Re: 12/8/00 - Gallery Magazine: Zak Mucha Interview with Gary Dobry
Note: On 7/13/00, Gary Dobry admitted to making false and defamatory statements against Talk Visual Chairman Michael Zwebner. Dobry settled for a $1 million judgment against him that Zwebner agreed not to enforce if Dobry did not attack him again. (See: siliconinvestor.com
Dobry is currently being sued by Richard Marchese in relation to claims Dobry made about him, among others, of being part of organized crime. Dobry not only claimed as such on message boards, but allegedly sent his accusations to various government agencies. (See: siliconinvestor.com
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Zak Mucha Interview with Gary Dobry
Gallery Magazine, Holiday Issue
Setting up an interview with ex-boxer/trainer/artist/writer Gary Dobry via his website chatroom, he relayed the warning that I may be contacted by certain people looking to slander his reputation. Seems that Dobry had testified against the mob and had given information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dobry provided the name of the SEC agent I should contact, if I needed to.
A week later, in the north suburbs of Chicago my cabbie got lost and dropped me off at the wrong strip mall, in a different suburb, about a mile away from Dobrys gym. Lucky to find a pay phone, I left a message for Dobry, saying I was walking down Algonquin Road, the four-lane highway that cuts through Palatine, a suburb notable mainly for the Browns Chicken massacre of several years ago.
Walking, I cursed all of the north suburbs, until an SUV pulls up in front of me with vanity plates: PUGS TKO. "Hey, you Zak?" asks the driver. To say Dobry is barrel-chested would be a gross understatement; his arms look like barrels and his upper body resembles a Volkswagon. "Glad I caught you," he says, offering a meaty hand. If I were a psychotic, murderous hitchhiker, my luck had just run out.
Dobry’s gym is in the corner of a quiet strip mall. None of the typical descriptions of smoky air and sweat stank and the hum of jumping ropes seem appropriate since the gym is closed on for the day. Usually, Dobry oversees the room and paints behind the counter near the front door. When he’s not painting, he’s working on his two novels, Kingdom Come and In Good Faith.
Dobry, who quit fighting this past year, grew up in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, an area notorious for raising kids who needed to be tough. "Me and my buddies would take the Lawrence Avenue bus over to Broadway and go see movies at the Uptown or the Riviera." Between the two theaters was the Northside Gym on a second floor above the Green Mill Tavern, which still proudly brags of it most famous patron, Al Capone.
At the age of nine, Dobry began fighting amateur. "I still always tell my guys don’t go pro," says Dobry, who followed his own advice. "At amateur, you can fight every week and you can always have fun. Pro is only about money. There’s two kinds of fighters when you’re pro, guys like David Diaz who won everything and went to the Olympics. The average guy who doesn’t go that route, he’s going to fight David when David comes to town."
When Dobry was sixteen, his mother moved to the north suburbs of Chicago and her son was quickly labeled as a bad influence on the other kids, being from the city, being a boxer. Off and on throughout his life, no matter what else he was doing, painting, writing, busking in the Paris subways, he’s been boxing. When the Northside Gym was threatening to go out of business in 1994, Dobry put his money up and became a partner. Within a year, his partner backed out and Dobry moved the gym to Palatine, closer to home.
At a young age, it seems that there isn’t much that Dobry hasn’t done. As he offhandedly mentions, "When I was in medicine..." I have to stop the flow of his story to learn he studied at the University of Paris, at the Sorbonne and had worked as a physicians assistant for several years. "I quit medical school," he says, "when I came back from Paris because I didn’t want to be a resident." Instead, he went to finish his art degree at the Art Institute of Chicago. When he says he’s writing two novels, its easy to believe this isn’t a guy who sits in the coffee shop talking of what he’s going to do, someday.
I ask about the mob guys. "I can’t go into great particulars," Dobry shrugs, "because of the deal I made. They keep harassing me with lawsuits. We made an agreement that I wouldn’t talk to anybody, but I can talk in general terms... You know what short-selling is with stocks? There’s a penny stock, a bulletin board company, and the company was going to do a private placement with this guy who also goes under these other names and he was a fugitive from the law... Anyway, I lost money in another investment. I got cocky and wanted to know why I got ripped off. I followed the trail and all these names came up who were connected to this guy..." At this point the story gets complicated with lawsuits, removed stock ledgers, 40-day restrictions, kiting schemes, death threats... While holding back on certain facts, Dobry rattles through the shell game that belongs in a Mamet movie. "What they were doing was a reverse merger scam. A pump and dump. They issue themselves a lot of stock, then they go into the boiler rooms and onto the internet and pump the stocks up." Because of his testimony and evidence given to the SEC, Dobry was facing defamation lawsuits that he has since been quelled. "Its a pissing contest," says Dobry.
