However, my most recent trip proved much more enjoyable, as I was able to spend my time admiring the doodlings of another impatient customer who took advantage of his wait by augmenting the mugshots of the FBI’s criminal posters. It’s juvenile and pedestrian, but hey, all the best things in life usually are. Enjoy!

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In addition to the flair of the deliberate and highly stylized lettering that incorporates arrows, inverted crosses and underlined letters to draw attention to certain words and phrases, there are also compositional elements that beg further notice. While the author uses individual boxes for each separate idea, the intentional placement of each geometrical shape and it’s spatial relationship to the others creates a somewhat disjointed flow that reinforces scattered feelings and message of his manifesto.

My favorite passage, however, recounts his early childhood years with the Harlem Globe Trotters and Harry Truman’s prophetic words that the Japanese “started the war, ” ultimately sending him to San Francisco for “Chinese eyes.”

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Except for Nick, who’s got things on his mind, things that would sour anyone’s warm weather plans. In no particular order, these things include: terrorist cells, ceaseless threats from the Russian Consulate and micro radio transmitters implanted in his prostrate. And then there’s the guys behind his woes: Michael, Oleg, Alexander, Alexey, Sergey O. and Sergey G., “Russian commie-criminals” intent on torturing Nick “16 hours a day, non-stop” with a brutal assault of “great stress on [his] nervous system, heart, brain and reproductive abilities,” all in retaliation against Nick’s self-professed anti-Soviet dissidence in the “1990th.”

Nick’s flybills have been spotted for the past two months up and down Geary Boulevard, often accompanied by a smaller explanatory flyer (not pictured due to the multiple phone numbers it lists) in which he offers the full names and ages of his tormentors, as well as his own contact information and a plea to the FCC to help him remove any and all radio transplants.

As excruciating as Nick’s paranoiac plight may be, I’m fascinated by the implicit contradictions his tactics raise. Here’s the Underground Man literally broadcasting his palpable fear and angst in block lettering on a 17” x 11” poster resembling any number of media promotions. It’s raw, loud and taunting in a way that inspires fear for Nick’s safety on the part of the viewer. Inadvertent as this effect may be, the work offers serious commentary on the inherent passivity of the observer and an embedded psychological content that’s a rare achievement within a constructed visual experience.

So enjoy your summer looky-loos, and as the burgers and brats spit over the coals, know that Nick is counting on you. . .

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However, upon long-overdue closer inspection, it appears that there is much more to the story. Judging from the cryptic Engrish ramblings and buffet of random international celebrity cameos, this guy/girl is either the heavily medicated, low-tech Chinese equivalent of Access Hollywood, or a distant branch of Scientology centered around the worship of a Laotian actress named Ching Lee, Mr. Entertainment Sammy Davis Jr. and some black guy with dreadlocks. My money is riding on door number one, but one can never underestimate the lunacy of religion.

It’s nice to know that crazy is fluent in many languages.

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While his mini “best of” pet portrait poster seems targeted at the smaller dogs (and perhaps their owners), we see a hybrid of past ideas and characters amid a virtual font explosion describing the latest prototypes for his patented Under Armour Body Suit for your sick or senile Canine.

As hard working and driven a man as Will appears to be, he makes no waste of time offering construction site security service. Not only is he available immediately, but he’ll even make himself at home and provide “live in” guard service protecting your site from…squatters?! My head hurts.

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Anyway, this Sunday, after months of silence I finally got my fix. After catching a fleeting glimpse of a poster taped to the back of a stop sign more than a week ago, this time I mustered up the motivation to hop off the bus along Cortland Ave. to capture one for the archives. Not only did I find a one, I actually discovered two and a quarter previously unseen posters along the sunny, early morning streets of Bernal. While his witty cartoon thought bubbles remain a means for animal-human communication, our artist seems to have abandoned his rough pen sketches in favor of a collage of photo-surrealism. From what I gather the 1980’s advertising campaign of Bud Light must have had a profound impact on Will’s formative years, as he appears to have enlisted the help of the once famed, ever-exuberant party animal Spuds MacKenzie, donning swimming goggles and offering clever one-liners as a spokesman for his master’s artistic services.

Interestingly, in “True Hollywood Stories” fashion, I discovered that Spuds MacKenzie (real name: Honey Tree Evil Eye) had quite the controversial life, complete with meteoric rise to fame followed by an almost immediate free-fall. After becoming an over-night sensation that began with a 1987 Super Bowl commercial, Spuds received a slew of endorsement deals and his face garnered everything from t-shirts to dolls. However, it was soon let loose that the super-macho, ladies’ man Spuds was actually a female! With the frenzied media controversy that ensued, reportedly Anheuser-Bush execs tried to shield her from cameras to conceal her female parts that might become front-page news when she had to go #1.

Like other pop-icons Prince and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, Spuds was even the target of angry temperance-oriented parent groups, who in 1992 accused her employers of selling the “too-cool-for-monogamy-and-sobriety dog” to America’s children. Even though the FTC ruled in the maligned Bull Terrier’s favor, the ads were dropped and less than a year later Spuds died of Kidney failure at the age of 10.

