Unlike so many of us in our generation, my friend Michael Griswold kept his nerve after graduating from college. He did not slink off to grad school or to study law. In those days, as the war in Vietnam staggered to a close and the churches emptied of skeptics and hedonists such as we prided ourselves on being, the old careers we read about in English novels, of military officer or clergyman, were no longer under consideration by a young man in search of a profession. Business was likewise no option for those of us who wished to believe there was some finer goal in life than the accumulation of wealth. No, Mike would make his way in the world unhindered by one of the safer careers. Instead, he would live by his wits, follow his heart’s desire, pursue his dreams, and in general embody the many aspirational clichés of the day.
He liked music, so he got a job at Stoner, one of the music clubs in Georgetown, popular with teenage suburbanites with fake IDs. Busing tables was how he got in the door. The pay was not adequate, but he lived with friends and friends of friends in a large group house near Dupont Circle, where the rent was low because it was split so many ways and because the house itself, though grand in its day, was close to the crime line of 16th Street. Besides, busboys who were not too picky about eating leftover food never went hungry. The career path for Mike at Stoner did not include waiting tables himself, though, since the owners of the establishment firmly believed that waitresses in tight tops and tighter jeans made for a thirstier clientele. Plus, young women could maneuver more gracefully through the packed-together tables at the club.
Mike played a bit of guitar and harmonica, and although he did not aspire to do that professionally, he lingered in the backstage rooms with members of the bands that passed through, often fetching black coffee or the carbonated form of coke for those struggling with drug-induced catatonia in the minutes before they went onstage. The owners took notice, having dealt too often with musicians who were barely able to perform. Even the stoned teenagers slouching at their tables, having paid a cover charge to hear a real live band, got restive when the piped-in music went on too long. One evening, Jimmy, the balder of the two owners, pulled Mike aside for a little talk. Mike’s first thought was that he was about to be chastised for giving away all that caffeine. But no.
“Hey, it’s cool how you’re handling the talent,” Jimmy told him. “They don’t seem to mind having you around, so keep hanging out with them as they’re waiting to go on. Even more if they’ll let you. Keep ’em happy and keep ’em vertical. And try to stay vertical yourself.” Mike did as he was told, which made him unpopular with the waitresses and other busboys, who had to pick up some of the slack. But it made him more popular with his housemates, since he tucked away the tabs of this and that he was offered by the musicians, sharing the goodies when he got home after work.
Before too long he began to hear from hollow-eyed Simone, who booked the bands for the club, that some of the groups’ managers preferred to do their booking with him, requests that she was all too happy to pass along, since it made less work for her. But it meant that Mike had to show up at the club during regular office hours, and although Jimmy reluctantly agreed to pay him for that time, it was at not much more than the busboy rate. He was also busing less, and the flow of illegal substances increased beyond his capacity to enjoy them or even give them away. “You can’t eat LSD,” Mike would tell his housemates. “Or you can, but you’ll soon starve to death without particularly minding.” Since he was not prepared to sell the handfuls of pills he would dig out of his pockets when he got home at night, and you couldn’t trade them for English muffins or anything else at Safeway, something had to change.
As it happened, one of his friends from William & Mary had gotten a job at an art gallery on Connecticut Avenue. When Mike ran into him on the street one day, he mentioned that the gallery was looking to hire another person. The pay was not great, but it was enough to keep Mike in English muffins, so he applied for the job and got it. When he gave notice at Stoner, Simone was sulky, but Jimmy took it well. Tugging absentmindedly at the ponytail that sprouted behind his bald pate, he leaned toward Mike, saying in a confidential tone, “Hey, man, stay in touch. You never know when we might need a new booker.”
Mike understood nothing about art, or nothing beyond what he had learned in a survey course in college, sitting in the dark and daydreaming as the professor flipped through the slides loaded into a projector. One quiz a week plus one paper and a final exam guaranteed a B or higher, but in the end all he had absorbed was a few works of the Impressionists. Mike’s friend Reid had also faked his way through art history, but the faking if not the history had prepared him adequately for this gallery job, which he had now held for several months without being exposed as a fraud. Happily, in this regard, almost nobody ever entered the gallery, and when someone did, either Reid or Mike was expected to hand the customer off quickly to the owner, who sat at his desk in a loft overlooking the gallery floor.
