Greg Carter | The Body the Rain Made of Our Days Before We Knew

Greg was the first person of note to take any notice. It’s strange, thinking about it now, like some other life; a life in snapshots, big blurry gaps between. The life before the life that was built on the solidarity and generosity of people like Greg. Back when we were puppies banging off the bumpers of performative obnoxiousness, hoping we might be special, knowing we probably weren’t; the kind of duality that can murder a person over time, suspend them over shadowy gorges that go on for decades. But when you’re young the contradiction doesn’t matter; if anything, the kinetics of the pendulum propel you forward in a kind of drunken crabwalk, staggering between self-love and self-loathing. Like everybody, we were busy being sometimes a little bit great, but mostly crap. The practical consequences of over-investing in either – balloon inflated, balloon shriveled – were the same; barely making the rent and the ceaseless vagaries of love.

We formed an agency by accident. It had little to do with photography, it was just the random taxonomy of who was lurking about. That’s how it works, right? Life happens to you, at you. I’d stumbled out of theatre in London, left it untroubled by my disapperance, and had the next gig been proctology, I’d have done proctology. We don’t choose our destinations, most of us, and they rarely turn out what we thought truest or most wanted to do. Hostages to accident and the path of least resistance, the mujahideen swing in on ropes and we’re dragged away, along with the dude next to us, kind of shuffling about waiting for his frappuccino. David led because he had some clients and the slightest clue. Chris joined because he admired David. Micheal was assisting the old guard and wondered if he might score a gig for himself. I didn’t know anything. My only connection with pictures was a part-time job in a photographer’s studio, out of the rain, $75 cash and a free sandwich. The guy shot tiny perfume bottles with massive cameras on Brobdingnagian rigs like the ones you launch submarines from. It was absurd, the pictures were boring, he was bored. The money was stupid, like he was printing it himself.

So suddenly we were a molecule, a door on sawhorses in a shared office on Washington and Watts. If it sounds punk rock (‘a chord, another, now form a band’) it really wasn’t. From the start the guys were in it for jobs and money, neither of which were forthcoming. I remember visiting Becky Lewis at Art & Commerce, hunting her down in some inner sanctum of a Brutalist garage, wafted by surly Nubians drifting hither and thither with Brewer-Cantelmo bags, and I thought, ‘we’re so fucked’. Clearly this playground required you to know how to play. Whilst I gazed aromatically at plains of polished concrete, she took calls from hallowed names I’d seen on mailing-lists in the studio. I felt like a jerk again. Like when I was getting into theatre. Like an also-ran, an imposter who doesn’t get what it takes.

But there was nothing else. Right from the start I was the oaf doing the job he tells everybody he doesn’t want to do. But every time I poked my head outside expecting to see God’s finger-and-thumb poised to pluck me up and seat me on Olympus, there was nothing. To get anything going anywhere ever, you need advocacy. We had a few natty-trousered philanthropists who worked in magazines; George Pitts, Susan White, William Nabers, Michele Romero, a bone here, a bone there, a quarter-page front-of-book inset on some Viking ogre waxing messenger-bags in a Greenpoint toilet. Scraps, tiny fluttering circles of hope, like birds tweeting around Tom’s head when Jerry hits him with the anvil. But work? Stuff that paid? Perfume bottles in aircraft hangers with fifteen people standing around eating canapes? We might as well have been flogging cheese-tastings on the moon.

What you need, but can never count on, is the appearance of a Greg. Born of common stock, I was weaned to believe all men are not equal, that some are endemically special, but not you, you four-eyed little twat. People in power were spun of finer thread, I mean, obviously; that’s why they were in power. Look how effortlessly they bore the yoke; brilliant, munificent, untrivial, their minds fixed on matters indecipherable to the column of dung-beetles beetling at their feet. It wasn’t possible they were anxious, lower-middle class Everymen who fell into good jobs by accident. People with girlfriends, obsessions with shoe-gazing warble-bands, metrosexual sweethearts with an exhausting eye for detail and home restoration. And Greg’s agency, Wieden+Kennedy, were the Gold Star Boys of Alt-Advertising. They had Nike. They had a + sign. They could do what they wanted. Ride around on skateboards at work, turn a client presentation into a food fight, press their tits on plate-glass room dividers during high-level conference calls. Their offices were probably a rocket or a disused Olympic gymnastics facility with junior art directors doing scissor flares on the pommel horses. Group showers. Banana soap. And for any photographers’ agent, be he a wooden-toothed mannequin or a malodorous gremlin poking like a thumb from a tumbleweed of pubic hair, there were three names that shone like beacons above the Palace of Mirrors. Greg Carter. Marni Beardsley. Storm Tharp. Three golden tickets in the desert of Wonka Bars we peeled and discarded daily.