Anyway, back to Will, who decided the optimal way to advertise his “Adventure Walks” was by showing a little girl being dragged along by an overpowering Alligator. Natalie the dog, with the clear intention of distancing herself from this bizarre spectacle, states she “did not take that picture.” Good to know who’s got your back, eh?

And then there’s this. If you ever leave town, you may have another option to leaving your beloved canine with family or a professional boarding kennel.

It’s nice to have something to look forward to (again).

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However, sometimes all it takes to jolt you back into the moment is a song, a smell, or something to prompt a smile and remind you that everything will be ok. For me that epiphany took the form of a cheap xerox poster taped to a local telephone pole. “Fuck Hitler. Learn German.” Direct and provocative with a clear call to action; It’s a marketer’s dream.

While I have about as much interest in learning German as I did in sorting through a small mountain of someone else’s mail, this crude poster is effective. The artist makes excellent use of the Punk Visual Art aesthetic, which according to artist Mark Vallen, is “steeped in shock value and revered what was considered ugly…designed to disturb and disrupt the happy complacency of the wider society.” He clearly understands, as do we, that simply evoking the name Hitler elicits a strong reaction from people. On top of the message, you’ve got a ferocious werewolf, bearing a diamond encrusted grill and a frowning characture of Adolf so simple it couldn’t be anymore perfect. It made me stop and take notice. What impresses me most is fact that a guy named Paco is teaching German.

Somewhere in this city of abject cultural sensitivity and increasingly homogenized thought, there’s someone else who thinks that in spite of the horrific historical associations with the man, the exploitation of Hitler for shock value and humor is still funny.

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Really, I should have seen this coming.

But allow me to backtrack: a few months ago Will’s Flyers appeared everywhere and almost overnight, for the most part stapled at eye level on bulletin boards in coffee shops and video stores. But the ones that caught my attention were the ones taped to utility poles just above curb level: easy to overlook unless you, the captive two-legged target, happened to be waiting for your dog to finish its business. Base, intuitive, and as calculated as the diaper commercials punctuating educational afternoon cartoon line-ups, this was brilliant advertising, clear and simple. I was immediately attracted to the incongruity of Will’s industrious sense of self-promotion and the aesthetic naiveté of the portrait services being offered at the bargain price of $20 per drawing. So I got it in my head (where most of my life-long regrets tend to originate) to commission Will for a rendering of my cat who was about to undergo long neglected oral surgery, a procedure I hoped would exorcise the flat of the strange, sardine-like stink that crept into bed late every night and curled up to stay. I called the number on the flyers, left a message and waited.

Two weeks pass, the cat has her surgery, and I give up on hearing back from Will. Then I hear back from Will, calling me from a phone booth. I know this because he opens the conversation by telling me that he is in a phone booth and that he doesn’t have much time to talk because he doesn’t have many quarters and his friend outside the phone booth is waiting on him to buy pie for dinner. Traffic tears through his voice while he talks. He asks me about the cat, about her surgery. I’ve forgotten my mention of this in my initial message, and caught off-guard by his concern I confess my surprise. “I don’t forget anything,” Will shouts. His mouth is far away from the receiver, and he sounds like a man accustomed to talking one way and looking another. Ignoring his tone I press for a back-story and Will obliges:

One man, three dogs. They live in a truck and share the front seat to stay warm. One of his dogs, Natalie (the namesake of his business), has a tumor the size of a golf ball on her neck that requires immediate removal, hence the assertive advertising campaign. All proceeds from Will’s dog walking will go directly to the welfare of his animals. As for the twenty dollar price tag on the pet portraits, Will considers this an insult to his talent but is willing to accept it on behalf of his charges. “Twenty dollars buys a lot of dog food,” he assures me, and because I have no idea what it’s like to survive on subsistence level as a struggling artist who happens to share most of his body heat and personal space on any given winter night with multiple kibble-craved dependents, I acquiesce.

Will’s instructions: photos of the cat, along with the money, are to be left in an envelope at a pet store on Stanyan street. The store’s owner, Gordon, will contact Will when everything is in place. “Don’t worry about Gordon,” Will assures me, “he’s the last hippie in the Haight.” But I ignore this red flag for the only reason that makes sense: if I deal with Gordon I don’t have to deal with Will, meaning his dogs. I don’t like dogs, and I hope to keep them as far removed from this experience as possible. “One more thing,” Will adds before we hang up, “how would you like your cat posed in the picture?” Like in the flyers, I tell him, meaning the cartoonish iconography I’d come to love, in which dish-eyed owls leer over leather clad mice popping wheelies on thumb sized (and undeniably sweet-ass) motorcycles. Cheesy Rider rides again, I quote, and Will laughs. “I just made it up,” he says. I tell him that’s why I called in the first place, expecting more laughter. Instead, there’s a long pause. “But I made that shit up,” Will insists. And that’s when I begin to suspect that everything is instantly and unexplainably fucked.

