Still in the shadows, an artist in his own right

crumb_095_mac.jpg Crumb is currently working on a comissioned art piece for a couple in New England. Maxon Crumb, the once-itinerant brother of noted R. Crumb, was featured in the movie "Crumb" by Terry Zwigoff -- sitting and begging on Market Street in the lotus position, swallowing a piece of rope in his room at a fleabag Tenderloin hotel. All the Crumb brothers, as we saw in the film, suffered considerable psychological damage at the hands of their late father. Ten years ago this month Maxon got off welfare and started selling his paintings, mostly through gallery owner Malcolm Whyte's website www.Word-Play.com. He's sold scores of his unique works, and has just finished a commission for a CD cover of music that features the "Crumb Suite for Solo Piano." Maxon still lives in the same hotel, but now he faces deadlines, pays taxes and no longer has time to meditate and beg for change on Market Street. Event in, San Francisco, Ca, on 8/11/06. Photo by: Michael Macor / San Francisco Chronicle Mandatory credit for Photographer and San Francisco Chronicle / Magazines Out less crumb_095_mac.jpg Crumb is currently working on a comissioned art piece for a couple in New England. Maxon Crumb, the once-itinerant brother of noted R. Crumb, was featured in the movie "Crumb" by Terry Zwigoff ... more Photo: Michael Macor Photo: Michael Macor Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Still in the shadows, an artist in his own right 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Judging by his appearance in "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's 1995 documentary about an artistic and deeply troubled family, Maxon Crumb didn't seem long for this world. The younger brother of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb was filmed in his seedy hotel room, sitting on a bed of nails and begging for money on San Francisco sidewalks. He looked haunted, spiritually ransacked -- done in by the family abuse that drove his oldest brother, Charles, to suicide.

[Podcast: Edward Guthmann with Maxon Crumb. ]

Twelve years later, Maxon Crumb still resides in the same Sixth Street dump, and still maintains an extreme spartan diet -- "only plant food" -- and an ascetic spiritual practice that includes long, holy-man treks to Bolinas Ridge, where he sits in lotus position for 12 hours at a time. But in the years since "Crumb" was released, he is no longer dependent on government assistance and has stopped panhandling and started supporting himself with his art. His paintings -- more intricate, surreal and disturbing than Robert's antic work -- sell for as much as $3,200; his ink drawings go for $1,200.

His personal life is also enriched. Once a recluse, Crumb, 61, has a close kinship with Yannick Ingey, a shy, birdlike French woman whom he met when they were both panhandling downtown. Although it's "platonic," Crumb says, he spends several nights a week at her tiny, Zen-like Geary Street apartment and credits her with nursing him to health after he was hospitalized in 1994 for vitamin deficiency.

Yannick brings him "balance," Crumb says. "It just makes life more smooth." And Yannick, who is unemployed and has the face of a careworn mother in a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl photo, says Crumb does the same for her. "His simplicity," she says when I ask her what makes Crumb unique. "His goodness and intelligence. ... His remoteness from the madness."

But if all this suggests that Crumb's rough edges are buffed to a warm glow, or that the raging madman we saw in "Crumb" now radiates a guru's placidity, that's not quite accurate. True, he no longer sits on cold sidewalks with a beggar's bowl in front of him. He keeps his bed of nails at home, but uses it rarely. And it's been years, Crumb says, since he grabbed or physically harassed women in public.

In "Crumb," he told of following a young woman into a store in the Marina district and, in a self-propelling fever of lust, pulling down her "obscenely brief shorts" to reveal buttocks "like a ripe peach." Today, he dismisses that behavior as "outrageous" and "bestial" -- but says he didn't feel embarrassed to see himself discussing it on film. It was a function, he says, of coping with celibacy. Every three weeks, Maxon Crumb swallows a long strip of purification cloth, a kriya (yogic discipline) that alleviates his chronic stomach pain. That pain, he says, is the legacy of his father who, while stationed in Shanghai in 1938, shot a beggar in the stomach. In Crumb's mind, that event triggered a karmic chain that still plays out in his troubled stomach.

Maxon Crumb will never live a life of convention. He says he's been celibate "since the mid-'70s" and remains so "by necessity" -- because sex triggers the epileptic seizures that began when he was in sixth grade. Crumb is a man who lives on a precipice between conscious thought and fierce, bedeviling dreams; who uses his art, as the formerly abused child is wont to do, to confront the darker impulses in human nature. Crumb's first published book, "HardCore Mother," released by CityZen Books in 2000, is a sexual horror story of mother-daughter incest and sadism. Illustrated with Crumb's surreal ink drawings, the book treads a mindscape similar to Edgar Allen Poe or David Lynch: mad, unrestrained, emotionally violent. The work of an artist scraping at the bone of his existence.

"I got two reactions," he says of the book. "A lot of people really got behind the subject matter. And other people were totally outraged by it. It just steps over a line for certain people -- and then they're just gone."

