Vince Whirlwind is dead and I'm not feeling so hot myself.

I got the news the other day that Vince Whirlwind was no more. It wasn't a surprise really. He had swung through town this spring on his way to the VA hospital. He had the big C and a bad case at that. The Docs said six months. A year if he took care of himself. We all knew he wouldn't.
He was tall and rail thin, like the mythical heroes of the old west. His face was covered with chasm deep creases and a network of wrinkles earned through hard living and a lifetime of vice. Vince scared the crap out of me when I first met him. I don't think that subtle tension ever went away totally.

We were both drawing caricatures in the Colorado Belle hotel and Casino in the little flyspeck of Laughlin, Nevada. I was hungry and eager to please the customers at any cost. Vince had a few more decades of caricature under his belt and I was frequently under his skin by throwing in extras for free. He thought I was trying to undercut him. We eventually formed an uneasy truce when he realized that I was just too naive and inexperienced to know the difference between self promotion and letting myself get ripped off. He did his best to educate me, but I'm a poor student in that regard. Sometimes still something he said will suddenly break through my Pollyanna fog like an axe through the door.
Here's Johnny! You're being a sap!
Once a huge man in a wheelchair collapsed within a few yards of our booth. Security guards arrived and with great difficulty extracted him from his chair. With even further difficulty they probed through the blubber in search of his xiphoid process and with still greater difficulty they attempted the Hiemlich maneuver. For me, it was a tense and terrifying experience. It seemed like hours. I kept thinking to myself, Holy crap, I'm going to watch this man die. Finally he coughed up a couple of inches of hot dog and began to breathe again. When it was all over, Vince walked up and said, "Despite the best efforts of security, the man will live".
It was at that point that I realized that in a world full of death, fear and loathing we need more punch lines. Another lesson from the master, and he was the master, of the dark jape.
Not that it seemed to bring him much joy. For the next ten years,Vince would wander in and out of my circle, returning to the caricatures he did so effortlessly until his natural misanthropy drove him out to the desert again.
I really didn't know him that well. He was fairly taciturn about his life. No doubt others knew him better, but I miss him just the same. I know he was in Nam, but I don't know what he did there. I've always assumed that it was a source of much of his bitterness.
When he got back, he grew his hair and spent some years in San Francisco, at the height of the sixties and got into underground cartooning. He knew all the greats. Robert Crumb, J.R. Williams and that bunch. It was here he was transformed from Tom Short to Vince Whirlwind.
He lived all in a lot of places. In N.Y.C. he roomed with Bob Camp and did cartoons for skin mags. One of his editors later showed up being interviewed in the film "Crumb".
He was for a time a contributor to "Cracked". Not his favorite gig. His gags were badly edited, until the humor was all but totally drained from them.
I think it was in New Orleans that he got married, had a kid and got divorced.
At some point he started doing caricatures for the public. He had a clean, seemingly effortless line and a flawless knack for likeness. He was supremely unsuited for the job. There's a certain amount of stupidity you deal with doing caricatures. O.K., a lot of stupidity.Vince reached his capacity for dealing with idiots about three times a day. On the bad days you could almost see the blood welling from his ears.
He headed out to Sedona the autumn before last. He seemed to have found some peace there. One of his many talents was an almost mystical ability to spot Indian artifacts on the ground. He seemed incapable of walking through the desert without casually scooping up arrow heads, knives and pottery. He railed at the irony that depending on his location, picking them up was illegal, but bulldozing the area and putting up endless tracts of houses wasn't. In Sedona, he hiked the back country and visited ruins that probably haven't been seen by a dozen people this century. He drew some hilarious and scathing cartoons for the local paper. Most mocked new agers and tourists. 99% of the population was made up of or lived off of those two groups.Only Vince would have the chutzpah to go out in the middle of nowhere and mock them all.
He had planned to come back here after his treatment to die. He said it was the place that felt most like home to him. But plans change when youčre dying.
I tried to reach him a few times in the last couple of months.
Eventually I found out that he was back in New Orleans with his ex-wife and her family. But nobody knew the number. The family was all down there for Christmas and two days later, he passed on.
Despite his pit bull exterior, I think Vince really cared. I think he had a lot of anger because he knew people were capable of better things, but didn't choose to do them. If you want to honor his memory, get angry. Get angry when they get to the bottom of an escalator and stop dead, oblivious to the hoards being propelled ever forward behind them. Get angry when they tell you they're eating the triple scoop fat free yogurt because they're on a diet. Get royally pissed when people tell you they voted for someone because they seemed not qualified, not intelligent, but nice. Do not suffer willful ignorance. When you can't take it anymore, jump up and gnaw on their skulls until you get their attention. He would have.
Then a little bit of Vince will live on in all of us, and claw at the pit of our collective stomachs. I think he would have liked that.
-F. Andrew Taylor

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