Friday, November 13, 1998
EAST BAY -- The peaceful, woody hills of Oakland may be a refuge for some, but Montclair resident and comic artist Phoebe Gloeckner dreams of a different environment. Growing up in the 1970s, Gloeckner found comfort hanging out with other runaways in one of the seediest neighborhoods in San Francisco: the Tenderloin. The alternative was home and, she says, sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of her young mother's boyfriends and then husband. Gloeckner has fond memories of the Polk Street area. ``I really love that area. It's one of my favorite places. It just kind of excites me,'' the 38-year-old artist says. ``I always think that if I was an old lady and didn't have any other responsibilities I would go live in the Tenderloin. I just feel like it's a part of me.'' When Gloeckner returns to the neighborhood, she runs into some of the hustlers, predators and damaged innocents she knew in the '70s. They also reappear in her comics, which have been compiled in a recent book, ``A Child's Life and Other Stories'' (North Atlantic/Frog Ltd.; $17.95). The book has won her the respect of comic and underground artists throughout the Bay Area and kudos from the New York Times, Publishers' Weekly and R. Crumb, who wrote the introduction. In typical Crumb fashion, he makes it a confession of lust for the 15-year-old Gloeckner he knew in the '70s. In a less typical gesture, the notorious misanthrope also lavishes praise on her work, calling ``Minnie's 3rd Love or Nightmare on Polk Street,'' her story of a teenage girl's crush gone bad in the Tenderloin, ``one of the comic book masterpieces of all time.'' In that story, Minnie, whose big eyes and black bangs resemble a younger Gloeckner, falls in love with Tabitha, who drugs Minnie and offers her body to various Tenderloin denizens in exchange for heroin. The story ends years later with a reunion on Market Street between Minnie and the panhandling HIV-positive Tabitha. Gloeckner's treatment of the tale and others is harrowing and complex, full of an angry, honest humor and definitely not designed for young readers. With their graphic depictions of childhood sexuality and sexual abuse, drug use and prostitution, they are stories straight out of Charles Bukowski or William Burroughs and images inspired by Balthus and German woodcuts.

But Gloeckner's gaze remains firmly female and true to her era and the spirit of the time as she grapples with the objectification of the young female body. She looks at the revolution of sex and drugs in 1970s San Francisco with the innocence of a child who inevitably gets exploited.

A UNIQUE STORY

``She's reporting from an area that nobody else has really seen. None of the other women cartoonists I've run into has quite covered the terrain she has, being a latchkey kid who was in the whole hustling drug scene,'' says longtime San Francisco underground comic artist Spain Rodriguez. ``She has a really unique story to tell, and it's a pleasure to see her getting the attention she deserves.''

With her huge hazel eyes and dark brown shag, Gloeckner resembles an older, worldly-wise version of the children in Margaret Keane paintings. Girlish and expecting the birth of her second daughter at press time, she plays with her hair and jumps up and skips around her basement studio to bring back artwork and books she has worked on.

She brings out the packaging she designed for an anti-impotency drug. Married to her second husband, Arthur, a physicist, with a 6- year-old daughter named Audrey, she has been making a living as a well-regarded medical illustrator.

Her illustrations also have adorned book covers for San Francisco Re/SEARCH publications such as J.G. Ballard's ``The Atrocity Exhibition'' and ``Angry Women'' and Rando.

m House children's ``pulp'' books such as ``Weird Things You Can Grow.''

LIFE OF ABUSE

Looking back on her childhood, the Philadelphia native recalls her artist father as an ``alcoholic drug addict'' and a series of abusive boyfriends and a stepfather her young mother acquired after she moved the 12-year-old Gloeckner and her sister to San Francisco.

``There were always men in our house and drugs. It was the '70s. So there was no focus on are we doing our homework, what was our social life, did we have the right clothes,'' she says. ``My response to everything was I hated myself. I wanted to destroy myself, and I thought everything that happened to me was my fault because I was sort of left on my own. But I was ill-prepared to do anything for myself.''

Expelled from various private schools that her father's family paid for, she would run away to the Tenderloin to escape abuse at home.

Her stories are grim.

