Essays
Voices.
“—for her recent divorce, shot her three children, aged seven—”
“—a judge praised defendant John Roy, but was dismayed to learn that he’d had sex with the corpse—”
“—state authorities last October released turtles into the Ganges, to try and reduce human pollution, and will now use crocodiles to eat corpses dumped by poor Hindus—”
Lathered in static, these voices, a crazed cross-hatching of FM monologues, one-way-only verbal highways upon which madness cruises unchallenged and unargued, a disconnected chorus battering their listener with a world gone wrong on its way to Hell.
A metal shiver zigzags up-down her spine to match the frequency of mayhem coming out the speakers of her night-black 1965 Ford Thunderbird as she cruises down a godforgotten Texas farm road. The empty Southwestern landscape is all boiling murk—the baked asphalt falling under her tires, the tallgrass prairie stunned dead and yellow by the low-slung sun, the heatshimmer horizon stretching just beyond reach—with only the faded road signs and rust-rotted razorwire fence lines to indicate a civilization once rooted here.
“Holy shit!” she shrieks as she violently twists the radio dial. “It’s Night of the Livin’ fuckin’ Dead!”
Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) whipsaws the convertible onto the shoulder, hurling herself out into the weeds in hysterics, demanding her napping fugitive boyfriend, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), snap awake and locate on the dial the music that will soothe her jinglejangled nerves. When he finds a song—the speedpummel frenzy of their favorite band, thrash-metal outfit Powermad—it’s as if the young couple is capital-R Resurrected. Sailor backflips into the field with Lula, the two of them hipgripped by ecstasy and dancing with a screaming, high-kicking abandon. Each is in orbit of the other, the music awakening them from their overheated twilight torpor—but also providing them with a medium for true communication. Intercoursing between their bodies via dance is a wordless and infinite conversation, a kind of limb-flailed physical glossolalia, an extension of the river of easy confab that seems to flow eternally between the two.
And when their bodies finally come together, Powermad fades and the swooning Romanticism of a Richard Strauss composition soars from the soundtrack, washing away any other sound, including their voices. They speak soundlessly, but we don’t need to hear to know what they’re saying, and neither do they: “I love you.” Such is the power of the connection between them, a bond that transforms the world from a dull, marrow-colored sunset haze to a warm magenta so vivid and safe it seems torn directly from a Technicolor rainbow.
This is a crucial sequence—possibly the crucial sequence, a kind of map key to all that has come before and all that is to follow—in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, a candied work of rock ’n’ roll surrealism that warps a lovers-on-the-run travelogue through the American South with the writer-director’s trademark arcane absurdia. It’s crucial not just because the scene highlights Lynch’s vision of the film (“a really modern romance in a violent world—a picture about finding love in Hell”), not just because it reflects Lynch’s perception at the time that reality was transmogrifying into a channel-surfed nightmare of, well, Lynchian proportions (“the world was coming unglued then . . . the world was going insane,” he noted in his memoir, Room to Dream). Rather, it’s crucial because it ably portraits that which is so fundamental to this story: communication and conversation. Not just communication between its characters, but between the film and the perhaps lesser-known novel it is based upon. A visionary conversation—via the shared telling of this story—between David Lynch and one of the most important and underrated literary figures of the last half century: Barry fucking Gifford.
If you’re reading this magazine, then maybe you’ve passed through this particular corridor of American letters before. Still, it’s late and it’s dark, baby, so why not trace a path with your finger on this here map just to follow along so we don’t get lost. And mind that fried-chicken grease so the words don’t get smudged, dig? Okay, crank up that radio and let’s roll:
Barry Gifford was born in a Chicago hotel room in 1946 to a beauty queen mother and mobbed-up and distant father, the kind of entrance into the world that, had it not actually happened, he may well could have invented for one of his wayward characters. It’s a kind of explicitly American big bang, a heady mix of the gritty and the mythic from which Gifford’s early life crisscrossed from Chicago to south of the Mason-Dixon, traversing layers of vernacular and experience, living in hotel rooms with his mom, soaking in roughshod B movies of the 1950s on various antennaed TVs, picking up dialects equal parts seedy and revelatory, the jazz, the blues, the rock, the road. From there: college at the University of Missouri, the Air Force Reserve, an unrealized baseball career, journalism in the early days of Rolling Stone.
Keep that finger moving down the highway, you’re not gonna believe this part, peanut: Crafting over a dozen volumes of poetry of leathered, laconic lyricism. Penning the Beat bible Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. Founding the literary imprint and noir gateway drug Black Lizard in 1984, reprinting/rescuing such then-forgotten crimepulp gods as David Goodis, the Charleses (Willeford and Williams), and Jim Thompson from out-of-print obscurity and placing them in the hands of a new generation of crime fiction fans and authors. Releasing exceptional and foundational writing on film noir. And here we go, right here’s the direction we’re headed: creating one of the most profound bodies of postwar American literature in the form of the Roy stories (a kind of fictionalized funhouse mirror that reaches back to his youth and transmutes it into a hardscrabble coming-of-age tale) and especially the Sailor and Lula novels—works that when combined form a dialogue-jazzed, wolf-whistling tribute to and vivisection of American danger and American cool from the 1950s to right now.
Gifford’s entire career has been one in conversation with and about the American subterranean. Nowhere is that more evident than in the desperado existentialism and deep-fried soul of his Sailor and Lula books, a series of rockabillied Southern Gothic tales centered (mostly) on goodhearted ex-con bad boy Sailor Ripley and the love of his life, the deeper-than-she-seems cheesecake belle Lula Pace Fortune. Compressed within these works of hard-boiled minimalism and crackling bebop rhythms is a series of conversations (again, mostly) between Sail and Lula, conversations that simultaneously drive and detour the plots while also serving as a kind of ongoing Socratic dialogue between the two, all leather jacketed with the calamitous couple’s philosophies, dreams, memories, and obsessions. As a whole, these conversations form—like the scales of the movie-Sailor’s snakeskin jacket webbing together to form the physical embodiment of his “individuality and my belief in personal freedom”—a kind of prismatic weave, a rainbow through which their stories are told.
It’s in this way that Gifford’s works converse with that American subterranean which he is a monumental evangelist for, influence upon, and evolutionary force within, shaping the worlds of noir and crime fiction in ways both sublime and blunt-force that cannot be overstated. Inasmuch as his books chart the chats between his road-worn lovers to form an image of who they are, so does his literature form, in its dialogue with Americana, a unique vision of who we are, and of where we live—in a world that’s wild at heart and weird on top.
Okay, a couple loop-the-loops and roundelays aside, looks like we’re right on top of it now, kinda where we started from but also where we needed to be: a conversation between two masters of the American absurd, David Lynch and Barry Gifford. It’s all right there in that roadside radio scene, one that’s shared by book and movie alike. In the book, Lula simply flicks off the radio and she and Sailor chitchat about the decaying nature of the world as they continue on down the road. The film adapted and directed by Lynch, however, takes the scene and stretches it, heightens it, slurs it with the surreal, doing what all the best conversations do—revealing something new and true and wild.
The plot of Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart is, on its surface, one of relative pulp-fatalist simplicity: Sailor Ripley has done a short stint of jail time for manslaughter and, upon his release, breaks parole with his girlfriend, Lula Pace Fortune, and together they hit the road from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to California. On their tail are Lula’s overprotective mother, Marietta, and her boyfriend, Johnnie Farragut. Along the way, the paradoxically naive-yet-world-weary twentysomethings Sail and Lula encounter all manner of human grotesqueries and curiosities before breaking down in Big Tuna, Texas, and later breaking up.
Then there’s the plot of Lynch’s film adaptation of Wild at Heart, which Gifford described after his first viewing as “not boring.”
A lit match, a flame, an implosion. The opening credits fly.
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is a film that begins in Hell and fights to claw its way out by the end. Like a kind of call-and-response, the movie is a conversational retort to the novel, which itself conversely begins with joy and descends into entropy and depression by its final page.
To experience both is to watch two great artists discuss love, sex, death, rebirth, rock ’n’ roll, cigarettes, childhood, dancing, road movies, trauma, freedom, violence, grief, noir, and America, all rolled into a series of short verbal vignettes—some created solely by Gifford, some created solely by Lynch, some created by one and then heightened by the other—that form a film marbled with fire and latticed with rainbow light.
We first meet Lynch’s Sailor and Lula in medias res—tornado-dropped right in the middle of their story in Cape Fear. No meet-cute, no dizzy arc of two hothouse motormouths falling in love. Instead, with one vertiginous swoop of the camera, we are thrown out of the fiery credits and hurly-burly into the snake pit of depravity that these lovers must witness, endure, participate in, and ultimately escape from by film’s end. And it all begins with an assassination attempt on Sailor, organized by an obsessed Marietta (Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd)—with the emphasis on attempt. Whirlwinded by the physical and mental ferocity of Nic Cage, Sailor handily splits the assassin’s skull wide open in self-defense, while Lula screams in dismay and disgust. As a result, Sailor is jailed for nearly two years.
Thus we meet Sailor and Lula not as they fall in love, but as their love falls into endangerment—the moment when the whole world seems a threat to that which is most precious to them.
“Well, we’re really out in the middle of it now, ain’t we?”
It’s a question Lula asks as Sail pilots her Thunderbird into the desert dark. Behind them, the past burns in a bloodied red swirl of taillights swallowed by an ink-black night; before them, the road yawns onward into that same dust-deviled dark. As the sinuously serpentine Stratocaster slink of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” weaves around their words, Sailor makes a confession to Lula: before he knew her, he used to be a driver for local mobster Marcello Santos (J. E. Freeman). Further, on the night Lula’s father Clyde died in a mysterious house fire, Sailor painfully admits he drove Marcello to a home that, minutes later, burned down. Through a typically complicated—typically Lynchian—series of noir-adjacent convolutions, Sailor realizes and admits that he unknowingly chauffeured the executioner of Lula’s father. With the same big-hearted openness with which she and Sailor share every part of their lives with one another, Lula accepts his confession with love, but also a newfound adult sorrow that hadn’t etched itself upon her beautiful face before.
“It’s just shocking sometimes when things aren’t what you thought they were,” she sighs.
Throughout Sailor’s midnight confession, Lynch cuts back and forth between it and its antithesis, a scene in which Marietta and her long-suffering boyfriend, Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), discuss their plans to reclaim Lula from Sailor. Farragut grudgingly agrees to help, but insists Marietta be honest with him—is her occasional paramour Marcello Santos involved in the chase? Marietta stiffens, her eyes stormy, dark orbs, and she lies, denying that she asked Marcello for help as well. Lies, and denies that Marcello is out there, organizing hits on both Sailor and Farragut (whom Marcello suspects of knowing too much about Clyde’s death). Though passionate, theirs is a relationship based on a foundation of dishonesty and selfishness, unlike the selfless honesty that flows between Lula and Sailor. A typical but ingenious bit of Lynchian doubling: two couples, two brunet men and two blonde women, but only one pair forged in honesty and understanding.
Both Sailor’s confession and Marietta’s anti-confession are wholly invented by the director for the film, but are spoken in Gifford’s storytelling accent, a kind of conversation between scenes and artists simultaneously. Lynch moves Gifford’s subtextual undercurrents to the amphetamined sway of his film’s surface, while also stressing what is so precious, and different, about Sailor and Lula from everyone else, and why their precious love must be protected, and what it must be protected from.
As Sail and Lula continue on into the night, they find the road dotted with the ellipses of disaster—clothes, metal wreckage, glass, all increasingly strewn about the highway. Soon, an overturned car falls in the path of their high beams. The pair—already shaken by Sailor’s admission—watches helplessly as a single survivor emerges from the accordioned metal carnage. The Girl (Sherilyn Fenn) wanders dazed in the desert night, her porcelain face cracked and painted red with gore-chunked blood, forebodingly muttering that “my mother’s gonna kill me.” She then collapses in the sand as Sailor and Lula watch, and dies right there.
Despite the charmed nature of their post-jail reunion—a staccato series of short stories in which Sail and Lula party at bars and clubs, or hold delightfully meandering late-night chats about love and smokes and family and life, or share so much in their easy way (at one point a comfortable and secure Lula admits to being raped as a child to a compassionate, attentive Sailor; elsewhere, Sail regales Lula with tales of his sexual conquests, which engenders not her jealousy but instead her extraordinary arousal), or dance against the twilight, or fuck unquenchably—this beautiful broken doll lies in the sand before them like a reminder of the head-cracked assassin who was the world’s first threat to their love, like a horrid memory surfacing in a fantasy, reminding them that all dreams must come to an end.
“Well, I know it ain’t exactly the Emerald City,” Sailor mutters in a hound-dog drawl patterned after his beloved Elvis Presley. The morning after the wreck and his confession, he and Lula find themselves in a sun-cooked and sky-hammered shitkicker Hell—the Podunk and tumbleweeded inferno of Big Tuna, Texas. A place about as far from their dreams of life in La-La Land as is spiritually, if not physically, possible. They are out of money, out of gas, and, though they don’t know it yet, almost out of time.
David Lynch had a problem.
While he fell intensely in love with Barry Gifford’s then-unpublished Wild at Heart manuscript in early 1990—so much so that he abandoned plans for a vacation and added the film’s production schedule atop that of his television megahit Twin Peaks—he found Gifford’s ending to be dispiriting and depressing. In it, Lula and Sailor are holed up in the big nowhere of a dead-end Texas town, where she reveals that she’s pregnant and increasingly despondent about the encroaching realities of their situation. Sailor, desperate to provide for his woman and unborn child, falls in with a dead-eyed killer named Bobby Peru (“like the country”) and together they rob a local feed store. In the process Peru is killed by local law and Sailor arrested and given a decade of jail time. Upon his release and reunion with Lula, and introduction to their son, Pace, Sailor feels he doesn’t belong in this family unit and leaves them both in a gut-punch bit of classic noir fatalism.
Not knowing that Gifford was already hard at work writing Sailor and Lula’s reunion in additional installments of their saga, Lynch set himself to giving these bar-crossed lovers the happy ending he felt their dreams deserved. To do so would require changing the conversation that is Wild at Heart, redirecting it from the fusion of Giffordesque artpulp and Lynchian surrealism it had begun as and instead driving it down a different—and very yellow—road entirely, to a place where evil is defeated, where hope is rewarded, and where the wild at heart fight for their dreams and win.
David Lynch was off to meet the Wizard.
A remarkable thing about Wild at Heart: Lynch’s decision to merge the fuck-noir surrealistic psychodrama of his vision of Gifford’s novel with the musical-fantasy magic of Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz is, on paper, such an atomically incongruent unification of aesthetics that the resultant film should have been an incomprehensible mush of babbled pop culture references. Instead, Lynch’s Wild at Heart becomes a frenzied and freewheeling conversation not just between his work and Gifford’s, but between two opposing pillars of uniquely American mythology (noir and Oz), finding a strange common language—both stories are road thrillers of a sort, both about heroes wishing to escape an evil witch and find happiness over the rainbow.
By allowing the two works to speak with one another, each highlights aspects of the other, with Heart bringing out the darkness in Oz, and Oz underlining so many of Heart’s deeper meanings that might otherwise have been lost beneath its ever-shifting road-movie surface. It’s a union most evident in the film’s repeatedly prolonged and graphic sex scenes. Throughout the film’s first hour, as Sail and Lula burn a path across the American South, they stop nightly at hotels to wantonly fuck with bed-cratering abandon. Each additional sex scene is longer than the one before, and on first viewing they could be read—and were, by many critics at the time—as nothing but superficial surface, requisite sex commiserate with the film’s equally over-the-top violence.
But closer viewings reveal something deeper, more meaningful. Each sex scene between Sailor and Lula, their bodies incurving and twisting and wrapping around one another in a wordless and moaning myriad of combinations, is hazed in a different color. Their first sex scene is steeped in a bloodied and visceral red. Their second night is caressed in a warm and gentle yellow gel. Their third is bathed in an almost otherworldly pink. Their final sex scene, occurring just before their roadside declarations of love in the face of radio-stationed Hell, runs through a whole spectrum of color—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple-pink. Using the visual cinegrammar of his beloved Wizard of Oz, Lynch shows Sailor and Lula’s sex as a kind of precious intimacy, a physical conversation to mirror their verbal union. Each scene adds a different color of the rainbow into their world, as if to suggest that the “somewhere over the rainbow” they seek is not in California, not in Cape Fear, not on the road . . . it’s not anywhere, really. It’s wherever they find themselves together.
Or, as Lula puts it to Sailor in her own very unique way, that special Lynchian Giffordese: “You just take me right over the rainbow. It’s like your cock is talkin’ to me with a voice all its own.”
While in Gifford’s novel Marietta Fortune is a somewhat sympathetic figure, Lynch’s film transforms her into an outright villain, using the iconography of The Wizard of Oz to cast her as Wild at Heart’s Wicked Witch of the West. Like the film’s outrageous sex scenes, it’s a decision that initially seems a superficial one, reducing Marietta from a flesh-and-blood character into a simple archetype, but it allows Lynch to heighten and emphasize his vision of the movie as “a picture about finding love in Hell.” In the novel, our duo encounters an escalating series of obstacles and eventually disintegrates as a couple, and while that serves Gifford’s excellent noir-tinged tale rather well, the nature of Lynch’s frenetic film is such that it requires a representative face for all the challenges to Sailor and Lula’s love.
That face is not the sickly green visage of Oz’s Wicked Witch, but rather the red lipstick–slathered appearance of Marietta. Her every decision as the film’s villain sets forces in opposition to the young lovers—from her affair with Marcello Santos leading to Clyde Fortune’s death, to her multiple hits on Sailor, driving the young man to murder and to break parole on the run with Lula, leaving the two finally broken-down and without hope in the Hell of Big Tuna and prey to monsters like the stump-toothed Bobby Peru (a gleefully perverse Willem Dafoe). By centralizing her as the film’s source of wickedness (at one point Lula even imagines Marietta chasing her Thunderbird on a broomstick), Lynch gives Sailor and Lula’s love a malevolence to overcome.
Using Oz’s schismatic conversation between Good and Evil, the existence of a Wicked Witch in Wild at Heart dictates that there must be a counterforce, a Good Witch, one who represents what is magic and good and wild at heart in the world. All the layering of Oz’s aesthetics and tropes into Lynch’s film—the rainbows, the musical numbers (Sail gets off two great Elvis songs), the malformed, fantasial monstrosity of the villains, the infinite yellow-lined road—leads to Lynch being able to insert a magical entity, a deus ex Lychina, to upend the story and give it the ending he wanted, and one that the characters needed.
It’s a moment of pure cinemagic—Sailor has left Lula and Pace (Glenn Walker Harris Jr.) and he drifts into an industrial wasteland, where he’s beaten by nomadic bikers. As he lies dead center in an unending road in a state of dubious consciousness, he’s bathed in rich magenta light, not dissimilar to that which shined upon him and Lula on that roadside so many years before. Within that light floats the Good Witch (Sheryl Lee), straight out of Oz and into Lynch’s film, where she (and Oz) act as a kind of medium, a final means of communication between Barry Gifford and David Lynch, with Sailor speaking for Gifford’s noirish story, and the Good Witch for Lynch’s surrealistically hopeful film.
Sailor lists all the character defects that compose his noir archetype—“I’m a robber and a manslaughterer. And I haven’t had any parental guidance”—as reasons why he’s no good for Lula and Pace. When he finally mutters that he’s too wild at heart for his family, the Good Witch speaks in words Lynch has expressed in infinite combinations throughout his interviews, films, and song lyrics: “If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams. Don’t turn away from love, Sailor.”
Moments later, the Good Witch is gone, as is Marietta, who disappears from her distant home in a screaming plume of smoke. But what remains—a reunited Sailor, Lula, and Pace, all bound together by Sailor’s impromptu rendition of “Love Me Tender” as the sun sets, as if they’ve finally found their own personal radio station to listen to as the world burns, one that finally plays what they want to hear—is a film, is a novel, is a story, is a conversation, that lingers on. 
Travis Woods lives and writes in Los Angeles. As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
Illustration: Olivier Courbet.
Certain critics have suggested that Cormac McCarthy’s novels are based on pointless violence. It’s a common experience to read a book in which the world is portrayed as a nest of vipers who exterminate each other in the worst possible ways; human nature unexpurgated, the critics argue. One can easily imagine the author rubbing his hands in front of a mirror, just before sitting at his desk, thinking about the vile, corrupt deeds his character is going to commit that day; wondering what new way he can find to horrify the world. To make the reader shudder. But in the case of Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023), that judgment is unfair and totally ineffectual. He wasn’t an author who arranged his novels as a list of senseless felonies. His prose work is among the most profound and beautiful to be found in contemporary times. His fictional worlds are inhabited by men with complex codes of honor, whose lot it is to endure hard lives on the margins of modern society. His narratives can pass from the straightforward, detailed description of a long ride on horseback to the purest lyricism when depicting the tenuous changes of light on the late afternoon horizon; from imagining the spirits of almost extinct native North American tribes galloping in the wind to speaking of the villainy of a gang of bloody scalp hunters; from defining God with a total lack of irony to displaying his own heartrending compassion for the burden of death carried by each and every member of the human race.