We head over to Dobry’s house and its not what you would expect from one whos led the pugilistic bohemian life, who’s been threatened by mobsters, who’s working on two novels while training amateur boxers. The house is bright and cheerful, more appropriate for someone who would be selling Mary Kay cosmetics, except for the fact Dobry’s paintings overwhelm the living room. The figures on canvas are almost luminous, the colors liquid and seeping like the reception on old, dying television sets. The boxers seem stuck in time, where or when they fought is impossible to judge. A portrait of a smiling man tipping his hat wouldn’t be so eerie if it wasn’t Sonny Liston.
Three dogs wait for Dobry as he opens the front door and tells me to wait a second. "Simons a little nuts. If he doesn’t know you... He’s a Chart Polski. Theres only about 300 of them in the world," Dobry takes the dog, which looks like a stout greyhound, by the collar. "These were the ones Stalin tried to kill off because they were too bourgeoisie. They’re loyal. They’d die for their owners." Simon eyes me for a while, then follows me to the kitchen where Dobry and I take seats at a glass-topped table centered with flowers. The Polish guard dog sits behind my shoulder. "He’s watching you," Dobry laughed.
The interview quickly, and gladly, takes an informal tone. Dobry switches subjects, from blues to literature to medicine to art, with the ease of a channel surfer, except the transitions are sensible. "There’s a pathology," he says of artists, boxers, and writers. "A normal person wont sit in front of a canvas for eight hours a day. Its an obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s not much separating the axe murderer from the artist. Some guys go down into the basement to chop people up, some go to paint..." For Dobry, creating art is an individualistic urge that can’t be taught or learned.
"In school," he says, "they do their best to teach you how to draw and paint like everybody else. In fact, when I was in school you’d walk down the hallways and see these kids, they’re all militant, either militant lesbians, or militant Afrocentric separatists, or they’re carrying Mao’s little red book and they got buttons all over their leather jackets... Everybody in groups looks the same, walks the same, paints the same, but they’re all nonconformists.
"I got kicked out of the Art Institute because I was in this multicultural painting studio. I thought, Wow, this’ll be cool." At the time Dobry was reading Jack Henry Abbott, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and several books of race and societal ills whose titles he can rattle off. "... I thought I was going to take this studio and apply all these things I been learning. I showed up on the first day and it was like an Islam rally. And all the reading... I didn’t know there were so many guys named Muhammad. Everything was Muhammad this, Muhamad that... So, it wasn’t really multicultural, it was denouncing the white man.
"There was this visiting artist- his name was Joe Louis-- I figured I’m gonna get along with this guy because he’s got a boxers name and were gonna communicate... In The Belly of the Beast, Abbott talks about the word nigger, right? Where he says everything ugly, vulgar, and negative about the word nigger should be attributed to the white man who created the word. Its no reflection on the black man.
"So, I did this painting of Mike Tyson with the word nigger tattooed on his forehead... And Joe Louis gives this big rap before the critique, saying how he no longer has a studio because he no longer has a need for a studio because all his artwork is in his head. Everyone applauds this academic rap..." When the time for Dobry’s work came to be critiqued, the visiting artist protested, "I’m not shocked." Dobry tried to explain the Jack Henry Abbot connection and the teacher chipped in, " Perfect example of white Eurocentric thinking. You even want to steal the word nigger from us... Well, you can have it." And when the time came for Dobry to write his final paper for the class, school security promptly escorted him out of the building.
There is something weirdly dichotomous about this guy. He’s a PA who could clear out an Uptown barroom and quote Picasso and Jack Henry Abbott at length. His paintings evince the most delicate touches of the brush, but his knuckles are callused from years of hitting the heavy bag. The pages of his novel, still in manuscript form, are flooded with blood and sperm poetry, more than any established author would dare to attempt.
Illustrating how cultures retranslate art, Dobry enthusiastically hums two different versions of "Messing with the Kid,"- the white version and the black one- while tracing the melody in the air with his hands. Evidently, he even has perfect pitch and a musician’s ear. He can talk of Picassos Dora Marr and theories of abstract art as well as tell the best of shaggy dog stories.
After our visit Dobry drives me back to the Metra station. We circle construction sites, follow and trace the tracks along the side streets of Palatine. It seems the one thing Gary Dobry can’t do is find the damn train station. And the one accusation that will never stick to him is that he fits any sort of stereotype.
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Warning: Gallery Magazine is an "adult" magazine. The above article will appear later this week in the Holiday 2000 issue. The cover may be viewed at:
girlnextdoor.com |
