets too heavy if somebody goes, 'Oh my God, that's what happened to me?' and they start crying and howling and whatever? Your Guy wouldn't know what to do."
———————————————
Cavotta and I learn we share a swagger: cozy in our respective skins, and this secures a foundation. Broadly, our conversations are very two- guys-at-a-bar. One guy talks. The other guy listens, offering spartan, practical feedback. Beyond my Three Words, there are no methodologies or mantras. It's conversation for adults, all ramping up to the photo shoot I forgot because I'm here with a destination that doesn't look like a picture. I don't know what it looks like. I’ll know it when I see it.
———————————————————————
Michael Cavotta Studios, Mentor, Ohio- November 19, 2022
(The day after my wife’s birthday)
MICHAEL and JIMI sit in his SITTING AREA.
JIMI sits quietly pressurized, visibly distraught.
MICHAEL sits across from him, attentive and focused.
IZRAEL: I have lost my ability ... my courage to pivot. I can't readily accept that I'm here alone. We thought we would change the world. And what I thought we were going to do, we're not going to do... I can't accept that.
CAVOTTA: (calm) Do you discount entirely...? ... the possibility that she's not right here, right now? Why choose to accept the version of reality where she's not with you, instead of saying ‘I’ve gotta bring her with me in a different way?’
IZRAEL: I have a sense that, wherever she is ... 10 years out, she sees me in stasis ... and she is profoundly disappointed.
CAVOTTA: (scoffs) Man, she's not disappointed. Do you know where she is? She is where there is no time... where all time ceases... and she’s waitin’. Waitin’ for you to get back to fuckin’ work. Sure, OK — she's gone. Boo Fuckin’ Hoo, sad fuckin’ story — but that doesn't take you off the hook. You still have all the tools, all the gifts you had together. The best version of you still exists, whether you want to believe it exists or not ... whether you're using it with intention or not.
He leans in.
CAVOTTA: Just think about; when you DO punch out and meet her on the other side, having not carried forth?! MAN … She's gonna want some FUCKING ANSWERS.
——————————————————————————
A month and two sessions later, here I am, and d'oh! the picture nobody asked for because it's part of the deal — it's low-key kinda the whole deal. Still, he totally had to remind me. I'm pretty sure I can do without it, honestly. I’m good.
"We need to be able to recognize the difference between the jimi having his picture taken and the real jimi, “he says. “We won't know moment to moment which jimi is gonna be there. But we'll see the difference."
Hm.
Yes. Of course we will.
________________________________________________
Michael Cavotta Studios Mentor Ohio,
December 2022
I wore a white cotton T-shirt and a wool gray and black winter scarf, dandy-knotted at the neck. I'm fresh from the barber, gonna take this fucking picture and love it like the bread I didn’t order with dinner, ‘cause I paid for it. Gonna eat the god-damn bread. In my head, it’s like I'm outsourcing a selfie — I hack into my clear plastic vanity to tolerate this.
He sits me on a stool, and adjusts the lights and angles —I know one thing: this untrained non-photographer photographer is a pro. We talk and jive while he pitches prompts, coercing me to lean forward and back, and as my back pops and knees crick, I comply because can we get this over with? I don't know what he’s trying to do. I only know what he says.
An hour later, I'm popping orange cordials like I don't know better, and we're looking at his screen, trudging through his shots, through different poses, I am silly and exposed, some slides are all arms because I am all arms, but then, I see something clear and frightening — it's me, wearing the first gift my wife ever gave me; and it's me on our wedding day. It's lost-and-found me, and I try not to cry in front of a stranger.
We’re here.
———————————————————————————————————
[by Zoom]
JUDY: When you see the picture, what did you see?
jimi: I see ... bliss.
Judy: Did you know you couldn't feel that anymore?
jimi: (shakes his head, a tear falls)
Judy (notices): Yeah, go ahead. Cry. It's fine. Um, the picture showed you that you could be happy, and you liked it, and you didn't feel guilty. And that told you something too — told you, it was OK now? Something in that picture got past your barriers of how you should be, how you should act, how people who've gone through what you went through should look, and whatever it did, you liked it.