We gazed at the names. Storm Tharp? Was that a human? Or did Wieden+Kennedy make it up? Some wry Situationist exercise whereby hordes of photographers are compelled to send fawning offertories to a character forged in an online alien name generator, the results of which are ground into grist and rebooted as a three word slogan in a bubble above Michael Jordan’s head? Let’s face it; none of us was getting a call from Storm Tharp. Why? Because none of us could speak fucking Klingon. So it was down to two. Marni Beardsley? Who could this be? With an i? Worrying. Why would cool W+K employ a cheerleader? AbFab irony? She wasn’t gonna call. She was too busy sewing pom-poms. Which left this Greg Carter fellow. A name you could shake hands with. A stocky, square-jawed name with an even, welcoming smile, a name to settle down in front of the telly with, knife, fork, glass of hoppy ale. Three syllables, ‘bum, bum-bum’, meat and two veg. Maybe – just maybe – if we kept sending out leaky toy-camera pictures of salt-of-the-earth pensioners being whimsical with badminton racquets, Greg Carter would one day call. 

Then one day he did. Urbane voice, slightly more alto than the name; witty, empathetic, low-steeped in enthusiasm. Like he’d called because he wanted to and meant what he was saying. Fucking weird, right? Thoughtful, perceptive, almost tender. Wait. Was this some prankster in the next room pretending to be Greg Carter, to giggle at how I bowed and scraped in the presence of royalty? It didn’t feel like it. This felt like the genuine article, earnest before earnest became something to worry about. Greg was a believer. Inundated with gaudy litter from perspiring photographers, he sorted the wheat from the chaff, kept stuff he thought was cool and maintained a watchful eye as it evolved with each new tsunami of promotional Rubik’s cubes and bespoke daguerreotypes on cauliflower-mash paper in hand-woven vellum. Me? I’d have tossed the whole shitshow in the bin and set about gobbling up the attention like I warranted every morsel. But I was no Greg. And he was also a matchmaker, marrying photography to brand concepts before anybody involved had the slightest idea they were betrothed. It was the nerd in him, the collector, the encyclopedic cataloguer of salt-cedar shingles and Indie bands. He believed he had an actual imperative in the goofy, noisy, ego-driven circus he found himself at the centre of. And whilst acknowledging its manifold absurdities, he refused to succumb to cynicism and (without being a prig) took his role seriously. Fucking insane. What was the dude thinking? 

Then after he’d reached out, he reached out more. We were chatterers, me and Greg. It quickly became clear we drove everyone around us nuts by being unable to shut up. And thus we became friends, if only to grant our other friends respite. I wish I could have told the photographers we spent hours talking about photography, only we didn’t. He tried sometimes, because it was something he cared about, but I treated the gesture like he’d taken a dump in my bento box, partly because I didn’t want to devote another hour to what I’d spent all day oinking about, but more because I was squirmingly at pains not to be perceived as angling for work. It’s the disease of the business, the vicious mole of nature that threatens to undermine friendship between those who give work and those who ache for it. So I avoided the subject and we talked about music, travel, love, poems, books, relationships, courage, fear, luck, and (most of all) what the fuck we were going to do with our lives. What was to become of us? Greg, sensitive, calm, cute, eager for connection. Me, noisy, scatological, overbearing, an angry ant in human trousers. Perfect match. If he’d been a willowy girl I’d absolutely have had a crush on him and lots of round-trip tickets to Portland on my credit card.

I think I was secretly jealous of the community Greg experienced at Wieden, the way personalities were allowed to flourish, idiosyncrasies celebrated rather than smothered. They always seemed to be in a burgeoning state of joyful hysteria, Beardsley tearing off her costume, honking and screeching like a harpie, Storm at his Chekhovian wit’s end, Greg shaking his head and trying to stop the scenery falling over. Marni and Storm tempered Greg’s Gregness, Storm and Greg bridled the runaway mare that was Marni, Greg and Marni parried Storm’s impatience with imbeciles. From a distance it looked like one of those french farces with lots of doors through which one powdered ponce disappears just as the next one comes flouncing in. It was an atmosphere I suspected I’d thrive in, a cartoon fight-bubble with hands and feet sticking out, contrasting personalities, each feeding off the other, synthesis, transcendence. Me? I was plodding a solitary path with a flock of blokes anxious for just desserts. So yeah, I was envious. Like the dude in Stardust Memories on the black-and-white train with the hydrocephalic, lantern-jawed passengers, looking over at the fizzing flappers on the colour train, all winking and sipping French 75’s. 

