Kris Victor was really a brilliant colorful person. He had no art training but it was something he’d always wanted to do so when he left Ohio and his job as a machinist, he found a job in Florida working for Museum Services making molds at first, sometimes being the body molded around (his was the castings used for a Winged Victory statue at Universal Studios in FL), and he learned a lot from being there. He worked with very skilled sculptors and played. When he was done with Florida, he packed up his BMW motorcycle and headed to California.
Adventure led his journey. He went to a bar in Texas where he was generous with shots and cervezas for the band and was invited by a musician in a bar to join him in Mexico. After paying someone to watch his bike loaded with all his possessions, he hopped into the jeep and opened a beer. Several hours later as the jeep was rock crawling up ravines in an area that didn’t look like it had ever seen human beings, his imagination started playing with him and he began in earnest wondering if he wasn’t being taken to be killed. He would tell this tale taking you on the adventure with him. Around a steep turn all of a sudden there was a terraced farm and a small home with small children running around. As soon as they saw the stranger they scrambled into the house. The jeep pulled out in front and the musician introduced Kris to his wife, who spoke no English. Kris spoke no Spanish. He smiled. She was more reserved but brought them both out some food. And he stayed with them until the musician crossed the boarder for his next gig the following week.
One day the musician took Kris way into the hills, past where the jeep would go into a cave and he bid Kris to sit in there. He was a trusting soul, Kris. He was ever the fool, happy go lucky with his bag of belongings over his shoulder being nipped by a dog on his ass, head in the clouds stepping off a cliff. He stepped off a cliff that day. He stepped into the center of a crystal mine and he sat there in awe for hours. Profoundly calm, accepting, grateful for the adventure and reassured that what ever was waiting for him, he was on the right path.
Back in Texas, a bracket broke on the bike that held his boxes, he left half of his belongings and never looked back. He thought of it from time to time. The things were left with an acquaintance and he had the address. He chose not to retrieve them. Things happened and you just went with it. Life is like this.
He reached LA and interviewed at Harryhausen’s special effects studio. It was the only job he sought and after two interviews he got the job but something had happened on the freeway in LA. His bike had broken down in the middle lane and it took him two or three hours to move his bike to the median. He decided this was not a place he could live. He turned down the job and headed to Marin and George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic Studio. In typical Kris fashion, he went straight to the gates. Alas, the gate he went to had security guards and it wasn’t the studio but Lucas’s ranch. Back in town he found the bar and started chatting up people about jobs. He never interviewed at Industrial Light and Magic. Former employees had things to tell him in the bars and it was all contract work, job to job. There was no security at ILM. But in the bar that first night, he met an older woman who had a gig for him- Poupee Millet. She also had a friend who rent out rooms. And with that, he found a home.
What was Poupee Millet? It was a French style rag doll with a ceramic head that featured a long nose, pin point eyes and a gregarious hat and a millet stuffed rag body. They were all handmade and the hats were as extreme as you could make them. Kris would be paid per head, but the designs needed to be original and amazing. Once a design was agreed on you would make a series of them. No two were alike but they were very close. These dolls, once assembled had a fan base and would be sent to galleries throughout the country. It wasn’t a great gig but it was his first as a sculptor making the actual sculpture, no matter how repetitively. Plus, this friend he’d met at the bar— she was connected. The Jaguar Gypsy as she was known, knew everyone and was a bit of a matchmaker for life adventures. She drove an old jaguar through the streets, a woman who lived on her own terms, lived the life she created, life as art.
In the enamel guild she belonged to there was another member Bob, he had a job opening she thought Kris would be perfect for so she played match maker. Streetlight Records had stores in San Francisco and was opening one in San Jose and it was a full-time position for a welder, artist and jack of all trades. It was the perfect job for Kris’ skill sets.
Bob Fallon was a visionary and a fool in much the same manner as Kris. He’d had an electronics repair shop he owned in Noe Valley and one day a kid came in asking if he could sell used records in the corner. Sure. Soon the record business predominated and he minimalized his electronics business. He bought a second building on Market at Castro. Who knew used records were that profitable! The kid was his general manager and the thing just kept growing. Bob wanted to be an artist though. He wanted to make big art. Steel art. And his next store, he wanted it to be a work of art.
When I met Kris he was working for Bob, working for Streetlight. We were at an art festival in San Jose in January and no one in their right mind does an art show in January in California. Most people do not have a picture of their first meeting but Bob wanted one of his booth with someone looking at his art, so we have one (at the top).
Most of us were all there because our favorite producer was trying it, and Michael’s shows were amazing. This one was well produced but had no attendees. We all ended up chatting with one another instead, not profitable but making lemonade out of lemons.
I was there selling pewter sculptures for Fellowship Foundry. I’d happened into the work by being in the right place at the right time. I’d been living in a garden apartment in Alameda going to school in San Francisco and one of the fellow tenants had gotten a job with the foundry. When I asked Michael about his new job, he said they were doing the Renaissance Faire and I said if they were hiring, I’d love to work that. Viola, I had a job. One year of cashiering their booth led to the next year, and then a job building their wholesale business, and then taking over their retail management. But before the retail management, while I was still working commissions as an independent contractor, I was also managing shows at weekend events. It was a three day show in San Jose, and the second evening Kris invited me to dinner. Two bottles of wine later, we got a hotel room.
Kris was breaking up with his girlfriend at the time. Really, he was still living with her and her kids. And they were still sleeping together. They were dependent on his salary to live in the house and he loved the kids and didn’t want them to change school’s midyear. It was messy.
I was dating another Chris as well. And I had my eye out for a Christine or a Krista… anyone I wouldn’t screw their name up in a passionate moment. My sleeping with Kris was easy. It wasn’t serious. We were friends and we had great conversations and I loved how creative he was. He’d also introduced me to martinis. We plotted and planned and drank and we wrote a contract to start a business and watch each other’s back.
I was living in a tiny illegal apartment behind a garage in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. Oh, how I loved living there. I had just dropped out of the English Literature Masters program at Mills College and was trying it at San Francisco State University (a doomed trajectory). I had been such an excellent undergraduate, but I was studying what I loved as an undergrad. Now I was trying to be practical as my professors had told me to be… there were way more teaching positions for English professors than that of Humanities.
Even at SFSU the graduate program wasn’t going so well. My head was elsewhere. So business… yes that might work. I was selling pewter goblets and glasses and pendants and figurines. I was marketing and doing wholesale as well as retail. I could be a business person. It would be fun. Kris was a sculptor. He wanted to do more metal work than record bins and stairways. He’d played with making drips of metal and he was good at it. He wanted to make cool over the top furniture. Yes we’d do that. Neo Furniture. Big. Bold. Expensive. Whimsical. Nitchy. Cool.
And then one day we were walking in Sausalito through a small gallery, not a good gallery, but a small one and there on a shelf was a two-toned acrylic sculpture about 7 inches tall, smooth and curved and mounted on a base so it stood upright. I pointed at it and said “Look Kris, a dildo.” We laughed. It was a joke but it planted itself in my head. I thought long and hard about it, thought of the feasibility and the actual marketing and profitability and by the next evening I called Kris up and asked him if he remembered my joke “because,” I told him, “THAT is viable.”
Soon he was sculpting in plastilina.