The word that distinguishes his work from the mainstream of the extremely violent novels swamping the shelves of bookstores is hope. Or rather, a strange sensation—mostly unjustifiable, and very difficult to locate in a way that is set in stone—that it’s all been worth the effort.
All that is true, but there’s no denying that the novelist wrote what can be considered some of the darkest, bloodiest novels in contemporary North American literature.
Bret Easton Ellis undoubtedly vies for that honor: American Psycho (1991) was, and continues to be, harshly criticized for the same form of excess. An interminable series of showy, gratuitous killings stultify the novel to the point of eliminating any narrative structure not associated with delight in the macabre. Ellis has published four more novels since then, but American Psycho remains in print and is by far the author’s most famous work. Nevertheless, Ellis did not yield to the monster he created; Lunar Park (2005) is a revealing sign of an evolution in style, the need for transformation that causes the younger version of the author to set out on paths that lead him to himself. From being the young nihilist who rants and raves rather than narrates, maintaining his enfant terrible status became less important to Ellis than the story and the tools employed to tell it, showing the metamorphosis of a lifelike (or almost lifelike) character and giving form to certain reflections that are central to the novel. If instinct (a destructive instinct, a vitriolic need to deliver blows to American society) is at the heart of his first books, it’s clear that in his more recent work this creative motor alternates with other reasons for writing, and that Ellis is refining his thesis with each new novel.
And the goal of that quest is meaning.
McCarthy, on the other hand, didn’t have to travel that path to self-knowledge in his books. From his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), the grim or thorny events in the story have their precise counterpart in his ability to find room for hope and to tease out an ending that gives precedence to certain untamed, godless versions of virtue over a reality that at times seems determined to annihilate its characters. The world is a wild place: this is one of the truths that filter through into every paragraph of McCarthy’s novels. But also, between war and cruel rage, lack of mercy and death, the heart of man triumphs in a completely unostentatious way; it glows humbly, like the fragile but incandescent material of which it is composed.
Holocaust and violence are forces inherent in the human soul—if we are honest with ourselves, centuries of history and literature make it impossible to ever forget this great truth; and if we do, there are novelists like the author of Child of God (1973) to remind us. But the art doesn’t simply lie in giving a pedestrian account of the damage, in recognizing the dark side of the soul and describing its expanses with sadistic rage and delectation. I imagine it also involves seeing what is behind it all. Searching among the ashes to which barbarity and pain reduce human beings to find the particles that continue to burn weakly, glimmering in the enclosing darkness. And then suspecting that we have come face to face with an essential—more hidden and inaccessible, and therefore the most precious—part of our nature.
Throughout the broad range of his novels, nature is far from being the backdrop in a movie yellowing from falsity. When Blood Meridian (1985) inaugurated McCarthy’s Western cycle, the landscape—already an overwhelming, hypnotic presence in the author’s novels—took on the endless, menacing dimensions of the old desert.
The fury of the elements is one more force, one more character—most often choleric and dry as dust—that constantly challenges the people who live in the remote plains or makeshift cities that compose the desolate geography of the author’s work. It rains a lot in McCarthy’s novels; storms roll in from the horizon to unleash lightning that flashes with all the strength of its soul: “[He] watched the lightning. Down there in the wood the birchtrunks shone palely and troops of ghost cavalry clashed in an outraged sky, old spectral revenants armed with rusted tools of war colliding parallactically upon each other like figures from a mass grave shorn up and girdled and cast with dread import across the clanging night and down remoter slopes between the dark and darkness yet to come.”[1] The celestial ray, the “sulphur light”[2] that makes human imagination regress to a magical state preceding reason. Then, infected by the perception of the attributes of an earlier era, the narrator asks himself, “Are there dragons in the wings of the world?”[3]
Rivers overflow, rain washes things away, cold and heat threaten life. It would be no exaggeration to say that in every one of his books, the author couldn’t resist the temptation to dedicate a beautiful, intense paragraph to a description of the dramatic effects of lightning on the world, the sky’s rage at the earth. “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”[4] Nature is a titanic stage setting whose dynamic is measured on grandiose scales. A looming, earthly god intimidates minuscule humans as it urges them to test the limits of their resistance.
In addition to reminding humans of their mortality, lightning becomes an instrument of destiny. The young Blevins who accompanies Rawlins and John Grady Cole in their flight in All the Pretty Horses (1992) is afraid of lightning as he is certain it will cause his death. A long list of family members killed by some improbable but well-aimed bolt is a strong argument for fearing the fury of the elements. Dying from a lightning strike is, therefore, a form of inheritance; a sort of prediction of death.
Animals, unsullied carriers of a fragment of natural forces, connect humans to the earth. In the first chapter of The Crossing (1994), sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with capturing a predator that is attacking his family’s cattle. After a long, ingenious struggle, during which the animal manages to elude all the traps the boy and his father lay for it, Billy succeeds in capturing the pregnant she-wolf prowling their land. Compassion for the animal leads him to disobey his father and return the wolf to Mexico, where it in fact comes from. The inhabitants of the region whom he meets on his journey say he is crazy and beg him to give up the plan. But something impels him to reinstate—even if only on a secondary and slightly onerous plane—the natural order of things. As if the human race were not possessed of life to use and abuse at will, but were only the least integrated of animals, the one that must keep its eyes open so as not to outreach itself, to remain in contact with its primitive, most genuine traits.
Rather than calamities one prays will never come about, those natural forces are integrated into the lives of the characters. Life and death are in true communion. The possibility of dying in the harsh climate or in an encounter with some wild animal doesn’t concern those who live in a territory where the border between Mexico and the United States is nonexistent, a region that predates geopolitical limitations; that undefined status makes them detached, stoic: both ideal attributes for integration into an ecosystem that provides only the necessities for survival. Infiltrating—or maybe reintegrated into—a primitive dynamic where everything is connected; a dynamic these indomitable cowboys don’t fear, even though they know its wildness, its lack of pity. Claws, fangs, extreme weather, poison, thorns, fast-flowing rivers, storms. The childhoods of the characters are passed in close proximity to death, in coexistence with wild animals, listening to the unspoken message of the harsh land around them, and so they grow into men who hear that voice of the wind and ghosts with which that part of life speaks to the human race. A human race that seems to benefit from listening to it from time to time.
A thin red line separates Mexico and the rest of North America, and within a context of illegality and death, the Mexican side of the frontier both resists and allows the trafficking of almost anything—people, goods, ways of life, expressions, stories—just as happens in nearly all the novels of this narrator of the Deep South. Riding between the postmodern Western and adventure fiction, each of McCarthy’s books has more than one thing in common with the violent, stark, lyrical, rugged, southern imagery of Sam Shepard and Barry Gifford. Literature that neither asks for nor offers mercy, these works present a cruel vision of a country of dark entrails and a turbulent spirit.
No Country for Old Men (2005) contains the usual dose of violence (bullets fired at point-blank range, scenes that seem more appropriate for a country in the grips of war) and rural life, but also introduces a new element into McCarthy’s work: the reflection on old age that triggers the incurable, senile nostalgia for times past that overwhelms Sheriff Bell—a Second World War veteran and pacifist—when faced with the senselessness of the present day. In this way, the novel oscillates between two territories that compose a spoken portrait of a region unsuited to men with little resolve: the sheriff’s monologues, wistful remembrances of an irremediably lost country that is burdened with “a strange kind of history and a damned bloody one too.”[5]
A careful reading of the novel would possibly lead one to come to the following conclusion: it is easier for people to communicate with and be receptive to the forces of nature than to seek the point where harmony can reign in their relationships. Rather than undertaking that quest, the majority calmly accept their role as pawns of a force that is capable of carrying them away: war is “the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”[6] This monologue in Blood Meridian, spoken by Judge Holden—a greatly feared and diabolical figure, leader of a group of nomadic bandits whose capacity for torture and killing knows no limits—displays a trite, mythic conception of war. The hostility apparent in armed confrontations illustrates the position this expression of civilization has in McCarthy’s oeuvre.
Desert roads are lawless. Or, at all events, law ends up being imposed, after hundreds of gunshots, by the person whose superiority consists of dodging the bullets of others and accurately aiming his own. Bandits, Indians, convicts, highwaymen, fugitives (possibly from themselves), thugs, lunatics, pariahs, men without a past or future; the vast majority of the characters in whom McCarthy and readers find points of fascination are beings who live in that shadowy space into which society fails to project its order. The limits of social life, in need of a higher arbiter to maintain the peace, melt away on reaching their frontier with an untamed region. Because society, civilization, that force constructed from culture and politics that brings humans together over time, finds its limits in each person who decides (or is forced) to live outside it.
In recent times, those of his readers who are accustomed to the twofold literary cartography of McCarthy’s work—novels set in the vicinity of Knoxville and others of a Western nature—have found No Country and The Road (2006) strange fruit. More violent and stark than usual. Even more direct, like two pressingly urgent visions: less lyrical, less parsimonious in prose terms; books of a calculated, disturbing minimalism. Two body blows attempting to connect as effectively as possible and so quickly canceling each other out. No Country for Old Men opens with a scene that clearly foreshadows catastrophe: the war veteran Llewelyn Moss stumbles on the aftermath of a mass killing; in an unnamed high plain on the Mexican-American border, a pile of corpses bears witness to the event, and two million dollars (which Moss feels no qualms in appropriating) is now the prize for finding the former soldier alive.
“I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. I dont know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell,” muses Sheriff Bell.[7] There is no enduring fixed point of balance to give oneself up to. Humans are capable of carrying off everything on their “worstward ho,”[8] and that sense of dejection is portrayed above all else in the novel.
Humans die with awful ease. We are entities with no way out, trapped in the fragility of decomposing flesh, poorly protected by a civilization that sooner or later reveals itself to be a rickety utopia. At the mercy of the truly powerful—the very people who hand out death: assassins, traffickers, madmen—for whom only violence has any value. The spiral of violence and extermination that certain men let loose on the species like tendrils of hate threatens to obliterate everything. The psychopath Anton Chigurh performs a string of the most horrendous forms of killing: evil embodied in a subject who had little need of an order from a narco to hunt down Moss. En route, a few others will bite the dust for simply having crossed his path. Sometimes for less.
In the violent darkness, the author often used to glimpse a subtle tone of light that gave meaning to the whole picture: Did he then admit defeat? Evil is certainly a presence and a constant point for reflection in McCarthy’s novels. The same evil that seems to permeate every hour of these dark times. The fact that it has been the focus of philosophers, artists, historians, and social and criminal critics makes it impossible to ignore for a sensibility attentive to the symptoms and open wounds of the age; it is the same evil that, in McCarthy’s novels, even the blind can see before them, from which some men flee, but which those brave souls who know how to confront it survive. In each of his books, evil is manifest as just one more element from which the world is constructed. No more or less important than all the other forces under which human beings exist. Evil is indeterminate and nuanced, although the latter doesn’t exempt it from showing itself to be brutal and bloody in the actions of men. But neither is it exuberantly fascinating, trivial, or commonplace; it, too, has its point of equilibrium. In that network of correspondences and battles, it finds its rightful place in the secret order of things.
Perhaps that last point explains why the figure of Sheriff Bell is capable of showing us that even in this cruel, frenetic novel there is a minute space where human beings can aspire to end their days in peace.
It could almost be said that the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Road was written by someone else. The prose is still spare, severe, but the novel has dispensed with the overloaded passages, the omnivorous grandiloquence, and the primacy given to style that was his trademark. It is as though McCarthy veered off the path and reached a conclusion even he found surprising. There’s always a temptation to interpret beyond the literary work and explain a book from the viewpoint of a particular moment in its author’s life or the historical period in which he existed. To find—or construct—an extra-literary message. Begin the investigation with the dedication of the book—a curious feature, as none of his previous novels had one—and you come up with the name of the author’s eight-year-old son: John Francis McCarthy. The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and its main problematic can be summed up in the following questions: How can a father raise his son to live amid devastation without making him heartless? How can one raise—a verb that clearly implies the future—any child in a world whose present has no value?
In this light, the novel might appear to be a long letter (I’m tempted to say an ethical will) disguised as fiction. The teachings of an adult male who has seen too much and is looking for a means to transmit (bequeath) a minimal core of knowledge to the person who is going to need it on the path he is setting out on. As mentioned above, this novel and No Country could seem like a pair of bones stripped of flesh by the action of the desert climate, stark and urgent, whose reading leaves no room for free interpretation.
Despite the heightened sensibility that spread throughout the United States after 9/11—or possibly exactly because of it—only a very few of the novelists interested in the practice and criticism of the American way of life have offered their take on the topic, fictionalizing the possible effects of the event. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) is a head-on vision of the attack, with one of the survivors as a central character. In McCarthy’s interpretation of things, he seems to have decided to move forward in time, to carry the atmosphere of beating war drums that are deafening the country to the limit, and then recount what would happen next.
In his brief essay “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Philip K. Dick speaks of the dangers facing writers when they allow themselves to be carried along by ill omens: “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom.”[9] In this sense, recounting the future becomes an exercise that repeats the scenarios and actions that occur after a nuclear catastrophe—a very possible future for Dick and other authors. But this is not an invitation to wallow in tragedy. Dick demands a more realistic function of post-apocalyptic narratives: to take desolation as a point of departure for imagining how humans might survive in such conditions. “Make the ruined world of ash a premise,” he declares. “State it in paragraph one, and get it over with, rather than winding up with it at the very end. And make the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve the problem of postwar survival.”[10] A horrific event recounted hundreds of times does not gain clarity in the repetition. Following this logic, it is right for The Road to dispense with almost all the scenes that are given pride of place in No Country. Here, life sustains itself precariously among the ashes of the old world, a practically absurd relic of a past that is painfully breaking up in the memory, on the point of ceasing to exist forever. And that quality—life—is central to the subterranean reflections the novel secretes under the scorched crust of a planet plagued by an atmosphere of ash and extreme cold. Nuclear war, climate change; speculation about technology or arms are not the enigmas animating this future narrative.
The only means of avoiding starvation is the canned food the survivors forage for among the ruins of civilization. When the protagonists of the novel find provisions in quantities that will allow them to live, the question arises of whether life in a devastated world is still an infinitely transcendent gift: “Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over.”[11] The value of life becomes relative in the face of “the frailty of everything revealed at last”; consciousness is an ember of humanity condemned to live in a cadaverous world. Violence is not inherent in the apocalypse, but in the circumstances that prevent its completion; the precious but flimsy miracle through which life persists, even though it be—I repeat—as a fragile spark that gives meaning in the infinite darkness.
An involuntary crier of doom, McCarthy never took his eye off the things that really matter, and this being the case, it became an almost ethical duty to deal with the grimmest of scenarios, the worst of futures, so as to be able to say that—between despair and madness, total aridity and lack, cannibalism and robbery—life must forge a path. “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.”[13] The father wants to preserve in his son the innocence every child has a right to in order to find out about life; he hides the brutality of the new world from him because he hopes that, when they reach the south, another life will await them. At some point in All the Pretty Horses, it’s said that if one doesn’t hide what’s coming from the young, they won’t even have the courage to set out on the path of their individual existence. It’s a hard test, and its cruelty has to be hidden under a veil of mystery. Otherwise, life would be immeasurable, an impossible task.
The Road would seem to be proof of that. Emptied of history and future, when the protagonists reach the coast, the father confronts the physical and spiritual enigma that is the sea, and in the face of the titan that has always prompted profound philosophical and mystical questions, he can only feel hollow: “The slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back.”[14] Highways and interstates are all that remain of the old way of life, language slowly empties out, lacking referents in the real world to give it meaning. What is it that makes us human? The question hovers over the ruins of the world in every page. Is there something beyond the historical convention of culture or the refined forms of existence that technological advances secure for the species? In what particle of our organic material does the essence that defines us reside?
The characters search among the rubble for that silver thread linking their battered souls to the extinct human race. The worst has yet to come: it wasn’t war and devastation; the world that most deeply violates human essence has still to be revealed, populated by posthumans urgently trying to remake themselves from their own ashes. At the heart of this lugubrious, terrifying story, the author states that the human race must forge the circumstances that allow it to “be”—not continue being, but being again, from a different perspective, a true renaissance—that ensure its existence, not as a mere sustaining of physical abilities, but with dignity. The dignity that violence and destruction wrench from us, leaving us at the mercy of our own rage and the most cruel and direct action of the elements.
CODA
The recently deceased Spanish novelist Javier Marías, himself an eternal candidate for a Nobel Prize, was one of the authors who for decades pointed to Cormac McCarthy as the ideal laureate. It’s no secret that there was probably only one reason why the Swedish Academy failed to act with the justice the case merited: I’d lay odds on the fact that the author of one of the last legitimate literary odysseys would have refused the prize on discovering that to receive it, he would have had to be present at a public ceremony. Nor does it seem likely that he would have considered—if given the option—recording a video, and not for reasons of his mental and spiritual health, but from sheer lack of interest.
An out-and-out recluse, McCarthy seemed unaware of what was happening around him: prizes, sell-through print runs, legions of readers and fellow writers publicly expressing their admiration. The cowboy-in-chief declared himself to have a long list of interests (the versatility of his narrative voice would support this assertion), in which literature never ranked very high. He was immersed in a world where Manichaeism wasn’t a valid perspective, where natural forces toughen the skin and the souls of men, and the size of a soul is measured in an unforeseen field of battle: a world where life and death are complementary forces that daily create what we call our reality.
It’s a curious fact that one of the most popular weapons of the Wild West, the single-action, .45-caliber Colt Frontier revolver, was commonly known as the Peacemaker. This rather evasive way of naming an object by the opposite of its effect can be seen as the equivalent of the order underlying McCarthy’s cosmos: without guns, peace would be impossible; without the changes and fractures that generate violence, it is impossible to discover the ultimate order of the world.
In the Wild West, a gun can stand as a counter-emblem of itself. Just as in those vast territories where the world is unquestionably real, there is a balance of opposites in objects. Antithetical spirits are present in a single material, exactly as they are in McCarthy’s novels: death and life, the fall and the rise, violence and tenderness.
As a peacemaker who felt no fear in eschewing what could turn out to be dangerous shortcuts on the long road to meaning, that sense to which all human will aspires, Cormac McCarthy took the roundabout route, the panoramic odyssey that takes in harsh territories, uncivilized towns, and implacable men.
In his final years, when we could all predict that stylistic changes in his most recent works heralded new forms (while his last novels[15] were cooking over a slow flame, in his implacable, unhurried manner) and announced a fresh creative (humane, philosophical) period, it was possible to state that the arduous journey had indeed had its recompense, found its meaning. Sixteen years after the publication of The Road, Cormac McCarthy once again surprised us by leaving the way the great do, at the peak of his creative powers: he died shortly after publishing his last great literary saga, offering readers another reason to appreciate his work and renewing public interest in it. The narrator of All the Pretty Horses says that “it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”[16] Reading McCarthy’s books, it seems to me that it was worth not knowing at the beginning where we were heading, that life was a paramo of loneliness and thorns; worth fearing violence, madness, and death, confronting the harshness of existence, in order to at least guess that a logic, the implacable logic of life, is hidden behind it all; to understand the nature of the destiny of human beings, their smallness and unending need to survive, after the event.
NOTES
[1] Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (New York: Random House, 1979), 287.
[2] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2007), 52.
[3] McCarthy, Suttree, 35.
[4] Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1992), 67.
[5] Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Random House, 2005), 284.
[6] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (London: Picador, 1985), 249.
[7] McCarthy, No Country, 79.
[8] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983).
[9] Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Oblique no. 6 (December 1955).
[10] Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction.”
[11] McCarthy, The Road, 163.
[12] McCarthy, The Road, 28.
[13] McCarthy, The Road, 145.
[14] McCarthy, The Road, 254.
[15] The Passenger and Stella Maris, both published in 2022.
[16] McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 284.
Luis Jorge Boone (Monclova, Mexico, 1977) is the author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collection Bisonte mantra, the short story collection Suelten a los perros, the novel Toda la soledad del centro de la Tierra, and the book of essays Cámaras secretas: Sobre la enfermedad, el dolor y el cuerpo en la literatura. He is a member of the SNCA of Mexico. He has received the Inés Arredondo Short Story, Elías Nandino Young Poetry, Ramón López Velarde Poetry, Gilberto Owen Literature, and Agustín Yáñez Short Story awards.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo
A little over a year ago, I moved to San Antonio. Since then, my mama has visited—often, and every time she parks her car at the door, there’s more of everything with her. More people. More bags. More plans. More requests of things like when can I wash and retwist her hair, or when am I gon’ write the book based off the plotline in her head, and mostly: where in the city can we go explore that got access to both kid-friendly activities and alcoholic beverages. Before I moved here, I lived with her in Dallas a lil over a year too. Spring of 2020. The pandemic hit the exact time my lease was up, and my mama had become the guardian of three little girls—my cousins. I decided to make my way back to Texas, finally, mostly because I assume my presence gon’ help since there’s no one else around who gon’ help her, like it’s my daughterly duty, even though I ain’t got no motherly instinct. Reacclimating to living with mine as an adult wasn’t that hard to do—albeit sometimes annoying, after not being there since I was eighteen. And living with three kids wasn’t that hard to do either—albeit sometimes annoying because they feed off each other’s energy considering they were only three, five, and seven at the time. Ironically, this was all happening while I was writing a memoir. I found it very hard to write, and hard to remember, reread, or remedy who I was at their ages. So during my homecoming, I spent all my time orchestrating bath routines, sitting through school days on Zoom, grocery shopping, cooking, playing, reading, picking up, dropping off, hosting movie and dance party nights—you know, parenting.