... you saw you, different than the one you expected. Cuz you know what you look like in the mirror every day because you miss your wife, and yeah, it's a horrible story and blah, blah, blah. You saw something in the photo that told you it was OK to go forward. Because you saw that you could and it would be OK, from what he told you, or whatever. I don't know. It wasn't the photo. It was your perception of the picture.
—————————————————————————
[BY PHONE]
"Are you SURE you're not Michael Cavotta?"
It seems, he’ll tell me, that Cavotta called years back, asking about footage and got nothing— any media from a WMC event was copyrighted, as far as Go Media was concerned. But that was then. Years on, Kevin Wilson, Go Media’s Web Developer, sounded a little annoyed, thinking Cavotta was taking another shot at the apple by cosplaying a Black Writer Who Sounds White-ish on the Phone. You know — that time-tested canard.
‘Am I sure I'm not Michael Cavotta?’ I say. Uh. Yeah. Pretty sure.
Convinced, Kevin recalls Cavotta’s talk because everyone does, he says.
I need to see what I saw ten years ago — does he have film footage?
Kevin says he has the audio — if I promise not to publish it anywhere, I can have it.
OK.
I'm listening to the tape, and Cavotta’s story sounds like every orgin story of its kind — the hook that hooked me isn't apparent.
And then he says:
"Holy shit, what am I gonna do?" He says, "... I sat down with my wife, and I said, ‘Hey, all this stuff that we've got going on, it's not gonna last.’ I knew she knew what I needed to happen, and I was afraid to do it. To her credit, she saw it all coming — a lot sooner than I did."
Ah.
_______________________________________________
Somewhere in Mentor, Ohio
February 2023
Ninja Sushi and Hibachi is the second place I'd ever been in Mentor — third, if you count the gas station. A traditional sushi bar with family-sized wooden tables, modern, well-lit, and super-clean. A few months out, maybe because he wants to show off his fairly good Mandarin Chinese, we're here.
In the time between our first sessions and the now, we've seeded a friendship. I order half the menu before I realize he wants to pay the check. That’s sweet, and I’m pretty sure we'll fistfight about it, until he insists. So fuck it.
Living without my wife is like walking through glass barefoot with half a shoe, but she loves sushi, and oh look! It’s here. I grab a fork while the Shokunin — this motherfucker — puts his chopsticks to work. I’ve rarely felt so out-classed. Cavotta’s not just another hipster or the Italian Kwai Chang Kane.
All those years back, This Guy mentioned The Wife, the inspiration and engine for all of it. This Guy Has What I Had. This Guys Knows What I Lost. We bonded over an irrefutable truth: You only need one person to believe in you, and that energy will be there for all time. They may go ahead, but they never go away. Nothing can break a bond like that.
He knew a secret I'd lost in the fog of grief: your wife picks you, joins and affirms your mission, and that spirit can live inside one of you instead of the two ... and it'll be OK. It'll be alright.
It’ll be FINE.
I know — you’re all like ‘that's got nothing to do with YouJitsu, Rex Kwon Do. Or headshots.’ Or maybe it does.
Or maybe we don’t make too much of it.
Maybe it’s not that Cavotta is Jesus and I am Lazarus so much as he’s just the last guy in a kitchen full of otherwise capable people trying to open a pickle jar: one person tries, then another, then another and five, six, fifty folks later there’s a real frustration until someone practically walks in from off the street, smacks the jar on the bottom, taps the fucking thing on the edge of the counter and >pop< it’s party-time and it’s a miracle — unfathomable — if it weren’t right in front of you. But you don’t ask. You don’t ponder the thing. You keep it moving, because who cares? You got pickles now. Pickles, man. Pickles.
I am alone here; I don't know how I get on, and I am scared. But I am living. I am alive. Writing, the record label, the comic book, mondo pussy (kidding/not kidding), you name it. I have risen. Heh.
"I had no intention of being anybody's life coach," he says, mouth full. "I had no intention of being anybody's therapist. I had no intention of being anybody's anything, other than a slingshot to get you from here to wherever you're trying to go next.
“And if it takes a next-level picture of you to do it?" He shrugs with a sushi grin.
"Great."