By Erin Hicks
Spring 2007 Kaplan Award Winner
Originally I planned to write about an underground rock musician in Seattle. I was going to describe the Seattle music scene as seen through the eyes of a struggling musician. I wanted to find someone who knew a lot of musicians, and underground spots in this city. Instead I found Leland Leichman.
He plays music, but I’m not sure if you could call him a musician. He draws and paints, but the stick figures he draws can’t be classified as art.
Leland wears the same pants every day, and they smell kind of like mothballs. He’s tall — over 6 feet tall, but he slouches so he looks a lot shorter and unassuming. He walks with a shuffle, and seldom gives eye contact, but when he does the gaze he holds is penetrating. His eyes are so brown they look almost black — intense but soft at the same time. They also look a little sad.
His friend Jeff Cole says it best.
“He’s an A-R-T-E-S-T,” Jeff said, spelling the word out and pronouncing it with a short “E.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“He doesn’t make art,” Jeff explains. “He is art; his whole life is one big piece of performance art.
Café Victrola
Leland lives on 15th, between Harrison and Aloha Street on Capitol Hill. He doesn’t have a car or a license, and since 15th street has basically all Leland needs to survive — a music store, a grocery store, and a 7-Eleven — he doesn’t really leave the neighborhood. He’s nicknamed the Mayor of 15th, not only does he seem to know almost all the locals, but they know him too.
When I asked to meet him for coffee, he immediately suggested we go to Café Victrola, a “hipster” café known for their clientele of bohemian artists and earth-loving vegetarians, and a wide array of vegan pastries. The special of the day is a green tea and red bean pound cake. The red beans in the green-hued cake gave it a festive vibe, but I ordered a biscotti just to be safe. It was my first time on 15th street after all.
Leland used to work at an independent grocery store two blocks up from Café Victrola, but when Trader Joe’s opened up a few months ago they started losing their customers and never recovered. They went out of business, and now Leland’s out of a job. He thought about applying at Café Victrola when one of his buddies told him they were hiring, but decided against it.
“I can’t work here, it’s become my hang-out spot, y’know?” he said. When Leland orders, he doesn’t have to pay, the baristas know Leland doesn’t have much cash. This time when he goes to the cash register to talk to his friend behind the counter, he comes back with a bottle of Peligrino water.
He’s running out of money, but money’s never been an issue for Leland. He lived in Hawaii for two years, working as a caterer in a Tibetan Temple, so he’s used to monk’s life of simplicity. He usually eats just one meal a day, when he eats at all. Much of his days are spent trying to get free food. He’s found a couple of shelters and communes that give food away. He’s also found a couple less obvious ways of getting free food. For instance he went to 7-Eleven at 2 a.m. that morning and the attendant gave him a whole bag of expired sandwiches. That means he’s set for the week, he said.
“Don’t you worry about food poisoning?” I asked him.
Leland stared off into space, contemplating the question. “No, not really,” he says. I wait for him to say more, but that is all. Once again Leland falls silent. I read once that the average man talks 4,000 words a day. I suspect for Leland, the number is significantly lower.
I am surprised at his cavalier attitude about consuming expired products because Leland mentioned that eating is healthy to him. So much so that he’s on a raw foods diet. Although expired deli meats are apparently an exception, he sticks mainly to uncooked foods, which include raw meat.
This whole raw foods thing came about six years ago during an eight-day fast. Leland fasts not for religious purposes or clarity of mind, but to quit smoking. He says it’s actually easier if he quits everything — food, water, cigarettes, everything — cold turkey. This way, he craves everything and he gets through it with the knowledge that eventually he’ll eat again. The relief of eating again makes him forget about smoking, and by the time he’s done fasting and has satisfied his food cravings, his cigarette cravings are completely gone…well for a little while at least. Unfortunately he still smokes like a chimney
He’s fasted twice, and every time he comes out of a fast, Leland says he gets a new craving for a completely random food item. The first was corned beef hash. The second time he craved raw meat. He’d never eaten raw meat before, and to this day he didn’t know the origin of the craving. All he knows is that he needed raw meat, and he needed it immediately.
Leland read a book about eating raw foods to make sure that he did it safely, and he bought some raw meat from a friend who owned a ranch. He consumed half of a pound of raw beef in one sitting, and described it as “more satisfying than any meat I had ever eaten before.”
“When I was done I had a huge smile on my face, and all of a sudden I just felt happy,” Leland says of the experience.
Today Leland continues eating raw meats and fruits and vegetables. I ask if he likes sushi, and he says it’s OK, although raw fish just isn’t as satisfying as raw beef. Raw sea food is pretty good though, he said. He also likes raw prawns, shell-fish, oysters and crab.
So Leland still craves raw meat — and cigarettes. He can’t even make it through an hour and a half coffee break without getting up to smoke three times. It’s funny, he says, because he’s good about giving up a lot of things. He doesn’t eat refined sugar, and he doesn’t drink, in part because drinking isn’t part of a cohesive raw foods diet, and also because drinking can be a problem for him. He can’t have just one beer, and besides, he doesn’t like to lose himself in “that way.”
