After scouring everything from old bills to court records found at the storage unit, the two men hit paydirt on the day they knocked on the door of an apartment complex — not a half-mile from where the flea market took place. When a fiftysomething man warily answered, Hadar knew he was standing face to face with Mingering Mike. “He was extremely suspicious of us,” Hadar remembers, adding that even now, Mike prefers to remain anonymous, shunning the publicity that has come in the wake of the discovery of his art. But eventually he did agree to talk to Hadar and Beylotte about the prolific, wholly imaginary career of Mingering Mike.
This conversation became the springboard for Hadar’s book. The lavishly illustrated volume reproduces the best of Mike’s LP covers and homemade discs, and it includes a discography of his extensive œuvre. There’s a preface by former New York Times pop critic Neil Strauss, who helped break Mike’s story, and an incisive afterword by curator Jane Livingston that examines Mingering Mike’s place as a self-taught African-American folk artist belonging to a tradition that includes Sister Gertrude Morgan’s sculptures and paintings and the quilters of Gee’s Bend.
Raised by his older brothers, sisters, and cousins in DC after his mother died of leukemia and his father vanished, Stevens lost himself in his art at an early age. Enthralled by music, he began writing lyrics to the songs he heard in his head in his teens and even taped rudimentary versions of some of these songs on a reel-to-reel recorder. He conjured a roster of artists. His artwork reflects a rich interior dialogue with an imaginary audience, a dialogue refracted through the prism of the turbulent era in which Mike came of age. “Mingering,” he explained to Hadar, came from a conflation of the words “mingling” and “merging” and “had a nice ring to it.”
As reclusive as he was, the events of the outside world found him. After being drafted during the height of the Vietnam War, Stevens went AWOL. Terrified he’d be arrested, he rarely left his house, immersing himself deeper still in his make-believe empire. And he was devastated by the discovery, nearly two decades later, that his albums might have been lost forever.
But thanks to modern technology, Mingering Mike, imaginary soul superstar, is now quite real. Fan letters and messages pour in to a rapidly expanding multimedia Mingering Mike Web site, and Hadar — who has since become Mike’s manager — has been fielding film and documentary offers. “It’s hard not to fall in love with him. Throughout all of the albums, there’s a consistent message of unity and togetherness — that’s what’s so inspiring about so much of it. Really, the guy is all love. He works as a security guard at an old-age home, and he’s constantly making mix CDs and writing poetry and songs for people.”
This year, the Vanguard Squad label is set to release a single taken from one of Mike’s original reel-to-reel recordings titled “There’s Nothing Wrong with You Baby (Parts 1 & 2).” Fiction, it seems, is on the verge of becoming fact. “What’s so fantastic,” says Hadar, “is that back then he made a 45 picture sleeve for this song and he made the labels, and it’s all going to be made into a real record, exactly how he intended it to be. For all those years, he had so much to say to the world, but he kept it to himself. Now, finally, it’s out there.”
