Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Four
November- December 2025
Self-Portrait, story by Thaddeus Rutkowski.
Self-Portrait
Along with everyone else in my high-school class, I was supposed to have my picture taken for our yearbook. But I didn’t want to be photographed. I didn’t want to follow the crowd, and, more importantly, I didn’t like the way I looked.
One student, an artist, told me he was going to draw his portrait for the yearbook, and I decided to do the same.
In my bedroom, there was a small mirror—a gift from my grandmother. The mirror sat on top of my dresser, and the glass could be tilted forward and back. I stood in front of the dresser and, with a fountain pen, drew a thin, black outline of my head. I scratched in my long hair with the nib. Then I added features: a wide nose, slitted eyes, thick lips. There was a shadow under my nose—I put that in, too. I outlined my glasses, with thick frames, so my eyes would be obscured. But my wide cheeks gave me away: I was the only half Asian, the only half anything, in my high-school class.
I brought the sketch to my father’s studio—the room was dark, even during the day. When I looked in, I saw my father sitting on a stool next to a drawing board. I put the sketch on the board and slid it across to him. “I want to go to art school,” I said.
“I’m surprised,” my father said.
He opened a brown-glass bottle with a church key and poured beer into a ceramic mug.
“See all this artwork?” he continued. He waved his hand at paintings stacked on the floor and papers piled on shelves. “It’s all here because nobody wants it. I should have invented the Etch A Sketch. I’d be rich now.”
I looked more closely at my self-portrait. My hair lay in a thick tuft down my neck. The shadow under my nose resembled a mustache. I looked older than my sixteen years. I was no Asian sage, but I knew what I wanted. “I want to move to a city,” I said, “and be an artist.”
“You should learn how to finish Sheetrock,” my father said as he drank from his mug. “Then you should learn to paint walls.”
I brought my drawing to school and gave it to the yearbook supervisor.
“There’s our pen-and-ink boy,” he said as he took the sketch.
My self-portrait was published in the yearbook. Below the headshots, each student was to describe a “dream for the future.” My dream, I wrote, was “not to have swum the Hellespont”; it was “to pay attention at the right time.” I didn’t know who’d said that but thought I’d heard it somewhere.
Soon after the yearbook came out, I learned that the student who’d told me he would draw his portrait hadn’t actually done so. He’d had his picture taken, like everyone else. I was the only sketcher in the book. I would have to live with that drawing for the rest of my life.
© Thaddeus Rutkowski
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of eight books, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions. He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of NY and at a YMCA. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Best Small Fictions award.