Light libations - A job in Tremont.

Two decades back, Dana Paterson stood on top of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, the dirt and decadence of the Flats' West Bank splayed out below like an empty promise, and imagined jumping and sinking into the cold mud of the Cuyahoga below. He'd fallen into cold water before. "You just kinda fall asleep."

He'd been sleeping on a wooden skid in the bowels of Terminal Tower (this was before the RTA revamp) for several months after relocating back from a short, failed jaunt to LA with his guitar, a story he doesn't want to recount. He was in his early 30s, self-medicating with whatever he could "afford, hustle or put together." He still kept looking for work though, every day trying to brush the road off, present himself as a prospective hire. But on this day when he walked to the bridge, he wasn't really going anywhere on the other side.

"I'd never thought about suicide, but coming over that bridge, with all the valley down there rusty and dead, and it all just seemed so bleak," Paterson recalls. "I just started freaking out, just looking down at the water, just staring at it. But then I looked up and there was this huge sign: The Brilliant Electric Sign Company."

He remembers that it took a really long time to get down there from his perch atop the river. "You'd think it was so close you could reach out and touch it. That was the sign."

He followed the sign like a star, asked for work, said he had some experience in drawing, sign-making. They handed him an application. He asked to speak with somebody instead. A quick interview, and a manager was asking him if he wanted to be an apprentice, learn how to be a glass blower, draw bugs to the light.

"It was like a gift from somewhere," he says.

Dennis Moeller, Paterson's assigned mentor, still works at the company after 23 years. He admits to clinging to a "dying craft." He still remembers Dana that day, "waving from the bushes, literally. A real good guy. He'd do things for you."

Dana was a pro after a few years, and he moved on to Boyer Sign Co., where he'd blow glass for another 17 years.

"I could have gone either way, but somebody found me and showed me how something was done," Dana says today about Moeller from his barebones corner workshop/efficiency apartment at Detroit and West 59th. He calls the place Dragon's Heir Neon Art, a tweak on "Dragon's Air," the Rolling Stones' tour packaging company during a period when Dana was especially fond of the band's aesthetic.

But there's no sign here that says any of that, just "NEON SIGNS" and a phone number in small, simple unlit letters in the corner of the front window. The landlord controls the electric on the exterior, Dana explains, and it'll come back on when the two come square.

He is thin, electric. He bounces around his shop like a ball, torching this, modulating that. His friends call him sweet, and he is, quick to blow out an abstract flower for a visitor's wife.

The wrinkles on his 52-year-old face are deep, dried rivers, but his blue eyes are alive with light. He doesn't look anything like he did just three months ago. That's when he cut the ZZ Top-long hair and beard, the look he'd nursed since he was young, in favor of a shoulder-length DA and an artful goatee. A family member of one of his clients, entrepreneur Tony George, had taken Dana aside and told him in a nicest possible way to get a fucking haircut. "Sometimes, something is put to you in just the right way," he says. "It registers, you know?"

How does one come to get four DUIs, every one of them on your birthday, May 23, each exactly three years apart? Dana doesn't even know, and he's the one who lived that. He's always been out looking for something to celebrate, a big smile to be the Buddha, but the pattern has led to some seriously baffled self-searching. "I started thinking for a while that the police were like, "Hey, it's Paterson's birthday, let's get a car over there.'" He laughs.

He got one driving around Bowling Green after another night getting hammered on Jack or tequila, another in Lakewood, two in Cleveland. The most recent, three years ago, he'd gone by some of the places in the Flats where his work hangs. The guitars in Pat's. The sheer wattage that was the Beachcomber. His work's all over. Pickwick and Frolic's martini bar. The 17-foot-tall "GUINNESS" sign outside P.J. McIntire's. That meditating figure in the window at There's No Place Like Om... The 9-foot martini glass at 806 Martini and Wine Bar.

A hurdle toward recovery: He can drink and eat mostly for free.

"I probably wouldn't have a dime in my pocket," he says, "but I could probably get lunch anywhere."

But he doesn't remember how it was that he woke up in a jail cell again the morning after his birthday, this time with no idea why. A guard told him about how he'd been driving on the sidewalk in the Warehouse District.

"I was beating a dead horse," he says. "I was thinking about all the times I'd drank before and all the cells I woke up in. And it occurred to me later that I was always on my own. There was never anybody with me on my birthday."

