Draft needs lots of cleaning up, sorry!
VICTOR HEREDIA
Loren's Right Hand Man
My Shop Teacher
Victor Heredia at ChicagoFest, summer 0f 1979. Looing west from Navy Pier, with the top of the 'Cock in the background.
I first met Victor Heredia when I took my first class at Gallery 1134. He was the teaching assistant to John Hoffmann, and he would was the one who took care of the details, like mixing up the chemicals, etc., in the lab that he had made.
Victor first met Loren Billings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975-76. He, along with other students from there, like Kevin Huotari, Tom Cvetkovich, and his brother pitched in to help Loren and Bob clean out the casket factory mess and rebuild it into Gallery 1134.
Here's a picture of Victor Heredia and Loren Billings at the 1979 ChicagoFest, back when Victor was Loren's right hand man. They are standing next to a portable display that Victor had made for displaying holograms with a built-in light source. The hologram being reconstructed is from TJ's collection of Russian holograms, showing Catherine the Great's jewels. This hologram was later broken by Lui, which led to some inevitable repercussions when she tried to pull a fast one and cover it up.
Looking at this photo from the vantage point of >4 decades later, I am older than Loren was in the picture, when she was a spry 60 years old on taht day. Hard to believe she would undertake such an enormous task at such an advanced age! And what also is disturbing,is that she has managed to keep herself in decent shape, almost lust-worthy! Why, if I were to...
John versus Victor
I was under the impression when I was taking classes there that John and Victor were the best of friends. As it turns out, that was not the case.
John came into the scene a bit later than Victor, after the Beginning and Intermediate labs had been built but the back-breaking efforts of Victor and Al, etc.
Johnny H. Screws Victor Over, Big Time
He put the nails in Victor's coffin by telling Loren that he knew that Victor had bought some weed from LaserSmith. How did he know that? Because I was there, too, scoring, but of course John didn't buy anything, that cheapskate. Of couse he would be bummng joints from us, but it didn't work in reverse.
So Loren showed him the door, but Bob, in one of his rare acts of kindness, got Victor a job with the City of Chicago's Water Management System. He started off cleaning holding tanks, then worked up to being an engineer, a job he held for 30+ years, and retired with a good pension. Victor talked to Bob once after his exile, but Loren never did.
Jon Seymour Screws Victor Over, Big Time
And of course Seymour got screwed over even bigger. The big move happened over a year previous, and I kept bugging Seymour to meet me at Casa Heredia, or I would be willing to pick him up on the way over, but he kept excusing himself as being too busy with business or family affairs, More than likely, he was having an affair and using me as an alibi.
Every 2 or 3 weeks since the move, which was literally tons of shit, I would go over to Victor's to hang out and get wasted and look at stuff and look at what new stuff he had built, setting up a lab for himself, finally.
"Where's my books?" he asked. I had to stifle a giggle as I could see that his books, if he even knew what were his books, were acquisioned into Biblioteca Heredia.
Victor and I hung out some more after Seymour split,
Ed Wesly Suffers Collateral Damage
But a few days later, when I awoke after my afternoon siesta, I looked out my back window sans eyeglasses and I could see that there was more junk out htere than usual. Rushing out, I found a van load of 1134 artifacts! Victor had snuck in and dropped off a bunch of junk without me even knowing it!
I tried calling up Victor, and of course, no answer. I called up Seymour, and he came over, and couldnt beleive it. I couldnt either; who in their right mind would do that? Well, obviously Victor was not in a right mind.
Happily Ever After
Perhaps Victor got the best revenge on 1134, as on one snowy Christmas Day, he donned not his gay apparel, but his City of Chicago Water Mangement Jumpsuit and a Day-Glo safety vest and unscrewed this street sign off a lamp post on Washington Boulevard!