While living there, I stumbled upon a backstreet like an airplane runway that I would drive back and forth on endlessly whenever I needed to be alone. The road runs uninterrupted, and most people who live up against it own farms filled with cattle and small bodies of water. My mama’s house is blocks over and arm’s length from the next one, but it’s the longest she’s ever lived in the same spot my whole life. Six years. When I was a child, we lived up and down Interstate 635 in Mesquite, Garland, Forney, Pleasant Grove, and basically everywhere in Dallas. By the time I graduated high school, we had moved almost ten times due to rent changes or life changes, or a combination of both, so I never really saw home as a roof. There was never enough time to grow into anything, much less enough space to outgrow it. It was not home. It was a place where I slept. On couches, in her bed, on the floor. By the time I started looking to live on my own again, I hadn’t had a bed of my own in almost four years. Home for me has been a car and a road and sometimes getting back to wherever my mama was. But she’s settled now, and stable in her neighborhood—able to provide my lil cousins with a home, and I’m happy they got one. If there is a home of my own for me to have, I thought, I need to figure out where it’s at and who I am in it.
It’s like the more I attempted to write about my childhood, the more I realized my initial Dallas departure was outta desperation and not the pursuit of a college education. I spent too much time having the same conversation: the one where I try to make my mama understand how our family’s abuse of her kindness makes me start saying I don’t really love the people I’m supposed to. At least not in the way I’ve been conditioned to believe I should. I didn’t know how to explain that without people thinking I was loose in the membrane or trying to hurt somebody’s feelings. So I found other things to say.
I told my mama This what I be talking ’bout. When is you gon’ stop?
I told my mama They got a mama, bro.
I told my mama Don’t tell me ’bout they mama.
I told my mama I can’t take her mouth.
I told my mama You gon’ have to make a decision whether or not you gon’ keep them because letting her come in and out whenever she feel like it is doing more harm than good. If they gon’ be here, it’s your job to protect them.
I told my mama None of this would still be happening if you stuck to a boundary.
I swear, my original plan was to stay. In her house. For a year. And in Dallas, once I moved out.
I spent a month or two researching and touring apartments across the city while carrying out my cousin duties without complaint. I loved being with the kids. (I would love to be close enough to where they could visit me whenever they wanted, but that would never work.) I apartment hunted through Plano and Richardson and downtown Dallas in search of my first big girl apartment. But again, it was a constant reminder that there’s other places to go. I don’t know when flowers are supposed to bloom—all my plants are fake—but I know they ain’t on nobody’s road to be seen like they used to be. The bluebonnets that ran alongside every road in Ennis and even Lancaster done been replaced—or covered—by cement from dump trucks.
I drove up Interstate 30 east toward the “luxury” of standard amenities and west toward “extra fees” because in too many ways, the city is building itself into something it’s not. My plans no longer mattered once I realized the people in the neighborhoods I once roamed were getting kicked out of their lifelong homes to make room for high-rise apartments for tenants demanding off-leash hours for their dogs in designer clothes. I assumed my dislike of every layout was a metaphor for something, and that metaphor was: you stay here, you die here—on the inside. Plus, I was in a cloud all day, every day. That, and I was eating a lot of Chipotle. And all of it combined not only shifted the plan but messed with the writing. I was so worried about what was happening to the kids that it was hard to concentrate on myself. Plus, when my mama told me to leave it alone—that I worked myself up too much, as if she wasn’t the one who kept bringing me all the information—the panic attacks recommenced. I spent less time writing because I was mad—at her—mostly for allowing me to be her main source of support. Eventually I started telling her some harsher truths. And only then did she want me to be her child. I said, “Aight,” and looked out the window. If I was a kid, she would’ve said I was being disrespectful and made me turn to face her—stare at her—for the rest of the ride home. But I was grown and didn’t have to do anything. But I couldn’t stay, and it was no longer sad.
I said, “Aight,” and turned my back on it all.
I said, “Aight,” and tried to hold in the bubbles inside my body since we almost back at the house.
Once we were there, I said, “Aight,” and went in the back room. Told her I gotta write, but instead I heaved into an empty Chipotle bag under a blanket on the floor for thirty minutes straight about having to break up with my mama. Once my body stopped spasming, I kinda just stared in silence for a while before eating the Chipotle I’d set aside, and then I Googled an image of the Texas map. One thing I knew to be a fact: there’s a way to get anywhere, even away. I just picked a place, a place where I didn’t know nobody. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon making a list of apartments to tour.
It all happened overnight—I was out the door by five a.m. that morning with a friend who was tagging along for the adventure more than they were tryna convince me to stay.
“I understand that,” she said when I told her the story of how I had picked San Antonio. I didn’t know nothing ’bout it—had no ties to it—other than the few field trips in grade school, so this abrupt decision confused some folk. They asked, “You moving for a job?” I said no. They asked, “For love?” I said no. They said, “Well, can’t you just stay?” I said no. Once outta Dallas and on Interstate 35, we passed through Waco into Austin fairly quickly before entering New Braunfels, which I also knew nothing ’bout as a town other than going to Schlitterbahn once. I made great time. It was barely nine a.m. when we had to stop for gas—at Buc-ee’s—because everybody know that’s just what you do whenever you see one. And after hours of sitting and switching my music between alt sad Cali-girl and substance-abusing Atlanta rapper, I stood outside and pumped gas with one hand while holding an egg, bacon, and potato burrito in the other.
“You got a place you like the most?” my friend asked through the window while I bit into the burrito about forty-five minutes out. She knew if I was making the first step, I’d already overthought and planned a slew of outcomes.
“Yeah,” I said, chewing, shaking the gas nozzle free of its last drops, “the second one is where I wanna really live, I think.”
I knew a decision would be made that day. Out of the five SA spots I scouted, they were all nice, considering they didn’t look all that different from some of the Dallas apartments I had toured. There was usually a well-dressed lady with a fake smile telling us the building was new and the apartment’s appeal was that the building was new, yet something about it felt like a hotel. All the hallways were cold and excessively long; the bedrooms were boxy and small. I wouldn’t fit. We saw another apartment that was in my budget, but it reminded me too much of the time I had spent rooming with roaches in Alabama, so the answer was no. We even saw an apartment with a floor-to-ceiling glass sunroom attached, and it felt like something out of a movie, but it was way too expensive and way too close to Six Flags and US 281. And if I couldn’t get to Target whenever I wanted without a forty-five-minute delay, I didn’t think I could survive. The spot I mentioned at the gas station was also overpriced, but it was perfect because I wanted it. It was perfect because its size made sense. It had an extra room for activities (aka an office) I’d rarely use. A patio. Windows. Lots of windows, for the light I needed to let in. I figured if I was gon’ move for real, it was about time I loved where I stayed. Plus, I’d been doing ok at this adulting thing, and I didn’t give myself enough credit. I mean, my credit was kinda nonexistent and I didn’t even have a credit card, but still: I framed the decision as a reward to myself.
“Living here might be tight,” I said, although I’d already been emailing about submitting an application.
“Yeah, but you gotta take a risk,” my friend said. “Figure it out later.”
“Yea, you right.” I nodded once we were back in the car.
Looking out at the surroundings between apartment stops, I thought San Antonio seemed isolated enough. It was full of people, clearly. But as I drove into the city more, all I could think about was finding the longest road I could drive down. I spotted obscure roads and anticipated exploring them and it soothed me—the thought of all the windows down in the nighttime. “You right,” I said again, already plotting who I could become in this pending seclusion. It’s how I’d found all my empty roads. I had found the backstreet by my mama’s house because I was always searching. Some days I’d plan out what time of day I’d drive down it to feel the wind at its height, and sometimes I’d bring the kids along so they could hang their heads outta the window and watch the cows. Other days I’d just end up there whenever I needed to get out of the house. In the daytime, the road was usually hollow. At night—eerily calming, mostly because it was desolate and lacked streetlights. I’d drive to its edge just to turn around and go back the way I had come. I felt out of place everywhere I would land, probably because I was scared of everything. But driving down this backstreet revealed my desire to feel placed. Sturdy. Open to more than one dream—a place where I could take my time. A place where I wouldn’t always be fighting the desire to leave.
“Leaving ain’t gon’ do nothing, bro,” my friend said. “You still gon’ feel the same way because you care about them kids, and you care about how people treat yo mama. You really all she got.” I didn’t agree about the leaving part because I hadn’t fully accepted maybe I was a runner, but I got what she saying. “I already know how you is though,” she finished. “Bye.” She laughed. “I’ll see you in six months. I’ll come visit.”
Two and a half months after that trip, I was living in San Antonio. Originally, I thought the move was the breakup and all it would take is a toll tag and a seventy-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Something like that. But I was always speeding then. The three years I lived in Alabama, I drove nine hours back home to Dallas as often as I could to get away from my depression. When I moved back in with my mama, I’d drive around aimlessly for hours to get away from my anger. When I drove around the city limits of San Antonio, I realized this city was also changing into something big-city adjacent with all its pending construction, fusion taco spots, and Starbucks on every corner. But it didn’t bother me, because it wasn’t about the place—it was about how I felt in the space. I changed cities with nothing but boxes of books and some clothes, and yet I never felt as content as I did with myself in a half-empty apartment. I loved figuring out what I wanted to do in each room of my space, where I was the most comfortable and safe I’d ever felt in my body.
My mama and my lil cousins helped me move in, and when she left, she texted me: in line at Starbucks which I will probably stop drinking so much of once we get back home. Speaking of home, make yours what you want and need it to be. In this same text, she also said: Keep in mind—family is forever and when we get to heaven it will be more of us. I finally accepted that she will never get it, or me.
I worked on my book nonstop from the moment I moved in, and almost eight months later, it was finally formed into a shape I wasn’t too ashamed to share. And although working on the book was the most devastating and stressful process I’ve ever endured, working on it made me fearless. Working on me is how I got here in the first place.
Now, I am alone. Even my dog is dead. I don’t know a better way to put it. I’m not complaining; this is the exact way I like it, the exact way I’ve always wanted it. I love not knowing nobody in this city. At a year of living here, I’ve stopped feeling unsettled, because I’ve stopped excusing my inability to face myself for freedom. This is the proudest I’ve ever been of me, even when it hurts. Even in those moments where my existence feels overwhelming, I don’t get the urge to run. Or throw up. I just lie down. In my bed. And say thank you.
Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She loves laughing, leaving, and writing Make Love in My Car, a music column for Southwest Review. Some of her other work can be found in, or on, the Paris Review, High Times, the Rumpus, and more. She’s the author of a book of poetry, The Collection Plate, and a book of essays, When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Fruit Punch, her memoir, is out now.
Illustration: Vitus Shell
Your love story? You can write the beginning. You can write the beginning and the middle, but not the ending. You can write the early-beginning and the late-beginning and the early-middle and even the middle-middle—but never the ending. There’s no end in sight, and besides, if you were at the end, you wouldn’t think to tell it because you’d be living it instead. But the beginning and the middle: You can type it. Revise it. Go over it the way water shapes rock, smoothing its jagged edges, polishing it in the sun.
How people feel about second-person perspective depends on who they are. Some readers say it’s tedious and some English teachers ban it from classrooms. Writers on Twitter say it’s an amateur move, too limiting—a claim to which other writers respond with successful examples: Here, here, here. Scholars publish essays with columns and diagrams to illustrate the different variations of second person because not every you is the same you—some yous are meant to be the reader, while other yous are clearly a narrator talking about herself through a thin disguise. Regardless, there’s always caution. Don’t let it make your writing lazy. Don’t let it get claustrophobic. Tread lightly.
But before second person, it’s first person, all I and me. You’re solo in a way that makes you pine for a you. You imagine this person as a jewel. You picture the gleaming facets: a nightstand stacked with books, the cracked, colorful spines beside a glass of overnight tap water with its cluster of tiny bubbles. You conjure another’s eyes, how they flicker with light as this person steps in from the storm, snowflakes melting into a dark wool collar. The feel of the other’s hip in your palm as you sleep, your chest against another’s back: you can imagine that, too. Even the clutter doesn’t bother you: the socks tossed near the hamper or the moisturizer in the bathroom, its cap left off in a rush. Still, the person remains abstract like that one Rothko painting, a gradation of reds—raspberry to persimmon to plum—that put an embarrassing lump in your throat when you visited a museum with an old friend, a reaction you couldn’t explain, except it’s the same feeling that swells when you cradle your dozing infant niece or hear Nat King Cole’s “O Holy Night” over grocery store speakers at Christmas. Wonder, maybe. In those moments, your body becomes an exclamation point.
When you fly from Nevada to Louisville to visit him on a windy day in your pale-yellow tank top, it’s because he said, “I think we could have fun together.” It seemed so breezy and light, playful like a dare. And you were up for it, up for arriving at his side just to see—to take the calculated risk, knowing that you’d regret not buying the discounted ticket with the long Phoenix layover more than you’d regret a five-day trip that fizzled or didn’t amount to much. At the very least, you’d have a story to tell your best friend or a future love, evidence of some tiny spontaneous bone in your body.
He picks you up. You rumble around in the dark as he drives his red Isuzu Hombre, a little truck with crank windows and a stubborn stick shift, through Highlands side streets and Cherokee Park shortcuts. You still know this part of town so well, but he knows it better than you do. When you relax against the seat—or try to appear relaxed, at least—you aren’t yet aware that this truck will become your truck, too, and that you’ll memorize its glitches and quirks along Southern California freeways, or that it’ll break down on a steep hill near Acton, California, causing your hearts to stutter, and, on a different summer road trip, that the AC won’t work in the Mojave and that you two, together for years by then, will laugh about it, speeding with the windows down. You can’t guess that in this small cab with its weathered Kentucky state map and fat, black books of CDs that you’ll discuss love, music, writing, sex, marriage, God, puns, drinks, dogs, dinner plans, fears, ambitions, books, movies, politics, old friends, new friends, job prospects, job losses, parents, siblings, childhood, beauty, grief, mortality, how you’ve changed, how he’s changed, too, as you morph across the years, faster than the truck can keep up. When, during that Louisville trip, you push the door open and step out on your first date to a concert his friends are playing at Headliners and the spring evening is so crisp that he offers you his black jacket in what feels like an organically kind gesture, you’d never know that you’d log years much like this moment, walking beside him as seasons, geographies, priorities flip like pages in a book. Because the beginning doesn’t announce itself. You never think, This is the start.
But you can replay the beginning after the fact: the yellow tank, raw silk with beige flowers and minuscule cutouts along the neckline, a shirt you paid too much for at a Reno department store with your mom on your twenty-fifth birthday when you were mostly broke. But because you wore it that whole first summer you fell in love with him, it seems now like it paid for itself. The moment you hold hands as you walk toward the concert despite not having been in each other’s physical presence much, you’re already a team somehow, moving through the dark to the small venue, shoes crunching the parking lot gravel, and your fingers laced in that steadying, private way. He was so skinny taking Adderall to finish school and you were skinny, too, from coffee and insomnia, working at a gym where you’d coach kids and teenagers all day, moving nonstop, plus the stress of a recent divorce and its attendant upheaval, and now the shivery thrill of this, whatever this was. Yes, when you picture the beginning, the two of you—his shoulder blades through the thin vintage cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, your leather sandals with the short heel that you could still walk fast in—there it is, water smoothing rock, all the signs that you’d assemble a life together, even though, in that moment, you probably wondered if your hand was sweating and why you never painted your nails and if you should go back to his place later that night if he asked you to, and you hoped he would.
You replay that summer soundtrack, the sound of Louisville, of Pavement and the Silver Jews and Wax Fang and Built to Spill and the Mountain Goats and Spoon, you passenger side, bumming his fruit-punch nicotine gum. How you’d sit on his Baringer Avenue porch swing while cicadas chirped or how you lounged in friends’ Germantown lawn chairs to share beers, Kentucky feeling more Kentucky than ever since you returned from the desert, which is to say green-on-green, lush and tipsy, drenched in honey-colored evening light that makes your day jobs seem incidental because, like the Ohio River, the future spills out in front of you, anything possible.
In the second person, in the editing and revision, you polish and shine up even the dumb, embarrassing times, like your most overblown argument in the beginning-beginning, those days when you were delirious for each other but also intense and disagreeable. The fight happened in front of a small art gallery, and it wasn’t sparked by some substantial issue like trust or where the relationship was headed, but by the fact that you wanted to look in the window longer and he wanted to make it across the intersection before the light changed. You’d never been angrier about something so trivial and you’re pretty sure your voices rose and that you both stayed mad for hours, maybe days, the fight a blaring sign of everything uncaring and oblivious about the other person, of how this must be a rebound on your part, a bad decision on his, and you were clearly incompatible so why not call it off now, cut your losses, move on? But as you revisit and revise, what comes into focus from that moment is the brick storefront and the wind chimes tinkling in the open door and how it was an early fall day, it must’ve been, because you remember those yellow blade-shaped leaves blanketing the sidewalks and gutters, and it was chilly—which was maybe part of his hurry, come to think of it—and you wonder now about the glazed ceramic vases in the window, indigos and blood reds, whether they’ve survived fourteen years. So much can happen in that time.
Maybe because your love occurred in a headlong rush, it’s hard to pin down the moment when so much I fell away. Maybe it was on that yellow tank top day or the first-date concert where you clinked glasses and said cheers beneath the bar lights. Or when, eighteen months later, he helped you relocate to Syracuse for grad school before heading west for his own program and you sat on the bumper of an open moving truck outside your new apartment and cried because you didn’t know if you could weather another change without failing. Or maybe it’s when, after months apart, you materialize in California with an enormous black suitcase by your side and he picks you up at LAX and you spend that contented, bare-bones summer in his Irvine graduate student housing with its industrial carpet and the wetlands three stories below his bedroom window, subsisting on iced black tea and late-night dinners and walks beneath purple jacarandas. Or maybe it’s when you move out to California and live together for the first time: you buy champagne and explore your new neighborhood beneath rows of swaying palms before losing your clothes across the kitchen, the living room, the bare bedroom with its box fan and naked bed, the place filled with your belongings divided for the last time into yours and his.
“You need to let in a little light,” he says about this book. This is it, this essay, as best as you can tell. But what’s the brightness without shadow? Because the shadows were an element, too. And maybe the reason why something that started as a dare has endured. You’ve never given hard-won happiness enough credit, always chalking it up to luck.
And, yes, luck—that’s part of this, too. Because, really, the whole prospect seemed ill-advised at the outset, the quickness and timing, but also the simple fact of letting some of the I, I, I slip from your fist, especially when you’d worked so hard to find it in the first place, as a daughter and granddaughter, as a mostly good girl who sensed that the gender game is rigged, and as a grown woman who came to know it. And then to have regained the I after filing divorce papers on a winter day in the courthouse that faces a small-town casino where people win sometimes but mostly walk away with less than they brought and sometimes more than they can afford to lose. The aftermath means untangling one life from another, means confessing to family and friends and banks and the DMV that you have your old name again (and who knew you’d have missed it?). So, it seems like a gamble to give up some of the I for you. But then you come to understand the paradox that was probably illuminated in your friends’ more traditional marriage vows that you only half heard while you waited for the violins and cake: that you can become more of yourself beside a second person. And that, from the other person’s perspective, you’re their second person—the accomplice, the sidekick, the secondary character in the story told from their point of view as they become more of themselves across a lifetime, too.
The middle-middle? It’s this moment. In his pink chair across the room, he doesn’t look different except for the silver stripe in his beard, something that seemed to manifest overnight two years ago when you both woke up and there it was: a straight line of white to match the single white eyelash he’s had since you met him. But surely he must have changed more than that. You have—so much so that the woman in the yellow tank top seems like someone you dreamed. Last week, when you applied mascara in the passenger-side mirror as he drove through your neighborhood, you said aloud almost by accident, “When did we get older?” to which he replied, “We’re fine.” Because it’s a trick how you think you’re making a life only to see that you’ve already made it.
