PAINTING 70 MORNINGSIDE
I spent Columbia Commencement
1974 in the day room of the psychiatric ward of St. Luke’s Hospital, staring
balefully across at the sacral bulk of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on
That spring in a burst of
manic fury I had completed my MA thesis on the Buddhist priest,
Dōkyō, who seduced the Empress Shōtoku and tried to make himself
Emperor of Japan in 769 AD. It was published in 1979 in Monumenta Nipponica,
a musty academic journal edited by an elderly British Jesuit in
The Dōkyō affair
was in the zeitgeist, albeit a highly esoteric zeitgeist, of the 1970s. Cappy
Hurst (GSAS 1972) presented a paper titled “Dōkyō and The Virgin
Empress” before the American Oriental Society in 1976. Also that year an
eminent American student of Japanese Buddhism (fortunately not a
“Then she would climb onto
the lap of her statuesque master, fondle the long lobes of his Buddhalike ears
and place her naked arms around the pillar of his neck. He, in turn, would look
the look of great peace into her eyes and let rise within her the pagoda of his
love.”
At the end of the decade
Doubleday published The Vermilion Bridge, Shelley Mydans’ elegant novel of 8th century
In fact, of course,
contemporary 8th century documents don’t give all the scandalous
details. And one modern Japanese historian has concluded that the relationship
between Dōkyō and the Empress was the result of an attraction between
two strong natures, and speculated that they may have been “just good friends.”
But the affair came strangely
to the fore in the 21st century, as the Japanese Diet debated an
amendment to the constitution to again permit a woman to occupy the throne as
Empress in her own right. The death of Empress Shōtoku in 770 brought to a
sudden end a powerful archaic tradition of strong female monarchs in
In the fall of 1974, in the
grips of a monstrous depression, I moved into my “suite” at
Still, it had a splendid view
of
In the spring of 1975 I
obtained part time employment in the Columbia Residence Halls Office in what
was then Livingston Hall. The duties
themselves were mundane – filing paper receipts, answering questions at the
business window, delivering mail occasionally in the Carman and Furnald Hall
mailrooms. But it got me away from my ancient Japanese studies and eventually
from my funk. The undergraduates and the office staff were bright, lively and
entertaining.
Things began looking up. I
won a scholarship to study Japanese language in
And then came my big break –
a full time job with the Residence Halls during summer vacation, supervising a
crew of undergraduates painting 70 Morningside.
My painting crew comprised
several
The team was as ethnically
diverse as a fabled World War II bomber crew: black, white, Hispanic and Asian.
We would form up at eight o'clock in the morning and, after downing a donut and
a cup of coffee, set to work. For the first few weeks we followed a strict
regimen – coffee break at 10, lunch from 12-1, afternoon coffee break at 2,
cleaning our brushes and rollers at 3:30, dismissal at 4.
Then, inevitably perhaps, a
certain tedium set in and the painters became somewhat restless, dragging in
late for work, extending the coffee breaks, and disappearing for several hours
over lunch. Fortunately, during the fourth week we discovered an immense trove
of pornography that one of the grad students had left in his closet. Some of it
was the graphic type – Penthouse and Playboy – but surprisingly
the bulk of it was literature, after a fashion.
My undergraduates were all
very bright, of course, and having been through the standard
So I was not surprised that
they soon tired of the graphic porn; they discarded it, or at least it
disappeared, and they turned to the erotic novels in earnest. At this point I
began to be seriously concerned that I had an informal strike, or at least a
work stoppage, on my hands. To call in the Director of Residence Halls to
restore order would constitute a serious loss of face on my part, and might
even lead to some dismissals. I was most concerned, of course, about the future
of my own career at Residence Halls.
To restore a modicum of
discipline in my crew, and to refocus their energies on painting, I hit on the
idea of reorganizing the gang into three-man units. One man would be appointed “reader”, while
the other two would paint. After a given period, the duty of reader would be
rotated. To my relief, this arrangement worked splendidly, and we finished
slopping yellow paint on a whole floor of kitchens and bathrooms in short
order. I commended myself on my managerial flexibility and finesse.
But there came a day when the
porn ran out and the crew again began to be fretful and rebellious. I was
dating a Chinese woman at the time, and one afternoon one of the more openly
smartassed kids asked me point blank “Is it true that Chinese girls are trained
from childhood in the art of pleasing men?” I could see the other workers
smirking behind their paint brushes but I kept my cool, and answered pleasantly
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask one?”, heeding the words of the Proverbs that
a gentle answer turneth away wrath.
Another time, during coffee
break, I came in to find the guys discussing “harsh taskmasters” and whether
Moses had been ethically correct to murder the Egyptian overseer. One related
an anecdote about how a worker servicing Coke machines had taken revenge on an
unpopular boss by spraypainting the words “Fuck you” on a whole shipment of
soda pop bottles before inserting them into the dispenser.
And so the long summer wore
on, and as the temperature rose my crew seemed less and less inclined to
actually work. I instituted Friday afternoon Hearts games beginning pretty much
when everyone had returned from lunch break. This proved popular, but soon
turned into “Friday Hearts and Tequila Time.”
Finally, in some desperation,
I hit on the idea of Jeopardy games. In the three man crews, one worker was
assigned to come up with answers in several categories, while the other
painters would take turns making questions for points, just as in the TV game.
This proved to be an immense hit with my witty and erudite crew, and soon they
were striving to outdo each other by dreaming up esoteric categories to stump
each other:
“Movies of the Forties”
“Lives of the Saints”
“Famous Degenerates and
Perverts”
“Old Testament Heroes”
“The Fall of the
“The Novels of Evelyn Waugh”
A typical answer in the $100
category of the latter might be “This was the color of Lady Margot Metroland’s
Hispano-Suiza.” After I announced a weekly prize of a bottle of Jose Cuervo
Gold for the top scorer, productivity rose sharply, and we finished another
floor of kitchens and bathrooms in three days.
As the summer wore to a
close, I received an invitation to a reception for Prime Minister Takeo Miki,
who was to have an honorary degree conferred upon him in Low Library. The
backstory was that the Japanese government under his predecessor, Kakuei
Tanaka, had given a million dollars to the Japanese studies program at
I bought a new suit at
Barneys down on
Soon it was time to be off to
The building was torn down
during my subsequent absence, but I asked the Director of Residence Halls to
save the door for me. It’s gotten lost in the shuffle of several moves since,
but the sentiments of my worshipful crew of the summer of 1975 are still
embedded like seeds in my heart.
--Ross Bender