THE BLACKOUT BLOGS #4 POTATO PANCAKES & GLOWING BABIES
This is a page from the graphic novel I'm working on called "Frequent Flyer", my lifetime adventures with UFO's.
The early 1970’s were pretty wild and full of creative possibilities, unfortunately for me I tended to drink myself into a state of obliteration.
I met Keith Haring one night at a bar on the lower east side called the NO NAME as he was drawing a glowing baby on the toilet seat I was pissing in. I had seen the babies appearing all over town, in the subways, and walls downtown. I was excited to be pissing with this mysterious artist at work. We became friends right away I even gave him some of his earliest illustrations assignments, but he really wanted to be a gallery artist and wasn’t much interested in commercial work.
Keith was also the first person I can recall to approach me about UFO abductions. I found a curious entry in one of my journals from that period about him. Looking back at the journal entry over 30 years later it is even more curious.
After we would drink and smoke our brains out at the No Name bar we would walk up the street to the Kiev restaurant and order potato pancakes and applesauce and talk for hours. He would always pull out one of his markers and draw the glowing baby and a UFO pulling it up into it and shove the drawing in my face. I loved the drawing but didn’t have a clue about why he would repeatedly draw the image and push it into my semi couscous face.
I have been told over the years that some abducted people can spot each other, and it has been certainly true that complete strangest have come up to me out of the blue and told me their UFO stories, for some reason they always seem to know I would understand their odd stories. But my gaydar has never worked very well and spotting fellow space travelers was something I never seemed to be able to do very well.
Back then UFO’s were nowhere in the gray matter of my brain, so I never made the connection until recently when I saw that entry in my journal.
Keith was always fun, but could become very serious when he wanted to be. I can’t remember him seriously talking to me about UFO’s but there are major chunks of the early 70’s I don’t remember.
I now am thinking that Keith was telling me in his own visual cryptic way that that we had more in common then sex, drinking, art, and the No Name bar.
art and words © a. j. epstein 2009