What’ve you made? In the middle-middle, the weight of it feels heavy and precious. In the middle-middle, it’s things like this: he calls you from the hospital across the country where his dad is terminally ill and you’re in a blizzard walking the dog across a frozen bridge, heavy tree boughs arcing above your head and the only sounds along the miraculously untouched paths are of snow settling and the dog’s soft pant and his voice through the phone. You’re the only people remaining in the world: Holy shit, this is love, you think and you can practically feel the big clock ticking, which means this might be as good as it gets and, finally, what more could you need? But it’s also this: the other night, in total darkness, 2:00 a.m., he woke you up to offer a glass of cold water because he said you looked thirsty in your sleep, and you were thirsty, actually, and so you sat up to drink it, to talk nonsense inside the dark for a moment you’ll barely remember before placing the half-full glass on the nightstand.
One time, because you talk about writing as much as you talk about anything else, he tells you that second person is his least favorite point of view. You tell him it’s one of your favorites. You’re not just being contrary: it’s intimate somehow, despite the lack of I, like a pact you’re making with a reader, a whisper in their ear. So you wonder if, when you tell him you’re writing this essay in second person—this one with the light—he’ll say it’s a bad idea, too annoying or over-the-top. When you mention it, you say it from the sofa where you’re typing on your ancient laptop with the frayed cord and he’s walking around, playing his bass, lines that will get stuck in your head for days. “Oh,” he says, “like in the love poems. The I/you address.” You tell him that this isn’t that kind of essay, though, that there really isn’t any I in it.
Except, of course, it’s all I. The second person just makes it easier to turn the bright jewel around in your palm. And although this essay isn’t a love poem, a direct address to the you, maybe you did mean to talk to readers all along. You know that the particulars of this story—red truck, scorched Mojave, cowboy shirt with the frayed hem—aren’t their love-story particulars: they have their own weathered maps and soundtracks and moving boxes and beds in which they breathe and curve against another in the dark. You suppose that, for some, a beginning waits just beyond their sightline. For others, you’re pretty sure they’ve come to the end, that the clock stopped and now their phone remains silent as they walk their dog through frozen woods. You think, they’re in the early-middle or middle-middle or late-middle. Not writing down each day but living it instead. Love so ordinary that it’s extraordinary. I see it, you want to say to them, your common, rare thing.
Ashley Marie Farmer is the author of the essay collection Dear Damage (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 Series in Kentucky Literature, as well as three other books. Her work has been published Gay Magazine, TriQuarterly, The Progressive, Santa Monica Review, Buzzfeed, Flaunt, Nerve, Gigantic, Salt Hill Journal, and DIAGRAM, among others. Farmer is the recipient of a 2019 Best American Essays notable distinction, the 2018 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2017 Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award, and fellowships from Syracuse University and the Baltic Writing Residency. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the writer Ryan Ridge.
“Second Person” is an excerpt from the new essay collection, Dear Damage.
We make our way under a white sky, in the footsteps of a peasant and his mare. The latter carries our backpacks, strapped to the saddle, while the former wears a hat on his head and a walkie-talkie on his belt. Soles and hooves sometimes sink into the earth, humid from a recent shower; four electrical cables sever an archetypal nature. Mountains capture the eye with their muted greens. Two dogs follow us and others bark as we pass by. From a row of corn, an indígena waves at us—this is the term in use here, ill-sounding to French ears after the Code de l’indigénat,[1] but a term claimed as their own by those it concerns most, in front of a world that thought good, having “discovered” them, to name them “Indians.”
The community to which this peasant—whom we met at a location agreed upon in advance—belongs reveals itself after a ninety-minute walk. A few tin roofs at first, a steep gravelly trail, and then a small square in the guise of a basketball court. We’ll stay a few strides away for the next fifteen days, in a hovel bearing the colors of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN. A large portrait of Ernesto Guevara (“Hasta la victoria siempre”), chipped at eye level, and a bust of Emiliano Zapata (“Tierra y Libertad”), rifle in the right hand, frame a wooden front door, dilapidated but obstructed by a metal chain. “Justicia – Libertad – Democracia,” the facade reads: large white capital letters against an all-black background, pierced by a red star in the middle. The four windows, wrecked, remind one of arrow slits. The man gives us a key and his hand to shake. “Compañeros.” Comrade: the word never ceases to amaze me—the only word liable, as soon as it’s pronounced, to turn a stranger into one’s fellow.
We drop our belongings on a concrete slab, guiltily thanking the animal for the help it gave against its will. The hall is vast and high under a sloping ceiling. A number of chairs appear to wait, in vain, for the rare visitor. Three other small rooms make up our new home: a sort of kitchen with no electricity, a disused bathroom, and a sordid closet with a toilet inside. We divide the space (Jules P. takes the platform at the end, me the middle and the wood table), then unroll our sleeping bags on the floor before stacking books and notebooks nearby—we’ve been traveling in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, for a month. On the walls, traces, drawn or painted, of previous volunteers for the non-state Civil Observation Brigades, which brought us here: “Free Palestine,” as well as Zapatista, anarchist, and ETA emblems.
At night, the Commission—four Indigenous comrades—pay us a visit to welcome us and answer prospective questions. The community counts three grocery stores (enough to buy the necessaries to cook over a wood fire, in the shed outside intended for that purpose), and we take note of its political or factional infighting as one would of geographic boundaries. A villager, Zapatista, was recently shot by paramilitaries; it’s one of the reasons we’re here: an all-too-modest internationalist solidarity, taking notes on the situation, bearing witness in the event of clashes, drafting a report on human rights. The compas (diminutive for compañeros) keep constant guard and communicate, from one end of town to the other, via radio transceiver.
A lamppost illuminates our dwelling’s surroundings. Dogs, muzzles thin, emaciated and famished, hazard a few steps—fearful at first, tails low, fleeing over small nothings. They’ll be sleeping closer to us before long: more so every day, in fact, with every bit of food we give them. One of them, a heart-rending female with sunken breasts, protects two or three puppies who rarely venture farther than the basketball court.
The moon is round, this first night: a candle high, holding its own in acid black.
The animals howl at her, distant memory of wolf blood; crickets make their night, populated, chirping. Lying down, head sunk in my rolled-up mesh jacket, I read the memoirs of Margarete Buber-Neumann, deported to Soviet Siberia at the end of the thirties. The failure of barracks Communism does not signal the end of the emancipation of the living, only the necessity of rethinking the question of power, more or less to the core: Zapatism has been trying since the mid-nineties . . .
I first met up with Jules in another community, non-Indigenous and libertarian. Its members—some twenty young men and women from all, or almost all, backgrounds—practiced meditation and self-defense. Meals were communal, mostly; dormitories, a few animals, two or three kids.
From there we went to the Universidad de la Tierra, Zapatism’s urban and intellectual stronghold, south of San Juan Chamula. I browsed its library (Spanish, English, French; Zola, Breton, Sartre, Gide, Maiakovsky, Althusser, and Tintin), listened to a mixed choir honoring the memories of indígenas assassinated by the authorities (the lyrics admonished the “capitalist hydra of the government,” urged listeners to defend the “homeland” and protect “Mother Earth” from being sold), and talked to a Kurdish feminist traveling through the continent. On the walls: frescoes, photos of Gandhi and Mandela, black flags flocked with red stars, a tribute to ecologist thinker Ivan Illich.
Jules came across an old bearded man who swore to having traveled, long ago, in Jacques Mesrine’s car while hitchhiking on the roads of France; I had a friendly conversation, in some tiled kitchen corner in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, with a Podemos candidate convinced that the radical left was cutting itself off from the masses with its codes, markers, watchwords, and mythology. We spent several nights in a hostel in the company of a German anarchist working with victims of domestic violence, whose name, I’m ashamed to say, has slipped my mind as I write these lines: tall, short brown hair, eyes of a rare blue . . . She’d talked of the Invisible Committee and I of Rosa Luxemburg; she’d hailed the necessity of multiplying autonomous zones, and I the parallel possibilities of mobilizing more segments of the population: we could, it goes without saying, trade in largely reciprocal vanities of a national-historical sort.
“Zapatism is a small movement and Mexico is uninterested,” asserted an inhabitant of Chiapas’s cultural capital, the “vampire city” whose walls are sprinkled with stenciled depictions of political prisoners and freshly traced slogans from the National Front of Struggle for Socialism: “No to paramilitarization,” “Solidarity with prisoners,” “Health is a right, not a luxury,” “No to state terrorism,” “Medicine for the people” . . . A woman from Mexico, occasional spokesperson for Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos—known as Galeano since his self-dissolution in May 2014 and withdrawal from the revolutionary organization’s leadership—professed no less: “Zapatism is not just another guerrilla group, they’ve built a real autonomy. It’s been a silent plague, in the last few years. The government cannot enter their lands.”
We met a painter whose work has helped forge the movement’s singular visual identity—a Chilean woman in exile, imprisoned under Pinochet’s dictatorship—and later came across a few soldiers from the Zapatista army, all famed balaclavas and sharp outfits. We then moved on to a caracol, one of five Zapatista organizational centers in the Chiapan mountains. “Para todos todo, nada para nosotros” read a sign at the entrance, in front of the guardhouse and the red-black barrier that secures the way in: “For all, everything; for us, nothing.” A salutary expression, if sure to force a smile on the faces of our own elected leaders. The men and women on guard duty wore hoods or scarves but no weapons. Journalists from the mainstream press were, one understands, denied entry: the organization had suffered from their remunerated dishonesty. The Junta de Buen Gobierno (Committee of Good Government) supervises the administrations of autonomous municipalities: positions are temporary, rotating, and unpaid—politics, here, is no profession. The municipality that accepted our visit claims to be the “central heart of Zapatism before the world.”
There, we ate every day—kidney beans and tortillas, for the most part—under the portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader incarcerated by the Turkish state, and slept in bunk beds usage would have us describe as “makeshift.” In the Zapatista zone, alcohol and drugs are prohibited, along with pesticides. Frescoes on every building showed a roster of national figures, but also images of sacred corn, Frida Kahlo, rebellion against the neoliberal order, the snail (caracol in Spanish: here a symbol of time recovered from surging modernity and capitalist hubris, the avatar of a revolt built stone by stone), the inevitable Che, and the African American struggle. I noted, amused, the following slogan painted in the shadow of a roof: “The algebra of revolutionary education is the dialectic.”
We had a long conversation with a number of Zapatista militants, danced—if only a little, and poorly—before attending an anticapitalist history class with a hundred boarding students, called “comrades” by their “education promoter.” “We move forward and the government doesn’t really know how to react,” confided N., in Spanish. His face was uncovered, as are those of the near-totality of Zapatistas inside caracols, when not attending semi-public gatherings. Their numbers are intentionally kept mysterious by the leadership. “A Zapatista is born every day, impossible to know,” confirmed our interlocutor, a peasant and teacher in his thirties. N. bore full cheekbones and dark, burrowed eyes, all on a face pulled hesitantly downward by a goatee. “We have neither the possibility nor the luxury of leaving, or traveling, because we have no money and we have to build our autonomy. It’s difficult to live communally, but that’s the way it is. We’re at war. But we have hope: the little ones will finish what we couldn’t. Our parents didn’t know how to read, we had no schools. Lots of babies died from simple fevers. Zapatism changed all that.”
This year, 2018, the National Indigenous Congress is preparing to enter a woman, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, in the next presidential election: a rupture, symbolic more than anything, with the autonomist paradigm employed until then (“The struggle for power is a struggle for lies,” Marcos deemed in 2001). “We don’t want to win elections but to win comrades,” we were told. “Yes, it shocked a lot of our own, this new strategy. But the Juntas don’t care about winning votes, we just want to gain more land for the people. The candidate is a pretext. We still think that the struggle must be fought below: government, education, food, all that must come from the people. That’s the Indigenous conception of the struggle. The Mexicans in power aren’t Mexicans. They use the flag to sell their country. They don’t work for the people but for capitalism’s transnational interests. There are two Mexicos: one above, and one below. The real one is below. We are the true Mexico.”
The Zapatista landscape repudiates the ideological divisions we are accustomed to, between a right and a left that morality and practice seem to oppose; the Mexican movement speaks, as it did for a long time through the voice of Subcomandante Marcos, of those above and those below, owners and common people. The peasant-teacher had emphasized that there is no real difference between the two official camps: the left is a belated right, and vice versa. “Zapatism was born when the left had disappeared. We were born when all was dead. That’s why they saw us this way: we arrived like hope.” What kind of future does this man dream of? “A world where we eat the same things, have the same houses, where no one dies of hunger while others have too much to eat. A world without center or periphery. A world of communities, against the capitalist vision of the world, that of wealth and destruction, individualism and power, suicides and CEOs.” The Zapatistas who speak Tzotzil, a Mayan language, indeed possess two different words for “work”: ámtel and kanal. The first indicates non-salaried labor, for the benefit of relatives or the community (i.e., working in farming, in education, or in politics); the second relates to the market, the boss, hierarchical exploitation, and the sale of one’s labor-power. N. himself, educator as he may be, isn’t paid by virtue of his being a Zapatista militant: “We serve the people.”
“People come here and think that Zapatism, it’s paradise,” N. continues. “No! There are fights, things to settle between people. Or even with oneself. It’s a process. Women, for example, don’t always find it easy to escape tradition. But women that went to Zapatista schools are much more self-reliant.” Another Zapatista, a woman with straight black hair, arched nose, and emphatic eyelids, later tells us: “If you allow the destruction of nature, you allow your own destruction. We have to ask trees for their consent before cutting them down. Everything is sacred for us. People, rocks, animals, everything.”
We managed to be allowed—foreigners must submit to rather strict regulations—to visit the caracol hospital, escorted by two “health coordinators,” who were aloof, in truth, and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. An all-mustache Zapata, a smiling Che, a variegated Virgin, and a female combatant, hooded and rifle in hand, were painted on its facade. Nearby, a dog limped, while a woman nursed her child, breast uncovered. The health center counted one dentist, a medical laboratory, radiology and operating areas, and six rooms, as well as gynecological and ophthalmological services. Only Zapatistas benefited from reduced costs; the practitioners, also volunteers, were trained by an international NGO. Inside, a shrine honored, with myriad icons, the mother of Christ, and a pedagogical fresco reminded visitors of basic hygiene.
An indígena played guitar not too far away, absorbed by the mist. Workers busied themselves on some construction site, next to the church and within reach of the women-run cooperatives. In the Junta’s modest offices, where no foreigner is allowed unescorted by an assigned official, we were observed by a great painting of Subcomandante Marcos—a man otherwise rarely on display, impervious, as he says, to all “cults of personality.” On a desk, the inscription “To die decently is to die an insurgent.”
The sky, setting, curls up in its copper shell.
Sitting near the entrance of the hovel fallen to the Brigade, I think of the roadblock we passed on a nearby regional road: the taxi driver had quite simply paid off the indígenas, non-Zapatistas, who were protesting the human rights abuses they claimed to suffer, as we learned in a leaflet they made sure to hand to each vehicle. I think, also, of the crowd of villagers on the side of a ravine we’d driven along, where the body of a murdered man had just been found.
Jules returns from a walk in the vicinity, his head lost in his cigarette’s gray clouds. The days pass, identical, earthly thread of a time Man still grasps, without transfers or connectivity, tracking or big data. The “conscious”—meaning “politicized”—members of the community gather every night to discuss the village’s organization, divided as it is between Catholics and evangelicals, beneficiaries of Mexico’s state programs or those contemptuous of them.
A light breeze irritates the trees. Two aged ladies converse at the back of their garden; a dog on the asphalt savors a corn on the cob; a horse neighs, unseen; a scorpion dashes off across the shed where we blow on the embers of a capricious fire. An old man—long nose tidying up a fine, gray mustache, jeans, his chest bare save for the polo shirt thrown across his lean shoulders—invites us over to his home, on the floor of which chicks roam about. He shows us a portrait of his father, ornamented by the angel Gabriel; his wife, cracked bronze face topped by a headscarf from which two braids stick out, offers us a cucurbit and kidney bean dinner. Two of their sons have emigrated to the United States. The mother’s eyes swell with tears, in the cast shadow of a hammock, at the mention of the struggle led by this community against the government, the international companies that ogle the area, and the paramilitaries. Those last do their training nearby, we are told, not for the first time: over there, in the mountains. “It’s a tragedy I will never forget,” confides one of the sons, twentyish, about the latest murder. The mother removes her scarf, unties her hair, then her braids, under the yellow light bulb. “Hallelujahs” arise from the adjoining church; the old man laughs. He will give me, a few days later, roots to ease a momentary fever: “It’s better than chemistry.”
We’re at the home of B., one of the compas in charge of overseeing the Brigade. He is never without his walkie-talkie and tells us of his growing interest, poco a poco, little by little, in what the left has to offer regarding ideas and theoretical frameworks. The concrete, ordinary struggle was, first and foremost, what had pushed him to join. “If Marcos is supporting the presidential candidate, she must be good.” B. reproves those evangelicals in the community who don’t get involved, “not wanting any problems,” then castigates the “opportunists” who agree to government money despite criticizing it—all nonetheless need to live together, with “respect.” The community’s former mayor (“a bastard,” he blurts out, laughing) was “let go” some time ago: the locals have self-governed ever since.
Cafés steam and a cat passes by.
We snack on tamales, corn dough rolled into plantain leaves. His daughter, less than ten years old, is drawing and has every intention of pursuing her studies in the future. B. tells us a joke, interminable, that his wife gives corrections to or contradicts—depends, they’re both cutting off one another—about the king of Spain.
The sun opens a breach with a sluggish hand, haze, clouds worn pink by the red he carries. I stare, for a while, at a busy ant colony. Jules and I play chess together. We manufactured the board out of a lid we lifted from the bathroom’s garbage can; the pieces were carved from the cardboard flaps that act as our blinds. I lose every game.
A bag of onions on the table, a religious sermon on the radio, two or three chickens about the floor—we talk. “I would really like to be a Zapatista. But the majority of the community accepts government aid. It’s therefore difficult to imagine our complete autonomy, for the moment: we don’t have our own school, we aren’t ‘conscious’ enough,” confides V. in her red dress, gray bangs, and silver teeth. “I would also love to make do without pesticides, but we don’t know how. No one taught us.” A smile, akin to a pout of disappointment. “There is no justice,” she concludes.
Our departure is close—we’ll have, fortunately, no clashes to report.
“Toward the socialist revolution” announces one of the walls of San Cristóbal upon our return. This is where indígenas evicted from their lands are camping: hodgepodge of tents and banners, a portrait—another—of Zapata, assassinated a century ago. It’s here, precisely, that twenty thousand masked Zapatistas paraded in 2012, silent and disciplined, fists raised in front of flags bearing the colors of the EZLN and Mexico: “Did you hear that? That’s the sound of your world collapsing, and of ours arising.” Jules intends to stay for some time yet; I reach Mexico City by bus, thinking of Trotsky, felled here one August day, skull shattered. Yes, when is the collapse?
[1] The name of an infamous set of laws that formalized the repression of colonial subjects throughout the French Empire from 1881 to 1947.
Joseph Andras is the pen name of a French author, most notably of the novels De nos frères blessés, Kanaky, and Au loin le ciel du sud. Born in 1984, he lives in Normandy when not on extended stays abroad.
Simon Leser is a PhD candidate at NYU. He translated Joseph Andras’s first novel, Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, published by Verso in 2021.
The first time it happens to me, I am four months pregnant, and it is February. I am walking around my car to reach the driver’s side door, and as I pass by the rear bumper, I step onto a slick of black ice and my feet fly out from under me. I lie there, my left buttock and outer thigh throbbing, stunned into inaction and then: sudden fear. My neighbor, who had been smoking a cigarette on his front porch, calls out my name.
“I’m okay!” I shout back, my voice thin, shaking.
I hear his breath, drawing nearer, and he rounds into view.
“Be careful!” I admonish him as he inches toward me, his arms held out as if he is trying to reel me in from a great distance.
When he has pulled me to my feet, gotten me to stable ground, my thoughts finally turn inward. “Do you think it’s okay?” I ask, looking up at him, my vision blurring. “Do you think the baby’s okay?”
It is the first time I experience the fear that is so inherent in motherhood, the fear that will come to live inside of me, next to my heart. I continue to feel it throughout my pregnancy, the fear that I will break her. I feel it after she is born, the fear that I will fail her.
Fear has never felt so close before. Sure, I have long embraced horror, loved the first mass-market paperbacks I pulled from my father’s shelves, the ones that hinted at supernatural worlds superimposed upon our own. I loved the B-movie horror flicks I watched in dark basements with high school friends, with twist endings that revealed nothing was what it seemed. As I grew older, I found myself appreciating books and movies that played with psychological horror, the ones that suggested that the true horrors were in the everyday. That the true horrors were within us.
But these days, the horror that terrifies me the most feels somehow wrapped up with the fear I feel for this tiny being ensnared inside me. I am undone by the horror flicks that are unrelentingly claustrophobic, the ones that show that the worst thing of all is to be trapped. Trapped in a world filled with unseen monsters. Trapped in a situation that has come about in the wake of a poorly made decision.