Greg always seemed happy there. He’d play exasperated, but there was always tender, incestuous devotion to his surrogate siblings. Oddly – and I might be wrong about this – I don’t think we worked together while he was at Wieden. Can that be true? Marni’s going to say it’s nonsense, we did all sorts of stuff, but can we really trust Marni? I mean, Greg and I spent days and nights talking, promising each other we’d burst out of our bodices, chuck it all in, unsheath our deliberate selves in Dharamshala, Ulaanbaatar, Phnom Penh. But that’s what compromised 30-something putatively heterosexual men with jobs and steady relationships do, right? Greg, in my eyes, occupied that sweet sliver of the dude demographic that is essentially steady, loyal and unlikely to do anything too unsettling, but with feminine edges which yearn for the aroma of Bonkers Pie. I like those dudes, because they accommodate my performative need to wax rebellious. I’m sure if I read my emails from back then, wazzing on to Greg like the Bard from Asterix about how he’s gotta fuck it all up, man, kick out the jams, my bowels would jellify. Because Wieden seemed to provide just the right cocktail of booze and juice to keep him happy but not wasted. It was family, and he had a role in the Grand Guignol, his nerdy fastidiousness noogied by the others, but ultimately appreciated, nurtured. When he first hinted he was leaving, I was probably too eager in my enthusiasm. Always blabbing on about my job being beneath me, I’d finger-wag about how important it was to grasp the nettle, change things up, without ever doing it. So watching Greg edge away from a situation I envied fulfilled two immature impulses; the vicarious thrill of witnessing metamorphosis, and dissipation of personal jealousy. The possibility of it not being a great idea manifested further potential for solidarity because he’d be over here in the grey East with me, diddling twee colonial houses and pointless acreage, breaking bread with middle-aged ladies at Arnold Worldwide. Except not even in New York. Fucking Boston.

Once he was on the east coast we really talked a lot. Like shipwrecked sailors on the Raft of the Medusa. I can’t remember his exact itinerary, but I think there were stints at places in tall buildings that do banks and beer, with art directors who say ‘wicked pissah’ while wearing cargo shorts. After a bit he ended up at Modernista!, an ersatz Wieden joint (hence the !) which was more his speed. I think I even visited him there. I remember a beard and a vintage three-piece suit which started to smell like its previous (perhaps dead) inhabitant two hours into the Acela. We drank beer somewhere, some belching artisanal broth pressed from twigs and boogers in a place with exposed brick. The kind of thing Greg had encyclopedic knowledge of, along with bands with girl singers that sounded like Big Thief, desolate warbly musical poets, Bill Callahan, tenderness, and how it all spirals back to Oxbridge Prog Rock, King Crimson, Soft Machine, Sandy Denny’s parents in the back garden on Unhalfbricking. And he was really into houses back then, burrowing like a weevil into the bones of the place in Marblehead, its 1700’s rood-lofts and ghosts of old Roundheads. And the new kitchen in the New Hampshire joint. So much hand-wringing over the dovetailing of a Lazy Susan. Always questing for home, Greg was; for the fire, companionship, belonging, the dog, sad music, love and slippers.

We worked together a lot at Modernista. Loads of stuff, image abstractions based on feelings, visual poetry which the creatives could hack into, lay text blocks over, build libraries of mood. All catalogued, classified and cross-referenced. Very Greg. He should have been a butterfly collector, in pith-helmet with net and pins, prancing through the rainforest spouting genus, species, order. We came up with ideas together, no art director, and shot most of it upstate at my place, I think, although the facts are blurry. It’s amazing how you can do a thing for decades and remember almost none of it. I guess when you’re not feeling it, when it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t go too deep. So when you reach for the memories, they’re not there. Somewhere along the line I staggered out of the business like a drunk. It had been a while since the work had been about anything but money. I’d sold my last few contrarian beans to the behemoth of lifestyle – beaming children leaping off rocks into lakes, girls daubing whipped cream on other girls’ noses – and had names on the roster I didn’t even recognize. The shape of them in my inbox, needling, creeping, made me groan.

