CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

VI: Yesteryears

Most of Brendon’s early work depicted dinosaurs. Stick-legs and fat heads with lolling eyes and tongues sometimes longer than the creature’s body. When eight, during a spring break from elementary school, Casey came over. Still young enough to not know the difference between a Camaro and a Firebird, yet old enough to mimic the revving of the engine and boasting a nose that could identify brands of beer by scent alone, Casey came with uncut hair and khaki shorts to spread himself across Brendon’s bed, sweaty skin an irrelevance in those short-lived days.

“Why do you have a T-Rex on your ceiling?”

“It’s a giganotosaurus.”

“What’s the difference?”

Brendon rolled his eyes with casual affront. “Everything.”

But Casey wasn’t interested in those differences. In fact, Casey wasn’t interested in anything but the bin of knock-off metal cars that had an occasional marker tucked within.

“You have a fire truck! And this car… My dad says those ’83 ‘vette motors are crap to work on, like picking around at bones and hoping for muscle to grow.” He tossed the shiny black car over his shoulder dismissively.

Brendon didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t want Casey to know that. So cars became the rule of conversation. They’d play racing, shoving cars across the shaggy carpet that their little wheels could not withstand. They’d lay tracks out of old blocks and mountains out of clothes to drive straight up, switchbacks a thing of the nonsensical adult world and not logical child-thinking. The dinosaurs came out, here…and there. In an apocalyptic land where Mad Max roamed or in an epic superhero time travel episode.

The dinosaur drawings on Brendon’s wall slowly swapped out for intricately detailed cars that Casey would critique in loving detail, his eyes alight and his words a tumble. At the time, Brendon just enjoyed the warmth that spawned from the appreciation of his art.

Eight years later, Casey first kissed Brendon in the front seat of a cheap, run-ragged Mustang with the engine purring and an indie rock band Casey loved playing from the small speaker of his iPod. No dinosaurs to speak of, unless one counted the car.

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Next Chapter!

CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

IV: Yesteryears

The day Brendon was born, a thunderstorm rolling in during a late June afternoon, the oil from a diesel had spread across the parking lot, a snake wound tight at one end and slippery, whipcord at the other. A dark rainbow patterned the asphalt and stuck to the bottom of his mother’s sneakers. She tripped on the way in, in between contractions, and though she didn’t fall, her stomach heaved and the diaper bag filled with newborn outfits spilled off his father’s shoulder and into the slick as he jerked to catch her.

Inside, in the corner of a labor and delivery room, that same diaper bag sat in an out-of-the-way corner, rainbow oil seeping up through cotton threads to bless a never-before-worn onesie with color goodness and a painter’s spirit. It had dried by the time his father changed Brendon into it over in the maternity ward, the dark smear almost unnoticeable against the navy fabric, and besides, the rest of the clothes had long since been smeared with worse things of a biological nature.

His mother later claimed it was a fairy, or faerie were Brendon in trouble, that had flown by and kissed Brendon’s fat baby thighs and spindly fingers to grant him such an artistic nature. He had a stork’s kiss, a puckered splatter of darker skin, that ran just under his hipbone and curled in the shape of a sickle, or a moon, or a fingernail, or the curving keel of a ship’s bow cutting up from the water, or the gentle sloping of a river, or the trajectory of a hummingbird’s wing, or…

Brendon’s mother could and did make up a hundred different ideas of what that patch of skin might represent and he took them into his heart, one after the other, where they blossomed from his fingertips on bath tile walls and later from the end of cheap, splitting bristles bought from a dollar store.

She’d say it was a fairy who kissed him and brought his talent, but he knew better.

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Next Chapter!

CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

III: Yesteryears

Brendon Kotes grew up in a small house in rural Maryland, just a few miles from the bay, but on the wrong side, where the money landed in patches rather than wide swatches of world. He hadn’t landed in money, per se, but he had landed with something infinitely better: two loving parents and a couple of straight-laced older siblings who gave him just enough rope to explore, but not enough to hang.

Not like Casey Mattingly, whose older sister introduced him to drag racing and the smoky after parties that tasted more of rubber and pisswater beer rather than the freedom he claimed. Casey fell, again and again, like a rock desperate to sink into the bay. And when that first crevice did not go deep enough, he’d find a new one, a better one, a darker one, until he settled in the deepest trench and no amount of hands could drag him out.

Where there’s one side, there’s always another.

Robbie Frey lived in one of those patches of wealth, with a boat slip and a jaguar under his own name before he turned eighteen. Possibly a bit overboard in terms of spending at times, with a dabbing of debt to hang on his kitchen corkboard, but all in all, a good fellow with a decent job who only stayed up too late on the weekends sometimes, who had only skipped his homework occasionally, and tried his best not to be late to work, but traffic happens.

A good sort. A balance to Casey’s insistent calls of freedom and open road. For who needs traffic at seven thirty in the morning on a bright spring day when one could have long stretches of tarmac to squeal down during moonlit hours of humid glory?

Robbie did, that’s who. But not Casey.

And not Brendon either, but it was years before he realized he didn’t need that long stretch of tarmac either. Didn’t need the car, the drive, the steady job or the transient races.

Just a good sable brush and the inkling of an idea.

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Next Chapter!