Shel and I would talk a lot. His mind was brim full of all kinds of shit. Stuff that was always spilling out in songs and poems and cartoons and conversations. His thoughts were constantly overflowing his physical casing. His ideas were organic, had souls and needed to get out and live on their own. More often than not he'd be confronting them internally, lost in inwardly implicit conversation, deciphering the spooks and enigmas that were clawing their way out. Those of us on the outside were frequently left out of the equation. We couldn't compete with the depth and turmoil of his internal sprites. Sometimes he would grab them as they escaped and scrawl their essence on bits of paper. His conversations with them were way more interesting than anything I could bring to the party. There were many times when his mind and heart were not in the same room we were in.

It was rare that he lost contact with his internal selves. But that's what was going on when we met. He was stumped. He had cartoonist's block. He had a book project, half complete, but his ideas and sprites had bailed on him.

Because his children's books were their best-sellers, Harper & Row had agreed to Shel's request to produce a vanity project.

He didn't have a title but he knew it wouldn't be commercially viable. It would be an hefty oversized, hard-bound collection of primarily sequential cartoons that dealt with adult themes. Like Man's unremitting pursuit of nookie and endemic moral capitulation. Cautionary tales told with clever resolution and humor. And produced without editorial interference. It was very much like Shel's underground comic book.

I got to know Shel when I introduced myself just outside my office on the tenth floor of the Playboy building. He'd been hanging around the art department talking to Kerig and Lenny.  I was effusive and fawning. Nervously I darted into my office and retrieved a art-filled sketchbook. "You're a major influence on my art" I bleated.

He leafed through my book of drawings and snorted "I don't see it!"

A half hour later we were walking to Melvin B 's for lunch. Melvin B's was on Rush Street a couple of blocks in one direction from the Playboy Building and a couple of blocks in the other direction from the Playboy Mansion. Shel and his friends had been having lunch alfresco at Melvin B's sidewalk cafe since the early sixties. There was a sense of History -- of continuity -- for him there. This was the first of many luncheons we had there.  I was drinking beer.  Shel nursed a diet Coke.

"Did you ever see someone approaching you knew you had to avoid?  If you were walking down the street and someone was walking your way who made your hair stand on end?  That instinctually you understood that this person had such a disturbing presence that the only reasonable thing -- the safe thing -- would be to cross the street?" asked Shel.

"That thing happened to me last night." he said.   "I was leaving a restaurant and I saw this guy coming through the door toward me who made my blood run cold.  A bad motherfucker."

"Then I realized I was looking into a mirrored doorway."

Then he said "I'm blocked I'm halfway through with this book project and I've hit a brick wall. My ideas have dried up and I'm having trouble generating new ones. The book doesn't even have a title. Maybe you'd like to take a look at what I'm working on?"

After lunch we ended up at Vic Lowndes' suite in the Playboy Towers -- where Shel would stay when he was in Chicago -- if the rooms were available. Lownde's (originally sent to oversee Playboy Europe because he kept stealing Hef's girlfriends) had fucked up things royally and lost Playboy's British Gaming license. So tensions were high between Hef and Lowndes. His suite at the Playboy Towers in Chicago was always available. And that's where Shel was working on his book.

The suite was strewn with pieces of Bristol board, each scrawled with images that would eventually be assembled and glued into final art. If he drew a figure and didn't like the positon of -- say -- the arm, he'd scissor the arm off the drawing and glue it into a more satisfactory position. He wasn't one to white-out an area and redraw the thing. He was adamant that an artist draws what an artist draws. Correcting something by painting it out and rendering over the paint-out was -- to him -- repugnant. But hacking with scissors and gluing it into something more pleasing to his eye seemed to be ok.

Shel broke out a little cocaine. He had a system regarding coke. During that time coke had become all the rage. Especially among artists, muscians and women, Shel's main retinue. Normally lines were laid down and snorted in quanity until the chatter became inane and tooth enamel was ground to dust. But Shel used coca as a tool. He'd toot up a tiny matchead of the white crystal and work off the energy provided by the drug until it dissipated. Then snort another small amount and get back to work. So it went with us that night. Snorting, talking, laughing, drawing. Through the night, into the next day until the sun set again. We spent about three days and nights getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, finding solutions and inhaling small amounts of cocaine. Now and again he would pick up his guitar and sing a song he was working on. I would light up the occasional joint for inspiration and to take the edge off the coke. But Shel wasn't a reefer-hound like me. He stuck with his anodyne and I with mine.