“How,” Mike asked Reid after a few days of work at the Winston Arnold Gallery, “how in the world does Mr. Arnold keep this place afloat?” After all, it was in a reasonably tony and presumably expensive location near the Mayflower Hotel. Winston Arnold himself toiled steadily up in the loft, acquiring new artists and setting up shows, and he never seemed to fret over how few paintings actually sold.
“No idea,” Reid said. “Maybe he’s working his way through a massive inheritance. Or maybe he can make ends meet by selling a few expensive paintings a year.” But in the months that Reid and Mike worked there, the shows were small and thinly attended, and even the paintings that sold were not particularly expensive. So the young men opted for the inheritance explanation. Or perhaps, they thought, he had married money, and his wife believed that whatever the gallery lost each year was well worth the benefit of keeping the darkly handsome but charmless Winston out of the house.
Not that Mike and Reid ever professed to understand the economics of gallery ownership, if there was anything to know beyond money out, money in—or was it the other way around? They especially never understood why Mr. Arnold thought it necessary to employ them both, since, except when they were setting up shows, there was barely enough for even one of them to do.
The near absence of customers made the Winston Arnold Gallery a less than fruitful place to meet girls, which would have been some compensation for the low pay. But being able to say they worked there did have its value when they were introduced to women in other contexts. The group-house world west of 16th Street and south of Rock Creek Park was more than adequately peopled with young women just out of college waiting tables while looking for a job on the Hill or at one of the sexier nonprofits. A job in a real art gallery seemed romantic even in comparison with these wished-for jobs of theirs.
Still, Mike and Reid learned so little about the gallery, met so few local artists, and had so negligible an exposure to the local art world that they might as well have been fibbing when they regaled girls in bars or at crowded house parties. They had not wanted to admit to each other that the hours they spent at the gallery, staring at the mostly unchanging display of Washington Color School imitations, had grown tedious. They felt like museum guards. Reid confessed that he had signed up for the LSAT and, depending on the results, would be applying to law schools for next fall.
Just as Mike realized he would have to rouse himself to look for a better job, a call came from Jimmy at Stoner. “Simone has run off to Ocean City with her boyfriend,” he said with a touch of wonder in his voice. “She’s going to manage a head shop on the boardwalk.” There came a silence that Mike didn’t know how to break. Was he supposed to express sorrow for Jimmy or for Simone? But Jimmy plowed on to the purpose of the call. “You want her gig?” he asked.
Mike did want the job, but he knew enough to seem not to want it too much.
“Can I think about it overnight?” he replied. “This gallery work is introducing me to the local art scene.”
Mike could hear Jimmy sigh on the other end of the line. “What you’re going to find out, man, is that there isn’t a local art scene. Just tell me what you’re making now, and I’ll double it.”
Mike named a figure that was twice what he was being paid.
“Bullshit,” Jimmy said. “No way Winston’s scoundrel wife would let him pay you that much. But if you can hoof it over here after work today and make a start on the bookings, I’ll double your fantasy figure anyway.”
“I’ll be there,” Mike replied.
He fell happily into the rhythms of the new job. His hours were his own, so he usually turned up at Stoner just before noon to do contracts and other paperwork, since the managers of the groups he was booking were not, to state the obvious, morning people. He liked how quiet the bar was in the afternoons, once the lunch crowd had gone back to their desks and before the late-afternoon setup and sound check. After that was over, he would work upstairs in his desk-size office until the band came back in the evening, and once he had gauged whether the administration of caffeine was needed or not, and acted accordingly, he was free to go home or sit out front and enjoy the show. Mike was an affable fellow, with a pleasing smile and a limber, athletic build, and he was as comfortable making small talk with the patrons as he was with the members of the bands.
One night, he began a conversation with a man at a nearby table who was sitting alone, eating a late dinner and drinking a Heineken. The man was going through a stack of papers that seemed to contain rows of images. He was maybe a couple of decades older than Mike, had a sunburned complexion, a bushy, sandy-colored beard, and was wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Mike watched him as they both waited for the band to come on, and decided that, although the man seemed interested in the pages in front of him, he was going through them so quickly that he probably wouldn’t mind being interrupted.
