“The paintings came down after we’d already advertised,” Roberts recalls. “We hadn’t seen them. They were all of guys getting screwed in the shower. Guys hanging, if you know what I mean. Oral sex. We’d invited this Nigerian bishop to attend the show. The blessing of the event was that the fuses kept blowing and the lights would go out, so no one could see much.”
Ultimately, the gallery was a success, so they opened a second one in Los Angeles. Roberts moved to California to manage the business there. Steve Martin was their landlord, and he stopped in often to shop; the business made a bundle. Then the recession of ‘79 hit, and 200 galleries — including J Hunt West — closed overnight.
Roberts came back to Minnesota and started over, opening one of the nation’s first one-hour photo processing labs, in Burnsville. It was a success. So he sold it and invested the money in a series of similar businesses offshore: St. Croix, Haiti, Antigua. He lived in Florida, sailing, surfing, eating at three- and four-star restaurants every night. In 1988, two things happened: the Antiguan government was busted for selling arms to Columbian drug lords, and Hurricane Gilbert wiped out his shops in St. Croix and Haiti. This time, Roberts was totally broke.
“So I’m in a nice restaurant in Boca Raton thinking, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’” he says. “I had a regular waiter at that place who I always tipped really well. I asked around about him and found out he had a condo on the beach and a nice car. And I thought, ‘If everyone tips like I do. . .’”
The next day, he put on a three-piece suit, got a couple fake recommendations from restaurateurs he knew, and got a job waiting tables at a mid-price restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. It lasted exactly 20 minutes.
Roberts wasn’t deterred. In fact, this experience only made him set his sights higher. He applied next to a “five-star-five-diamond” restaurant in Pompano Beach. It had a manager from Cornell and a famous chef. It also had a rigorous two-week training program — even for experienced wait staff, which Roberts claimed to be.
And a waiter was born.
It was restaurant work that eventually brought Roberts back to art.
Some time in the late ‘90s, he came back to Minnesota, reclaimed Hunt’s couch, and applied for a job at Muffuletta. His manager was a young woman named Denise Rouleau. She’d just finished a degree in international relations at the University, traveled through Europe for a while, and returned to do an internship at the State Department.
A Duluth native and daughter of a miniaturist, Rouleau had always been interested in photography and sculpture. But she’d given that up in exchange for an academic career. Now, working in the restaurant and talking to Roberts about his life, she changed her mind.
When La Belle Vie moved from Stillwater to Minneapolis — and Roberts decided to leave Muffuletta for the higher-priced gig — Rouleau went along, even going from manager back to server in order to make the switch.
Soon, the two had a small artist’s studio together and were working on a series they called Art of the Catacombs. It features dozens of tiny mummies in printers’ letter boxes and was based on the catacombs in Paris, which Rouleau had toured. The work is a joint effort: she casts the mummies; he puts together the boxes and lines them with different textures and designs.
“It’s interesting to me how we can be so obsessed with what Paris Hilton is doing,” Rouleau says about the work. “But you have these catastrophic events that involve millions of people, and they get lost. I like the juxtaposition of the single against the masses.”
They’ve been working together for roughly eight years now, sharing an artist’s space in the Seward neighborhood, splitting their shifts, creating more than 35 joint works of art — acting sort of like married people, except that at the end of each day she goes home to Pete, her boyfriend of 19 years, and Roberts returns to Hunt’s house, where he now has his things more or less permanently set up in the guest room. And after all this time, they’re suddenly seeing success.
Art of the Catacombs just finished a run at Gallery 181 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And it will be featured at the Nina Bliese Gallery, downtown Minneapolis, from October 15 until November 9.
Now, Roberts has a new project. He’s set up a darkroom, bought up all the Polaroid film he can find (he uses this and a special “distressing” method to produce impressionistic color prints), and has applied for a grant to launch his photography career again. Three of his photographs are hanging on the walls at La Belle Vie, along with an early one of the Catacomb series.
But even if he becomes well-known in the art world again, Roberts says he’ll probably continue working as a waiter.
“I’m just fucking impressed every day with the quality of the food at La Belle Vie,” he says. “That’s what makes my job easy. The place is great, and I get paid to make people happy. I think about that a lot: I’m probably luckier and more satisfied in my work than most of the people I wait on.”
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