By the end of the second day we had knocked his block loose. And that which. would become "Different Dances" found itself.

 
    Skip Williamson and Shel Silverstein

Shortly after the beginning of the new century I lost three of my closest male friends to the Reaper. One was Shel Silverstein, troubadour, playwright, poet, author, artist. He died of heart failure in bed surrounded by a clutter of unfinished work.

I was art directing at Playboy in 1977 when Shel made one of his frequent forays back to the Windy City. I always enjoyed Shel's company and he sought mine when he was in town. Besides being a fellow cartoonist and a willing accomplice in promiscuous monkeyshines, he was a walker. I liked that about him. When you were in Shel's company you walked. He didn't drive and taxis were a last resort. He was an eager and resolute walker.

Chicago's North Shore had been Shel's home turf since he was young but he had made his way in the world and now he lived in several locations so that he'd have a base of operations as he wandered the country. He had a houseboat in Sausalito, apartments at the Playboy Mansion West and in Greenwich Village and he was about to buy a little house in Key West. But the North Side of Chicago was home. His mom lived there and -- always the good son -- he attended to her maternal needs. Family and history always brought Shel back to Chicago.

There was nothing better than prowling Chicago's Gold Coast with Shel. He hauled me into a shoe repair shop where a cobbler would repair and fill the holes and worn spots in his ancient cowboy boots. He'd been wearing the same pair, mended and rebuilt, for more than a decade (A few years later he'd write the cobbler into the film "Things Change" which he co-authored with David Mamet.). I went with him to look at banjoes in a storefront stringed-instrument emporium on Rush Street. A place owned and operated by an elderly artisan known for constructing the finest violins. We'd stop for lunch alfresco at Melvin B's sidewalk cafe. "I've been comin' here for twenty years," he said. We'd sit and talk about art, music, the early days at Playboy and Man's unremitting pursuit of pussy.

For the last few years Hef had been flying to Chicago from the West Coast Mansion for regular meetings with the editorial staff. Gradually he'd been setting down roots in Los Angeles. Finally it had been decided to sell off the Chicago Playboy Mansion and to ferry the editors to LA every month. So the Chicago house was emptied and locked. The Livingroom where Sammy Davis Jr. and Lenny Bruce had boogied all night was a vacant chamber. The Grotto pool where naked water sprites splashed and shrieked was dark and had been drained. Hef's bedroom with his great rotating round bed was a barren tomb. The Red Room where bombastic playmate Christa Speck pillow fought with her giggling girlfriends was hushed and unlit. It was just a big old empty house. Elvis had left the building.

Shel stopped by my office and asked if I could get him into the Mansion for a final walk-through and adieu. I said "Sure" and grabbed the keys from Barbara Hoffman and we headed out walking down Walton to Rush and north to 1440 N. State Parkway.

Shel was quiet during the walk. Normally he'd be animated, talking about a project he was working on or spinning stories about hanging out with Warren Beatty or jamming under the Texas stars with Willie Nelson. He could be absorbed if he was trying to knock loose a lyric, uncover the payload of a cartoon or discover the direction of a quatrain. He'd retreat creatively into his thoughts, focused on the problem, scratching down ideas on scraps of paper. Searching for the solution within himself. Not at all concerned with the external world. But as for now he was lost in melancholy, not creativity.

As we made our way to the Chicago Playboy Mansion Shel's hands were jammed into his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his stride resolute, his focus penetrating and his aura silent as Death.

I unlocked the black wrought-iron gate. It squawked and swung open. A short flagstone footpath led to the portico and the front door, a dark mass of hardwood alive with Moorish carvings and set off by intricately detailed brass hinges, straps and sensually esoteric fixtures. I inserted the key and the lock unlatched with an echoing clack. I leaned my weight into the heavy door and it creaked open slowly, hindered by its own heft. It admitted us into a dark and silent vacant cavity.

Shel was stunned and glum. His heart was broken, his soul lost in memories of past revelries. He seemed stooped and small in the remarkable emptiness. "I can't believe this" he whispered. "There was something very special that happened here. Now there are just phantoms in the dark. This really is the end of an era. Like a death in the family." His voice trailed off.

Eras don't end suddenly. Like our lives they erode slowly until one day we turn and look and discover nothing's left.

***