There's a fearlessness in Crumb, similar to his brother Robert, that compels him to expose his id, his sexual fears and fantasies, with no concern for the marketplace. The bottom line is that Maxon Crumb is a very odd guy with no desire -- or ability -- to duplicate the patterns of existence and thought that most of us call "normal."

That is what makes him fascinating, and that is what makes him maddening. Conversation with Crumb is erratic, nonlinear. He'll speak to a question but quickly slip into a tangent or philosophical rant. Italicized with nervous gestures and shakes of the head, his words issue forth in a crazy rush.

In the first of three visits I paid to his tiny room at the Winsor Hotel on Sixth Street, Crumb was sitting on the dirty woven mat on his floor -- he has no furniture -- and explaining how art and money exist for him on separate tracks. While the first feeds his spirit and intellect and supplies his life force, the second barely holds his interest.

"Money is vague if you're poor," he says. He doesn't know what he earns year to year, and insists he's never made as much from his art as he did from the SSI (Supplemental Security Income) payments he received for 20 years.

Malcolm Whyte, an art dealer who has sold Crumb's work for 10 years, says Crumb has never made more than $15,000 in a year. For several years, Crumb says, "I was doing a little over $6,000 a year." Breaking free of government assistance was a good move, "but I don't know if the way I'm living would be less socially acceptable or less understood by most people than if I was actually on welfare."

On the floor, propped up by a pair of bricks, is a painting commissioned by a Connecticut couple who admire Crumb's work. Both figures are exaggerated, in a comic, grotesque way, by buck teeth and craning necks. The man is broad-chested and formidable and holds the woman in his hand like a pencil. She is naked, with one marionette-like arm upraised. Her aureolas are surrounded by concentric circles so that her breasts resemble marksmanship targets.

Each work takes weeks, perhaps months to complete, "depending on the depth of the project," Crumb says. During that time, he'll go into a creative fugue and sometimes stop eating altogether. The world drops away. The making of art eclipses every mundane concern.

"I know it's absolutely ridiculous," Crumb says at one point. "I could be making thousands more. ... It's not so much that I produce real slowly. (But) you can see the detail of my work, which obviously takes more time."

As Crumb works on the portrait of the Connecticut couple and Chronicle photographer Michael Macor shoots him, an anguished voice reaches the fourth-floor room from the alley below. A man is threatening to kill another man, but Crumb, who probably hears similar imprecations daily, works steadily and calmly, impervious to the shouting.

His room at the Winsor Hotel, home for the past 26 years, is filthy. The plaster is coming down in sheets, and layers of dust and grease cover the floor. Books on poetry, art and computer programming sit in piles; so does his collection of meditation audiocassettes. There's a clunky Underwood typewriter; various computer parts; a monk-like arrangement of food (half an avocado, ginger root), bowls and dirty silverware.

It's the home of someone unencumbered by the material. Crumb, who enjoys the opportunity to talk, is wearing Army camouflage jeans and a loose green shirt, unbuttoned. He's got a billy goat's patch of hair on his chin and neck. Several teeth are missing from the left side of his mouth, the result of a dental bridge that didn't fit and an extreme fear of dentists that followed. Crumb says he's still close to his brother Robert, who in 1992 moved to the south of France with his wife, Aline, and daughter, Sophie. The older Crumb, who captured the hippie zeitgeist with his trippy, LSD-inspired Zap Comix in the mid-'60s, stills visits California occasionally and stays in contact with his brother. But Maxon, who has a fear of flying, has never been to France.

"I have a very strong affection for Robert," he says. A strong rivalry persists, but during the '70s and '80s, when Robert still lived in California, "he was the only person in my life that I was still in contact with. Separation from him kind of gives me some disconcert on that point."

Most of Crumb's family is gone: His father, Charles Sr., a former Marine who beat and emotionally terrorized his sons, died in 1982. His mother, Beatrice, who in "Crumb" is seen living a hermit's existence with her son Charles, died in 1997. Younger sister Sandra, who declined to be interviewed for "Crumb," died of liver cancer in 1998. The most tragic of all, Charles Jr., never moved out of his parents' home. Unemployed, haunted by "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies" -- his own words -- Charles ended decades of depression when he killed himself in 1992.

Robert, Maxon and their older sister, Carol, survive. The family's dysfunction, illustrated so heartbreakingly in "Crumb," continues to shape Maxon's life. In his introduction to the 1995 collection, "Crumb Family Comics," he wrote, "I have to continue indefinitely as a socially misfitted, god-mad, brooding ascetic and celibate, starving and street begging, eating a cloth string for meat and sitting on a bed of nails." When I read that quote back to him, he says the description still fits, except for the street begging. His childhood wounded him, but it gave him a sensitivity and a way of seeing -- a spot of genius -- that he wouldn't otherwise have.

To hear excerpts of Edward Guthmann's interview with Maxon Crumb, listen to the podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts.