Drawing the Illustration for Gay Talese’s “Getting Even”

Pen meets prose: Behind the scenes creating art for the new story just published in The Metropolitan Review

When

Lou Bahet

from The Metropolitan Review sent me a transcript of a new Gay Talese essay and asked if I wanted to illustrate it, I responded the way any normal adult would when handed the sacred scrolls of modern American journalism: I said yes, panicked, then spent the following 48 hours sweating through my pants.

I mean, it’s Gay Talese. The man wrote Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Me? I once wrote a New Yorker caption about a dog that poops candles.

The story is called Getting Even, and it’s exactly what you want from Talese: a slow-burn character study with razor-sharp restraint and a hint of revenge fantasy. You should absolutely read it here to get the full effect of the incredible, immersive writing.

It follows Angelo Janiero, a washed-up actor-turned-taxi-driver who realises (too late) that the woman who’s just stepped into his cab is the high school English teacher who flunked him twice and ruined his life. He doesn’t confront her. Doesn’t even tell her who he is. He just quietly exacts his revenge. It’s petty. It’s perfect.

Photo by Jason Chatfield

Lou sent me the early draft just before I was in the back of a cab myself, heading over the Williamsburg Bridge at night. It was one of those serendipitous reading environments that ends up enhancing the whole tone of the story. I read it again the next day at Dos Caminos, sketching thumbnail ideas while pushing a taco around a plate like a man about to be found out. then I read it again. The story stuck to my ribs.

There’s something inherently romantic about the old New York taxi-especially those 1960s Checker Marathons. I love their cracked vinyl seats, the dome lights, the clunky metal dash with a cigarette burn near the ashtray. I take a cab instead of an Uber whenever I can, even though the numbers tipped long ago in Uber’s favour. I blame Edward Norton. I loved him in Motherless Brooklyn, gliding through noirish Manhattan in clunky old beasts. The same with DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Probably ruined me for rideshare forever. There really is nothing like looking through the windshield of a stinky Manhattan cab as you bomb down Broadway on a hazy day, or zipping back to the city over the Queensboro Bridge, catching glimpses of the Chrystler through the slats. There’s almost certainly some obscure German word for that precise emotion. It doesn’t have quite the same effect in a black Toyota Camry with your driver scrolling the Gram at stop lights…

When it came time to draw, I wanted to keep it all tactile- dip pen and ink on paper. That’s how I could stitch together the story’s key visuals: the ghosts of the students reflected in the windscreen, the narrowed eyes in the rearview, the gloom inside the cab as it lurches onto the Queensboro Bridge. I stayed awake into the wee hours in my studio working on it, sirens echoing outside, the usual Hell’s Kitchen soundtrack of arguments and ambulance brakes.

I don’t usually do editorial illustration. I said as much last night at a party for The David Prize in Brooklyn—standing in a sea of creative New Yorkers, telling Ed Steed and Millie von Platen that I felt like a fraud. They’ve illustrated for everyone from The New York Times to The New York Review of Books. I sometimes draw dogs in hats.

But I’m chuffed Lou and Ross trusted me with it. I turned in the final at some ungodly hour. Lou, of course, was awake. Editing. Probably also drinking coffee that had gone cold twelve hours earlier.

I’m glad they liked it. I never like anything I make anymore. All I see are the mistakes. But I guess that’s the cost of caring. And maybe, somewhere, Angelo Janiero would understand that.

Here’s to Talese, and the cabbies of New York.

Cheers,

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