By Stu Jenks and Bo Petersen
© February 1996, March 2001

Dedicated to Mama Lillie and Nannie

In the Fall of 1978, I studied Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And it was then that the Legend started. But first, a little background information.

My college career was anything but exemplary. I started out in the Drama Department, but it became a little difficult to memorize lines when you're smoking dope all the time. I moved to the Scenery Department and eventually flunked out. After Summer School, I went back as a Sculpture major in the Art Department. There I was sort of a oddball. Got the nickname of "Brick" for making brick sculptures, in the Summer of 1978. A single sculpture every day - 1,196 bricks. I did some other odd stuff. I was pretty unfocused and was basically ignored by most everybody.

I lived in this beat-up old farm house at 608 Airport Road, an old hippie house. There were six of us living there and I lived in the garret. The parties were so large that Scott's job was to guard the banister going upstairs, because so many people would lean against it that it would fall over. Dancing upstairs would get the dining room ceiling sagging. One art project I did there, I leashed myself to a front porch post with a huge rope I tied around my waist. I didn't talk for twenty-four hours. Then I went out and ordered ice cream with my then girlfriend Annie. One of my roommates had a TV destruction party with a wall of television sets in the backyard, with a pendulum, a rope and a smaller TV as a swinging projectile. I actually left this party because it got really weird and almost violent. The crowd started smashing televisions with rocks and hands.

I don't know where This Idea came from. I can honestly say that. I hadn't seen any Perry Mason shows lately. But 608 Airport Road was a house that was right on Airport Road. The sound of the traffic, especially when it rained, came right through my window. I remember I liked it. It was like a river outside, flowing smooth and constant. It might have been raining the night.

I was sitting at my desk smoking a bowl. It was about two o'clock in the morning or thereabouts. When This Idea hit me. I knocked it around in my head for a while. It was a Big Idea.

The next morning I walked uptown to the police station. It was October, 1978. When I walked under the pines, I felt cold and fresh. Going through the door to the police station felt like stepping into a cage though. But I walked in and asked. I didn't give them my name. They didn't ask my name. I guess I looked like just about anybody in a college town in the 70's. Full beard, John Lennon glasses. They seemed happy to give me the information. This Idea unfolded in such a way that . . . I mean, the innocence that I had, innocence in not knowing what the consequences would be, was enormous. They didn't ask and I didn't tell them what I was going to do. I found out that twelve fatal traffic accidents had happened in town in a 8-year period from 1970 to 1978. I found out where each fatality had occurred. And I walked out, thinking I've got the Stuff.

I went to the Art Lab Building, where studio sculpture students worked on the outskirts of town. I made some very large pieces of chalk out of plaster. I went out to the parking lot and began to trace my body as if I were tracing a dead man. I would lie down on the asphalt and trace my body as if it were on the Perry Mason show. I filled up parking spaces with these interesting little dusty images. But the chalk blew away. I would need to make a more lasting image. I'll bet part of the reason I wanted to do this was I was getting pretty tired of people driving so fast and inconsiderately, almost running over us pedestrians. I wanted people to slow down. So, I went out and bought some white spray paint. And I did one on the wall, the outline of a Fatal Figure. A ghostly outline on the wall. That may have been a mistake, for it became a clue to the Police later on.

I remember the first one I did. It was on Highway 54 east of town. It was three o'clock in the morning. I parked my car in a church parking lot, my old Karmann-Ghia with the funky bumper stickers and the makeshift silver paint job. There was very little traffic on the road. You could hear for miles. I wore a sweatshirt and had the chalk and the paint in a backpack. I outlined my own body in chalk in the middle of the street, this one in a spread-eagled position. I got out my spray paint can and sprayed over the chalk. I was exhilarated with a sense that I was doing something dangerous. It might even be against the law. It was like doing a very powerful drug. Pure adrenaline, uncut. When I got to the Karmann-Ghia I decided to drive over the figure to see what it looked like. I didn't see it until suddenly, within ten feet of it, the white paint flashed into my eyes. It was a brilliant image, frightening in and of itself, and before I knew it, I was over it and gone. I remember thinking, "I've created a monster." I think I did one more that night, one a little more dangerous, out front of the Administration building, and went home. (See "Fatal Figure #7" in the Sacred Spaces section of www.stujenks.com)

But I was scared and I began to make a few mistakes. It wasn't going back to the sites to photograph them. That wasn't a mistake, even though I did that . . . no, that wasn't a mistake. No one saw me. The mistake was that I began to talk, began to tell my fellow art students what I was doing. After all, there was that image on the wall at the Art Lab Building. I began to talk it up, to drop hints. Looking back, if there was one thing I would change, one thing only I would change, I would have kept my mouth shut. If I hadn't said a word, no one would have known it was me.

