El Vasco

One of my favorite people that I have met is also someone about whom I have the most conflicting feelings. Of course. He is a man, and we will call him El Vasco, the name that he says he uses in his paintings. I have seen one of his works of art, a highly textured and abstract depiction of a house and some flowers. It is a beautiful work, but given the way he articulately describes his mental illness and sees the spirits, souls, and ancestoral histories of others, I think he can do better. Maybe I expect too much.

When he lived at the Family Shelter, each member of the staff had strong and wildly varying opinions about him. We all had different relationships with him depending on our individual tolerance and/or appreciate of his mental illness, the severity of which varied depending on the situation, and his pension for reading palms, spirits, and auras (auriolas, in his broken/spanish-inflected English). I spent most of my time talking to him and trying to convince him that he could not afford to live on SSI (disability checks that are, at most, $623 per month) in New Orleans, and also listening to him tell me my life story and make predictions about my personality and relationships with others. He correctly guessed (saw) that my father is an alcoholic, that I am often nervous, and that my family is very important to me and also very supportive. But he said that my father was Casanova--not a casanova, but THE Casanova. Wow. And that is why I have "strong sexualities."

EL Vasco is creative and eccentric and pisses off many people and confounds even more. But that is part of his charm. The men and women who come to stay in homeless shelters, their lives tainted with seemingly endless hardships and bad luck, have had the creativity forced out of them. Certainly empowerment of low-income residents--and here I'm talking about a movement that comes from within the Black community--would include empowering people to once again be creative. Modern life, modern poverty, is exhausting. To create is a luxury, and to see someone who so clearly has been through it all--revolutions in two different countries, day-to-day life of a refugee, a hurricane, and alcoholism--yet still has the drive to create and the desire to see visions even though they make his life harder, is beautiful and should be admired. No matter how frustrating it was to provide him with services or to mediate when people complained that he spit in the shower, his creativity inspired me