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The Portsider

A note from the Portsider, Staff Writer:
My pal Ken LaZebnik lost a friend in May. He asked me if I could loan him my column to tell you about it. I said sure, someday you’re going to be writing my obituary—you and the tax man are two people I want to keep happy. So here it is:

Richard Bunkall loved old things. He painted the Chrysler Building and steam engines and immense city plazas with Romanesque arches mysteriously enclosing the Titanic. He painted with depth and clarity and melancholy, so it seemed natural that he was a baseball fan.


"If I have to be dying of something, at least it was named after a baseball player," he said. Richard had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS: Lou Gehrig’s Disease, the only time I know that one can be diagnosed with certainty as a ballplayer. I met Richard when the disease was pretty far along. He’d set up his studio in his garage and there he painted large canvases by jamming a brush between the fingers of his painting hand and then supporting that throwing hand, as it were, with his glove hand. He wore a respirator, a plastic contraption over his nose that was braced behind his head with elastic straps like a catcher’s mask. He worked to the steady pump-organ wheeze of the respirator, which filled his failing lungs with a falling gasp.


He kept painting like this, with increasing effort, expending more and more energy to simply move the brush across the canvas, until two weeks before his death. He painted because he had to: he possessed the artist’s need which exists independently of cause and effect, but he also had to provide for his wife and three children after the death he knew was coming. He finished a show of eleven paintings—we all thought it was his last—and then lived a year longer and painted four more big canvases.


On a shelf in his studio was a wooden rack about two feet square. It held old and beautifully scuffed baseballs: a sculpture, I assumed. Each grass stained ball implied a story; arrayed together it looked like an abacus of America. Only it wasn’t a sculpture. Richard found these balls walking his dog near a Little League park. He’d see a forgotten, lost ball, pick it up, and add it to the rack because he liked the way old baseballs look. I thought it was a sculpture because everything Richard did rang with beauty.


He liked Moby Dick. He liked Shakespeare’s plays, Wrigley Field, and Billie Holiday’s voice. Americans are always on the lookout for the new, the next thing, the hot information we should seize upon. Richard cherished the old news, the lasting information, a few things he knew were beautiful.


He said, "Today I consider myself the luckiest unlucky man on the face of the earth." He never complained, never wondered why God had picked him for this disease or this disease for him (and Richard believed deeply in God). He loved his wife, Sally, also an artist, as fully as any man ever has loved. He loved his three boys—twins of seven and a five-year-old—as deeply as any father ever has. He loved baseball because it is an old thing, a game addicted to old habits like the hit and run and old knowledge like "Never make the first or last out at third base."


They tried building new ballparks in the sixties and those failed. What succeeded in the nineties was building new old parks, an irony which delighted Richard. His paintings were like Fenway: solemn, full of echoes, melancholy, and deep with history.
Richard usually painted big canvases, eighty inches wide, sixty inches tall. The last thing he painted was a tiny portrait of his son’s baseball glove.



I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith:
—2 Timothy 4:7

—EFQ

KEN LaZEBNIK is the founder of Elysian Fields Quarterly. He lives in Studio City, California, with his wife and two sons and writes for television.

© 1999 Ken LaZebnik