Then again, who knows if it was wrong to talk or not. Some of the worst things that have happened in my life have turned out to be some of the best things. Some of the best things have become the worst things. In other words, if I had kept my mouth shut, I may have never gotten into the chain of events that happened after. It's almost as if it were planned. I'm not saying I'm not taking responsibility for my actions, but there was a sense of it unfolding the way it should be. Anyway, I went to a few of my friends. I talked about it.

Now, I'd only done two of the twelve of what were known in my mind as The Fatal Figures. It was important to me to complete all twelve. Put them down on the asphalt, leave without being seen. This was dangerous in a number of ways. I was putting death right down there, and I'm lying down in the street, showing death to oncoming traffic. It confused me that a part of me wanted to do this, to hold it up in front of the world and say, "People died here." A few days later I did two more. A couple more days, I did another two. That's when the newspapers picked up on it.

I remember seeing the newspaper for the first time at the Art Lab and my heart just about flew out of my body. It was The Chapel Hill Newspaper, an article talking about ghastly images, a Halloween joke two weeks early. Was it a bunch of kids doing this, roving the streets? The police were interviewed, talking about a young man who asked where fatal accidents had happened. The cop said I said I was a journalism student. I never said I was a journalism student. I never did. I was scared but I was excited.

I couldn't admit it to myself back then, but I was thrilled. Here I was, somebody who had basically felt like he was nothing for so many years. Who the only times he felt like he was doing anything was when he was doing art, playing music or writing. Here I was in the press. I felt like somebody. But I must have looked like a scared rabbit. Thank God for the few friends I had. I decided that night to do three more. Three more glowing images of death on the highway.

The shit really hit the fan after that. This was beginning to infuriate the police. You have to understand, you're just driving along, minding your own business, and suddenly you run over the outline of a dead body. It scared the hell out of me and I made these things. Imagine what it was like for other people. Even though my intent was to have people drive more carefully, it probably made them drive more recklessly. But then again it's hard to say.

In the Art Lab there were rumors, talk. They were looking for me. Remember that first Figure still loomed up on the wall. Conversations would stop when people walked by the Figure. The campus cops were questioning art students and knew that a guy named Stu, who was an art student, was doing the Figures. But I felt compelled to go on, to finish the project. People started telling me I had to turn myself in. Art teachers were pleading with me to turn myself in; the bad name I was creating for the Art Department was intolerable, etc., etc. At the time I thought, "This is the biggest thing that's happened in the Art Department in years, since the 60's. This is not bad press." Frankly I still feel that way.

I did the last three in one night. The last in particular. I remember doing the first one and the last one with the most clarity. The last one was literally 100 feet up Airport Road from my house. I walked out my front door at two in the morning, walked up 100 feet with spray paint and chalk in hand, laid down, whipped it out, walked down the street and went back in my house. It took all of three minutes. I found out later a police officer in a cruiser drove over the spot before I painted the Figure, and went to the bottom of the hill which took him all of three minutes. He had gone into the A&P parking lot when it was radioed to him that another one had appeared on Airport Road. This was shaking up City Hall but good.

I knew I had to go on the lam at this point. But my art teacher, Mike Cindric, told me not to say anything to anybody.

"Keep your mouth shut!" he said. Heat was coming down on him too from the Art Department administration. Cindric was tall, bald on top, long hair. He looked like Bozo the Clown with this really nice bushy mustache. He wore cut-off Army fatigues. He had this look in his blue eyes and behind them there was this tempered rage and this deep compassion that was always there. He was a very good man. I had a meeting with the people I lived with. I said I would go live with an old girlfriend, but I would recommend we get all the drugs out of the house. They were not pleased. There were probably enough seeds in the couch to grow a good field of marijuana, much less the miscellaneous acid and cocaine dispersed throughout the house. They did their best, got rid of the bongs, cleaned up and vacuumed.