The first time I see The Descent, I spend the entire one-hour-and-forty-minute run time with my heart a hot fist in my stomach, my breath shallow, as a group of female spelunkers—trapped in an uncharted, underground cave system—fight and strain to find a way out. Never mind the monsters hiding in the shadows. There are jump scares, yes. But what is most terrifying—at least for me—is the sense that their air is running out. That their time is running out. That soon, they won’t be able to breathe at all. It is chilling in the way it feels familiar. Walls closing in. Time disappearing as each character is forced to choose between two paths. And then another two. And then another two. Back or forward? Life or death? Who wouldn’t be panicked by the dark pressing in on them?
After my fall in the driveway, I walk back to my car, get in, and drive to a country club twenty minutes away to teach yoga. I cry as I drive. I am so shaken I nearly get into an accident on the way there. This time, my car hits an icy patch, and as I struggle to regain control, I slam into a curb.
When I eventually return home, I set up an emergency visit with my ob-gyn so she can perform an ultrasound. After I explain what has happened—the driveway, the curb—she assures me I don’t have to worry. “As long as you don’t smoke crack,” she says cheerfully, “your baby will be just fine.”
When my daughter is born five months later, there is a new fear. The bogeyman that is SIDS. The thing you can’t quite control. That can’t be explained. This fear consumes me, just as it consumes many mothers.
I soon find that my love is wrapped up in terror. In those early months, I have a camera for a baby monitor set up in a corner of my daughter’s room. I place the monitor on my windowsill so I can see it from where I lie in bed. The image is small, fuzzy. I find myself squinting at it, trying to decipher my daughter’s every move. When her wail comes through the monitor’s tiny speakers, slightly delayed, I fear something is wrong with her. When she sleeps, when she doesn’t make a sound, I fear she’s dead. I get out of bed, crouch down by the window, stare into the monitor. Is her body moving? Can I see the gentle rise and fall of her breath, or am I just imagining it? Eventually, I walk across the hallway, quietly open her bedroom door, tiptoe over to her crib, and lean in, stare at her tiny form. I place my palm against her back, wait for it to move. I wait for proof that she is still with me.
The days aren’t any easier. I am wrung out from childbirth, still carrying my body around as if it were a fragile object, still wearing Depends to stanch the bleeding that drains me further, leaves me depleted. And still, my body is the barrier I must use to keep my daughter alive. To protect her from the world. My body is the thing that feeds her.
I watch Mark Duplass’s Creep around the time my daughter turns one. The specter of SIDS still hovers. A friend of a friend has lost her child to crib death at the advanced age of two. But there are other fears now as well. The fear that she will choke in her car seat while I am driving. The fear that she will fall off my bed or pull a lamp down on top of her head. I am so afraid, all the damn time. I won’t leave her with anyone other than my own parents. I trust no one.
Meanwhile, the protagonist of Creep finds himself at the mercy of a man who is not who he says he is, whose story keeps shifting. But even as the sense of danger escalates, even as things turn dark, the hero of the story feels compelled to give his tormentor the benefit of the doubt. He wants to trust him, even after everything he’s faced. In the end, choosing to trust this strange man costs him his life.
The ending stays with me for months after I watch the film. I ache for the man who chose to trust. I ache because he didn’t deserve what happened next. But this outcome validates my own fears. I spend my days as a new mother desperate for help, but fearful of what could happen if I trust the wrong person. I don’t want a bad decision—the decision to entrust my daughter to someone else—to end her life. The only person I really trust is me.
The next year or so of motherhood passes in much the same way. Then, when our daughter is just two and a half, we enroll her in a preschool located eight minutes from our home. For three hours a day, three days a week, we trust that these strangers will take care of our child. On her first day of school, we accompany her up the walkway to the house on Park Street, her backpack straps sinking into her coat, her pom-pom hat pulled down to cover her ears, and she seems so small. She clutches her stuffed animal, a cheetah she calls Chester, in her hand. When we pass her along to her teacher, I pretend I am wiping an eyelash out of my eye. My daughter doesn’t look back.
Over the next two years, my daughter grows into an odd mix of cautious and fearless. She refuses to go down slides, yet she will follow another child up a steep embankment while wearing hand-me-down jellies that slide off the backs of her heels. She hesitates to participate in sing-alongs, yet she will approach strange children at the playground, saying matter-of-factly, “I’m Emily! I’m five! Do you want to play?” I admire her. I fear for her. And always I hover, poised to catch her if she falls.
When my daughter starts kindergarten, the circle of people in whom I must place my trust grows ever larger. Administrative staff. Class parents. Young teachers forced to contend with groups of more than twenty students at a time. Young kids who have been raised differently from my own, with different rules, different values, different belief systems. That small, intimate preschool, I could handle. My extended family, I could lean on when I was desperate.
But once upon a time, it was just me and her.
I miss that time when she was always attached to my body, clinging to my legs, pulling at the edges of my sleeves.
I was suffocating. I was questioning my every decision. But I still felt like I had a measure of control.
She is six now, and the illusion of control is slipping out of my hands.
One time, when I was just five, I couldn’t immediately find my mother when the teachers marched us out of school at the end of the day. As we approached the crosswalk at the midpoint of Van Houten Avenue, a block away from the elementary school, I whipped my head around, craned my neck, searched everywhere, panic building in my chest. There were so many people around me. Parents taking their children’s hands. Teachers directing their students to go two by two. Pedestrians pressing past.
And then I saw her. Standing in a cluster of other mothers. Just across the street.
She had never been across the street before.
“MOM!” I yelled, and without a second thought, I darted into the street, pumping my legs, my backpack slamming against my lower back.
I was later told that the entire crowd of people on both sides of the street—teachers, parents, students—held their breath. Cars coming from both directions skidded to a stop. Time stood still.
But I barely noticed the commotion around me. There was only my mother. And she seemed so far away. It seemed to take forever to reach her.
When I finally, at long last, flung myself at her torso, she knelt down, wrapped her arms around me. “Why did you do that?” she asked me. “Why didn’t you wait?”
She gripped my upper arms and looked into my tear-streaked face.
“I was right here,” she said. “I was coming to get you.”
She shook her head and hugged me to her again.
“I was right here.”
I want to tell my daughter that I will always be right here. That she’ll never have to look for me in a crowd and feel that she is lost. That she’ll never be hurt because I won’t allow it. I want to tell her that the bogeyman under the bed, inside her closet, can’t get her as long as I am here.
But as close as we are right now, as much as she delights in pressing herself against my body, clambering on top of me, grabbing my legs when I attempt to leave a room so that she is dragged along the floor, giggling, she doesn’t seem to need that.
Still, there is the fear that lives next to my heart. Always.
At least when I watch my fictional horrors, I can know that my fears are nothing new.
Steph Auteri has written for the Atlantic, the Guardian, Pacific Standard, VICE, and other publications. Her more literary work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Dirty Word and the founder of Guerrilla Sex Ed.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
—Genesis 6:4
In our family there were two instruction manuals—the Old Testament and the stories of the Old West—and it was often difficult to tell what, if any, difference lay between the two. If we weren’t in church, we were watching Gunsmoke, and in the high heady days of my childhood, I came to believe that Christ likely bore a closer resemblance to Marshal Dillon than to a long-haired bestower of boons. After all, one might preach just as well with a pair of six-shot Colts as with the Gospels. Did not Christ declare that he came bearing a sword? And why wouldn’t a manifestation of God walk with an easy lolling shuffle and speak in a John Wayne baritone soft as saddle soap? These seemed facts beyond dispute.
Among my tutors at this early hour of life were not only Sunday school teachers, but also my grandfathers, both of whom had served during World War II. These were brusque, no-nonsense men of a sort now mostly vanished. Their values were hardscrabble, and they brooked very little foolishness, and it is to be counted among the Lord’s many blessings that they did not live to behold this most stupid of centuries. It is to be counted among the Lord’s many ironies that had they been a different sort of men, we might not even have this century at all, stupid or otherwise.
What wisdom they kept found its mythos in cinematic Westerns. My maternal grandfather, Guffie Morris, a booming US Navy veteran of the Pacific theater, loved in particular The Searchers, while my paternal grandfather, V. C. Taylor, who served in Europe, held a fondness for Zane Grey and A. B. Guthrie novels. These stories seemed to measure up to their own experiences somehow. It was not uncommon to hear them tell a war story and confuse it with something that had occurred in John Ford’s Monument Valley. The settings and scenarios might have differed, but the travail and epic scope were the same—how do good men bear up beneath the yoke laid upon them by a suffering world?
For them, the West as it was wrought in the piebald dapplings of a sepia sunset seemed rightly grim, and if they were given to brazen, boyish hooting at the sight of John Wayne riding across the screen, it was because the stories of the West redeemed all the tragic horrors of the twentieth and most woebegone century. To see horses unfurling at manifest speed across the wide, yellow plains seemed to set them once again at peace, for they had seen the hand of God and knew its quick and terrifying penmanship.
Among the Westerns that most captured their reverence was Lonesome Dove.
In 1989 the dramatization of Larry McMurtry’s eponymous novel ran on CBS over the course of four nights. Both my grandfathers loved it. So did the rest of my family, but I recall watching it with these two old men and feeling little different than I did when I sat next to them on a church pew. Something close to prayer seemed to be happening between us as we watched Gus and Call drive a thousand steers from Texas to Montana, and when the final frame faded, I expected someone to say “Amen.” Perhaps they did, if only in their hearts.
Once Lonesome Dove ended, it became something of a talisman in our household, referenced at moments of both pathos and high brio. At the funeral of my great-uncle Ulysses (called Useless by those who knew him best), I heard more quotes from the miniseries than I did from Psalm 23. My grandfather Guffie would spit lines from the show at the dinner table or after church. Knuckling my towheaded scalp, he’d recite the choicest snippets of a story he considered holy. “I god, Woodrow, in twenty years we’ll be the outlaws,” he’d say. Or, if my grandmother was in a particularly vexing mood, he might pipe in with “My wife is in hell where I sent her. She made good biscuits, but her behavior was terrible.”
As with all things, my paternal grandfather V. C. was less forthcoming with praise for Lonesome Dove, though he did love it. Like Guffie, he’d been involved in the great World War II, enduring some of the fiercest fighting in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, and there are in my possession, along with his Bronze Star, several faded Nazi armbands to prove it. The experiences of the war left him taciturn, at times morose, at other times capable of legendary rages, and I have seen him snatch a pump gun off the mantle and then rush out into the moonlit barnyard to send a chicken-thieving fox into eternity.
In retrospect, it seems to me these two men were approximations of the sort embodied in Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. One was a boisterous man who loved to joke and sometimes pulled a cork, while the other was dark-eyed and brooding. Both grew up in poor circumstances difficult for a generation of digital natives to imagine, much less admire. They feared little other than God, though they were often baffled by their wives. They were unashamed of blood, but felt sex was something best not discussed. They were flawed, but not tragically so, and they had helped save a world that had turned its back on their values.
It’s little wonder that they saw something familiar, if only dimly, in the characters of Gus and Call. Like McMurtry’s fictional cowboys, they had gone out on their own adventures. They had seen the world and its troubles and knew that a great deal of them could only be solved by a bloodletting. They knew that evil was a real presence in our world, and that it was sometimes brought to heel through forces larger than any individual, or through the intervention of fate and happenstance.
Perhaps the best literature always gives us back our lives. We lose so much of ourselves in the threshing and winnowing that scant memories remain to give us ballast. So it is that we come to live more inside a story than in this world of glassy glances.
As they neared the sunset of their lives, this certainly held true for my grandfathers. Often, I would catch them watching the far distance, and I knew they were somewhere else, out riding fences and chasing the horses of their youth, singing in their bones the tales of a forgotten time as their blood raised a toast to the “sunny slopes of long ago.” One of the stories that seemed to stand up taller than the others was Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. It returned to these old men something they thought had been lost in the moral desuetude of peacetime—namely, the thrill of adventure.
Paradoxically, as a writer, McMurtry was no adventurous stylist. In interviews he claimed to write between six and ten pages a day. These aren’t the habits of a man weighing each word, and to read a McMurtry novel is to forget that simile and metaphor even exist. In his weaker books—The Berrybender Narratives are an embarrassment—he seems to speed through his sentences as though running his finger down a shelf of nonperishables. The prose is stilted, canned, and bereft of music. His diction can often be repetitive and tedious, and he was far too prolific, publishing over forty books and scads of screenplays.
Even so, one can’t dismiss Larry McMurtry as a mere genre writer. He doesn’t belong on the ash heap of nigh unreadables such as Stephen King or Tom Clancy or Jim Thompson. His best books—Lonesome Dove being among them—are as fine a rendering of human frailty as anything penned by Chekhov. Who doesn’t weep during the death scene of Emma in Terms of Endearment? And who isn’t torn to their core when Gus and Call are forced to hang their old companion Jake Spoon? These are moments when the reader is given back, with startling clarity, their own life.
Of course, McMurtry is more Hank Williams than he is Russian master. Anyone who has stood alone in a moonlit field in Texas and heard the wind go singing through the barbwire and the sage grass understands something about “The Lovesick Blues,” that heartache is given special emphasis in our lives so that we may be startled by love and perhaps awake to its promise, or grieve its absence. They also understand a great deal about the lonesome world of Larry McMurtry. In novels such as The Last Picture Show and Horseman, Pass By, he renders, perhaps better than anyone, the yearning of youth and love’s lingering failure, but in notes drifty as the skies above Archer City. If Chekhov found a metaphor in the cherry blossoms of Melikhovo, McMurtry found one in the flinty light of the Texas panhandle, a light that seems to make everything, even the people, hard and thin as tintypes.
The soil made McMurtry’s oeuvre, and he never forgot it. Even when accepting an Oscar in 2006, he wore Wranglers and boots and a bolo necktie onstage. There’s a bit of the defiant Jim Bowie in such a gesture, and we should applaud it. McMurtry cared deeply about where he was from, and he wanted us to care as well.
In a frivolous age, place counts for naught. We live in blips and blinks, scattering from one nameless exit to the next, never deigning to know our towns. Why look at the mountain or the oak when one has the blessed Tubes of You? If everything is disposable, why not also discard one’s roots? Better yet, pluck them up from the dirt and cast them like tares onto the fires of repudiation. And there are considerable social rewards for such destruction, at least among the literati. It is lauded as bravery and a sign of sophistication. But this is a fantasy. Soon, its sweetness turns to gravel in one’s mouth. The deracinated man finds himself adrift, unmoored from any coherent ethos. He harbors no sense of obligation toward the future, nor can he take comfort in the bequest of his ancestors, who, by today’s pious standards, were all benighted ogres.
The late philosopher Roger Scruton coined the term oikophobia to describe this phenomenon, oikos being the Greek word for home. If, so the logic goes, we repudiate our homes, then whatever sins might have occurred there cannot be laid upon our souls, and in signaling our own escape from the demands of a place, we believe, foolishly, that we will be granted entry into the elect kingdom of Nowhere. But, as Scruton points out, this leaves us in a spiritual desert.
The greatest writers are all writers of somewhere. The longer the shadow place has cast in a writer’s heart, be it Flaubert or Flannery O’Connor, the more enduring their creations, and part of their artistry lies in the fact that the place is remade in their image. Who can watch a Mississippi sunset and not think of Faulkner? Would we even notice it without Light in August?
For all the personal—and even artistic—ambivalence McMurtry might have felt toward the Lone Star State, it was the place he chose to set most of his work. It was also where he chose to live and to die, perhaps because he had helped to shape not only our understanding of Texas, but also our fantasies about it. Perhaps we wouldn’t even conceive of Texas at all without Larry McMurtry.
The writer Susan Sontag once quipped, regarding Archer City, that McMurtry lived in his own personal theme park. Steeped in the McMurtry mythos—the residue of Hollywood lingers in the air in a haze of brittle, deep-fried tinsel—the town, with its many McMurtry-owned bookstores, seems more like Thalia, the fictional hamlet of The Last Picture Show, than it does itself. There’s a bit too much self-ogling, and a bit too much hamming it up—all of it based on the success of Larry McMurtry—but this seems to be the way of literary towns.
Yet beyond this schlock searches the brisk and quickening wind. When we hear it sawing through the chaparral, we think of Duane and poor Deets, Lorie and Clara, Newt and Pea Eye. They never existed, yet they stand taller than a noontime shadow in the dusty dun-colored day. Though McMurtry expressed antipathy toward the cowboy mythos, it was larger than his own personal vanity. It endures. It stands up, sturdy and true, helped along by the novels written by a son of the Texas soil. How else to explain the way my grandfathers—two men who’d gone to war—loved McMurtry’s books? These weren’t disillusioned soldiers, but the sort who still believed in the old verities, rough-hewn as they were. It is more than a passing irony that some of McMurtry’s most ardent readers were just this sort—cowboys of the twentieth century—whose ethos he admitted in interviews to finding a bit hollow. The more one ponders on this, the more one is reminded that writers and poets know little to nothing about the hoi polloi—and that there is indeed a divinity that shapes our ways, and more in heaven and earth than in all our philosophy.
For all his reputation as a writer of gun sagas and adventure, McMurtry must, at the final reckoning, be deemed a man who did not destroy the myth of the West—writers are never so important as they think—but one who composed its epitaph. The small towns of McMurtry’s youth were already dying by the time he grew to manhood, and the cattle drives he heard yarns about were at least three quarters of a century gone. Even so, in the sifting, sandy winds, he must have caught the lingering air of a larger, more noble time, and perhaps heard singing, each to each, the shadows of heroes, their voices growing fainter with every passing year. And he must have loved those times and those people. Why else devote his life to their study, and to telling the truth about them?
Read in its entirety, McMurtry’s corpus seems a chiseled remembrance of the West as it was, ought to have been, and will be no more. Seen in this light, novels such as Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo don’t demythologize the West, either as reality or genre, but sing its funeral dirge. They offer both praise and pity for the men and women who settled the North American continent during the 1800s, an era of brutality and racial animus, to be sure, but also one when dignity and grit, gumption and heroism were not only common traits but ideals to which people aspired without irony.
Of course, it must be said that the song heard at eventide in the West is a plaintive one. For McMurtry, the West was as much about dreams that didn’t turn out as it was about manifest destiny. If a thousand men made their fortunes under the big sky, how many sundry others fell into the ditch of absolute failure, killed by a Comanche’s lance or scalped by the Sioux just west of St. Louis? As the West was settled, a flux of unimaginable savagery washed over the land, drowning out many of the native cultures who had lived on the continent for millennia, who in turn visited vengeance upon many innocent European immigrants.
Such grand upheavals plow up fertile soil for burgeoning myth, but also for pathos, and McMurtry, for all his humor, never tired of reminding us of the fleeting nature of life. Our years pass as a vapor and man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Even so, there is a sweetness to loss that only the truly bereft know. As Gus reminds Newt in Lonesome Dove, the earth is mainly just a boneyard, but pretty in the sunlight.
This sentiment is too easily derided as nostalgia. But what is nostalgia but praise for what one has loved, and loving it with all the more vigor because it has been lost. It is the same sentiment intimated by Basho in the seventeenth century when he wrote, “Even in Kyoto / Hearing the cuckoo’s cry / I long for Kyoto.” It is echoed in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, wherein the life of man is described as the flight of a sparrow through a mead-hall. And we find it in the works of Larry McMurtry. From dark to dark and winter to winter, the bird of time ever darts away, and to read McMurtry’s finest books is to hear the old sorrows wing down the ages and know how they have brought the hoarfrost of wisdom to the brows of sages and seers.
Is it too much to suggest that McMurtry ultimately perpetuated the old myths he sought to destroy? I don’t believe so. In fact, one can say that this was his greatest, if accidental, accomplishment.
Larry McMurtry, for all his grousing about the West and cowboys, for all his pretensions, wrote books my grandfathers spoke of with the same fondness they accorded to their oldest and truest friends. I believe he helped these men die a little better than they might have otherwise. And he helped those of us left behind remember our own losses so that we might grieve.
In remarking on McMurtry’s death, I am reminded of one of the most poignant scenes in Lonesome Dove. During the fording of a river, one of the cowboys, a callow Irishman, is killed when he swims his horse through a nest of water moccasins. As the rest of the Hat Creek gang buries the poor boy in a narrow grave by the riverside, Augustus doffs his hat and offers a eulogy. “This was a good, brave boy,” he says. “He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. . . . Let’s the rest of us ride on to Montana.”
We will all miss McMurtry’s voice. But there are trails yet to ride, and I’d like to think McMurtry would admire those who will blaze them. Adventure, after all, is still a noble and dignified tradition, one worthy of our praise and our efforts to uphold its practice.
Alex Taylor is the author of three books: the story collection The Name of the Nearest River, and the novels The Marble Orchard and Le sang ne suffit pas. A recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, he teaches at Morehead State University and lives in Grayson, Kentucky, with his wife and daughter.
