Two months ago musician and Oakland resident John Benson bought an old bus for $5,000 from a wind-turbine engineer, and he and his friends rigged it to run on vegetable oil, put in a new floor, built loft beds, and constructed a stage. Two Wednesdays ago, in a Garfield Park warehouse parking lot, they hosted a show inside it.
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G–just G–was short and stout with long, stringy gray hair and a beard that covered most of his face. His only other notable feature was a largish fleshy growth in the middle of his forehead like a third eye. He wore glasses held together with electrical wire, the nose pads cutting into his face, and tattered running shoes.
For a living G paints those paper signs you see in cheap grocery store windows, advertising sales on Heineken and corn and the like–you know, where half the text is always spelled wrong but they look amazing because the font is just slightly imperfect.
Like “Charlie”–whom he claims to have met and calls a “boring little pimp”–he’s attracted to “throwaways,” women who don’t matter to society. He told us he’s informally adopted at least 37 young women who were kicked out of their homes, addicted to drugs, or pregnant and had nowhere else to turn. He said he wants to be the father he never had.
We did go back–about ten minutes later, after Andrea had had some water and our curiosity overcame our good sense. G welcomed us, then showed us some of his skills. “How do you spell your name?” he asked Andrea. As she spelled it out he repeated the letters aloud, drawing them with a fat red marker in olde English calligraphy on a piece of cardboard. He then wrote my name slowly and deliberately, like it was an invocation.