I went to Annie's house, a woman I had been in love with, but we had broken it off, or rather she had broken it off. I scratched on her door and begged to sleep on her sofa. Round face, curly hair. She was a Christian Scientist. I was a drug addict. It was a match made in hell. Once, I quit smoking cigarettes for her and ended up smoking marijuana by the carton. I remember when she broke up with me, she said she couldn't support me in my art. And she wasn't talking just financially. She didn't want to see me that night. But to be honest, I was still in love. And I wanted to make love to her that night. So, I told her I was on the lam. She allowed me to sleep on the couch. That night at three in the morning, the time I would have been out painting the Figures on the street, she came in and said for me to come into bed with her. I left the next day. I didn't spend another night there.

The Chapel Hill police contacted Cindric. Cindric told me they had made arrangements for us to come down to see them the next morning.

"Don't talk to anybody about this," he said. He looked at me hard. I said I was willing. But I was terrified. I didn't know what they were going to do.

The detective was a crusty old guy with steel eyes and a large marijuana leaf pressed between glass on his office wall. We shook hands. I told him the details of my night Artwork and that my intent was not to hurt people.

"How many have you done in the county?" he asked. I looked at him.

"I haven't done any in the county," I said.

"Well, they're starting to turn up in the county now," he said. I was honored but troubled by this news. My original intention had not been to randomly throw down outlined bodies. My Figures had a point.

"That's terrible," I told him.

"Do you know about the boy on Estes Drive?" the detective asked. One of the Figures I'd done was directly across from an elementary school. A little boy had been run down there by a car on his way crossing to school, right where he lived, right across the street from the school. The mother of this dead child woke up one morning and found the Fatal Figure. The information of the fatalities I had was only time and place, not circumstances of the accidents. This was the first I hear of this little boy. I felt horrible.

"Are you willing to talk to the mother? Are you willing to talk to the press?", the detective asked. "What are you willing to do about this? Will you pay for the city to paint over them?" I offered to paint over the Figures myself. He smiled sarcastically.

I told the detective I wished to write the mother of the dead child a letter explaining the purpose of the Fatal Figures, my intentions to have motorists drive safer, my sadness and regrets of painting one in front of her house, that I apologize for any harm I had done to her. The detective agreed.

I agree to pay the city to paint over the Figures. The detective told me that no, I would not be charged with any crime because I had not broken the law. They couldn't get me for destruction of public property for that statute dealt specifically with buildings. They couldn't get me for malicious mischief for my intentions were good. Frankly, I probably could have walked out of that office and said "Pay for painting over them yourself" and been within my rights. Except for one thing: 608 Airport Road. Remember the hippie house/pharmacy where I lived? The police could have busted us at anytime for anything. And the charges would be valid. I nodded to the detective. I would pay.

The detective set up an interview with the press. The Chapel Hill Newspaper came, the Durham Morning Herald. I told my story. It was then that I learned that newspapers don't always print the truth. There were things in quotations that were not things that I said. Maybe I was a buffoon but I looked more like a buffoon the way they printed it.

Things were set in motion outside my control. The radio stations called. I became a weird little blurb on the television news. I found out later a friend in Chicago saw an AP/UPI news wire story on the Figures, and when he found out who it was he couldn't stop laughing for a long, long time. Another friend in Denver saw a similar story in her newspaper.

The response of my parents wasn't what I anticipated. I expected my mother would find it somewhat amusing and my father would be furious. My father, Stuart Jenks Sr., was driving home from the Research Triangle Park where he worked as an upper level manager in the IBM Corporation, when he heard on the radio: "Stuart Jenks turned himself in today, the person creating the silhouettes of dead bodies, the proverbial Fatal Figures in the city of Chapel Hill. He explained he was a conceptual artist, blah, blah, blah." His initial response was, "Well, I didn't know I did anything in Chapel Hill." My mother, Mary Jenks, on the other hand about died when she saw my story on the local television news. My sister, Pamela Jenks, found out about it when our mother called her at work saying "You won't believe what your brother has done?"

That night, I watched the television broadcast in a friend's house at the Cookie Factory, a small cinder-block house on a lake west of town, the former home of a man who made it rich with a cookie he invented in its oven. I watched with Scrap Man, who lived there, and two women from the house next door. I remember at the end of the broadcast I stood in shock, still not aware of what was happening to me. And they all applauded. I don't think I'll ever forget that moment.