``One time I was staying with these little boy hustlers who were living with this old man, and this old man would support all these kids in this flat, and it was really nice and there was this TV, and they had pizza every night, and then they had to go out and turn tricks,'' she recalls.

``I was the only girl there, and the man didn't want me there at all. But somehow the boys got him to let me stay there for two weeks and I couldn't go out because my mother was looking for me, showing my pictures to people on the street.''

The Tenderloin scene hasn't changed, she says. ``Even now it's amazing you can see these kids that are exactly like I was or my friends were. Just kids lurking in little alleys or walking up and down the street. That's all we'd do: We'd walk from one end of Polk Street from Geary or Post to the other.''

MOVING ON

When she turned 18, she felt her life had ended. She was used to older men ogling her because she was an attractive teenager. ``I had heard that all my life, even when I was a little girl, even from my stepfather, so it became so ingrained in my head that by the time I was 18, I was depressed. I was going through a midlife crisis,'' she says.

She decided to end her life of shoplifting, speed and loitering on Polk Street. ``Something snapped, and if I didn't move in some other direction, than jail or death was going to be my fate,'' she says.

She turned her D average around, got into a pre-med and art undergraduate program at San Francisco State University and eventually earned a master's degree in medical illustration from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

``I was so afraid of becoming like my father in other ways that I decided to stay in medical illustration because it was secure and stable instead of saying I wanted to become an artist,'' she says. ``I did all that, and it turns out I'm doing more comics.''

Over the years, she drew comic stories such as ``Minnie's 3rd Love'' for anthologies such as ``Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art,'' tapping into her love of underground comics such as Zap and overcoming her hesitation to depict her family. ``They'd get angry and threatening, so it always seemed like I had something to lose by showing my work in a sense,'' she says.

When she came into the North Atlantic/Frog Ltd.'s office looking for work as a medical illustrator and was instead offered a two-book deal with the recommendation of artists like Rodriguez, she couldn't pass it up. ``Since I did it, I feel so much better,'' she says sighing loudly. Her mother has started to accept her work, she says. ``My mother actually has responded very well after responding very badly in the past to my work. She's able to hold it, read it and see what it really says and somehow feel a little bit proud of me in some weird way.''

COMICS HIT NERVE

But other obstacles came up when her book went to press. Her publisher's Michigan-based printers refused to print it because of its graphic depictions of childhood sexuality and sexual abuse. At first, when it got to the production floor of one print shop, employees refused to work on the pages.

The opposition didn't surprise her. Underground comics, such as the influential Weirdo comic that had published work by her and other envelope-pushing artists, have encountered printers' rejection before.

The Berkeley-based North Atlantic/Frog's publisher Richard Grossinger says his company was sufficiently ``irritated enough'' with its regular printer, Malloy, when it refused to work on the book that the company ended its 15-year relationship. Ironically, Gloeckner says, ``if the book had been written instead of drawn, we never would have had a problem with it. People respond to pictures so much more quickly.''

Gloeckner doesn't subscribe to the idea of art therapy (``What is that -- a magazine?'' she deadpans), but the stories have given her a way to take control of a past in which she felt powerless.

``In a lot of ways I was sort of injured by my past, and to just live with that seemed unacceptable, so I was always looking for explanations and ways to understand what happened and why and what my role in that was so I wouldn't repeat the same things my whole life, which I felt was always a danger,'' she says.

She is working on a new book for North Atlantic/Frog Ltd., ``Diary of a Teenage Girl,'' which will include excerpts from her journal and comics that comment on her writings. A children's book is also in the works with another publisher.

Still, she looks uneasy peering out her studio window.

``It's actually hard for me to live in this kind of area. It really is urban wilderness,'' she muses. ``I just love the sounds of buses, the smell of cars, the gum wrappers in the streets. I grew up in cities, and it feels more natural to me than trees.''

WHERE TO FIND GLOECKNER'S ART

Phoebe Gloeckner's ``A Child's Life and Other Stories'' is available at bookstores such as Cody's, 2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. Call (510) 845-7852.

Her artwork is on exhibit in ``Innocence & Experience: The Work of Phoebe Gloeckner'' through mid-December at the Cartoon Art Museum, 814 Mission St., San Francisco. Admission is $2-$5. Call (415) 227-8666.

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