Photo: Laura Wilson
X-Files FBI Special Agent Fox William Mulder told us, “I want to believe so badly, in a truth beyond our own, hidden and obscured from all but the most sensitive eyes.” I too, like Mulder, want to believe. I have always wanted to believe. Growing up Catholic, we were not just Catholic, we were Catholic. We attended church every Sunday, walked the Stations of the Cross, lit and knelt in front of candles in our home, praying that the saints would act as our intermediaries to God. I grew up with stories of angels and saints, saints like Our Lady of Lourdes, who was blessed as a child with the ability to see the celestial being of the Virgin Mary bathed in stars and light. The young girl, Bernadette Soubirous, would go on to join the Sisters of Charity, and years later when she was asked about her vision, she said modestly, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”
At one point I believed that in order to become elevated to the point that Mulder spoke of, to have the “sensitive eyes” that could observe truths hidden from all others, I needed to become like Soubirous and dedicate my life to prayer and meditation. My mother was not pleased with my desire to become a nun, so that was quickly stopped, just like her own father had stopped her from becoming a nun many years before. Perhaps my fascination with spirituality came from my mother, her stories about espiritismo (spiritism) in Puerto Rico from her upbringing in the 1940s, and rumors that my grandmother was the town healer.
Still, my fascination with the possibility of something else, of a curtain we could peek behind, continued. Above my childhood bed hung that famous print of the Guardian Angel: A little girl has her arm around a little boy, presumably her brother. Her face is turned away from us as she whispers something to him. His face is one of fear, consternation. They are barefoot on a worn wooden bridge. Just behind them is a worrisome scene of dead, weeping flowers, and of a gap in the bridge that we can only assume would have led to the children’s deaths if they had slipped and fallen through to the vicious waves below. But these little children have passed that danger, and onward they go. We can assume the little girl is telling the boy to be brave, that they are almost there. And then in this image we see the Guardian Angel, a woman in luminous, billowing robes, who hovers just above them. They cannot see her, but she is there, and a single bright star is settled just above her head; this star seems to be the source of all light that this angel draws power from. The angel’s hands rest above those children’s heads, and we can only guess that she is sharing her light of protection with them, guiding them, keeping them safe from harm. Before the children, we see the bridge is complete, and blooming flowers surround it. We can only hope the most worrisome part of their journey, their final battle through the dark and dangerous forest, is over, and that little sister will continue to comfort little brother until they reach their destination safely.
I believed then, when I was a little girl, that there were dangers in the world—dark and terrible forests, looming dangers that lay ahead. Yet I also fiercely believed then that there were angels who could guide us, who could give us comfort in our times of need. And in believing that, I believed as a little girl that there was something magical beyond us.
I grew from a child into a teenager, and while I shed my beliefs in Santa Claus and fairies, I took up a Ouija board, because “What if?” What if I could call upon a heavenly being, or ask questions of someone on the other side? Nothing happened. So, in middle school, I stood in the girls’ bathroom right outside of the gymnasium, turned off the light, and said: “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” The light flicked on, and a group of girls walked in and shouted “Boo!” and then laughed at me. I thought summoning Bloody Mary in the school would be safer than, say, raising her in our house. How was I supposed to explain to my mother that a ghost in a tattered, blood-covered wedding dress was trying to kill me? Bloody Mary never showed.
In my neighbor’s house, I found myself lying on the basement floor. My neighbor, a girl a year younger than me, and her three little sisters placed their index and middle fingers beneath my thighs, back, and neck, and chanted, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” I felt their fingers push upward, but still I did not take flight. They giggled. I sighed.
Over the years, there came other self-appointed challenges, all part of my effort to peek into the other side. One time I decided to sneak into Rosehill Cemetery at night, on Halloween. Rosehill Cemetery is Chicago’s largest city cemetery, with over 350 acres cradling the final remains of more than 100,000 people. Rosehill is the final resting place of Civil War soldiers, people who died in the Great Chicago Fire, politicians, athletes, former mayors, victims of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and more. If there were a place where I could find something worth exploring, a portal to the other side, it would be here. However, once I approached the broken metal fence to sneak in, I stopped myself. I felt an overpowering embarrassment because the dead, and the other side, should not be disturbed like this.
I have visited the Edinburgh Vaults, the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, the Tower of London in England, Castillo San Felipe del Morro in Puerto Rico, and Madame LaLaurie’s Mansion in New Orleans; gone underground in Seattle to explore networks of tunnels; and traveled to countless other purported and reported places of mystery, sorrow, and madness said to harbor a ripple in the fabric of reality, but I have come away with nothing.
Yes, I have experienced events that I can claim as strange, but those things or feelings can be brushed away as the effects of anxiety or sleeplessness: a tingling sensation in my forearms in a dark hall in the Edinburgh Vaults; a star, or what appeared to be a star, above Badlands National Park in South Dakota one night, lazily following a linear and then a jagged motion; and even one day walking into my church and seeing a woman in a traditional black nun’s habit seated front and center, but once I stood at the lectern and faced the congregation, she was gone. In all of those instances, what I felt and what I saw cannot be validated as proof of the other side.
I have stood as a participant in séances, watched as tarot cards were shuffled and people’s lives spread and read for them. I have spent hours and hours in the dark, holding tape recorders in the air, walking through silent halls and houses calling out, “Is anyone there?” I have taken pictures at locations where people have gone missing or have been maimed and murdered. The most fascinating picture is one I took at the Chicago River at the site of the SS Eastland disaster—America’s Titanic—where in 1915 a passenger ship capsized and 844 were killed. It was late at night, past midnight surely, and a shape seems to rest right beneath the water’s surface, bright white and its human form directed toward me. Still, I brushed it off as just the reflection of the thousands of lights in our skyscrapers above.
I know the language of paranormal investigation, a field often mocked and ridiculed in the mainstream for its camp, tackiness, and big personalities: electromagnetic field, an unseen energy force that is capable of driving a charge; extrasensory perception, an awareness others may not have; ley lines, patterns of invisible energy that are located at places deemed sacred by some; mediums, individuals who claim to be able to channel spirits; and more, so much more. There is equipment dedicated to discovering what lies beyond. There is an industry of people who are devoted paranormal sleuths, but again, have any of them moved beyond the wanting to believe, to the actual knowing?
Over the years, in one way or another, I have done it. I have sat in darkened rooms, with only a candle flickering or a flashlight shaking in my hand. I have chanted ancient names and phrases. I have been splashed with blessed waters, have twirled in the smoke of sage and Palo Santo. I have received blessings from people who claim to be witches and wizards, shamans and priests. From these gatherings, my house now holds various collections of divination tools, crystals, stones, incense, graveyard dirt, and every sort of herb or oil—for success, for prosperity, for blessing, for banishing negativity, for the evil eye. I have books in my house with the names of every demon and all of the saints. I have books that claim to summon the Holy Guardian Angel if you follow a grueling, detailed, yearlong dedication that involves isolation, fasting, intense ritual, and meditation. All of this has been in an effort to somehow peek into that other place.
I have played all sorts of games in an attempt to summon, divine, and invoke, these dangerous games that children play in the dark in their rooms, and that adults participate in at abandoned castles, asylums, hospitals, and mines: Musical Chairs Alone, the Midnight Game, Hide-and-Seek Alone, the Candles Game, and more. Some of these methods and suggestions came to me from friends or friends of friends, and, of course, from long-lost, dusty, and forgotten books I have collected from occult shops across the world. Some of these games claim that you will fall into a trance and see the other place or be able to call upon otherworldly entities. I have put myself in what some religious leaders may call spiritual danger, all in an effort to connect to something greater and beyond myself. Some of these rituals have rules. Some variations of these rituals are thousands of years old. The Egyptians wrote about how to prepare the living for the journey to the world of the dead. The oracles of ancient Greece claimed to channel the voices of gods, and many individuals were allowed to witness these presentations. Nostradamus entered a focused state to record his prophecies. Ritual—all of these involved a ritual of some kind in order to see a ghost, talk to the dead, invoke the angels, or peek into futures and a plane beyond our own.
At some point in our history, these games became synonymous with spectacle and deception. The Fox sisters claimed they were mediums and could speak to the dead by deciphering a series of clicks and knocks, but they were really generating those sounds themselves. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, fiercely believed in fairies, otherworldly beings, and the abilities of mediums, but his one-time friend Harry Houdini had made it part of his life’s work to expose mediums, psychics, and astrologers as charlatans.
Other famous people who believed in the power of ritual include the wives of presidents—from President Lincoln’s wife, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who reportedly practiced spiritualism in the White House, to President Reagan’s wife, Nancy, who is said to have employed an astrologer at the White House—as well as numerous politicians, musicians, media stars, and athletes. Most of these activities have been dismissed as a part of those people’s eccentric and hopeful personalities. Yet I would argue that a much wider range of the human population is curious about the possibility of divination and prediction, and holds the hope that there is just something else out there in the heavens.
All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day have historically been days to remember the dead, and how we remember the dead may vary. Some believe that an actual veil lifts and the spirits of the dead come to visit us on that day. Yet I have never seen physical proof to validate such. I have never seen a miraculous beam of light that shuffles the souls down from heaven, or the disintegration of an actual wall separating the worlds of the living and the dead, allowing them to greet us once again. All of this is based on hope—the hope that the dead come and visit us, the hope that our dead loved ones can see us and celebrate our joys with us and offer us comfort in our times of need. Altars set up in homes throughout Latin America with pictures of the dead, their favorite foods, and other items that can stir a memory are meant to direct the dead back to our homes, where we are longing for their presence. We set these altars up so that they know when to return home, and where home is, in case they have forgotten.
I suppose I can only say that we don’t know what we don’t know, and what we don’t know is the breadth and possibility—and I suppose the truth—of the paranormal. Parapsychology is the field that investigates paranormal phenomena. Paranormal simply means that which cannot be explained by science. So parapsychology works to try to understand events that science cannot explain. Some events that science has been unable to explain include why we detect unintelligible signals from space, sightings of a being we have lovingly called Bigfoot, déjà vu, mysterious disappearances, those feelings of knowing that humans call intuition, multiple sightings and movements in the sky that we call unidentified flying objects, and so much more.
Again, I have participated in events and rituals that are all meant to create an effect, that are all meant to tap into something else. Yes, I have witnessed and experienced questionable things, like the sighting of that nun in the church and that chill in the Edinburgh Vaults. I have also been in places where those who are with me have claimed to have experienced something they cannot explain.
One Halloween, my husband, my best friend, and her husband decided to visit Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, a long-abandoned cemetery cut off from the main road, tucked in the Rubio Woods in Illinois. This cemetery is often called one of the most haunted places in America.
One of the first burials at Bachelor’s Grove took place in 1838. The last was in 1965. Shortly after, the area fell into neglect, and it became a place of pilgrimage for local teens looking to step into a place between worlds, given the numerous urban legends surrounding the greater area. There were stories of a stagnant pond nearby being a preferred dumping ground of Al Capone’s; some saying a horse-drawn funeral carriage could be seen emerging from the murky water during a full moon. Then there were the mysterious blue lights appearing among the trees, a car materializing from within the forest and chasing after people only to disappear when they reached the main road. And the stories of the white farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a single lit candle in a front window—they all said whoever entered the farmhouse never returned.
Bachelor’s Grove had become a scary place in the 1980s and 1990s, when America was gripped in a religious paranoia we called the Satanic Panic, reminiscent of the Salem witch trials in a way, where anyone who did anything outside of social conventions was feared a witch, or in this case, a scary, baby-eating Satanist. Headstones at Bachelor’s Grove were soon discovered cracked and toppled over, withering corpses were found smashed and scattered across the forest floor, and blood-drained chickens and other small animals were found hanging from trees. Was it all just for effect? Done in response to the now-debunked fears of Satanists operating in America? Or were there really people who visited the cemetery who believed that these actions, no matter how violent or how much a violation of the dead, could call upon something?
When my friends and I visited one Halloween, we found only a scrubby, sad, but pretty little cemetery tucked away in a forest preserve. There was a local volunteer group onsite cleaning the headstones, tending the grass, and making sure the other visitors—there were many that day—did not litter. My two friends went for a walk in the forest while my husband and I stayed back so I could take photographs of the grave markers and walk over to the Mafia pond. My friends were gone for over an hour. We were worried, and when they finally emerged, wild-eyed and frightened, all they said was, “Let’s go.” In the car they told us how they had found themselves lost in a maze, wrapping around the same trees and stones and creek. They were lost in a sort of twilight zone where everything they passed they had just passed before, and then there were the blue orbs they claimed to have seen off in the distance. None of this I can prove, but I can prove they were both very upset on that car ride home.
I still don’t know if anything I have seen or experienced is real or can be proven by science. What I do know is that within my heart I do believe that this process of ritual and this need to believe gave me answers that no medical professional could give me. When we received news from our hospital that the baby I was carrying would not make it to term, the first person I went to see was a close friend who is a houngan, a Vodou priest. He asked me if I was prepared to know everything, the good and the bad, and I agreed. I did not tell him what the medical professionals had told me; I just needed to know what the other world—if another world existed—had to tell me. During our time, my friend laughed and grieved with me. He told me he could see my son, a beautiful baby boy wrapped in rainbow light surrounded by my ancestors. My son came with a message: he was here just to teach me lessons, and he would be with me always, but he was not made for this world. The pain was excruciating, to know that this life I was carrying could not join me here, and I think of him now as my own guardian angel.
A year later, when I was pregnant again, I so feared for the child I was carrying. Were we healthy enough to bring this child into our world? I again went to see my friend, the Vodou priest who had lived and studied in Haiti, who had danced in ceremonies, initiations, and blessings, who had tossed cowrie shells and bones in divination. I was just a few weeks pregnant, not visible, and only my husband knew. When I entered my friend’s home, this Vodou priest who surrounded himself with many of the same things that I have come to surround myself with over time—sigils, powders, potions, and incense—he looked at me, smiled brightly, held both my hands up and out, away from my body, and looked at my stomach and shouted, “He is strong!” And he gave me the biggest hug.
I think about Mulder’s words often: “I want to believe.” For some, these words are just a part of a meme from a television show they have never seen, or a television show they grew up with. For me, those words are seared into the core of what I so desperately desire, a peek through the window, into the beyond—the ability to pull back the veil, the curtain, and not only see and feel, but know that there is something else outside this realm where I plant my feet. This is not because I want to believe that there is a god, or because I seek validation of any spiritual or religious beliefs. This is all simply for the hope that when we are done here in the form in which we exist now—all skin and bone, and anxiety, worry, hope, love—that when we shed this skin, we will continue on somewhere else, bathed in a glorious light.
Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, and the upcoming Children of Chicago (Agora/Polis Books). Pelayo is an International Latino Book Award–winning author and an Elgin Award nominee. She lives in Chicago with her family.
I have never felt more beautiful than I do now, sitting in this swivel chair, staring at my face in a movie star’s mirror, the kind framed with brightly lit bulbs. Behind me, the stylist teases out my blunt bob cut into a dandelion puff and encases my head in a cloud of hair spray that settles like sticky pollen on my skin. Next to me, my new stepmother undergoes her own beauty treatment: hot rollers, back comb, tease out, hair spray. Our faces are powdered, dabbed, brushed. We’re having a girls’ day out; today we are allies in the pursuit of beauty.
“See?” she says. “It’s fun to be pretty.”
The Glamour Shots stylist swipes my eyelashes with mascara, and like magic, my eyes seem suddenly larger. They’re blue like Dad’s, with flecks of gray and green. They glitter like tiny oceans, reflecting the mirror’s light. My blonde hair comes from Dad’s side too. Even Mom says I look like his sister, my aunt Mina, though she predicts that my hair will darken as I age. “No, it won’t!” I tell her, refusing to relinquish my golden hair. Already, I have learned the ways in which beauty and lightness are intertwined.
The stylist applies dabs of rouge to my cheeks, creating the illusion that I have just come in from the cold. The face in the mirror belongs to someone else now, someone more outgoing, less afraid of making a mistake, someone who thinks it’s fun to be pretty. She bats her long eyelashes back at me like a Disney princess.
Glamour Shots is inside the Park Meadows Mall, tucked between Claire’s and a pet shop where Mom thinks the animals are mistreated. Bubbly pop music floats through the air. Overhead, there is a TV where you can see your photos and pick out the ones you like in real time. The stylist shows me all the different shades of lipstick, arranged like flowers in a bouquet. I pick out a light pink. My stepmother chooses a deep red. Her thin hair is teased so high it looks like cotton candy.
“Look at us,” she says, squeezing my waist and pulling me to her. “Like mother and daughter.” I file this moment in the category of things I won’t ever tell Mom.
Our Glamour Shots package includes two outfits and two poses. For the first photo, I pick out a denim jacket and a floppy brimmed hat with a big sunflower pinned to the front. My attempt at a coy smile looks more like a gap-toothed grin, head tilted to one side, my hands popping out the collar of my jacket. With the Glamour Shots soft focus applied, my skin is smooth as plastic.
My stepmother and I pose together for the second shot. This one doesn’t involve outfits, but rather elastic tube tops that won’t be visible in the photo. We kneel and the stylist drapes a fluffy pink feather boa in front of us at chest level, creating the illusion that we are naked, floating in a luxurious pool of feathers. I don’t like the exposed feeling of wearing the tube top, of my bare shoulder pressed against her bare arm. She wraps her arm around my waist and squeezes. Her acrylic nails press into my skin. I am beginning to understand the way she moves through the world, touching hands, kissing cheeks, squeezing shoulders. I don’t like kissing her on the lips the way she insists we do, but I’m getting used to it. Her attention is like a warm spotlight shining on you. When it’s gone, you’re standing alone on a dark stage.
When I bring the photos home to Mom, she stares at them silently, as if willing the small squares to burst into flames.
“Do you like them?” I ask. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, which is scratched and stained from various craft projects gone wrong. She purses her lips, looking from the sunflower hat to the feather boa. I study her face, looking for clues. I’ve become attuned to her emotions, the way they vibrate beneath the surface of her skin like a taut string ready to snap. I look from the mole on her right cheek, to her dark eyes, to her nose, which she says looks like George Washington’s in profile. Her expression hardens, and for a moment I am afraid she will cry.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” she tells me. “The most beautiful in the whole world. You know that, right?”
“I guess,” I say, knowing already that there are different kinds of beauty, different tiers. Cinderella, for example, is beautiful when she’s scrubbing floors, but she’s even more beautiful when she’s wearing a ball gown. You can tell by the way people look at her.
“I like natural photos of you best, though. Where you look like yourself.” Her eyes search mine, as I search hers. Something has broken in them, some fresh disappointment.
“I know,” I say, wishing I had hidden the photos away in a drawer. Mom likes to says she is a natural woman. When she puts on make-up for work, she pokes around a bag of sample-sized tubes of rouge and cracked eye shadow palettes. She wears flowy skirts and silver jewelry. Mom thinks she spends too much time on her appearance, says she is vain. We avoid saying my stepmother’s name.
“I can’t help but think about JonBenét Ramsey when I look at you dressed up like this. It makes me sad. It’s not right for little girls to wear make-up. Little girls are supposed to play and not worry about how they look.”
I know JonBenét from her photos on the news. She’s a girl my age, with pale skin in a fluffy pink dress. A tiny princess with a tiara on her yellow ringlets. She’s dead now, murdered. In the photos they show, her skin is as smooth and airbrushed as mine is in the Glamour Shots. I wonder if Mom is telling me that beauty—the kind that involves hair spray and make-up—is dangerous, even lethal.
In a letter to Dr. Katz, our family’s court-appointed child psychologist, Mom will write, You should have seen the photos. They made her look like a teenager.
She doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, so she frames the photo of me in the sunflower hat and puts it on the mantle, but hides it behind my new second-grade school photo, which features my mismatched front teeth and crooked bangs. Sometimes, I’ll move my Glamour Shot to the front, only to discover days later that it’s been hidden again.
Make-up, lighting, hair spray, the perfect angle, a soft filter: these are the beauty secrets of Glamour Shots. A manipulated moment, captured on film. At Dad’s house, the photo of my stepmother and me is framed, placed on the antique vanity in my bedroom. You might mistake the blonde woman and the blonde child for mother and daughter, if you didn’t know better.
In this house, decorated with antiques and oil paintings, there are certain standards of being, of beauty. In this house, my bedroom walls are painted purple; the bedspread is a butter yellow. A slender silver crucifix hangs on the wall above a small wooden desk. My stepmother has arranged this room for the girl who lives here half the time, the girl in the Glamour Shots photo. This girl collects tiny porcelain boxes, reads Dear America diaries, watches her stepmother attentively as she curls her eyelashes, teases her hair.
“Lauren loves that I dress up,” my stepmother will tell Dr. Katz in their interview. “She wants her hair and nails done. Lauren wants to be like me.”
At Mom’s house, the standards are relaxed. The beds may not be made. There may be golden retriever hair on the carpet. My bedroom here is painted lime green, the bedside table bright pink. The color scheme is aggressively happy, upbeat, childlike. The girl who lives here wears overalls and baggy T-shirts, collects penguins, and reads every single book in the Little House on the Prairie series. On the doorframe of this bedroom hangs a mezuzah that the girl made in Hebrew school, the tiny prayer folded and tucked inside.
Over the years, each bedroom accumulates more stuff, the extra detritus of living two lives. The girl bifurcates, refracts, doubles back on herself. She is mutable, reflecting whatever world is around her.
