Tales From The Crip

The politically incorrect cartoonist, whose drawings of the pope and hoary feminists have sparked fiery protests and the keen interest of Hollywood stars like Robin Williams, sleeps under a purple Little Mermaid comforter.

That's just the beginning of the contradictions that accompany any honest description of Callahan. He's a quadriplegic who is more productive than most people who have full use of all their limbs. He's a social liberal who once ran for office as a Republican. He's a gregarious loner who has just issued a CD that is both dark and surprisingly hopeful.

Apparently, it wasn't enough for Callahan to be the author of eight collections of cartoons, an autobiography, a children's book, the brains behind two animated television programs, the creator of a cartoon that has run in this newspaper for 23 years and drawings that have appeared on everything from refrigerator magnets to greeting cards.

He needed to make music. "I have to [create]," says Callahan, who spends nearly 14 hours a day in bed because sitting in his wheelchair for too long causes uncomfortable compression in his chest. "It's like breathing. I always have to be creating something or I don't feel quite right."

His CD released last month, Purple Winos in the Rain, isn't the only thing that could help make '07 a big year for Callahan. He is also the subject of a new documentary made by a European production company that will premiere in February at the Portland International Film Festival.

At the age of 55, Callahan says he has moved beyond the anger that nourished his work for so many years. He claims that his creative impulses no longer drive him to pique people—particularly women.

"I still reserve the right to be politically incorrect, if it falls that way, but I'm not going to go out of my way to offend people," Callahan says.

If this conversion holds, longtime fans of Callahan's outrageous, cover-your-eyes-in-disbelief cartoons face discouraging prospects. It would be the equivalent of Borat signing up for "diversity awareness" training.

But Callahan swears that, as 2006 comes to a close, he's more interested in speaking from his heart than floating some new gags. He admits his cartoons aren't always funny now.

"Sometimes it's ironic, and sometimes it's sarcastic," Callahan says of his work. "Sometimes it's poignant, and sometimes it's just plain sad."

Callahan's apartment in Northwest Portland is hardly the opulent spread one would expect from a successful artist who sold the movie rights to tell his life story to William Hurt, then Robin Williams and then Showtime—for "more money than you could fit in a bread basket." In fact, it is faintly depressing.

For a while, Callahan did own a spacious home now valued at more than $700,000 on Northwest Raleigh Street. But since 2004, he has rented a basement apartment—a small one-bedroom with outdated fixtures—in a nondescript building not far from Northwest 23rd Avenue.

Plumbers have recently removed a wall in Callahan's apartment to reach the leaking pipes behind it, and in the process they knocked over and broke Callahan's only lamp. One short row of windows and two overhead lights now are the only source of illumination.

But on a recent weekday, Callahan was pitched forward in the darkness over the keys of his upright piano, working on the bridge to a song by crudely striking the black and white keys with his ghostly hands.

Called "Roll Away the Day," the song is about dying, although the last lines in the tune are oddly sweet: "Watch the seagulls fly across the bay/ When you die, you just keep rolling/ You ain't got no say."

To relieve his persistent pain and frequent spasms, Callahan runs his electric wheelchair up a small skateboarding ramp inside his apartment, allowing him to elevate the front wheels of his chair and throw his shoulders back in a wheelchair-yoga-like bridge pose. ("I'm a quadriplegic with a bad back," he quips. "Isn't that redundant?")

SING US A SONG, PIANO MAN: Callahan played the piano as a child and has been writing songs for years. IMAGE: WYNDE DYER

CALLAHAN AT 20: Before the car crash that left him a quadriplegic.

And yet Callahan's art has gotten him in a lot of trouble. He's pissed off Jews, African-Americans, animal lovers and pro-choice activists. "So many of them really have caused problems—my little delinquent cartoons," Callahan says. Some call it black humor, but Callahan prefers calling it "survivor humor," a way of compensating for his disability, the feelings of abandonment he harbored for years as a result of being adopted as an infant and the years of alcoholism that he suffered through in the '70s.