“What kind of camera takes those tiny pictures?” Mike asked.
The man looked up and gave Mike a neutral smile, with no trace of anything patronizing in his eyes. “These are contact sheets,” he said evenly. “They’re printed directly from the developed roll of film.”
Mike felt himself flushing. He had fair skin and coppery hair, so the blushing came easily. “Oh, of course,” he said. “Really dumb question.”
“No, it’s okay,” the man replied kindly, having gathered up the loose sheets and tapped their edges on the table to even them up. “After all, who brings his work into a music club? Probably it was the context that threw you.” He reached down and grabbed a well-worn leather satchel in which he tucked the sheets.
“You like this band?” the man asked of the group that had not yet emerged, although a couple of guys were fiddling with the equipment.
“Grin? Yes, they’re terrific. They have a great guitarist who, get this, played piano on After the Gold Rush. He hangs out with Neil Young. And they’ve got an album of their own now.”
“Have they been here before?” the man asked. “I’ve been off on assignment for months and just got back.”
“Yes, we book them every few weeks or so if we can get them. But they’re starting to outgrow small venues like ours.”
“Oh, so you work here,” the man said, more an observation than a question.
“I do. In fact, I make the bookings. And ‘on assignment’ sounds like you work for the State Department or are a journalist or something.”
“Photographer, yes, for Geographic. You know, National Geographic.”
“Oh, how amazing. That must be one of the coolest jobs in Washington.”
“I’ve been doing it for a while, so, you know, the glamour has worn off. But yes, it’s a pretty great way to make a living if you don’t need to be home too much.”
They would have gone on like this, but just then Jimmy appeared at the mic at the front of the small stage with his trademark greeting: “stoners!” After which he delivered his usual high-decibel introduction, which Mike always thought would have been better at a third the length. But soon enough the guys from Grin wandered onstage and launched into “Outlaw,” a song from their album.
After they played a half-dozen more of their own songs, mixed in with a few covers, including “Southern Man” in tribute to Neil Young, they took a break.
Mike stood and offered his hand to his new acquaintance. “I’m out, but I hope I’ll see you back here again. I’ll buy you a beer next time. My name’s Mike Griswold, by the way.”
“Harrison Parker. Pleased to meet you. I’m home for a little while so, yes, I’ll be back, and I’ll hold you to that beer.”
Mike watched for the photographer in the days that followed, and the next time Grin was set to play, there Harrison Parker was, alone once again. Fall was coming on, and Parker had hung his jacket on the back of the chair next to him, so when Mike asked if he could sit down, Parker cordially pulled it off and slung it on one of the seats across the table.
“I know, I know,” Parker said amiably, “a Geographic photographer wearing a bush jacket. All too predictable. I might as well have a yellow border around me.”
It took Mike a moment to follow what he was saying, since he had not been aware that he had been eyeing the jacket. But then he understood and said, “Yes, and where’s the pith helmet?”
“Okay, I’ve never gone that far, but I will confess to wearing a bush hat in places where the sun is scorching.”
“You go a lot of places like that? You’ve got that ruddy look of having spent years in the sun, hat or not.”
“I’m the red-faced Robert Wilson from that Hemingway story about the great white hunter in Africa.”
“But a lot nicer, I suspect,” Mike said. “He was an evil, cynical fellow, if I remember.”
“English major?” Parker asked.
“Guilty.”
As Julia, one of the waitresses who liked Mike, passed their table, he signaled for her to bring Parker another Heineken, and one for himself. Then Jimmy came onto the stage and screamed out, almost word for word, the same intro he had used weeks earlier. When Grin appeared, Mike was glad to see that, unlike Jimmy, they were not planning to repeat themselves, but opened with a different song from the album, and mixed in some new covers, and a few new songs they had been working on.
At the break, Mike and Harrison, as Mike now called him, spoke a bit about what they had been hearing. Then Harrison asked Mike a few questions about his living situation, whether he planned to stay on in D.C., how long he saw himself working at the club, his long-term plans, and other questions that Mike had no idea how to answer.