Not for a while, anyway. And it's not like things were always great when people were around, either.

His parents are gone now, buried down in Florida, where they retired his father's jewelry business years ago on a big pile of money that Dana's never seen.

Bare Bones - A sexy silhouette at Asterisk.

When he was a boy Dana's family lived all over: Hawaii, Kentucky, Texas, Mississippi. Dana says he remembers his mother throwing a blanket over him and his older brother in the backseat as they passed a neighborhood lynching in Biloxi.

His father had been a gunner on a B-17 during WWII. Dana says he survived five crashes. That'll fuck up a man - and his family. Dana blames his father's war service on the violent outbursts, the harsh whippings and the instability of his youth.

His mother ended up standing by his father, turning her cheek. But he remembers being about 5 when his mother tried to woo another man when his father was away. Her mere presence thereafter was a duty in Dana's eyes, a consolation.

When Dan was around 10, his father drank Drano and threw himself down the stairs. He lived, but nothing got better. Dana claims that this is when he turned to the rebellious lifestyle he'd always imagined having. He got caught selling drugs. He dabbled mostly in weed, LSD and mushrooms, mostly just to have them readily available.

"I wanted out of there," he says. "It was getting really bad. One day, when my mom was gone and my brother had left, he just said, "Dana, sit down,' really calm, and said, "You know what? I'm going to kill you with my bare hands.'"

At 15, he went to his first of several foster homes, until a bust at school. A judge was going to sentence the rest of his childhood away. But another savior came.

Dana credits his gift of gab to his transient youth, and his knack for making things with his hands to his father, the jeweler. But nothing else.

He credits his survival to John Park, who just recently brought Dana a new computer for him to better align his craft with modern expectations. Something a real father would do.

At the time a closeted gay juvenile parole officer in Toledo, Park stepped forward for Dana when no one else would.

"He was in a situation where the judge was going to certify him as an adult and send him to an adult prison for his involvement with drug-selling at the high school," an openly gay and retired Park recalls today. "I went to the judge and offered him the alternative of placing him in my home, as my son."

Park's raised, at various stages, a dozen children. Dana was with him for five years, until he was 20. Park remembers a smart, independent spirit who couldn't stomach illogical authority, the youngest member of his local Students for a Democratic Society chapter, a kid whose heroes were luminaries like Warhol, Dali and Ken Kesey. Dana remembers "just a wonderful household. I consider that man my father."

"Dana didn't fit the mold of a military child," Park recalls. "Not at all. That was the beginning of the problem. But Dana, in fact, didn't fit any mold. He was looking to make his own paradigm for life."

Parks once had to get him out of the state hospital after a marathon of drugs.

"That's always been his issue," Park says, "taking things to the edge. One of the firmest rules I had was that he couldn't have any quantity of drugs in the house, and I caught him with 150 hits of LSD, which I promptly flushed down the toilet. To this day he has not forgiven me for that."

Actually, he has. But it did take a while.

"When he falls down, my tack has been, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We all fall. It's getting up that's important.' What he's done in terms of solving his drug addictions and alcohol addictions, I'm impressed as hell. I have every confidence in him. Maybe I'm being naïve, but I think his past is behind him."

Since those early days near Bowling Green, Dana has used drugs and alcohol to soften life's hard edge. The system has tried to wrest him from it. Only he knows for sure if it's all been worthwhile.

After his last DUI, Dana laid low with his addictions for as long as he could. Then, a year ago, he suspects a competitor turned him in to police. He'd ridden out his warrant for long enough. He spent a few weeks at a work farm, then began a stint in the soul-searching world of nonprofit addiction services counseling. He formally railed against his counselor's brash tactics, got time tacked onto his program when a field test showed cocaine in his urine.

"I should bill them my shop time for wasting all this time for me," he said on the way home one day from class. He swears he's through with self-imposed oblivion. He's working, bending and blowing every day to pay the landlord, stock the refrigerator, light the night.

"All of my heroes were fucked up," he says, trying to explain the struggle. "They're actually all dead now. I've given myself heart attacks. I've stroked myself. I know it. Hey, some people like the merry-go-round and some people like the roller coaster. But Christ: Enough is enough. I've got some shit to do still."

