SAN DIEGO — He was only known as Klimo. No other name. I employed him occasionally, and I once fired him twice in one day. I paid him in cash, the small employer’s magic fairy dust that eliminates the need to pay taxes for employer and employee alike.
Klimo was born with the soul and talent of an artist. He was completely without guile or deception. Unfortunately, the Depression prevented him from pursuing his artwork. Instead, he earned his living as a journeyman plasterer. For countless days, months, and years, he toiled at his job, smoothing plaster and cement on the walls of the endless new Southern California housing tracts., but, he never gave up his love of the arts, Every night after he scraped his trowel clean, he rushed home to experiment and explore the possibilities of manipulating sculptural forms in different materials. He used metal, clay, stained glass, cement, resin plastics, and even the plaster he applied to walls eight hours every workday.
When I met him, he was in his early fifties. He was about five-foot-six inches tall, a portrait in white, except for his red, ruddy, cherubic face that defined him as one of Disney’s seven dwarfs. His neatly trimmed, full head of hair, was white, as was his signature goatee. I always saw him clothed in full-length white overalls covering a clean white T-shirt. White sneakers finished off this regalia. He had a five-month pregnant paunch that didn’t seem to get in his way as he worked.
Klimo had a long lasting marriage to Martha, who was an ideal partner for him. She was a bit taller than he and comfortably built. She wore her salt-and-peppered straight hair in bangs that covered half her forehead, like a teenage coed. Martha seemed to float like a rubber duck in a bathtub. Nothing seemed to bother her. She agreed with everything her husband said or did, and the life style they led. She called him Klimo, too. Martha was a photographer for the Singer Company and brought in a dependable paycheck every week. This became essential, because in the never-ending quest to satisfy his artistic soul, Klimo eventually gave up full time plastering for crafting his beloved creations.
Klimo would work for me from time to time when I needed plastering or assistance in my art commissions. One day when I was trying to get a job finished, he showed up for work two hours late. His excuse was, that he had to draw a caricature someone had commissioned him to do the night before. “Be gone!” I said, and paid him what I owed him. An hour later, he returned and said he delivered the drawing, and innocently asked if he could return to work. I was desperate to finish the job, so I relented and said, “O.k.” An hour and a half later we broke for lunch, and he returned quite late again, having obtained another caricature to draw. This time I suggested he find a way to stuff the holes in green olives with peanut butter before I would employ him again.
This was not the end to our relationship, though. Klimo loved to show me his artwork. One day, he invited me to his home, a one bedroom log cabin surrounded by two acres of lush fruit-bearing avocado trees. At harvest time, this bounty brought him additional income. Many years ago, when Southern California real estate was inexpensive, he and Martha bought this unique abode in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. To my regret, I never asked him its origin. To enter the log cabin, you passed through a steel framed, wire glass door. He had salvaged the door from a remodeling project and installed it in the cabin. The door pivoted in the middle. To enter, you had to turn the door ninety degrees and then maneuver your body until you slid into the living room. Built into one wall was a stone fireplace that cozily heated the entire cabin. Firewood was no problem, as the avocado trees dropped branches with regularity and were easily gathered and stacked. The kitchenette was minuscule, with just an occasional pan or last night’s dishes covering counter space. He and Martha ate in either the living room or the bedroom. The bedroom was a depository for welding accoutrements. Oxygen and acetylene tanks were positioned on one side of the bed. There was hardly any space in the room for the pots which were positioned strategically to gather dripping rainwater from the perennially leaking roof.
Once when I was in the living room, Klimo brought out a wood board full of electrical sockets and switches. Connected to the board were wires from various colored lights scattered throughout the room, maybe a dozen or so. He wanted to demonstrate his light show to me. Enthusiastically, he started plugging in various sockets on the board like an infant who is given his first educational widget toy. He had significant problems figuring out which plug went into which receptacle, and finally gave up the demonstration before the fuse blew and the cabin went dark.
I admired his greatest creation- a magnificent sculpture he had crafted. It was an abstract series of intertwining sail-like twisting planes in smooth, white stucco cement. It created its own theme and emotion. It was pure design and form, for the joy and sake of itself. It was monumental in size, about fifteen feet long by nine or ten feet high. He supported it in a stained wood casing that framed the structure in elegant simplicity, and it stood comfortably nestled among the trees.
While he was proudly showing me his creation, I happen to notice four beat up fiberglass surfboards standing upright. I was curious, because he didn’t have any children and I know men with a pregnant paunch don’t surf either. It seemed as out of place as mating rabbits in a convent. I asked, “Why do you have four surfboards there, you don’t surf?” “I got them at a swap meet,” he replied. I was about to ask him the next obvious question-What he was going to do with the boards?- when my eyes wandered to a row of twenty-four new white toilets, all partially covered with a couple of years of green, creeping pickle, ice plant.
“Now Klimo,” I spouted. “What in hell are you doing with all those toilets?” “I don’t know,” he replied, “but they were such a good buy! I only paid ten dollars-a-piece for them.” Ironically, a couple of years later, without any foresight or shrewd business sense, just plain dumb luck, the purchase turned into a gold mine. The Koehler Company, which dominated the U.S. market in manufacturing toilets, went on strike for almost a year. This created a tremendous shortage and building contractors were desperate and paid any price for anything that would flush. He made a small fortune selling his collection.
As for the surfboards, I think he used them for the four walls of a toilet he made at Surfer’s Beach. I heard the roof leaks, but he has positioned pots to collect the drips.
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Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego..