Epilogue: The Art of Making Barns That Aren't There

Epilogue

I think about that hotel room sometimes. Not often — it's not a memory I've polished into an anecdote or told at dinner parties. It sits in a quieter place than that. The kind of memory that doesn't announce itself but shows up when something rhymes with it.

I was fourteen. I stood in a room with a man who had been so thoroughly replaced by his own image that meeting him felt like trying to read a book through a stack of photographs of the book. He was in there. I could feel it. The warmth, the intellect, the philosophical seriousness that no one had told me to expect — those belonged to him, not to the icon. They leaked through the signs like light under a door.

The older friend who brought us there — the one who'd spent years building the mythology, installing the signs in us with the patience and precision of someone who understood perception as a craft — he is gone now. He died trying to reconcile the distance between what he'd built and what was real. That sentence contains a book I haven't written yet, and this isn't the place for it. What belongs here is simpler: he was the most gifted sign-maker I've ever known. He could make you see a barn that wasn't there. He could make you miss one that was.

Billy Idol — William Broad from Stanmore, the kid who meant it before the industry learned his name — is still alive. Still performing. Still, I imagine, somewhere inside the image, looking out through the same stack of transparencies I was looking in through that afternoon. I don't know if he remembers the meeting. I don't know if he could have seen us any more clearly than we could see him. Two teenagers and their guru, pre-loaded with signs, standing in a room with a man pre-loaded with his own. Nobody saw the barn.

I'd like to tell you there's a way out. That the essay you just read is a key, that naming the barn effect dissolves it, that awareness is the first step toward clearer sight. Murray would love that story. He'd tell it beautifully, standing in the field, describing the barn he cannot see.

I don't think there's a way out. I think there might be a way in — a practice, not a solution. The discipline of pausing before the signs finish loading. The habit of asking, before you form a conviction: did I encounter this thing, or did I encounter the signs about this thing? The willingness to say, honestly, most of the time... I encountered the signs.

That isn't liberation. It's just honesty. It's the smallest, most stubborn form of resistance available to a person standing in a field full of billboards — the refusal to pretend you can see what's behind them.

There was a moment in that hotel room. Before the mythology fully resolved, before the icon clicked into place over the man, before I understood what I was feeling or had any language for it. A flicker. William Broad, unframed, looking at me with something like curiosity. A person, not a sign.

I don't know if I actually saw it or if I've built this memory after the fact — constructed my own sign about my own barn. That uncertainty might be the most honest thing in this essay.

It was 1985. A novelist was writing about a barn no one could see. A rock star was disappearing behind his own image. A sixteen-year-old sign-maker was perfecting his craft. I was fourteen, six-foot-four, and for one half-second in a hotel room in San Diego... I think I saw the barn.

I think.