After a while, Harrison said, “This interrogation isn’t as idle as it might seem. It looks like Geographic isn’t going to send me out on a long assignment anytime soon. One of those belt-tightening moves that, thank God, never lasts very long.”
His grimace turned into a smile that showed his teeth through his bushy beard. “When I go on a long shoot, I always hire somebody out where I’m working to be my assistant, to help me with the equipment and anything else I need. Because I’ve been on the road so much, I haven’t had anyone like that here for a while. But it looks like I’m going to be needing an assistant based in D.C. for the foreseeable future.
“Is it something that might interest you?” Before Mike could respond, he went on: “If you have some flexibility here at the club, we could start slow and see how it goes. I might need you for some overnights, but there will be things we can do in a day, or even a morning. You’d be freelance at first, but if it worked out, and you wanted to do it full time, I can get you hired—you’d be a regular employee of the magazine.”
Mike was too surprised by the offer to consider pretending that he might not be interested. “I can keep up with the bookings here even if I don’t come in every day, which is really all Jimmy needs from me. I’ll have a talk with him about it and let you know.” This time it didn’t occur to Mike to ask about the pay, which would turn out to be more than adequate. But he wouldn’t be doing it for the money.
Harrison Parker seemed to consider the time when he was not on the road, when he was working out of the big National Geographic headquarters building on 17th Street, as a form of house arrest. For one thing, it made him all too available to his managers, and to their managers. The corporate types especially liked Harrison because he looked so much like what he was, a weather-beaten but still vigorous and even charismatic photojournalist. Paradoxically, it was this exotic quality that made them want him to take on the sort of drab domestic job he despised, portraits of distinguished visitors to the building or, worse, of the society execs themselves, posing with big donors. Or shooting Geographic events. His presence gave a whiff of the romantic exploratory mission of the society to the banal corporate goings-on they wanted documented.
This sort of assignment, which put Harrison in what, for him, passed as a grumpy mood, was when he most needed Mike’s assistance. The work was usually indoors, either inside the Geographic building or at some rich guy’s oversize office, so lighting was required, and thus the amount of equipment that needed lugging increased to well beyond what one person could manage. It wasn’t like moving a rock band, but the job required a couple of extra arms and a sturdy back. Mike also sensed that his being in tow increased Harrison’s patience with the whole undertaking. Maybe having an assistant present made him feel less like a lackey himself. Mike also saw that Harrison seemed comfortable with him, treating him less as the gofer he was and more as the budding protégé Mike quickly knew he wished to become.
Harrison had the patience of a natural teacher. While they were setting up a shoot, he talked steadily to Mike in a low tone about what they were doing and why. Mike learned fast, so before long he knew how to assess whether there was enough natural light to be of any help, where to place the subject in relation to that light, how much artificial lighting was needed to fill in, and from what directions it should come.
“Love these corner offices with big windows,” Harrison said one day when they were setting up at an older building on Farragut Square, just down the street from Geographic. Harrison sat on a chair about 15 feet from the windows and got Mike to take a light reading.
“Won’t need a lot of extra light,” Mike ventured.
“Yes, if only we can get this guy to sit or stand right here.”
Just then the PR woman from Geographic, Linda Halvorson, ducked in. “You fellows okay?” she asked. She had been at her job for about as long as Harrison had been at his, and her cordiality was tinged with a bit of weariness around the eyes.
“Yup, fine, Linda,” Harrison said. “But before we get the lights set up, maybe let’s be sure this works for Lanny.” Langdon Phillips was one of a flock of vice presidents for the society. His boyish looks and smooth self-confidence made him the guy who handled the biggest of the big donors.
Linda returned with Lanny, who poured on the charm with Harrison. Lanny had known Harrison long enough to be aware of how moody he could get in these situations all of them knew were a waste of his talent.
“Looks great, Parker,” Lanny said. “All that outside light will really warm this one up. Not exactly Marrakesh, but good.”
Harrison muttered a response and busied himself with the lights.
When everything was set up, Lanny and Linda ushered in their donor, who, Harrison later told Mike, was somehow making millions from investing in countries that were poorer than the state of Mississippi. He had the out-of-season tan and coifed hair of the well tended; Harrison later estimated that his suit cost more than he and Mike combined made in a month. He looked as if he had once been a linebacker, and even now, perhaps thanks to a personal trainer, not much of his muscle had turned to fat.