A couple days later, I saw them painting over the Figure in front of my house. I went out to document it as I documented everything in those days. I took a photograph of the city painting a big black square over the Fatal Figure. The bill came to $138.36, a figure I also will never forget. I had no idea where I could get that kind of money. I worked as a dishwasher at a local posh restaurant.

But I came up with another idea and went back to the Art Lab Building. I made up some porcelain, squashed it into a rough circle, created a stamp of the Fatal Figure from plaster and stamped it into the porcelain. I fired them all in a kiln. I did not glaze them. They were five inches in diameter. I made a banner out of a sheet, with an outline of a Fatal Figure in black and yellow paint. I went to the center of campus at noon, tied the sheet between two trees and put the porcelain Fatal Figures on a table. I began to sell the Figures for $1.00 each. I didn't anticipate what would happen. People came by screaming at me, calling me names. Journalism students screamed at me for making it harder for them to get information from the police. I tried to explain to them that they said I was a journalism student, not me. They wouldn't hear it. Others screamed, "You're crazy!" and walked away. I sold fifty. A few people were supportive, yet the verbal onslaught was surprising. I don't think I could do that again.

At a Halloween party at 608 Airport Road I put a map on the wall with photographs attached and a collection bucket under it. As I said earlier, our parties were quite large. Usually 200 to 300 people showed up. The beer was drunk. The joints were smoked. I collected probably $20.00, and a couple of joints. I'm still about $60.00 short and I don't know where it's going to come from.

But by this time I had become a minor folk hero about town. I became part of the Inner Sanctum of the Chapel Hill Music Scene. Which meant the quality of drugs went up. I went from the living room smoking joints to being invited to the back room and offered cocaine.

I was hot news for a few weeks. One night, working as a dishwasher, I was told a patron wanted to speak to me. I walked out smelling like old vegetables and Hollandaise sauce. I believe he was gay. I believe he thought I was cute. He asked me if I had paid off the debt. I told him no, I hadn't. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a check, signed the bottom and gave it to me blank. Years later, I found out he was an administrative assistant to a very wealthy local entrepreneur. He once took me out to lunch to meet this rich man. Nice clothes, pleasant demeanor, warm face. At the time I was too stoned to realize that I was letting a possible patron of the Arts slip through my grasp. Who knows? The A.A. was probably just trying to get his hands in my pants. In gratitude for the check I gave him the map of the Fatal Figures.

And now that I was part of the Inner Sanctum, I learned something quite disturbing. Even though I was famous or infamous, all most people cared about were the Figures on the streets. People cared no more about who I was than they had before. I was angry. It hurt too. I'd walk into the Cat's Cradle and people would glance, raise an eyebrow. I was something weird and special, this guy who might be a little bit dangerous. But they like that. At the same time, a part of me realized that this was me living a image that I had created myself, along with the newspapers. I was really in new territory. I didn't have a map, nor did I know how to ask for help.

Even though I was getting good cocaine and women were looking at me who wouldn't look at me before, no one cared any more about the soul and spirit of Stu Jenks than before. I did get laid a lot. I remember sleeping with some women, very casual sex, very shallow. Feeling smug, if I remember, with one woman, the Cat's Cradle woman, to be doing this loose thing, being inside the music scene. The Cradle had a bunkhouse where the bands used to stay and she lived at the bunkhouse. I was lying in bed afterwards thinking "I'm part of this scene, getting laid by women, using them and they using me." A little voice in me was saying, "I don't think this is very good for you, Stu." "Heck, I don't care, little voice. Pass me the joint." By the end of the semester I was getting tired of people asking me if I had painted on the streets lately.

I remember I did do one last Fatal Figure piece after all of the hullabaloo quieted down. I need to mention this. It was a crucifixion Figure with the arms stretched, like a cross on the asphalt in back of the Art Lab Building. I built one of my brick pieces around it so it was entirely enclosed in brick. People could crawl through a hole and sit in there. I heard Cindric held one of his 3-D design classes inside this sculpture, students sitting on the white Fatal Figure paint.