But cigarettes are a different story. “Cigarettes are definitely my drug of choice,” he says as he rolls himself the eighth cigarette of the day. And it is only 1:30 p.m.
108 days later
Eating and smoking aren’t the only things Leland has temporarily given up. He quit talking once. He didn’t speak a word for 108 days. I asked him the significance of 108. He said that’s the number that the Japanese, Chinese and Indians count their mantras, a religious symbol or poem, in. It is also important in numerology: 9 planets times twelve zodiac signs. It is also how many books the Buddha is said to have written.
People talk too much he said, and when people talk their energy can say something different. Leland was sick of talking, and just wanted to listen for a while. He wanted to focus on the people around him and the unique energy they bring with them. So he spent his days doing a lot of listening, and drawing. He’d draw pages and pages of stick figures, kind of like a stream of consciousness exercise in a creative writing class. He said he wanted to take the time to get rid of all the distractions in his life and focus on his art. He said he’s not sure what he was looking for during those 108 days, but whatever it was he thinks he found it.
The Art in the A-R-T-E-S-T
“So Leland, what motivates you?” I ask while we sit at the Hopvine Pub a block up from Café Victrola, waiting for his turn at open mic night. He plays his guitar there every Wednesday night — he’s been performing there for over two years. The performers have to sign up, and he is one of the last that night, number 12. Number two gets off the stage after improving his version of Salt-N-Pepper’s “Push it”, which involved blowing into a Heineken beer bottle to create the beat. Open mic nights can get interesting, Leland warns me. It was going to be a long night.
Leland does what he does so often and stares off in space while contemplating his answer to the question I asked earlier.
“I want to make art,” he said.
“Well how do you define ‘art’?” I ask. I didn’t want to say it, but his stick figures look like they could have been drawn by a 5-year-old. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe I just didn’t see it.
“Art happens in everything; it happens by being connected,” he says. “If you look at pigeons, they are totally immersed in their world. Birds sing, they’re not eating or anything, they just want to sing. We are so busy what we’re doing, we’re separate from nature,” Leland continued. “It’s an unsatisfied doing, not really being present.”
We talk more about how stifling the nine-to-five can be. I told him I could relate to what he is saying, that my Dad is a vice president of a company and works all the time. He spends little time with me, and when he does he has one foot out the door, and one hand on his BlackBerry. Leland says that’s exactly the kind of life he doesn’t want.
He leaves for a while to talk to some friends — I ask if he knows everyone at the bar and he looks around. No not all, he says, but most. He comes back to tell me he is the next act up.
He plays a metal guitar. His voice is deep and gravely, he mentioned Johnny Cash was one of his musical influences, and you could definitely tell when he sang, it sounded like the “Walk the Line” soundtrack. His songs were sad and satirical: he played two and the first was about memories and missing someone who left. The other was about eating zombie brains. The later was a crowd favorite, some even seemed to know the chorus. They sing along with Leland as he wails into the mic.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard Leland play, but definitely not songs about love and zombie brains. I thought I was going to meet a musician when I met Leland, but I doubt any audience outside of 15th street would show such enthusiasm for Leland screaming into a mic “I want to eat your brains.” I think music is more of a hobby for Leland than a career. I’d recommend he keep his day job, but he doesn’t have one.
The Past and the Future
Leland Leichman is still unemployed. He’s applying for a position at Noah’s Bagels, which is attached to the QFC that is next to the grocery store he used to work at that is next to his favorite hang out spot that is next to his post office — all on 15th street. He spends his days writing poetry and songs, and drawing.
He says he just goes day-by-day. He has good days and bad days. On good days he applies for jobs and tries to teach himself Flash animation. His friend Jeff Cole is an engineering graduate student at The University of Washington, and he’s trying to get him involved in computer graphics. He could do a lot of things, Leland says. Maybe he’ll do computer programming, maybe he’ll get a job at a health food store, “that’d make me pretty happy.”
But Leland has bad days too. On his bad days he worries about the future, and regrets his past. He dropped out of high school in his freshman year. He’s afraid that will limit his opportunities.
I think Leland is searching for something. If you listen to the lyrics of the song he sings at open mic night about memories, and listen to the things he says with his soft spoken voice, he’s not some unreadable creature that’s so different from everyone else in society. Leland is just a 20-something-year-old, looking for love, looking for a career, looking something to fill his days with. Like his friend Jeff said, Leland is a performance artist, but maybe we are all artists. We’re all a figure in the still life portrait of our lives. We’re all musicians in our own symphony. We’re the protagonist in our own novel. We all just want someone to listen to us, and to be heard.
The lyrics in his non-zombie-brain song say it best. “I love love, I love trust, I love you, even when the luster of love has crumbled into dust.” “I’m a love whore,” he moans into the microphone every Wednesday night at the Hopvine Pub. “Give me someone that I can adore.”