Memorabilia: The Little Man in the Boxes

In my many moves around the world, I have brought with me a few items that remind me of specific times, places, people, and adventures in my life. This painting is one such.

While we lived in Thailand, my parents acquired some interesting pieces of original and local art, which moved with us and formed a familiar backdrop to our homes from Bangkok to Pittsburgh to Connecticut. We did not take much when we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, most of it went into storage. Sometime while I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, our household goods were moved from storage in Connecticut to my aunt’s property in Texas, where our old dishware may still be languishing in a disused falling-down barn full of rattlesnakes. I later rescued a few items, including the above which had been painted by our family friend Irma, an artist who owned a Scandinavian design shop in Bangkok.

Irma hailed from one of the Nordic countries but had been in Thailand for a while. She lived in a big house with her daughter Hanna, often hosting parties for other expats – wannabe hippies like my parents, and some US military stationed or taking R&R leave from Vietnam in Bangkok.

I never heard whether there was any particular story around this painting or who the man was, but I’ve always been fond of him, sitting there looking so diffident in his blue suit and shiny shoes. He now hangs in my office.

The drab colors in this painting were not typical of Irma’s style. Thai markets in those years sold paper mache animals large and strong enough for a child to sit on, although they were hollow and hence not heavy. There was a slot in the animal’s back so you could use it as a piggy bank (you would have to break it to extract your money). There were elephants, pigs, tigers, etc., painted as close to natural colors as could be achieved with shiny paint, the elephants grey, caparisoned in red and gold, the tigers orange with black stripes.

Irma would turn these animals psychedelic. She gifted us with an elephant painted day-glo yellow, with big pink daisies on its ears and other decorations all over its body. We also had from her a life-sized human figure, painted white? I don’t remember. The elephant plus a pig and a tiger we bought ourselves were mine to play with. (They didn’t survive much beyond the first big move when we left Thailand in 1972.)

The mannequin stood in my parents’ “study”, a room dedicated to getting high in. They had the walls painted flat black, then put up popular posters including the infamous Wally Wood Disney Orgy (NSFW!). That was my first exposure to the classic Disney characters, which may explain my dislike of them. Other posters displayed popular memes of the day: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” (later co-opted by a cereal ad) and “War is not good for children and other living things.” I was allowed to stick a trail of day-glo colored dots with footprints on them all across the walls. I loved stickers, still do.

Although the soi (lane) we lived in and the apartment complex next door were largely rented to expats, I didn’t have any friends nearby for most of my five years in Bangkok. Hanna was only two years older than me, so I was always happy to go to Irma’s house to hang out with her while the grownups were getting stoned. Hanna delighted in hiding around corners and jumping out to scare me – she got me every time, and I hated it. The original concept album of “Jesus Christ Superstar” came out in 1970 and was a smash hit with my parents and their crowd. I liked it, too, but I didn’t care much for the song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, which Hanna therefore sang to me often. Perhaps she wasn’t an ideal friend, but she was one of the few I saw regularly, and I was a lonely child. Outside of school, I spent more of my time around adults than kids.

In 1971, Irma threw a Christmas Eve party for a bunch of expat friends. Below are photos that I took of the event. It’s odd now to remember how everyone smoked so freely (cigarettes as well as joints).