The remainder of my senior year was one big sophomore slump. How do you top this? I formed a rock band called Wobbly Gumbo with a couple friends but ended that after only two gigs. I hung around town working in a print shop for a few months after graduation. And I grew more and more depressed.

Within a year, I left town. Just let it be known that the following year I was living in the mountains of North Carolina, working as a magician in a theme park and I wanted to die. I seriously considered driving my Karmann-Ghia into a tree. I even picked out the tree.

No, I didn't kill myself, nor did I try. I eventually ended up in Tucson, Arizona, working as a waiter, and to my surprise, married. In 1984, as we flew back to North Carolina for Christmas, I told Denise "I bet someone I don't even know will ask if I've painted on the streets lately."

She said, "That's absurd. It's been six years. Most of those people are gone."

I said, "Mark my words."

On Christmas Day, at friends of my folks that I barely knew, one of their daughters looked across the dining room table at me and said, "Stu, have you painted on the streets lately?" I turned to Denise and smiled. Denise said nothing.

From when I graduated from art school in 1979 to 1985, I was getting a bit lost. Probably long before that. Frankly, the forest was getting very dark and I couldn't find my way out. In 1985, I was able to ask some good people for some help, and I began to find my way back, thanks to them. It took me a while. Denise and I got divorced, among a lot of other things. Not everything needs to be told.

My sister Pamela took an art history course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990. Dressed in her power suit, she introduced herself to the class by stating that she herself as an artist, that her medium was embroidery and that "My brother is a conceptual artist." The professor looked at her name, looked at her face, and gave a slight shake of the head.

She said, "You could see it in the eyes."

In the Summer of 1993, I flew back home to attend my 20th high school reunion, and to do the at-least-once-in-a-southerner's-lifetime-pilgrimage of Civil War battlefields. I visited Cindric. I visited my folks. I also visited Chapel Hill. One stop that my rental Mitsubishi took me to was the Art Lab Building. Pinned to the wall by a wooden cabinet, flying like the angel it is, bright and silvery as if it was painted yesterday was The Fatal Figure on the wall. As a summer rain fell on the tin roof, I pulled out my Sony Camcorder and shot it from four different angles. No one saw, but I. No mistakes. Another circle was connected.

So, I guess it's time to put these ghosts back in the box and look around at what is alive. An African crucifix with Christmas lights that burn year round. Nocturnal time exposure photographs of Utah Canyonlands highlighted with hand held flashes. Prayer sticks made of saguaro ribs, owl and hawk feathers, and black and yellow paint. A photograph of a circle of standing stones constructed on a hilltop, to create a sacred space. Clay vessels with sparkling interiors created during Holotropic Breath workshops. A knitted purple and blue scarf made by a woman with soft skin, blue eyes and a gentle soul that receives the love I give.

Suddenly, it's Christmas morning, I throw open the shutters, look out into the snow covered lane, and become Ebenezer Scrooge.

Acknowledgments from the 1996 Edition

To Bo Petersen, for transcribing and writing the first draft, and for giving me an appreciation of Duane Allman leads.

To Mike Cindric, for teaching me to trust my own vision, and for Hot Doughnuts Now.

To my parents, Stuart and Mary Jenks, for putting me through Art School, and for loving me no matter where I went.

To Tom "Scrap Man" Whicker, for being the cinematographer of many a conceptual art piece, and for being the heartbeat of the Wobbly Gumbo.

To Levi Neill, for mentoring me through the Early Days, and for teaching me I didn't have to be perfect.

To my sister, Pamela Jenks, for finding the Fatal Figure slides in the damp moldy basement of our ancestral home, and for just being my sister.

To Michael Doll, for the use of his Tri-Star computer and the tutorial on Wordperfect, and for having the patience of Buddha.

To Annie Gordon, the second Annie, for putting her hand on my heart, and for loving Christmas as much as I do.

Addendum from March 2001

Maybe it's because my parents have cancer that prompted me to pull out the Fatal Figures, do some editing to the 1996 story and put it on my website. Or maybe it's because I was recently interviewed for an article on my current series of Circles and Spirals, and the Figures came up. Whatever the reason, here is the Legend for your pleasure. I'm not doing this kind of Artwork now, but the Figures were a good piece and they are part of my history. And to act like they weren't created, just wouldn't be right.

Much love in your direction, and keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

Stu Jenks
Tucson, Arizona
March, 2001