Continue Reading Part 2

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Back at Charles’ apartment we find that his cat was way too fat for the harness, so we spend the afternoon taking turns with the leash, dragging her on her side across the kitchen floor to get her used to the sensation of moving when dead-set against it (the feline definition of catastrophe, we assume). Attempting to console Charles in the wake of his failed contingency plan, I point out that the cat’s unwillingness to be moved could mean salvation, given that in the event of a major cataclysm I would be chief among the grief-stricken and hunger-crazed mobs tracking him through the underbrush with the intention of devouring his cat, pink leash and all.

Now that the whole pet-portrait scenario is out of our hands, Charles and I kill time by scouring the city for Will’s flyers, which seem to be plastered everywhere from the Great Highway to the Embarcadero. The cost of dog food aside, Will must be spending a small fortune at Kinko’s for an effort that seems to be going completely unnoticed by most people, except for the two of us and a friend who calls one afternoon to say that he’s just seen Will tacking up a flyer in an Outer Richmond café. But when I ask for a description all my friend can offer is that Will seemed really tall. Which is about as useful as describing a shark as really wet.

Two weeks go by, and while I’m not an impatient man by any means, I often like to know when things are going to happen and exactly how they’re going to go down. After all, it’s not everyday that I walk into a pet store and hand a wad of bills to a man who’s likely to mistake my envelope with his monthly mail-ins to Mr. Kite’s Benefit. So I call Gordon to see if Will has been by. Gordon reports that Will has been in the week before and might have picked up the envelope, but is reticent to offer any more information. I decide to call Will and track the order’s progress.

In my message I’m polite, asking Will if he’s received the photos and the money (you know what they say about the fidelity of hippies), but Will’s beeper service cuts me off mid sentence. I call back and am cut off a second time. After dialing again I get several seconds into my new message and forget my train of thought so I hang up and call back a fourth time.

The following night I come home to a voice mail from Will, one that I’ve saved on my machine and replayed for friends enough times that their immediate look of shock and concern upon hearing it has begun to erode at my initial amusement. The message starts and ends with Will referring to me as “man,” a bit slurred and unmistakably riled. “You’re really starting to irritate me now,” he warns, “and you don’t have to be calling me every day.” Then he insists that if I’m “in such a damn hurry” we can make arrangements for me to pick up the drawings from him “as is.” Hearing this the first time I briefly considered his offer to meet and collect, until I began to imagine the actual transaction: a night scene, most likely under a freeway, with me fumbling my way around pallet fires and mounds of discarded doll parts until I’m suddenly blinded by the high-beams of a camper as somewhere beyond the light the ring of tags and collars begins to close in.

Needless to say, I decide to sit on things at this point, prepared to take a forty dollar loss if need be. But when I play the message for Charles he’s convinced that the whole thing is too hilarious not to pursue, insisting that I call Will back to apologize for my impatience. Admittedly, I give in despite my knowing that every additional phone call I make carries the potential to ramp up Will’s hostility. So I keep it brief, speaking quickly to avoid multiple truncated and rage-inducing messages. I apologize to Will for rushing him, and apologize for wanting to know where the money was. Then I apologize for any past apologies that I may have accidentally offered in any past messages, expressing my regret for anything that may have come across as remotely overly-apologetic, after which I’m cut off. And as I hang up, it’s impossible to ignore the likelihood that all this false humility has done little more than piss Will off, further jeopardizing the chances of seeing any pay off for my troubles. Quite naturally, my thoughts turn to devouring Charles’ cat feet first.

Continue reading Part 3

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This time Will answers and I take the opportunity to jump right in and explain that he’s got me confused with someone else. Hell, I tell him, I don’t even know any professional dog walkers. Not in the mood for talk, Will cuts me off. “I’m done with this,” he says, “you can pick up your drawings at the Peet’s Coffee on Van Ness.” And with that it’s over. I’m shut out and cut off, and whatever Will wants to throw my way is what I get for my money. The man has my name, my phone number and my money. He also has a vehicle filled with dogs that may or may not be eager to meet me. Needless to say, this has gone badly. No doubt, Will is in charge, and has been from the outset. Any thoughts I’d entertained of cultivating patronage, of commissioning endless ‘outsider’ masterpieces of my own dictation have been instantly exposed as pure hubris. And to top it all off, I can now add decrepit vehicles boasting ominous ‘Beware of Dog’ signs propped on the dash to my ever-expanding register of indelible phobias.

But I feel like I should end this on a semi-positive note. As promised, Will has delivered the final portraits along with the original photos, and after collecting them midday from a thoroughly confounded employee at the specified Peet’s, Charles and I have spent an evening staring at them spread atop the bend in a neighborhood bar. Tracings. Nothing but tracings:

“Wow,” Charles says, “I mean . . . wow.” Then he buys a round for my troubles.

For further reading and great posters from this infamous artist:

The Way it Could Have Been
Cheesy Rider! Rides Again…
Don’t Let The Tumor Stop Me!
I Love My Cat

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