Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed

by Joe Andoe

Overview

Joe Andoe is an internationally exhibited painter. His work, hailed by The New Yorker as "cowboy noir with a fashionista twist," is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and countless other locations. He is a father. He is a writer. He is sober. That's now.

Once upon a time, though, way back in the '70s, Joe Andoe was a delinquent bad boy growing up wild in Tulsa, Oklahoma—drinking, drugging, and driving too fast down a dead-end road. He was one car crash, one overdose away from head-on disaster. His art saved him.

A life story told in discrete, arresting snapshots of despair, resilience, creativity, and hope, Joe Andoe's raw, vivid, and utterly original memoir is as striking as his painting. With echoes of Jim Carroll poetic insight and Charles Bukowski grit, yet still uniquely the artist's own, Andoe's literary portrait of his time to date on earth is as powerful as a heavyweight's hook and as spellbinding as a major crack-up on the opposite side of the highway. It is an important work of curiosity and grandiosity; a testament to a young man's resilience and genius and luck that enabled him to survive a life lived wildly out of control; an unparalleled adventure, a rocket ride from the sordid depths of self-destruction to the glorious pinnacles of…Jubilee City

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061982989
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joe Andoe is an internationally renowned artist. His short fiction has appeared in the literary journals Open City, Bomb, and Bald Ego. He is a father of two and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Jubilee City
A Memoir at Full Speed

Chapter One

Fence

I was in the backyard of our new rented house in Tulsa, and on the other side of the fence that separated our yard from the people behind was a bunch of little kids, a babysitter's bunch.

I was four or five and talking to a kid, about like me, through the gray diamond-shaped links.

Can you come over and play? he goes.

I don't know, I said. I'll go ask my mama.

So I did and she said, You know they look close but they're really far away.

I remember wondering, Does the fence act like a telescope or a magnifying thing?

Around the same time my twenty-five-year-old mother took me to the grocery store in a hurry. We parked and it was crowded. She put me up on top of a fiberglass horse and dropped a nickel in the box and the horse ground back and forth for a few minutes. Then it stopped. Disoriented, I thought she forgot me and I ran out into the sun and the parking lot looking for her.

Then a friendly old man came out of nowhere, took my hand, and walked me away and smiled as I said, No, she's back there.

He said that we would find her this way.

Looking back toward the store I told the man my address and phone number like my mother taught me to if I ever got lost. We turned the corner and went into a liquor store where he was familiar with the woman who worked there.

Right away she picked up the phone book as I told her my address and phone number.

I was thinking, Why is she looking in the phone book? Then she made a call. Then the old man and I sat on the curb in the shade in front of theliquor store and we talked to the lady as we waited for something.

Very soon a black-and-white police car pulled up. It had a big gold star on the door. I got in the front seat.

I was too small to see over the dash but I could see the curly black rubber cord (like for a telephone, but thicker) going from the radio to the hand microphone he was talking into, and I saw his big silver pistol in a black holster. I tried to tell him my address but he said he already knew. How does he know? I wondered.

Then we pulled up to my grandparents' house.

Out front stood my smiling grandma and my not happy red-eyed mother who I was so glad to see. I jumped out of the police car and ran to her but she didn't smile or hug or anything; she said, Get in the house.

And yes, I wondered why she wasn't glad to see me.

Baby Needs Shoes

I was dropped or suffocated or abused or deprived of something, all at the hands of her evil sadistic doctor.

This was what I was told any time I messed up or got poor grades, and I did mess up a lot and I was usually the last to know.

In 1955, when this all started, my mother, Lois, was a nineteen-year-old cutie with red painted toenails and jet black hair and alabaster skin, a gum-popping bank teller who was voted "Best Figure" by the other tellers.

That was before she got pregnant with me while on her honeymoon in San Diego, shouting distance from the naval base where Dad was stationed before he took off for Japan for almost two years.

I looked like I'd been in a fight by the time she saw me hours after my noon delivery, she said.

They had knocked her out because I was so big—almost ten pounds—and she was only five foot three.

So she never trusted that I was okay.

The high point of my birthday, besides being born, was that my first visitor was a famous Indian artist named Acee Blue Eagle, who was a traditionalist and a writer and a performer. He had toured Europe before World War II and performed for Queen Elizabeth when she was a child, and Mussolini, and Hitler, who might have got the idea for his swastika from a symbol of friendship (turned the other way) that was in Acee's exhibit.