And that’s when I came to understand that what looks like friendship can sometimes be just an agreed conspiracy of need. That tragic mole again. Tweezer need out of its socket and watch all the lights go out. My reaction to the pall of cosmic indifference that greeted my departure was to recoil, secure all the windows, and run. It was a Lot’s Wife thing, staggering away from everything; community, respect, identity, money, and I couldn’t afford to look back in case I was making a mistake. And I feel bad. In the visceral urge to be reborn, I poured out the bathwater, babies and all. Greg would write with a combination of admiration, curiosity and real concern, and I’d get back with something fleeting, flabby, a placeholder, or maybe nothing at all. There’s no excuse. I just couldn’t get my mind around a worthy response. It’s all too intense and fraught with doubt, you’re being asked questions you don’t know the answer to, and you’re up there clinging to the handrails. I guess it’s like when you’re seriously unwell and people write asking how it’s going and you want to say something but it’s all too much and there doesn’t seem to be any option between vomiting up the entire five-course dinner or saying nothing at all. 

I have email exchanges from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, but none with the breathless fervour of our glory days; no symphonies, reveries, no quiet operas or verbal ping-pong tournaments. That amazing synthesis between two people who are thinking, feeling the same thing at the same time, in different places, like two points of light on a desert landscape at night from 30,000 feet. He’d send me music (of course). We talked about love, about the humiliation of being blindsided, finding ourselves alone when we least expected, having to put on trousers and face the world like we were okay when we were actually excoriated. He wrote ‘it took me 3 or 4 years to get over the guilt at having been caught napping.’ Spot on. Like a haiku. But again, it only went so far. When you’ve been run through with a lance, there’s only so much you can talk about jousting. And now I map his journey, I find him back in Portland, then Boston again, then Virginia. Virginia? When the fuck was that? I was talking, sure, but obviously I wasn’t listening.

And then out of the blue, a poem. Nothing else, just the poem.  Not Horses, by Natalie Shapiro. He said it made him think of me:

What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
when no one thinks of anything else, least of all
that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been
into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s
busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,
and even that won’t keep me alive. I share
my home not with horses, but with a little dog
who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,
makes her muscle known to every statue.
I wish she could have a single day of  language,
so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid —
our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

I love it. The melancholy of Auden’s ‘sadness of the creatures’ but in that aching, suburban American setting. You can feel the wire fence at the edge the backyard, the shrubs, now sticks, and the last heels of snow in the shade where the sun hasn’t found them. Like a David Berman song, but feminine, broken, in a feminine way. It’s an honour when somebody reads something that murmurates, forms shapes, then funnels down and lands, in their mind, in their heart, on you. 

And a deeper honour when they reach out and say so.

And then the email with the lyric from the Bill Callahan song. The body the rain made of our days before we knew. I’ve been looking at that song a bit. There are clues throughout. Well I can tell you about the river, or we can just get in. And then the river grew higher and wider, deeper and darker as I was closing in. And it led me to you which led me to say ‘let’s get in.’ 

Have faith in wordless knowledge.

And then at the bottom of his second-to-last email, in 2019.

‘I’m very proud of you Julian’

And finally his last two-word email, a few weeks later.

‘Ugh. Work.’

•••

And now I’m driving home in the rain from the supermarket in this town where I don’t know anybody, a couple of people, and there’ll be nobody in the apartment when I get there. Since Marni wrote I’ve kind of thought about nothing but you. I’ve done other stuff, sure, but you’ve been there watching at the periphery. The news never hits like a fist. It never floors you. We say it does, but it’s more like something we understood was coming, one or other of us, but not the who, not the when. Like you almost nod when you read the words, at four in the morning, and think ‘yeah, of course.’ I’m listening to a playlist I made for Dusty when I was in Budapest. She asked for all the sweet songs from the car when she was a kid. I didn’t know, but while I was making it you must have been broaching the endgame of cancer. It’s crazy. Oblivious. Two people walking, parallel lives. One stops, one doesn’t. The universe shrugs. You’d appreciate the songs. Fred Neil, Lee Hazelwood, Elizabeth Cotton, Yo La Tengo, Will Oldham, Dave Van Ronk, Karen Dalton. And Townes of course. And you’d have loads of ideas for more.

•••

Greg Carter, my accidental friend. A love whittled from unlikely wood. I wish there could have been more. We were too damn busy not shaking the grass.