He used to enjoy offending people with power, Callahan says, especially if those people were proponents of "politically correct" attitudes. "It was fun to pop the balloons of people who had too limited a sense of humor," he says.

There is, perhaps, no group he has affronted more often than women. In but one example, Callahan drew a female clerk belittling a male shopper by telling him there is no humor section at her feminist bookstore.

"I think he's crass. I think he's anti-feminist, and I don't think his humor is all that sophisticated," says Grayson Dempsey, a Portlander who works as a women's health consultant.

Last week, for the first time ever, Callahan revealed that his cartoons about women were informed to some degree by the fact that "I had a tough time as a kid at the hands of women," Callahan says.

At the age of 9, Callahan says he was sexually abused more than once by a woman who was not a family member. This is the first time he's publicly acknowledged the private trauma, which Callahan now acknowledges forms the basis for many of his cartoons insulting women. "Women can be honest about this, so why can't men be honest, too?" he asks.

At least one camouflaged attempt to address what happened to him as a child hit a very raw nerve in one reader. The cartoon, which appeared several years ago in WW, depicted a handful of children and a caption that said their uncle let them "ride his baloney pony."

An outraged reader wrote in to say Callahan had no right to pen that cartoon, because (she assumed) he had no way of knowing the pain of childhood sexual abuse.

The letter burned Callahan.

"'What in the name of Christ is she saying?'" Callahan recalls thinking, the anger rising in his voice all over again. "'Who does she think she is?'"

A few years ago, Callahan says the anger and resentment toward women, especially strong women, simply dissolved one summer afternoon. He's worried this will sound unbelievably hokey, but he says he was about to pass a statue of the Virgin Mary on East Burnside Street when he decided to pause and say a prayer. "It sounds so goofy," says Callahan, who grew up Catholic, "but I had almost a spiritual experience." He realized he was tired of carrying the burden of his resentment and decided he needed to let it go, a process that was made easier by years of therapy.

"That which I thought was killing me is now kind of saving me," Callahan says. "I fought the feminine for most of my life, sort of chased after it, but I never could quite catch it. Somehow I was broken down."

Now, just as when he gave up alcohol at the age of 27, Callahan says he regrets some of the harm he caused.

"I've always felt bad about some of the cartoons I've written about lesbians and feminists," Callahan says. "I almost feel like I owe people an apology. But I had to work out some baggage. I'm sorry some people had to be offended."

The image of Callahan as a "moderate misogynist," as he once called himself, has always been laughable to Callahan's close female friends. "He is the kind of guy who makes you feel really special when he talks to you," says Michele Overman, a striking blond artist friend of Callahan's who considers the cartoonist a "courtly" gentleman. "He walks on water as far as I'm concerned."

His friend Joy Campbell, who dated Callahan for almost two years, says he is "incredibly selfless." "He just gives to everybody," says Campbell, who is 58 but looks no older than 40. "He's so generous and selfless."

Having "faced his demons," Callahan has turned his attention to his music, Campbell says. "His primary passion right now is songwriting."

Callahan's life and his new music career will hit the big screen this February at the 30th Portland International Film Festival at the Northwest Film Center. Called Touch Me Someplace I Can Feel, after one of his more haunting songs, the one-hour documentary was filmed this year by a Dutch woman named Simone de Vries, who also made a film about another out-there artist and social commentator, Kinky Friedman, one of Callahan's longtime friends.

"This music career may eclipse everything he's done in art," says Friedman, an author, songwriter, humorist and Texan who ran unsuccessfully for governor this fall as an independent candidate.

"It could happen, and it could happen real fast."

De Vries says Callahan's life, humor and work were the perfect recipe for a film.