In his final parenting report, Dr. Katz will write that one of the girl’s bedrooms is “too formally finished” and the other is “too unfinished.” He will say that the girl should be encouraged to define herself through what she puts in her rooms, what she hangs on the walls. I remember talking with Dr. Katz and showing him my bedrooms. I remember his thinning black hair and small, round spectacles, and how he nodded intently and asked me questions that I did not know how to answer. “The report is not intended to be read by the children,” Dr. Katz will write. But I will read it, years later when I am no longer a child. The sensation is like seeing oneself as a specimen through the eyes of a highly trained scientist. Like reading a fairy tale about one’s own life. In that report, I am Goldilocks, except everything is always too hot or too cold, too soft or too hard, too big or too small. Nothing is just right.
At Mom’s house, I play dress-up. Dress-up is not about looking beautiful, though it can be. It’s not about the doing but the being. I like to transform into someone other than myself. I do mundane things—dancing in front of the TV while my brother, Sam, is watching cartoons, playing with the dog, pouring myself a glass of apple juice—all while wearing too-big high heels and a sequined dress.
Dress-up always begins with the battered plastic tub with rope handles, the one we keep in the basement and that overflows with polyester, tulle, and sequins. A blue tutu edged in silver trim from my first and only ballet recital. A clown’s wig. A tattered sun hat. Mostly, the bin is filled with Mom’s old castaway clothes, which she says are hideous, and Can you believe I wore that?
To me, these items are magical, and so familiar that I could identify them by touch alone. A floaty pink chiffon bridesmaid dress from the early eighties with see-through sleeves and a rip in the armpit. A pilling polyester maxi dress with floral embroidery, once worn with wooden platform heels. A pair of scuffed red leather flats (which I will one day wear to high school when I finally grow into them). A sequined long-sleeved shirt whose matching skirt has been lost to time. A shiny blue sheath dress with puffy sleeves that Mom once wore to an office Christmas party.
These dresses intrigue me; they are secret clues to Mom’s past, the person she was before I existed. I wonder why she bought these clothes, which are bolder and more feminine than anything in her closet now. I imagine her wearing the pink chiffon dress as she applies lipstick in the bathroom mirror, holds a glass of wine, dances in a crowd of people. From old photos, I know her hair was once long, cascading down her shoulders in thick, dark waves. Now it is cropped short. Did she feel beautiful in these clothes? Did she feel like herself?
“Well, it’s all downhill from here,” my stepmother declares, walking through the door from the garage. I am flying down the slippery carpet stairs in my sock feet.
“Downhill to where?” I ask. I give her a dry kiss. Her leather coat smells like perfume, hair spray, and winter air. She sits on a step to take off her high-heeled boots. I notice they’re almost exactly like Jill Mordini’s, whose husband drives a brand-new Hummer and coaches Sam’s football team. Sam, at nine years old, is the star running back of the Titans. He pukes before every game, a symptom of anxiety that will persist until his freshman year of high school when he finally quits.
“Downhill to old age,” she says with mock self-deprecation. We both know that she knows she’s still pretty. “First, these lovely crow’s feet show up around my eyes. And now, the guy at the Lancôme counter tells me my skin is dry and aging. So, of course, I had to spend a fortune on these.” She holds up a bag filled with tiny jars and vials.
“You’re not old,” I say. “You don’t look a day over thirty.” She likes when I say this, even though we both know it’s not true. I’ve noticed how her eyelids look thin and crinkly when she puts on eye shadow.
“Thanks, pumpkin.” I turn to run upstairs, back to my room, but she stops me. “Come here for a second.”
I approach, close enough to smell the black coffee she drank and the Listerine strip she ate to cover it up. She’s studying my face with a look of concern.
“What is it?” I ask.
“We need to do something about this unibrow,” she says, touching the space between my eyebrows with an acrylic fingernail.
I reach up to touch my face. Horrified, I feel soft little hairs growing there.
“I’ll take you to get it waxed this weekend,” she says. “Before it gets any worse.”
I scramble up the steps and run to the bathroom mirror. She’s right. Delicate sprigs of dark hairs arch toward one another. I picture them marching steadily together, forming a hairy caterpillar above my eyes. I hate her for pointing out another defect, like the patch of dry skin in the hollow of my neck, or the little bumps on my upper arms. Once I see these parts of me, I can’t unsee them.
In his bedroom Sam is pacing back and forth, trying to crack his neck. I watch him as he walks around his room, stepping around his open backpack, his piles of clothes and books. He juts his head in and out like a chicken. He started doing this a few weeks ago and hasn’t stopped.
“Why do you keep doing that? You’re going to hurt yourself,” I say, leaning against his doorframe. His room here is decorated in a nautical theme, with a red-and-blue quilt, wooden sailboats hung on the walls. Though I would never ask her, I wonder why our stepmother settled on this decorating scheme, since Sam has never been sailing, and we live in a landlocked state.
“No, I’m not,” Sam replies, still moving his neck. “It feels good.” He stops suddenly, looks at me. “Did you hear that? Did you hear it pop?” I roll my eyes.
“You look like an ostrich,” I say. I feel annoyed with him, knowing that he’ll never have to wax his eyebrows or shave his legs, or worry that his bra strap is showing.
When Dad comes home, I tell him I’m getting my unibrow waxed.
“What are you talking about? You don’t have a unibrow,” he says, examining my forehead under the hanging light in the kitchen. He grips my chin in one hand and rotates my face from side to side. Above us, the bird clock chirps Carolina wren: seven o’clock.
“Yes, I do. See?” I point to the dark hairs that I will never not see. I need them gone. He looks over at my stepmother. Her hands are in mitts and she’s removing a Costco lasagna from the oven.
“You know she’s genetically predisposed,” she says, shutting the oven with her hip. “She’ll have to start at some point.” Dad pretends not to know what—or who—she’s talking about, but I know he just doesn’t want to get her started. If we both avoid mentioning Mom, then maybe she’ll forget that my mother and all my dark-haired relatives exist.
Years earlier, Dr. Katz had noticed the way my father deferred to his new wife, how he “gave up what appeared to be very good parenting instincts” in her presence. He called this dynamic “a ticking time bomb.” He predicted that unless something changed, “the children” would be “placed in compromising positions.”
“But she’s only twelve,” Dad says. He loosens his tie as if undoing a noose. His defenses are weakening by the second, and my stepmother and I know it. She removes the lasagna’s foil top, puts it back in the oven, and sets the timer for ten more minutes. Then she calls up the stairs for Sam to set the table.
“Please, Dad? It’s not that big a deal,” I say, even though it’s actually a huge deal. I can’t bear the thought of keeping my unibrow for another day.
“If you say so, Dolly. I’m jealous of anyone that can grow hair,” he says, reciting his favorite baldheaded dad joke. He ruffles a hand on my head.
I’m not sure when it happened, exactly. All I know is that one day I woke up and my stepmother had filled the refrigerator with single-serving containers of low-fat, sugar-free yogurt. They are like little plastic soldiers, stacked six deep and three high, their blue lids glinting in the refrigerator’s bright beacon of light. They come in a rainbow of flavors: vanilla bean, key lime, mango, banana cream pie.
Once upon a time, the pantry overflowed with peanut butter crackers, Chicken Biskits, Cheez Whiz, Fig Newtons, packages of ramen, and boxes of After Eights. Now there are no snacks, only the essentials: cans of tuna and tomato sauce, jars of olives and sugar-free jelly, boxes of angel hair pasta, bags of croutons and seasoned salad toppings. No more home-baked banana bread. No more Drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches in the deep freezer, only giant bags of frozen salmon filets and family-sized frozen lasagnas.
I am so hungry. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house, I stand in front of the refrigerator door. Open. Close. Open. Close. I’m looking for something that I already know isn’t there.
On weekends, the bird clock taunts me, counting down the hours between meals. In the in-between times, I roam the house, looking for things I want to eat. I can’t stomach another yogurt, and tuna makes my stomach turn. At least there are clementine oranges. I eat them five or six at a time. I down sugar-free Crystal Light lemonade made from packets I find in the cupboard. The only marginally interesting food in this house is a giant bucket of Red Vines—her favorite candy—which sits on top of the fridge. I eat two, maybe three at a time, convincing myself that I’m satisfied. But I’m not convinced. Nothing here satisfies me.
Sam tells me he can’t stand it here. Most of the time, he’s grounded. He forgets to take out the trash, refuses to clean up his room. He can’t play video or computer games, can’t leave the house to see friends. The TV is in a locked cabinet, and only my stepmother has the key. He spends his summer afternoons riding his unicycle up and down the street, plucking hard green apples from the neighbor’s tree, and eating them with a pocketknife.
“Can you please not ride with the knife?” I ask him. “If you fall, you’ll stab yourself.”
“Who cares,” he says, riding past me.
I know how you feel, I want to say, but I don’t say anything. It is easier to believe that I can fix things myself, that I can fix myself.
What I don’t understand is how she is satisfied, how she is ever not hungry.
My stepmother has changed as drastically as our refrigerator and pantry. A few years ago, she started her own garden and landscaping business. Most days, she wears khaki shorts and a T-shirt with her company logo on it, pulls her thin hair back into a ponytail that she threads through a ball cap. She doesn’t bother with acrylic nails now that her hands are calloused from manual labor. She’s always been thin, but now she’s whittled down. Her arms are sinewy and tanned to a burnt umber. When she’s not working, she’s outside in a bikini top transplanting, deadheading, trimming, watering, mowing, transforming our suburban yard into a series of lush gardens that need constant maintenance.
In the summers, I work with her part-time along with a few stay-at-home moms whose sons once played football with Sam. We weed, water, plant petunias, haul sacks of soil. She pays us ten dollars an hour in cash, more than what I make at Panera Bread.
At first her clients were regular rich people, the ones with the nicer, newer houses in our neighborhood. But now she’s moved up and out of Cherry Creek Vista North and into the estates of Denver’s wealthy and well connected. She tells me her clients prefer having a crew of cute white ladies working their lawns over Mexicans who don’t speak English. Among them are a venture capitalist with an antique car collection and the owner of the largest chain of sporting goods stores in Colorado. Their houses have fountains, pools, horse stables, koi ponds. She knows all the gate codes. I’ve never seen the owners of these mansions, though I have the eerie feeling that they’ve seen me on their security monitors.
Workdays start early with a light breakfast. For her, that means a low-fat yogurt and black coffee. For me, that means two pieces of thin-sliced toast with sugar-free jelly. Around noon, we pause to eat lunch in the car, before heading to the next job site. She opens a single-serving container of low-fat yogurt. Drinks more coffee from her thermos. Says she can’t eat when it’s hot. I could eat an entire pizza. A whole chocolate cake, like the one the fat kid in Matilda was forced to eat. We’ve been moving nonstop since seven in the morning, but I pretend that I’m satisfied with the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and baby carrots I packed. I want it to be enough, but it is never enough. By the end of the day, I am lightheaded, sunburnt, hollowed out.
Dinner is the only time she allows herself to really eat, though she makes a performance out of consumption, bragging about how many bags of mulch she lifted that day, how many shrubs she planted. I understand that the harder she works, the more permission she has to eat. I start to see food in this way too. What has my body done today to do deserve these calories? For dinner, she makes rich food: creamy pastas, meat loaf, salads slathered with Thousand Island dressing. This feels, somehow, perverse. She and Dad drink cheap red wine or vodka with lite cranberry juice. If Sam is grounded, sometimes she won’t let him eat with us, making him cook his own boxed macaroni.
She is shrinking, and I am expanding. “All my pants are too big,” she says in mock sadness. “I’m as flat-chested as a twelve-year-old boy,” she complains, clutching at her chest.
Meanwhile, my jeans are tightening. My limbs, which have always been knobby and too long for my body, are filling out. Even my hair grows unruly. Every day, I blow-dry and straighten it to hide the curls that sprang up in middle school. As her body hardens, mine softens. When I look in the mirror, an unbearably round face stares back at me. Even when I pluck my eyebrows, apply eyeliner, mascara, blush, and concealer, I can’t see the face I once saw in the Glamour Shots mirror. Never have I felt uglier, and more desperate to be beautiful.
Movies and fairy tales have taught me that the young are more beautiful than the old, that stepdaughters should be more beautiful than their stepmothers. But next to her tanned and angular body, I feel pale, cartoonish, outsized.
When Mom tells me I am beautiful, I choose not to believe her. I fail to recognize her unconditional terms as a precious gift, shrugging them off like platitudes. Instead, I work hard to meet the conditions of my stepmother’s approval, her fickle love. The time bomb is ticking, nearly ready to blow.
Maybe if I lived here full-time, I could learn to like black coffee. I could stay outside in the sun and forget about food. I could whittle myself down into what I used to be—a child. But as soon as I get to Mom’s house, relief overwhelms me. There is food there, all our favorite snacks. I eat Oreos dunked in milk, mint chocolate chip ice cream, brown sugar Pop Tarts. But it is always too much. I can never find the balance between underfed and overstuffed. And no matter how much I eat, the hunger always returns.
Mom’s hair is its own character in our family drama. For as long as I can remember, she has complained about her unruly hair, its coarse texture, the way it defies gravity and anti-frizz sprays. Her ponytail is the circumference of a fist. She can go two weeks without washing her hair and you’d never know, the natural oils soaking back into her voluminous mane. She is forever growing her hair out, or lopping it off in frustration, agonizing over whether to color her roots or let them go gray, searching for the perfect stylist who can tame the untamable.
“I hate my hair. I wish I had hair like yours,” Mom tells me all the time. My hair may be easier to control, but I also dislike it in its natural state: curly, frizzy, unintentionally asymmetrical. Her whole life, Mom has searched for the secret thing that will make her hair good. Maybe this is why she indulges me in my own quest for perfect hair. Throughout high school, she takes me to nice stylists to get my hair cut, fills the space under the bathroom sink with hair creams and oils, diffusers and flat irons, pays for highlights when my blonde hair begins to darken, even caves when I beg to get my hair chemically straightened, a process that leaves it brittle and dull. If only . . . if only . . . we mutter in front of our mirrors.
When I learn how to French braid, Mom lets me practice on her. “Just get it off my neck,” she says, as if her hair is a tightening boa constrictor. She sits cross-legged on the floor in the living room, propped up against the couch. I sit behind her, dividing her dark hair into thick strands, weaving one strand into another, into another. In his report, Dr. Katz had written that I was most affected by my mother’s “paralysis,” that my “inhibited anxiety” mirrored her own.
But in this moment, there is no anxiety, no inhibition. We are mother and daughter, tribal animals, grooming one another, expressing love in the most primal of ways.
“Don’t be afraid to make it really tight,” she tells me, looking straight ahead. “I want this to last.”
“Beauty takes pain,” I say, cheerfully. This is my joke, what I tell my friends when we experiment with hair removers or pose for homecoming photos in uncomfortable high heels. We laugh because it’s the truth.
Mom lets out a groan as I pull back the hair behind her ears.
“Sorry,” I say, “too tight?”
“Nope, just keep going.”
When I finish the braid, I secure it with an elastic hair tie, step back to appraise my handiwork.
“It looks good!” I say. “Sleek, like a fish.” Mom pats her head gently. I hand her a mirror, so she can see the back.
“You really got it this time,” she says. “It feels good to have it up.”
“Mom, your head looks like a stegosaurus,” Sam says, walking by. We laugh. Her hair is so thick that the braid does form a stegosaurus-like ridge down the middle of her head. She leaves it anyway.
One day I, too, will get fed up with my hair, will get tired of its weight on my neck. At that point, I will be living in another state, no longer landlocked. I will go to the beauty school down the street where they charge fifteen dollars for a haircut, and tell the student stylist that I want her to shave my head. Are you sure? she’ll ask. When I assure her that I am, she’ll go looking for her instructor. I’ll wonder, How hard is it to shave a head? The instructor will come over with clippers. I will watch as clumps of hair fall to the ground, will feel the pleasant buzz of metal against my scalp. A couple other students will gather around the instructor, attentive to this impromptu lesson in how to uniformly shave a woman’s head. I feel as if some ritual shearing is taking place, as if the woman wielding clippers is a high priestess and I am her sacrificial lamb, as if this moment will divide my life into a before and an after. When she finishes, she will brush the loose hairs from my neck, unsnap the cape. Take a look, she’ll say. I will tilt my head from one side to the other, meeting my eyes in the mirror, inspecting the newly visible tops of my ears, the bare nape of my neck. I will see my face, and I will recognize the person looking back at me.
Lauren Rhoades is the director of the Eudora Welty House and Garden in Jackson, Mississippi, and an MFA student at the Mississippi University for Women. She is currently working on a collection of essays about family, identity, and religion.
Even if it hadn’t been next to the Rite Aid where I bought my lice shampoo, the Out of the Closet on Sunset would have been hard to miss. The thrift store was attached to an AIDS Healthcare Foundation Pharmacy. Strapped to the roof of the building, a fifteen-foot inflatable muscle man flexed his biceps. Free HIV Tests read the sash across his chest.
The counselor who administered the test handed me the certificate verifying I was negative—my clean bill of health—and shook a basket of free condoms at me. The wrappers were red with the word Love written across the front in white letters, like Valentines. “Remember, use lots of lube,” he said, as if I were limping because I hadn’t thought to. I’d had anal sex with only five people in my life, but I wasn’t that naive. I knew to use lube.
What can you see about me that I can’t? I remember wondering.
Corey pulled up as I was coming home. We’d been messaging on gay.com for the past week and I was disappointed to see he wasn’t worse looking. A big lug of a guy with flouncy brown hair, he didn’t appear to be missing any digits, and when he took off his Ray-Bans both eyes tracked me darting into his field of vision. I had liked that his profile was un-Hollywood: no sizzle reels, shirtless selfies, or YouTube videos with adorable dogs. I’d thought I might have a chance.
I felt bad for the guys I met online. Based on how I presented myself, it’d be reasonable to expect a shaggy blond camp counselor ready to scramble up a boulder. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, just not the complete picture. While I loved to jog in the Hollywood Hills with my roommate, Katie, and while I did resemble a camp counselor, the able avatar I created online would fall apart the second I stepped toward these internet beaus, no matter how flat I tried to walk, how earnestly I attempted to roll from heel to toe or swing my right arm. My limp made me the damaged goods people warned you about on the web.
The alternative, I figured, was to add “super-minor case of cerebral palsy” to my profile and end up with an even sadder inbox. I took my chances instead.
I showed Corey the Band-Aid where the counselor had pricked my finger and told him he better get tested soon, in case this was going somewhere. Corey laughed and said he’d just gotten tested, too.
“And?” I asked.
He smiled an easy smile and I made out a toothpick-sized gap between his two front teeth. His chin was weak, his voice deep and charmingly doltish, like a surfer’s. “Negative,” he declared. “And by the way, hi.”
A wave of relief larger than I’d like to admit whooshed through me. Growing up closeted in Utah, I’d been taught to think of LA as a cesspool of crime and HIV. Two nights before leaving Salt Lake, I went to a Bret Easton Ellis movie that took place in LA in the glamorous 1980s. The film featured Kim Basinger injecting drugs into Billy Bob Thornton’s penis and ended with a chick in a gold bikini roasting on the beach as she died of AIDS.
It was obvious: moving to a bigger city meant bigger risks.
I was totally going to be the girl in the gold bikini.
Corey offered to drive and I hoisted myself into his truck, casually lifting in my right leg after me. I had my usual arsenal of excuses at the ready: “tight tendons,” “born with it,” “not in pain or anything.” For the first few minutes of the drive I was glad he didn’t ask about it, and then I started to get annoyed. What’s your deal, buddy, I wanted to say. Didn’t you notice my limp? Are you some kind of asshole?
The truth hit me with a pleasurable pang: He’s a little nervous.
Corey had a decal from the Catholic high school he’d attended in his rear window and a school picture of his little brother, Miles, on his dashboard. “That’s some ’fro,” I said, pointing to the orb of curls engulfing Miles’s cherubic face.
It was all the invitation Corey needed to spend the rest of the date, at a Mexican restaurant in Silver Lake, bragging about Miles’s college prospects and SAT scores. “He’s smart in school and dumb in life,” Corey said, not without pride.
Corey didn’t use the term Asperger’s, not at first, though it was easy enough to piece together. I recognized many of Miles’s proclivities, as described by Corey, from my little sister, Chelsea: an endearing if overpowering inability to go with the flow of a conversation or speak at an appropriate volume, the trouble making friends and clumsiness with social cues, the detachment that could read as bratty or immature. I also identified with how much Corey adored his younger sibling. Miles and Chelsea were just one year apart in age. “If it doesn’t work out with us maybe we’ll set them up,” I said. “Or even if it does.”
The waitress brought out our beers on a tray. Picking at the label on mine, I apologized for being so in Corey’s face about getting tested earlier. I’d just watched my dad slowly die of ALS. Plus, my mom had cancer. She was back in Utah with weird, wonderful Chelsea.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m a total hypochondriac,” I said.
