Skip to main contentHere's a little secret about John Callahan.
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?")
He does this constantly, but he also leans forward in his chair, hanging his arms down by his feet in what amounts to a counter pose, of sorts. And he fidgets, too, by jamming his upper arms onto the armrests of his wheelchair and lifting his weight off the seat, which helps prevent deadly bedsores.
He has limited use of his arms and hands. He draws by placing a pencil in his right hand, which he steadies with his left hand. Though he can prepare sandwiches on his own by slapping together the ingredients, he is a regular at Kornblatt's Delicatessen on Northwest 23rd, where the waitstaff gives him hot tea with a straw, or crumbles his crackers on top of his matzoh-ball soup without prompting. On a recent visit, Callahan fed himself soup by propping the spoon between his thumb and his index finger while watching his favorite television program, Bonanza.
Callahan is protective of his independence, tenuous as it may be. Years ago he had an operation to have a urinary-tract-diversion device attached to his abdomen, which means he doesn't need any assistance heeding nature's calls. And yes, he can have sex. As he writes in his 1989 autobiography, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, the quadriplegia did not impede his ability to make love. "I invited her to sit on my lap," Callahan writes of one woman he met shortly after his car accident. "I had no idea that this was going to be my M.O. for the rest of my life."
The odor of mortality is hard to avoid around Callahan. It's not just because of the transparent fragility of a person whose spinal cord was severed 34 years ago when he was a passenger in a California car accident. It's not even because Callahan's answering machine once had a recording that said: "I don't want to come to the phone right now. I'm pretty depressed. Leave your message after the gunshot," followed by what sounded like the blast of a large caliber pistol.
It's also because Callahan is fond of uttering the sort of existential insights that tend to halt a person in her sunny tracks. "I just think death and life," he noted recently, "are both sides of the same thing; they are one thing."
Such utterings may not amount to a worldview, but they help define Callahan's career, which could be seen as a tightrope walk between death and life, between that which is funny and that which is offensive. It has been an almost balletic dance. Ironic for a quad, no?
On the one hand, Callahan has been a smashing success. He lives entirely off royalties from his work—an annual salary that changes year to year but typically falls between a teacher's and a lawyer's, he says.
He has three healthcare attendants, whom he pays with his own money and who help him get out of bed, dress and bathe. Callahan also recently had a 19-year-old assistant who helped him run errands, and he regularly employs one taxi driver to take him across town or, when he's anxious to get away from the city, to the coast.
Medical insurance covers the cost of Callahan's doctor visits and medications, but he pays for the other services, and he no longer receives any public support because he makes too much money from his royalties. "In general, it is expensive being me," he says.
Callahan's success has led to a kind of networking that would make Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams look like a recluse.
Robin Williams, who bought the option to tell Callahan's life story in a movie (although that right later reverted to Callahan and now belongs to Showtime), remains a friend. Tom Waits, whose singing appears at the end of Callahan's CD, is also a buddy. His list of acquaintances runs from the late Christopher Reeve to Billy Crystal to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
In addition to his many famous friends, Callahan's network envelops disparate pockets of Portland. "Hippie girls" (who are in their 30s) periodically drop by Callahan's place to dye his hair a distinctive shade of flaming red. "They insist that it be henna, because they say it makes my eyes bluer," Callahan says.
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."
To hear songs from Callahan's new CD, go to wweek.com.
Callahan was born in Portland in 1951 and was raised by adoptive parents in The Dalles.
He plans a sequel to his autobiography, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, the book that inspired Robin Williams to option the movie rights to tell Callahan's story.
In 1996, Callahan ran for the state House. He was unopposed in the Republican primary but dropped out before the general election.
Robin Williams never made the film of Callahan's life, and the rights eventually reverted to Callahan. Callahan now says Williams let the rights expire when the actor became too old to convincingly portray Callahan as a young man.
Actor William Hurt was the first to buy the option on Callahan's life story, then let it lapse. John Ritter and Billy Crystal also expressed interest, but Callahan says he didn't think they were right for the project.
If Callahan's life story is ever produced as a major motion picture, he says he hopes Philip Seymour Hoffman wins the role of playing the cartoonist-cum-musician.
Callahan does not own a computer or use email, but a friend created a MySpace account for him and he has a website, callahanonline.com, where fans and foes can find his most outrageous cartoons and a sampling of his hate mail. The website johncallahan.com belongs to another redhead, a soap-opera actor who once appeared on All My Children.
WWeek 2015