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The Michelangelo of The Sink��

It was a hot, ethereal summer night,��July 4, 1989.��

I was heading home from the Folsom��fireworks show. I crossed Broadway at��Pennsylvania and there he was: Michelangelo.��Standing in front of the Sistine��Chapel smoking a cigarette.��

OK, it wasn’t the Sistine Chapel. It was��The Sink. And it wasn’t Michelangelo. It��was Llloyd Kavich, the beatnik artist who��in 1952 painted the murals on the walls.��The Sink was his Sistine Chapel.��

He was in town to restore his��masterpieces.��

In 1974, Sink proprietor Herb Kauvar��decided to rebrand The Sink as a delicatessen��— Herbie’s Deli — as a��way��of breaking with 1960s bad karma that��still hung over The Hill like a miasma.��So Llloyd’s murals were covered over��with rough pine paneling.��

Fifteen years went by. Herb’s kids,��now in the family business, convinced��him that the time had come to��“de-model” the deli back into The Sink.

So Llloyd (he spelled it with three��Ls “just for the l of it”) wa s summoned��back to �������� by his patrons in the��House of Kauvar.��

And there he stood before me taking��a cigarette break.��

So I introduced myself and we started��to talk. When he was ready to resume��painting I followed him back inside. I��watched the Master throw himself into��his work, gleefully laughing at the old��jokes — “the floggings will continue until��morale improves” — as he refreshed��the great works and added new ones.

Naturally we talked until sunup. By��then he had painted a picture of me on��a wall in the back; it’s still there. We’d��been talking about guns — I was working��for Soldier of Fortune back then — so��I invited him to go shooting the next��weekend. We had a great time, and within��a few days he had painted caricatures��of everyone in the shooting party.��

A couple of weeks later, I ran into��him in Doozy Duds.��

“What’s up?” I said.

“I’m gonna get a dog,” he said.��

A week later he turned up with��Streamline, the world’s smallest, smartest��adult dog (a Russian toy terrier, I think).��

She was so small Llloyd could hide��her under his shirt and smuggle her��onto airplanes.��

They were inseparable.��

A couple years after the Kauvars��sold The Sink to the Brothers Heinritz��(Mark, Chris and James), Llloyd was��brought back for one last gig.��

Llloyd Kavich died in October 2013 in��Santa Barbara. He was thought to be in his��80s. He was preceded in death by Streamline.��Hardly a trace of his life remains.��Except for the glorious murals in The Sink.��

Photo by Peter Burke��