Victor Navarro Jr.: Madman Laureate of Pittsburgh’s Little Italy
IV
How did a man of such education and intelligence end up poverty stricken, living at a coffee shop? Why do so many people love him? Every artist in Bloomfield has used him as a muse. There are wheat-pasted psychedelic portraits of Victor with a mohawk and butterfly wings all over alleyways and overpasses. The City Paper reviewed his album and said he was a mix of Tom Waits meets the Frogs. The coffee shop sandwich boards have pictures of him and his best friends Al and Eric, two other senior schizophrenics, wearing t-shirts that say, “Bums are People too” and they put these up when the stores are closed. If you try to walk in after hours you’ll meet their insane faces guarding the door like Cerberus, the three headed hound of hell.
He’s been photographed more than John Lennon and he even has a MySpace profile. He’s published two novels with a small local press and his band, the Schizophonics, gets gigs in dive bars all over the city.
“I lost my mind in the seventies.” He finally answers.
I should have known. The seventies were particularly difficult for Victor. That’s the decade he took the fateful acid tab at a party. That’s when cigarettes started tasting funny and people started staring at him. That’s when he started living in an endless loop of the Doors’ “People are Strange.” Soon he was a full blown paranoid schizophrenic and was officially “in the system,” meaning he was diagnosed and overmedicated. He floated in and out of institutions until he found the coffee shop and decided to stay there.
According to Victor, the sixties were beautiful, but the seventies were full of demons. He explains that he was damned by all sorts of Gods during that decade. A homeless bum asked him for a smoke and Victor refused him, saying he didn’t have any left although he knew he just bought a fresh pack. The bum stood up and revealed himself to be God and damned him to hell.
“How was I supposed to know he was God, hun?” Victor asked incredulously the first time he told us the story.
“Victor, you know he isn’t God now, right?” Hilary asked, the realist, always trying to guide Victor back to earth.
“Oh, of course, hun of course I know he isn’t God now,” Victor said, a little irritated with her question. He took a long drag off his cigarette and paused,
“But he was then.”
Victor rewires your brain. Like old psychic Edgar Cayce who claimed that he was able to tell the future by tuning into the invisible matrix of universal consciousness where everyone is remembered, Victor has tuned in to some realm of pure creative play where everything is extraordinary. He sets your brain chemicals running free through neuropathways heretofore road-blocked by your bad habits of normal thinking. For this reason alone, people can’t get enough of him.
Although he’s his own favorite subject, Victor is a great listener. When we imagine crazy, we imagine some lost soul chattering away like a windup doll somebody turned on and left for dead. We imagine all non-sequiturs and a bad smell. Victor’s not like that. He may smell bad sometimes, but he’s present. In some ways he’s hyper-present. He listens completely and remembers everything you tell him. Sometimes he remembers too much. It’s common knowledge that Victor has the biggest mouth in Pittsburgh and anything you tell him will be known by everyone who frequents the coffee shop.
His eye-contact is exquisite. When talking to him, I often notice that we’re both leaning forward in our chairs, completely captivated by the intensity of the conversation. Victor knows the contents of my heart more than anyone. He’s nursed me through many heartbreaks and frightening mind states when we were pulling “all-nighters” as he calls them, sitting in the back of the coffee shop after hours
Victor’s very aware of his situation. He knows he’s a “bum” and he calls himself one with pride. He explains that his life is a mix of choice and chance. He didn’t want the delusions, but he made them work for him, writing about them and entertaining all of us with their details safely after the fact. He identifies as an anarchist and an artist and he basically understands mainstream society as a farce most people aren’t smart enough to see through- a powerful smoke and mirrors show, one of the oldest tricks in the book. The hungry ghost pursuits of the American dream were just too boring for him. If, as the dream says, you can really be whatever you want, why not be a crazy genius nobody Somebody? Why not? This is his identity and it’s as real and as valid as “librarian” or “doctor” or “teacher.” Prestige is another matter- I guess that’s all in the eye of the beholder.
As for those of us who love and care for him, we don’t buy into his rationalizations as easily. We don’t believe in his diagnosis either. The schizophrenic, like any artist, uses powerful metaphors to describe reality. Love is often described as an arrow to the heart and most of us hear this description and immediately recognize the pain and powerful emotion it refers to. The schizophrenic, on the other hand, gets lost in the metaphor and really believes there’s an actual arrow in his heart- or was once in his heart. He can’t understand that his actual heart isn’t literally damaged or dying. Or maybe the doctors can’t understand his poetry. Nobody really knows.
But most of us have a theory that Victor is completely aware of his metaphors. That he relishes in his colorful language and absurd statements- that he’s half mystic, half bullshit artist and that’s just fine with us. In fact, we wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s living, walking art. His body is a walking sculpture, his ramblings are poems that went wild and ran off the page. His elaborate gestures and dirty jokes are once in a lifetime performance pieces. He is Art Brute, the art of the mad. He is someone no one will remember and none of us will forget. Is he crazy?