At these performances Acee wore full headdress, buckskins, and moccasins, and played Indian flutes and tom-toms. He would dance and sing Indian songs and tell stories and show his paintings and medicine.

Then there's Walt Disney, who wasn't there, but we did share the same birthday. Walt took Bambi from Acee. I was told that, years earlier, on a trip to New Mexico, he saw Acee's deer paintings that looked like Bambi.

Acee was a friend of the family and worked at home not far away. He saw me before anybody else did, and maybe put some kind of Indian spell or medicine on me, because he was that kind of guy. And I could draw pretty well early on, and I drew a lot of Indians.

Mom's best friend Jane had a girl a few months before I came along and like all baby girls she looked more advanced than me.

I didn't seem to be as engaged as Jane's baby, plus I was so big—all of this was part of my mother's reason for thinking that I was defective.

They say I was a good baby, hardly fussed; I would lie there and entertain myself. And this worked for my mom because she wasn't cuddly anyway.

So here we have this twenty-year-old mother with her groom on the other side of the world and what she thought was a big slug of a baby.

She lived at her mother's, who had remarried just a few years before to a drunk just because he went to the right church and they were the only people being allowed into heaven.

Jubilee City
A Memoir at Full Speed. Copyright © by Joe Andoe. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Not every painter of lonely landscapes and stark, haunting creatures has a readable story to tell. But Mr. Andoe makes this book a natural offshoot of his art, combining cool understatement with brass-tacks candor.
—The New York Times

Janet Maslin

He has a gift for ruthless analysis, and among the disjointed microchapters of his life story, there are exacting self-revelations every few pages. He describes his relationship with his beloved daughter this way: "While I had huge Viking hammers, she required fine delicate Swiss watch tools and somebody with the motor skills to use them correctly." Such tools he may lack, but now that he's sobered up, he's able to survey the car wreck of his early life and turn it into a kind of art.
—The New York Times Book Review

Amy Finnerty

In this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited-the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said "No" to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh. (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

A celebrated painter recalls his Americana roots and metropolitan adventures. With broad helpings of grievous angel dust borrowed liberally from Sam Shepard, Tom Waits and Gram Parsons, Andoe depicts his dysfunctional personal life and recognizable artistry in distorted snapshots. The author recalls his unlikely elevation to fame as a painter, starting with a scrappy upbringing among rednecks and reprobates in Tulsa, Okla. The erratic opening half, focused on the author's rebellious childhood, leads with self-centered grandiosity, like this report of his first teenage hangover. "At last I had mastered the low art of coming unmoored," he writes. The overall effect is that of an urban poet trying to hustle some literary mileage out of generic rural tales of cars, drugs and girls that will echo with uncomfortable familiarity for anybody who grew up in the country's dusty middle. The stories are punctuated by Andoe's melancholic portraits of horses, stoner buddies and dull-eyed girlfriends. For all the cliches of adolescent lawbreaking and hot-blooded romantic misadventures presented, moments of truth emerge. Unlike the sharp-tongued noir facsimiles where Andoe is clearly trying to sound cool, the surprising candor of unguarded flashbacks come at the most unpoetic moments: the split second of his father's heart attack, a hasty marriage proposal on a second date or the unexpected pitfalls of the marriage's "twelve-year-long Mexican standoff." His memories improve as we near the present day, shedding light on the absurdity of the art world but revealing very little about the artistic process. The paintings are remarkable, but the artist's story only scrapes the surface.

Kirkus Reviews

Charming . . . [Andoe’s] wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh.” — Publishers Weekly

“A raw, laconic kind of confession . . . filled with the kind of sentences that demand a reader’s attention.” — USA Today

“Joe Andoe talks the way he paints in simple, direct phrases. He’s no horseman. He’s always preferred fast cars and motorcycles.” — NPR's All Things Considered

“[A] life straight out of Chuck Palahniuk’s twisted imagination. — International Herald Tribune

From the Publisher

A raw, laconic kind of confession . . . filled with the kind of sentences that demand a reader’s attention.

USA Today

Joe Andoe talks the way he paints in simple, direct phrases. He’s no horseman. He’s always preferred fast cars and motorcycles.

NPR's All Things Considered

[A] life straight out of Chuck Palahniuk’s twisted imagination.

International Herald Tribune

A raw, laconic kind of confession . . . filled with the kind of sentences that demand a reader’s attention.

USA Today

"Joe Andoe talks the way he paints in simple, direct phrases. He’s no horseman. He’s always preferred fast cars and motorcycles."

All Things Considered - NPR