At any given time, Dana plays host to a mad mix of people. Arts community types. Bar owners. Developers. Friends from AA, the streets. He's always working on a new sign for this bar or that storefront. The room is littered with odd parts and pulses with a pressing heat, welcomed in winter, cursed in summer.

Toilin' Trouble - A warmed-up Paterson at home in his studio.

Though he tries to pay the bills with grunt work on the commercial side, the art bug sustains his outlook. Until he was evicted, Dana kept a reportedly charming studio at the Hodge colony on the East Side, where he spent days on end awake, pressing his fretwork to his neighbors' patience, just working and playing, working and playing. The LoConti family helped him set up the studio there when he was doing extensive work for their clubs. But in a few years, he had squandered the space.

"I remember he called me and was like, "I'm on the street. They threw out all my shit,'" recalls arts benefactor Norm Roulet, the founder of REALNEO.org who's helped Dana secure gallery showings in recent years. "I got there and he was sitting in the gutter outside the Hodge. I was like, "Oh, Dana.'"

He's trying to live on an even tighter budget these days. When he moved into this space two years ago, the corner outside was an open drug market that sometimes wandered in. He bought a pit bull, screamed obscenities. "One day, this guy came in and was like, "Give me your smokes and your money,' and that was it. The dog comes roaring around the corner." The door jammed, he says, "and the dog tore his pants and a chunk of his ass as big as a fist" before the man escaped.

In the window, near the door today, is a sign on paper that'd look great in neon:

"NO SMOKES

NO SPARE CHANGE

NO HANDOUTS

BEAT IT!"

It's hard to know whom to trust. One recent group of friends stole equipment to sell for drugs. Another time, he had to build a glass-blowing station from scratch - a $6,000 endeavor - when finances got desperate.

But he's always rebuilt. In the early years of the new century, he collaborated with Jeff Chiplis, a SPACES board member and found-neon artist still working in Cleveland. A Plain Dealer article focused on Dana's attempts to light up the flagging East Bank. Shows at Asterisk Gallery and Art Metro raised his profile. More commercial work came in. In 2002, Chiplis asked Dana to create several words in his own style to fill in the blanks on several word works he was creating for a show at Lake View Cemetery called Celebration of Spirit.

Dana bends glass, Chiplis doesn't. A natural partnership formed.

A famous critic for Art in America took notice, but the article focused on Chiplis's work, with nary a mention of Dana. "It was kind of a slap to Dana," Roulet says, "but they've gotten over it."

Dana says now that he understands his anger was envy, but at the time, "In my eyes, it was supposed to be a collaborative effort, but as soon as the light hit him, he just didn't see me anymore."

Chiplis, who just stopped by the shop the other day to collect some scraps, says he respects Dana as both a craftsman and an artist.

"He's one of the best people around for going on 20 years here," Chiplis says, "and that's something to be commended for. And since he's gotten clean and sober, that's been a major step. If it continues to go that way, it's like anything else, you just keep on doing it. That's how you get better. You just keep doing it. Me, it was just a very lucky thing. I was in the right place at the right time. Somebody saw my work and said, "Let me see what I can do for you.'"

Dana Depew, founder of Asterisk, says part of what Chiplis can credit for his work garnering a certain measure of acclaim, besides its power and sweep, is his persistence. "You can't just sit back," Depew says. "You gotta knock on doors, take advantage of opportunities. I own a gallery, but I still have to go out and take advantage of contacts, submit work. It's work. I know Jeff, and he's very active about doing that."

The haircut and trim, Dana says, are proof that he's taken that lesson to heart. It's his job to find a way, he says. He's got busy work like a service contract for the Cleveland Public Theatre, a sign for a new restaurant in Pepper Pike. And he's got work he likes to do on Sundays, like a chandelier sculpture he's putting together for a Lakewood salon.

No kids. No wife. He says he doesn't want to put anybody through the hardship. This week, he goes from three addiction classes a week to just one. And this birthday, he's determined to stay sober and off the roads.

"Nothing is random," he says. "It's all meant to be. I've just been too slow to learn, I guess. I never paid attention. I was always having fun. My sixth-grade teacher, he stops class this one time and he's like, "What are you going to do with your life, Dana?' He stopped the class for this crap. And I was like, "I wanna walk down the street and have people know who I am."