He got a job at Warner Bros., as an assistant art director, drawing storyboards for a Tarzan movie, King of the Jungle (a bildungsroman, by the way). Hollywood went on strike a week later, October 5, 1945. The picket line was walked by movie stars and screenwriters and artists—not commercial admen who sucked on capitalism’s tit, but WPA muralists who painted sets by day and studied the Mexican muralists by night. He was invited to go landscape painting with them. He taught himself to paint by imitating their brushstrokes.

He left his wife with their one-year-old son (the daughter my age hadn’t been born) and traveled to Mexico to study at the source, with Rivera and Siqueiros.

He realized he would need more life drawing if he were to paint with any kind of acumen and abandon. He was twenty-eight already. By twenty-eight, Picasso had already finished his Rose and Blue Periods. Arnold had the same artistic aspirations that I would one day have, to get his own slide in an art history carousel, or his version of that ambition—the technology of the slide carousel had not yet been invented.