Me and Bob Ross: The Oncology Clinic

Sere vistas, the sun setting.

My aunt was going through chemo, in and out of the hospital. I was nineteen, on academic suspension from a third-rate technical college, between three week stints at jobs so incredibly dull that suicide seemed like a viable alternative. So my parents had me drive my aunt to her appointments, as a term of my getting to reside in my former bedroom and use the family car in the evenings. I think they wanted to impress upon me the fleetingness of life, or its preciousness. Or provide me an opportunity to act as a responsible member of a family. Or maybe they wanted to make sure I didn’t sit in their (it was definitely, now, their) living room all day, smoking cigarettes and drinking all their Diet Dr. Peppers.

Having watched a good bit of PBS in the couple of months I’d been home (this was the early nineties, and my parents definitely weren’t paying for cable), I had seen Bob Ross’s show. Happy little trees. That calm and fuzzy white man fro. The beard. The unmodulated and valiumized vocal tone. So when I saw him sitting in the waiting room, I nodded to him in greeting. He nodded in turn. I sat down a couple of seats away from him, to observe bro space.

“Are you sick?” he asked me. There was the closest thing to concern in his voice I’d heard in a few months. And so I lied.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m, uh, cancerous.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “My wife is in there right now. You can’t imagine how strong a person she is.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. Then, because I was that special kind of unreflexive sociopath that most nineteen year old males are, “you think she’ll probably die?”

He flinched, blinking a few times in rapid succession as if maybe he’d gotten a spatter of paint in his eye.

“I think I’ve known that was possible,” he said. “But I haven’t articulated it to myself yet.”

“Sorry to, you know, bring that shit up then,” I said.

“But I guess it’s been coming out in my paintings,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like if she does go. I’ve been painting sere landscapes, suns setting, frozen winters and unscalable peaks.”

Frozen winters, unscalable peaks

“That’s some heavy shit right there,” I said. “You, uh, got a psychology degree or something?”

“When I came back from Vietnam,” he said. “I was very angry. I went to a therapist for many years. I learned to use my painting to access the parts of me I couldn’t articulate.”

“You saw some fucked up stuff, huh?” I said, patting my pockets for my cigarettes.

“It was a very bad time in my life,” he said. “And it was soon after I returned that I met my wife. That I met Miriam. All of it, my healing, my painting, my wife’s and my relationship, it’s all connected in a way that I can’t imagine parsing out.”

“Sorry to have, you know, got your head going on that then,” I said, pulling out my pack of cigarettes then proffering it. “I’m going to go outside and have a smoke. You want one?”

“Don’t smoke,” he said, his face becoming impassive in some other way, some way that made me feel slightly off-balance. “Miriam either.”

“I guess I might as well, huh?” I said, holding the cigarette pack out at arms length as if to better study it. “I mean, what’re they gonna do, right? Give me double cancer?”

“They think it was second-hand smoke that might have caused Miriam’s cancer,” Bob Ross said, his hands clenching on themselves.

“Okay. Well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Ross,” I said, standing to go outside.

“You’re not really sick, are you?” he said, turning and looking up at me with these thousand-year-old eyes.

“No,” I admitted, because I couldn’t not.

“Why do you come here?”

“My aunt,” I said. “She’s got cancer.”

“When you come here next time,” he said. “When you come next time with your aunt, you wait outside.”

“Okay?”

“If I see you again, I will crush your windpipe. So help me god. With these hands. I will squeeze the life from you.” He held out his hands–large, muscular, blunt. Not some mellow neutered painter’s hands but the hands of a man who’d split wood, swung hammers, maybe crushed windpipes in the ‘Nam.

“Okay,” I said, and walked away.

I never saw him again. Not even on TV.

I was scared to find out what might happen if he somehow found out I’d watched his show.

I’d like to say that thereafter I instantly became 85% less of a shitheel, that Bob Ross threatening to kill me had some immediate and profound impact on my dissolute life.

But it was still a whole lot of years until I found myself in a place to take in the lesson he taught me. And I’m not sure I can articulate it even now. Something about appearances. And integrity. And accessing the parts of you of which you cannot speak.

But I didn’t get there by painting. I tried a couple of times, but it didn’t really take.

Tagged as: Bob Ross, Happy Little Trees, Oncology