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small kitchen, a bedroom, a living room, a foyer, and one bathroom. I slept for a period of my life under the stove. Well, I was young. But people were forever sleeping in the hallway or foyer. Or everyone slept in the one bedroom. At one point I slept on a folding cot. For years my sister slept on a small bed at one end of the bedroom while my parents slept together in a big bed in the same bedroom. But that was for a family of four in three rooms. When you had a family of six or seven it was like the Marx Brothers. The concept of having a room of your own didn’t exist. There was no such thing. Sometimes you’d see it in the movies and you would wonder what it was. I mean somebody with their own room, their own bed, their own dresser? What is that? That was somebody else’s fantasy about another kind of life. It could have been on Mars.
    In our building of around fifty families, no one had their own phone, but there was one phone and it was in the hall on the ground floor. Because we lived on the ground floor, when the phone rang—and it could be for anyone in the building—I answered it. And that went on for a good part of my life there. I’d answer the phone, “Hello, who’s this?” “I’m looking for Irving Schnabel.” “Okay. Okay. Wait a minute. I’ll ring his bell.” And I would go outside to the hallway entry and I would ring that person’s bell three times. That was the acknowledged signal. Ding ding ding . Then I’d go back into the hall. The person would open the door upstairs and I would yell, “Telephone!” “Who is it?” “Didn’t say.” “I’ll be right down.” What a nutty idea! But fortunately phones were in such infrequent use we’d get only a few calls a night.
    My mother was the person who said that I could do anything in life. My father was the one who said prove it. It wasn’t as antagonistic as it sounds. He was a man with modest aspirations. A timid man to a large degree. A very decent, hardworking man. But he had no sense that great achievement of any kind was possible. He knew that he was meant to work. And so he worked twelve hours a day every day of his life. But my aspiration to be an artist was something he didn’t fully understand because he couldn’t figure out how anybody could make a living from that.
    The most touching thing that occurred between my father and myself was when I went to visit him in an old-age home in Florida, six or seven months before he died. We were sitting, talking, when he said, “You know, you did the right thing.” And I said, “What do you mean?” “You know, you decided to be an artist. I resisted then, but you were right. It turned out to be the right thing for you.”
    You don’t get that confirmation often in life. It was like a benediction. Because all he wanted when I was young was for me to be able to make a living.
    I have a standard story about the origins of my interest in the visual world. My parents were going out to some kind of event so they asked a cousin of mine to babysit. He came to the house—I was five—he came with a paper bag. I didn’t know what the bag was. He said, “You want to see a bird?” and I said, “Yeah.” I thought that maybe he had a bird in the bag. But when he reached into the bag he pulled out a pencil. He then drew a bird on the side of the bag.
    I think it was the first time that I had ever seen anybody draw something that looked like something outside of a child’s crude scrawl. It was as if he had created life in front of me. A bird had materialized out of nothing. Out of a bag and a pencil. I suddenly realized that I was going to spend my life creating life. That I could make something magical occur. I have to emphasize that this was a revelation. It wasn’t logical. I almost fainted. It was like a blinding light. Suddenly! It was like the hand of God had come down. It was that important.
    In some cases there isn’t an event like that. There’s just a slow accumulation of