Cartoon portrait of what I imagined from Wallace’s last message to me. “Sorry for the poor correspondence. I have found myself in a managerial sous chef position that eats all my time away and I’m still chasing those monkeys off my back while dancing with them and showing them cute little toys I’ve made….” – Wallace Byron Curtis. …this was the last I ever heard from him. Part of a message he sent me back in January of this year. (“Yep. Me too, tho mine play together a lot nicer than they did back then. I appreciate their artistic talent….” Part of my reply.)
By Cat Jones
Last Friday night seemed like such a celebratory moment from here. It was raining in New York, but I had a show that night, and made the rent, and was so relieved to have that settled. Wallace, on the other hand, turns out to have had a much different kind of night. He was on the other side of the country, dying of an overdose. He was 27 years old.
Very briefly a lover, always a friend, Wallace was a boy I curled up with for a little while in the Year of the End of the World; a fellow traveler and refugee out on the edge.
I guess it was a lethal combination of things that took him out. Nobody knows for sure, but it looks like it was an accident from what I understand. Another number in The Opioid Crisis. Some people won’t be surprised by this, given how he lived. But I was. I still can’t really believe it, and I want this to be one of those bizarre performance art pieces he was always in the middle of pulling off.
Wallace had a really shitty life early on, and I think he deserved better than he got. Like a lot of his friends, I found out on Monday morning. I had not seen him since I left Cascadia, and had not talked to him since January. But I feel a hole where he was anyway, and I will not forget him. Here is a cartoon tribute to him, of a few of the moments I remember sharing with him back in 2012. This is more for the people who knew him back then than for people who did not. It might seem irreverent to do this by scribbly cartoon, but …I feel like he’d appreciate this. Sometimes, there just aren’t any words.
Click on images for a slide show….)
This is the first time I ever met Wallace. I had just moved into this funky artist’s SRO, and I was walking through the hallway there. Wallace was wearing giant, polka-dotted, women’s glasses that he’d found somewhere. He did that a lot. He was goofing around hanging up intentionally bad art in the run-up to a First Friday show, just to fuck with people. He was calling it his “installation,” and “explaining” the piece to an entourage. I think he was already getting evicted by that time, but I did not know it yet. We were introduced then, and I noticed his very intense eyes and sense of humor. I liked him immediately.
The night we wore top hats and cumberbuns and packed beer cans in our pockets and he took me to see the play.
This was right after the play, and the night I realized how much I cared for him. After the play, we wanted to play music. But he played accordion, and it was too loud for our building after midnight. So we went outside into the dark, rainey, night. It was way after midnight. We went out to the bus shelter, and he stood on the bench and pulled out his accordion, and played and sang and wailed his heart out. He was such an astonishingly talented musician, and could play so many instruments. His voice was beautiful. I fell for him that night.
Curling up together on the floor, under my easel, where I slept, with my 3 dogs, when I wasn’t sleeping on the floor of my closet.
“Buddha, drops the dime on us.” She kept running over to Wallace and jumping in his lap, and people who knew her looked at me funny. (She was a very shy girl, and did not bother with anyone but me generally, and only got warm and friendly with people who slept in my room….)
Linda kept pulling me aside to “warn” me about Wallace. He drank a lot and…and took drugs, and…had a “reputation.” Like I cared.
Ha! When Linda, the bufoon who was managing Gallery 5, let a client remove a painting halfway through the month-long show and then insisted on leaving the big space in the middle of the wall BLANK, so that, as she figured, “people will see that the art is selling and it will make more people want to buy,” Wallace and I snuck into the gallery in the middle of the night and hung a magnificently horrific, framed poster of Barbie, matted against leopard-print paper, in the spot. We thought it would be spotted and removed the next morning, but it hung there for more than a week before anyone even noticed anything weird.
He used to wander around with ear buds in, pretending he couldn’t hear anything, even when he could. He did it so he did not have to interact with everyone, and so he could hear what everyone was saying about him when they thought he could not hear them. DudeManBro always fell for this
Yeh. We went to Scrap this one day, and there were these giant, fake-brass paperclips, and he thought they were cool and we should get them. So we did. I mentioned (or did he?) that they would make good earrings, but the wire was really thick. Wallace stabbed one through my ear anyway, and I let him, though it stabbed out a big circle of flesh and I yelled. I left it in awhile, but my ear got totally infected. I still have at least one of those somewhere… last time I saw it I think it was hanging on the shower curtain in my bathroom over on Lark street.
“Fishy Fishy.” Wallace used to want to cut a fish-pond shaped hole in the floor of my room, because Matthew lived beneath me and he wanted to be able to throw fish food down to Little Matthew and call him “Fishy Fishy.” He mentioned this more than once.
One night, down in Little Matthew’s room, I was sitting there talking to Matthew, and Wallace grabbed some scissors and cut the rat tails off the back of my head. (I had shaved my head earlier that year, except for a weird mohawk and those rat tails. It was finally starting to grow back when he did this.) (We drank a lot that year.)
After he cut off my hair without asking me, we went across the hall to one of the shower rooms, and he helped me rinse off the loose hair. I called him a fucker for cutting off my hair and we laughed and laughed in the water.
Yeh… Linda again. It’s just, she was ALWAYS dogging Wallace. I do not know why. Every time we walked through the entrance and past the gallery, she would glare at him and say mean, nosy things. She was like, 40 years older than him, and just such a bully to him. She is the one who finally got him evicted from there. So she was a large and looming thing back then.