"It was everything together: the person (bright-orange-dyed hair), his razor-sharp observations of humans, wit and his life story," de Vries writes in an email. "And when I went to visit John for the first time I found out he also writes beautiful, melancholic songs and has a great voice. I may sound like a crazy fan now, but it was just that there was so much there for a rich portrait of a man, struggling with everyday life, expressing his feelings and expressing them quite freely, not holding back. He asked me: 'This is not going to be a spinal-cord rehabilitation film, is it?' I sure hope it's more than that. I hear from people who watched the film they think it's moving, wise, funny."

A Callahan illustration is the cover of Purple Winos in the Rain, titled after one of his songs. From behind a rain-soaked scene of clownish-looking hobos, a tiny yellow sun peeks out, threatening to turn the haunting purple haze into blue sky.

Callahan says he's not quite sure what his songs mean. "It would be a lie for me to say what they mean," Callahan says, "because I would be pretending to know what they're about."

He describes his role as a songwriter as a musical "medium," meaning the inspiration for his lyrics simply comes through him, he says. And he also describes his album rather cryptically, as "lavender" and "tingly." But the images he uses to create that effect are concrete and deadly: hand grenades, bullets through the heart, and thoughts of suicide and drug overdoses.

The lyrics from "Overdose" are appropriately dark: "I thought it would be fun at first/ I tried religion and I died of thirst/ I rose up from the ashes but I got so close/ I want another overdose."

Taken as a whole, the album is sweet and surprisingly hopeful. "I could hear a lot of people singing this stuff," says Friedman.

Friedman himself plans to rerecord some of Callahan's songs. "John is a dealer in hope, and he's always been an inspiration to others," Friedman adds, noting that he also hopes to share the tracks, which he calls "universal" in their appeal, with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. "I think the day's coming when these songs will be a financial pleasure for John."

Terry Robb, the legendary bluesman who produced the CD, says the instrumentation on the album is purposely sparse in order to emphasize the lyrics and Callahan's singing.

The result is a mix of words and music that mirrors Callahan's own life and his outlook on it.

"John likes to juxtapose a dark lyric with a happy little ditty," Robb says. "It's kind of how life is."

He adds: "It really represents him a lot; there's nothing phony or pretentious about it."

Callahan is lining up his gigs for 2007. Robb, along with pianist Chris Hubbard, will be touring with him. Their first stop is Salem's Guitar Castle on Jan. 21.

Expect more.

"What I like about being paralyzed is that it's so utterly limiting...that it's also liberating," Callahan says. "It's very simple, but it's very complicated. It's very beautiful and very horrible."

^SEE MORE CARTOONS

After Pope John Paul II publicly embraced rock ’n’ roll in the spring of 2000, Callahan drew this cartoon, using the lyrics from Patti Smith’s edgy glorification of r’n’r. The use of the N-word outraged JoAnn Bowman, a local black activist and former member of the state Legislature. Bowman was unfamiliar with the song, but called the cartoon “outrageous,” “racist,” “disrespectful,” “insulting” and “not funny.” She organized a one-day demonstration in front of a Fred Meyer, with people holding placards blasting WW

This cartoon generated a lot of mail. Callahan wrote in his autobiography that much of WW’s readership “saw this as glorifying the Klan. They could not accept the suggestion that simple humans like us, concerned equally with creature comforts, wore those sheets and committed those crimes.”

“Building humor on the handicaps of a victim of some accident is…base and without merit,” wrote one reader in response to the above cartoon.

“During your next conversation with your cartoonist Callahan, I wonder if you could do me a favor,” Michelle Herrmann of Southeast Portland wrote in a letter to the editor about the above cartoon. “Could you please ask him what, exactly, is funny?”

The above Callahan cartoon prompted Grayson Dempsey of Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette to write: “His cartoon…adds fuel to an argument that is often based on misinformation.… Messages such as Callahan’s are ignorant and perpetuate an issue that is becoming more violent and more divisive every single day. If he wants to draw offensive cartoons, he should stick to subjects that he knows something about.”