Before Lanny could start to lay it on thick with the “Meet our famous photographer” bit, Glenn Bain was waving his arms like a referee. “No, no, this is all wrong,” he said. “I want the windows in the picture. And Admiral Farragut in the background.”
“But we’re on the eighth floor,” Mike began, when a look from Harrison told him not to continue.
“Give us a few minutes,” Harrison said quietly to Linda, who was standing beside him. She immediately herded her charges out of the room.
After the shoot, as they were breaking down the lights, Harrison said, “It’s just not worth arguing with these fat cats who think they know everything. What’s in it for us? If we just go along, you know, he gets to show he’s the smartest guy in the room, Lanny and Linda get the photo they want, and we get to scoot out of here that much faster.”
“Well,” Mike said, “I admire your ability to hold your tongue. Not one of my strongest qualities.”
“Usually, just saying nothing is the best way to show a guy like Bain I think he’s an asshole, but without causing a scene. And since I don’t make millions, he doesn’t really care what I think. I’m about as important to him as this reflector, you know, and that’s fine by me.”
Over the first few months that Mike assisted Harrison, he began to think of the older man as a mentor. He absorbed Harrison’s attitude, seeing it not only as a means of dealing with difficult subjects, but as central to his perspective as a photographer. What was important was to focus—both the camera and his attention—on the technical aspects of taking a photo, and at the same time to hold himself apart, to stand, in a sense, behind himself as he composed and completed the picture. His method was much more evident in his real work, both for the magazine and for himself, than in the situations like the Glenn Bain shoot, where nothing was at stake for him as a journalist or as an artist.
Oddly enough, it took some time for Mike to realize that, although he had managed so far to stay off the safer career paths, his connection to something more fulfilling to the soul had been consistently tangential. Shop boy in an art gallery, booker for a music club, and now photographer’s assistant … these were jobs that reflected his youth and inexperience, and perhaps luckily did not require a reckoning about the presence or absence of imagination or, more distantly, talent. Harrison had been generous in teaching Mike the mechanical aspects of his job, even giving him the opportunity to practice what he learned. But photography of the sort that Harrison did went well beyond the mechanical, and about this the older man had been silent. No real conversation about aesthetics, composition, sensibility, narrative, ideas, or even journalistic values. Why? Was it because, for all his good will, Harrison wanted to hold back what made him so accomplished at what he did? Maybe he wanted, ultimately, to keep separate the jobs of carrying the camera and using it. Or was it simply that Mike had never asked, never directly expressed an interest in becoming a photographer? If so, was that because he so admired what Harrison could do or was it because he felt no confidence that he could, someday, do it himself? What worried Mike most was that it had simply not occurred to him to ask.
But now it had occurred to him, and even so, he could not bring himself to talk to Harrison about it. One day, Mike walked over to Georgetown and across Key Bridge into Rosslyn, where he was able to find National Pawnbrokers amid what was left of the clutter of loan and pawn shops clinging to that ugly edge of Arlington. He looked at an assortment of old cameras and settled on a slightly beat-up Olympus range finder listed at 40 bucks. Since it was a pawn shop, Mike felt obliged to haggle, and managed to talk the shopkeeper down to $25.
As he made his way home, he found a new appreciation for the yellowy brilliance of the late-afternoon, late-winter light, aiming his camera every which way—at the soulless buildings sprouting up amid the bars and strip clubs of Rosslyn, the Potomac flowing a greenish brown beneath the bridge, the unlikely wildness of Roosevelt Island, the spires of the university up high and the diminutive black-and-white Dixie Liquors building down low, the narrow streets of Georgetown, the traffic on Rock Creek Parkway, the gaping hole for the new Metro station north of Dupont Circle, the rows of once-elegant brick townhouses on Corcoran waiting for a better day. Although he was too shy to aim his camera at random people on the street, he was profligate in the number and variety of scenes he framed and struggled to focus with the tricky range finder, his improvidence owing to the simple truth that he had not yet bought any film.