Once, we were all sitting up in my room, and Wallace was behind me, playing with my sword. A real sword, with a really sharp blade. And for some reason, he just poked me in the back with it. Ouch! I yelled, and he went, “Oops! Well, uh… that’s about as far as we should go with that,” and he put the sword away. (It’s just one of the weird things that still sticks out in my mind about that time. People who did not know him will think that sounds awful, probably…but people who knew him will get it.)
We all used to have these awesome broken arts nights together in the 2nd floor kitchen….
This one night, Wallace and Kally Kahn and I all went to see Chervona Bambino play over on Alberta street. On the way back afterward, some guy jumped us and started hassling all of us, but especially Kally. I tried to defend Kally, but that shit head sucker-punched me and then kicked me in the head, and kicked at Buddha. I’d had this pocket watch on me that my boy and I had given Sid for father’s day one year. It says “Dad” on it. When that guy smacked me, the watch broke and the back fell off. I still have the watch, but I never found the back. Wallace rescued Buddha for me, and I guess got the guy off us. But I was badly hurt and blanked out the whole rest of the night. The next day, I didn’t know where all those injuries had come from, and assumed I’d just fallen into the street. Wallace told me about the assault, and told me that he would “tell me all the rest of it” some other time… but he never did.
This was an event that happened out in the garden. Wallace was “permanently banned” for a short time from Mp5, because Linda was friends with the Man and hated him and lobbied for him to be excluded for good. But, as he was so well-liked there, eventually they relented. The first day he came back, we were sitting in the garden, and Linda did not know he was allowed back. She thought she was, like, super cop or something and was so smug. Sigh. That was an ongoing thing. But we all had a nice time in the garden, and he did not have to leave.
The time he came back to mp5 after he’d been thrown out and we let him into his old room. He’d loved that room so much, and had been really hurt when he had to leave there. So when he came back, he was such a kid. He disappeared into the bathroom and we heard him scratching around in there awhile, and then he triumphantly emerged, with a little screw in his hand. It was from above the bathtub, and he said he’d been the one who had screwed it in there, and he kept it for a souvenir.
This is the last time that I ever saw him in person. It was right after Buddha got hit by that car, and I could not live in Portland any more. I thought I could not live at all. I was giving away everything I owned. Most of it, I just dumped in the free boxes or left in my room, but I had a few things that were sentimental. So I went down to Mercedes’ room, and gave Wallace my magic window that I’d had since I was little (he always liked to play with that thing almost as much as I did), and my giant jar of Cascadian weed, and a few other things. He told me he was sorry about Buddha, and that he had cried when he’d heard about what happened. We stood there in the doorway, and I hugged him goodbye, and I never saw him again (though I did occasionally converse with him across the ether).
Wallace was an incredible person, as someone who pushed through quite a few formative years with him. He made me campus in high school by lighting my hair on fire — it became a bit of a legend for a while. Ha. We hadnt spoken in a while, and when id left him last, he was not doing well. But his ability to constantly express what felt like pure, genuine, creativity and insight, even in middle school is something that has a very deep and long lasting impact on how I develop as a person.
I leave all this here because a friend just found me this link, and this is a wonderful tribute to a beautiful soul. Thank you.
oh my god… so YOU are the person whose hair he lit on fire. Ah, that was one of the first deep conversations we had… it started off as kind of a funny story, but then veered off into a sad lane as he described the ways in which his life was impacted after that by stupid, awful, authoritarian people who put him through a lot at a time when there were no adults to speak of in his corner. He still remembered you fondly when I knew him. Thank you for sharing.
hey there, Wallace was my nephew and the son of my sister JUDITH who died of cancer and also had a very tragic life. The only people left out that whole family, my sister Janice, and we had no idea about this until she found your blog. Thank you for all your wrote about him. I And recording some of his songs in my studio, and wiping gold spray off his face until he passed out. He was the one and only. Feel free to contact me if you want, it’s Spacecowgirls@protonmail.com
Beyond the Barbed Wire 
Wallace was an incredible person, as someone who pushed through quite a few formative years with him. He made me campus in high school by lighting my hair on fire — it became a bit of a legend for a while. Ha. We hadnt spoken in a while, and when id left him last, he was not doing well. But his ability to constantly express what felt like pure, genuine, creativity and insight, even in middle school is something that has a very deep and long lasting impact on how I develop as a person.
I leave all this here because a friend just found me this link, and this is a wonderful tribute to a beautiful soul. Thank you.
oh my god… so YOU are the person whose hair he lit on fire. Ah, that was one of the first deep conversations we had… it started off as kind of a funny story, but then veered off into a sad lane as he described the ways in which his life was impacted after that by stupid, awful, authoritarian people who put him through a lot at a time when there were no adults to speak of in his corner. He still remembered you fondly when I knew him. Thank you for sharing.
hey there, Wallace was my nephew and the son of my sister JUDITH who died of cancer and also had a very tragic life. The only people left out that whole family, my sister Janice, and we had no idea about this until she found your blog. Thank you for all your wrote about him. I And recording some of his songs in my studio, and wiping gold spray off his face until he passed out. He was the one and only. Feel free to contact me if you want, it’s Spacecowgirls@protonmail.com