My leg tightened under the table and I had to work to keep from wincing. In addition to CP, I have what my brother refers to as “verbal diarrhea.” I say something harmless like “I’m a total hypochondriac” and then find myself bringing up pertinent if unflattering anecdotes such as the time I caught crabs on a family cruise in the Mediterranean. The trip was a last hurrah before my dad went on a respirator, and given that we were sometimes sharing pool towels, I’d had to come clean to my entire family in the ship’s formal dining room as Chelsea threw dinner rolls at my mom.
“The thing is,” I whispered to Corey across our two top, “I hadn’t had sex for months.”
“It sounds like you’re not a hypochondriac,” Corey said, picking up my hushed tone. “It sounds like you had crabs.”
But where’d they come from, these immaculate crabs? It couldn’t possibly have been the theater major with the cute accordion bong who I’d hooked up with a few months before college graduation. No, like many before me, I blamed a pair of chinos I’d tried on at a Banana Republic outlet days before our flight to Barcelona.
Probably because of what I still insisted were the mysterious circumstances of my first outbreak, I remained paranoid about crabs for years, periodically shaving my body hair and lathering my crotch stubble with specialty shampoos.
This habit followed me to Los Angeles.
Leaving clumps of hair in the wastebasket by the toilet, I’d limp to the Rite Aid across Sunset for yet another lice kit. Lather, rinse, nit comb, repeat. I even thought I spotted a crab crawling from Katie’s sports bra on one of our jogs, a false alarm compounded by my misuse of the word midriff. I’d meant cleavage. The crab turned out to be a clump of mascara.
A consultation with a dermatologist in Salt Lake over Thanksgiving revealed that the red spots crawling from my hairless abdomen to my chin were not pubic lice but a staph infection for which I needed antibiotics. My crabs had gone from immaculate to delusional.
“And how are the crabs now?” Corey asked, scratching at a spot behind his ear.
“Gone,” I said. I didn’t add that I kept a nit comb and shampoo under the bathroom sink just in case of a recurrence.
When Corey didn’t slip away to the bathroom, never to return, I thought I just might invite him over.
I lived in a turquoise house on Harold Way with my brother, Danny, and Katie, my best friend from college. The three of us had moved to Los Angeles together to make it as writers: Danny kept up a comedy blog and was going to screenwriting school at USC; a journalism major like me, Katie worked as a personal assistant out of a famous media mogul’s Brentwood mansion; and I stayed home and edited the two short stories I’d written in college. I was applying to get my MFA. As a side project Katie and I were also adapting, on spec, one of Roald Dahl’s adult stories, “The Great Switcheroo.” We had a recycling bin full of bottles of Two-Buck Chuck to prove it.
Our street, like our lives, was what you might call “showbiz-adjacent.” Harold Way was sandwiched between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. At the end of the block sat a derelict motel, the sort that could plausibly be closed off for both premium cable shoots and the sleazy activities they depicted. News choppers circled low. One night after I’d moved out, Danny drove home from Del Taco to discover cop cars blocking our street, their lights swirling: a fugitive had been captured in our driveway. Harold Way was where police chases came to an end.
Why did it feel so much like home? Our landlady, Maripat, had raised the funds to buy this crumbling block of Hollywood by playing a nun in a one-woman show. Red-faced and usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Maripat lived three doors down from us with her girlfriend Glinda and a gang of chihuahuas named after Chicago mobsters. She wrote emails in all caps and, like a nun, threatened to line us up and slap us across the face whenever we left our security door flapping open at night. It had been installed backwards so coming or going made you feel like you were in a behavioral psychology experiment. When the plumbing backed up, Maripat shouted in our front lawn, “You tell Katie to stop flushing her tampons down the toilet!”
Katie’s godmother, Maripat’s long-suffering sister, was an interior designer. She had decorated our house, stringing our single bathroom with Christmas lights, sponge painting the living room purple with gold stenciling. A candy-colored acrylic chandelier hung in the kitchen, where you’d also find a pallet of Diet Coke and an overflowing trash can filled with the brown paper towels I used as coffee filters. A glorious midlife crisis of a place, we called it “the bungalow.”
A pot a day plus the shared-bathroom sitch turned me into the bungalow’s outdoor water feature, forever whizzing into some ivy off the back patio. A rocking chair sat on the front porch and a lemon tree dropped its bounty onto the hood of my dad’s hulking Lexus at the back of our skinny driveway. Around the corner from a Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, Harold Way always smelled like fried chicken, except for the time someone down the block ran over a skunk.
Corey entered our stanky lair with low-key aplomb. It took me the second half of that first date to determine that much of what he had told me about himself wasn’t true. This is not a testament to my skepticism or detective work. Corey’s lies were guileless—he was a couch potato of a liar. The first fib was that he had gone to Berkeley. In an unlucky break for Corey, it just so happened that Danny had also gone to Berkeley. Naturally, when the two met over drinks at our kitchen table, the subject came up. Danny asked where on campus Corey had lived. “Where did I live?” Corey said. He took a quick swig, looking up at the chandelier as if he might divine the answer there. “Sort of all over.”
I’d visited my brother only a few times in college. Most of one homecoming weekend I’d spent blacked out in a side room in his frat that had been filled with packing peanuts. But even I could recall a handful of street names and major landmarks. Corey had never heard of Noah’s Bagels, Zachary’s Pizza, Telegraph Avenue—places I knew just from being alive.
“Telegraph, yeah, that sounds right,” Corey said. “I lived there. Around there.”
At the end of the night, Danny and I rolled our white picket fence slash security gate aside so Corey could back out of the driveway. “Your boyfriend is full of shit,” Danny said, giving him a friendly wave. “But he’s probably just trying to impress you. Either that or he’s homeless.”
We watched Corey’s brake lights blink at the end of the block and disappear around the corner. The palm readers, payday lenders, and weed dispensaries on Gower would be open for business now, neon signs lighting up their windows. The night air smelled deliciously of fried chicken, hashish, and something else: possibility.
Someone trying to impress me? I liked the sound of that.
Walking home from 24 Hour Fitness one crisp morning, I got a call from Corey telling me he had been fired from his job as a construction site manager. Though typically mopey, from what I could tell, he’d already tied his mattress to the flatbed of his truck. He was leaving behind his Santa Monica apartment, and his annoying roommates, and moving back in with his mom and Miles about forty-five minutes down the interstate in Santa Ana.
I hit the walk button to cross Gower. “That happened fast.”
“I was subletting,” he said. “Hey, aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry I had a rough day?” He let just a bit of irritation creep into his voice.
“Of course,” I said. “That really sucks. Can I help you move?”
“Nope, all good,” he said, “but I’d like to take you out. Do I get a second date?”
“I can’t turn you down now,” I said.
Corey came over and made out with me in the driveway for a good two minutes. For starters, he’d already gotten rehired at his old job at a fuel dock in Newport Beach, and for another—here he pulled a red T-shirt out of his backpack and tossed it to me—he was the newest part-time deckhand on the Balboa Island Ferry. “Look on the back,” he said proudly. “See how it says crew? They only give these shirts to actual crew members. I stole one for you.”
Sure, it was a little fishy that Corey had lost his job, found two new ones, and moved within days of meeting me, but I was struck by the modesty of his invention, if that’s what it was: this “Berkeley” grad had gone from being a construction worker in Santa Monica to a gas station attendant in Newport Beach. Big whoop. We were in a recession. I never even got a response to the job applications I filled out.
Until I did. Sort of.
On a Wednesday night in March, about a month after meeting Corey, I received an email from the director of the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. All the coffee had paid off. The promise of a funded, three-year fellowship lay before me. My writing career—if that’s what I now had—was taking me to Texas. I’d be moving by the middle of July.
Corey turned down my offer to celebrate at Disneyland with Katie. He was disappointed I’d be skipping town; he was also happy for me. It took the pressure off. We figured we should enjoy each other for whatever time we had left, not worry about our relationship status. We didn’t have sex, not for that first month of seeing each other. I had a swimsuit rash and an appointment at a free clinic on Melrose: I wanted to make sure the rash wasn’t herpes. Plus, I wasn’t ready to take off my jeans and explain the surgical scars on the backs of my legs and have my flaccid penis poked at. My limp didn’t bother him, but I was scared Corey wouldn’t want to see me anymore if he found out I’d never topped anyone, ever, that I doubted I could. That I both struggled to get hard and came too easily.
Corey proved worth the wait. One of the great lays of my life, he was gentle with my stiff legs, patient with my temperamental parts. The subject of me topping never came up, though he’d boyishly offer to blow me when he got drunk. Sober, Corey was squeamish about anything that smacked of passivity. He was the top. “Masc.” A dude’s dude. Give him a beer or four, though, and he’d camp it up, rolling his eyes and lisping, a giant grin on his face. It felt good to let Corey inside the tight coil of my body, to give up control. I’d be so relaxed when he left I’d walk into walls as I made my way up the stairs to Katie’s attic bedroom to tell her all about it. There was JBFed and then there was JBCed: Just Been Coreyed.
Every ten days or so, Corey drove the hour north to hang out at the bungalow. We weren’t exclusive. I went on dates with a guy whose WASP roots stretched back to the Mayflower and who enjoyed John Irving novels as much as I did. And I gleefully hooked up with the guy who hosted me during my program visit in Austin that spring. (What can I say? His condo complex had a sauna.) But I was happiest with down-to-earth Corey. He was the first guy I ever knew who called me handsome to my face. “Hey, handsome,” he’d say, and I’d stand there blushing, astonished at how good it felt.
“You know what you’re getting with a guy like Corey,” Danny said, brushing pretzel crumbs from his lap. “His ancestors weren’t butt fucking on the Mayflower, I’ll tell you that. Life with him means hanging out on a fart-stained couch.”
Danny meant this as a compliment. Corey was great at hanging out on our couch.
When we weren’t boning, we’d go on dates to the Getty or the La Brea Tar Pits. We’d walk around Hollywood Forever, tossing bits of granola bars to the cemetery’s peacocks and marveling at the tombstones that, anywhere else, would have been roadside attractions: the granite replica of the Atlas missile, the bronze statue of Johnny Ramone humping his electric guitar. Corey teased me when I left a stone on Estelle Getty’s grave. Hiking in Griffith Park, he playfully flipped off my camera and snuck kisses during a laser show at the observatory. He’d make me laugh when he told stories of playing tricks on his dad, bleaching his hair as a teenager and earning badges as an Indian Guide, the YMCA’s version of the Boy Scouts.
Generally speaking, Corey was as sketchy as he could be sweet. He’d stand me up and then text the next morning about how he’d hit his head in his dad’s garage and sustained a concussion. I’d offer to meet him somewhere in Orange County and save him the drive to Hollywood and he’d turn me down. After a night of being standoffish, he almost passed out at a Dr. Dog concert at the Palladium and had to go take a seat in an armchair in the lobby. “What is up with you?” I shouted over the music. “Why are you being weird?”
Corey mentioned once or twice that his dad was Jewish, mostly as a way of putting him down. I’d find out later from Miles that their mom identifies as Native Californian, descending from the indigenous inhabitants of the state. It was a heritage Corey openly rebelled against. If he said the word “Mexican,” it was usually with the word “dirty” in front of it, even if we were out in public—at the ArcLight, say, as the lights dimmed.
“Dude, why are you being racist and anti-Semitic against yourself?” I hissed. I said “dude” sparingly, and, in my estimation, to devastatingly bro-ey effect.
The only time I ever saw Corey really lose it was when he tried to use chopsticks at a pho place in Silver Lake. I remember him throwing them down and banging the table with his open palm so hard I jumped in my seat.
“Hey, it’s not like I’m great with them either,” I offered.
Corey’s dad had accidentally backed over Corey’s right hand when he was five or six and he couldn’t spread his fingers or make a fist. I hardly noticed the scar, but he carried the trauma of the accident with him all these years later. He told me his dad once threw him against the wall, that his dad had wanted his mom to abort Miles when she’d gotten pregnant.
Corey’s parents divorced when he was fifteen, and in a fit of anger, Corey had accused his dad of turning him gay. That’s how Corey had come out of the closet, not with tears and hugs and his mom giving off-color advice about hooking up with men and women to see which he liked best, as mine had, but with a shouted accusation. It was hard not to laugh at the story the way Corey told it, using his dad’s prejudice against him, but I could tell there was also real pain there.
Now that I was leaving Los Angeles for grad school, I gave up any pretense of finding work and spent my days reading literary fiction and AIDS memoirs on our back patio, library books and coffee mugs piling up around me.
The epidemic was an obsession of mine, even more so than it is for a lot of gay men who came of age in the ’90s. I turned anxiety about my disability and my parents’ terminal illnesses into hypochondria, and hypochondria into humor. Not good humor, mind you, but humor. After hooking up one afternoon, I joked that a birthmark on Corey’s thigh was a lesion he was trying to cover with makeup. I’d read about an actor doing that very thing in a tell-all memoir on my nightstand. “You’re a jerk,” Corey mumbled.
This reaction in itself was surprising. I’d expected Corey to laugh.
I spent the rest of the night walking back my stupid joke.
Still, I wanted him to buy firming cream for the bags under his eyes and told him he needed to see a dermatologist about the acne on his legs. He claimed he already had seen a doctor about the outbreak: it was from not toweling off properly after the shower. And maybe his semen would be less watery if he started working out?
“Eat a dick,” he told me.
“OK,” I said with a shrug.
It would be easy to make too much of these warning signs. Even when I look back at pictures of Corey today, it’s impossible to spot the ravages of illness. What I see is a depressed person. Corey’s graphic tees and 511 Levi’s are stylish, but he needs to shave the scruff off his cheeks. And for the record, my catty observations about the bags under his eyes were said in the context of him being a healthy, good-looking-if-schlubby twenty-five-year-old, like me. We were both sweethearts, playing with bitchiness like it was a lighter. That was our thing. I figured because of the whole Jewish-Mexican hunk vibe Corey had going, his skin was a little different from mine, more prone to irritation. Was that a thing?
In his driver’s license picture, taken just a few years earlier, Corey was downright chubby. Only in retrospect would I recognize the wrinkled flab on his stomach as a sign of catastrophic weight loss, as if the fat had been lipo-ed off rather than slowly burned away through diet and exercise. Far from alarmed at his recent downsizing, I made fun of him for being a former fatty. He put his hands on my butt and pulled me toward him. “You don’t seem to mind when I’m doing you,” he said. It was true: I didn’t even have to touch myself to come against the flab of his belly.
Corey wanted to follow me to Texas, but he had his brother and mom to look after in the OC. I felt relieved he couldn’t move with me, and then guilty for feeling relieved. I’d only just started feeling confident enough about my lame body to date. This was my big adventure. I wanted it to be mine. I wanted to play the field. But would Corey be willing to drive with me to Texas?
When he made the bumpy descent into Salt Lake, the starting point for our road trip, I took him home and introduced him to my mom and little sister. Later, when I was 90 percent sure they’d gone to bed, I pulled Corey outside by his busted hand and had him make love to me on a lawn chair by the pool in the backyard as I looked up at the starless purple night. I’d always wanted to do that.
On our drive south, we got caught in a lightning storm in Arizona. Stuck on the freeway because of a flash flood warning, we watched patrolmen pile sandbags along the side of the road and poke the beams of their flashlights into the cars in front of us. I gave up on our audiobook. It was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Corey would not stop imitating the monotone of the British actress doing the reading. “Have it your way,” I said. I turned off the car and we watched the lightning cross the sky like we were at a drive-in movie. I gave Corey a blowjob but he gagged at the suggestion of returning the favor. “I hate swallowing,” he said.
In Texas, Corey built my IKEA bookshelf, desk, and chairs. Sometimes he got cranky but he was mostly a good sport. He picked out an expensive couch at Crate and Barrel and then guilted me into buying it by making fun of me in front of the saleslady. “You’re getting that couch,” he said. “You should own one nice thing.”
It was red, midcentury modern, and I still have it.
Corey cleaned the bugs out of my light fixtures, hung curtains, and drove me to two Costcos across town from one another to buy a TV. We walked to a place playing live music on South Congress one night and I tried to make him race me down the street. All he would do was call after me that I was being a dick. He wouldn’t swim in Barton Springs or eat at Whataburger. He hated Whataburger. He wouldn’t even try tacos. “I have a sensitive stomach,” he said. Friends ask me now what Corey did eat, if not burgers or tacos, and I tell them the truth: I can’t remember. What I do remember is that we watched Clint Eastwood movies on my living room floor and had so much sex Corey said he felt like his dick was broken.
One of our last nights together, lying on my mattress on the floor, Corey told me he loved me. “I love you too,” I replied. “I love you like a brother.”
Corey rolled out of bed and said he would sleep on the floor. Downstairs.
After fifteen minutes or so, I followed him downstairs to find him drinking a bottle of water in the kitchen. The anger was gone, replaced by a sadness he’d never let me see before. I didn’t realize until then how much he cared about me.
He told me how lucky I was to get to move to Austin and start a new life.
“You can visit,” I tried. “You’ll have your own bathroom.”
My new place had three.
“I love you,” he tried again, looking me full in the eyes.
“I know,” I said, feeling my scalp prickle. “I love you too.”
It was the easy thing to say. I wish now we’d had it out, cried, screamed. Things might have turned out differently. Next I knew, I was lying on the floor with my foot in his lap and he was spreading my bunched toes. In the shower, I asked him if he would say yes if I proposed. He looked down at his large, pale feet. “Probably.”
When you’re young, such a remarkable turn of events is possible: over the course of a single night, even a single hour, you can go from loving someone like a brother to floating a marriage proposal.
Corey stayed with me for two weeks. At the end of our time together, I gave him an orange Longhorns cap and kissed him goodbye at the airport. He told me he loved me and I thought he might cry. I hurried out my own I love you. He looked cute in his new hat. “No one’s being shipped off to war,” I said. “No one’s dying. We can always Skype.”
My first weeks as a Michener were filled with workshop, after-class beers at Crown & Anchor, and talking to Corey. We’d Skype and chat at the same time, typing long strings of gibberish to each other when the screen froze or we got disconnected.
I was stoked to see that Corey was experiencing a personal renaissance. He was all about taking night classes in Long Beach to become a high school history teacher or a psychiatrist. “You should see the looks people give me when I tell them I went to Berkeley,” Corey said. He joined a gym, went running, cut his hair, lost even more weight. He seemed to be coming out of a years-long funk. “Now all we have to do is get rid of those bags under your eyes,” I said. “Let’s raid the MAC counter.”
Corey and I Skyped less as the fall progressed. I assumed it was coming from my end. I was dating the writer who’d hosted me during my program visit. We spent one Saturday reading naked on the rocks of Hippie Hollow and arguing about what he should call the spaceship in his Mars novel. My vote, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, was DietCoke.com.
“The writer’s giving me a bed frame,” I reported to Corey.
“I’m gonna beat that guy up,” Corey said, playfully jealous.
Corey sent a card for my twenty-sixth birthday in October. You have changed my life for the better. Love, Corey. He called on my birthday, too, but I was at a café on Lake Austin with the writer and didn’t answer. I Skyped with him the next day to scold him for not singing “Happy Birthday” to my voicemail. I felt bad for not answering.
“Do you want me to sing to you right now?” he asked. “I will if you want me to.”
“No,” I said.
A smile spread across his pixelated cheeks. “Do you want me to?”
The writer broke up with me a week after my birthday. Among other things, he did not appreciate me calling his spaceship DietCoke.com. I started to think that maybe Corey really was the one for me. Maybe he should move to Austin so we could make a go of it. “Let’s at least spend New Year’s together,” I told him, tilting my laptop down so he could see the Crate and Barrel couch he’d picked out, finally delivered to my living room. “You’d look good in a tux.”
“I would,” he agreed.
The last time I talked to Corey he had a cough—not a racking cough or a hacking cough, a dry cough or a wet cough. Just an everyday, regular old cough. He said he couldn’t video chat because his computer was broken. It occurs to me that he probably said this because he didn’t want me to see just how much more weight he had lost, how he struggled to breathe.
In mid-October, the Michener Center gave us free passes to the Austin Film Festival and I took full advantage, going to movie after movie. I had just come out of a Friday night screening of I Love You Phillip Morris when I got a call from Corey’s best friend, Elizabeth. I didn’t know what to make of it. Corey had mentioned her in passing, but we’d never spoken. My dad’s Lexus was still splattered with bugs from the drive to Texas, and finding it in the lot, I hesitated at the thought of leaning against it. The lights above were crowded with bugs, too.
Elizabeth told me that, last night, Corey had been admitted to the intensive care ward of a hospital in Orange County and treated for pneumonia. They had intubated him and pumped a quart and a half of fluid from beneath his lungs and said he was going to be fine. “He didn’t want me to tell you, but I figure if my boyfriend was in the hospital I would want to know,” she said.
I had the urge to correct Elizabeth, tell her Corey and I weren’t technically together, but I settled for saying thanks and to keep me posted.
Why wouldn’t Corey want his friend to tell me he was sick?
I went to a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse on Sixth Street the next day with my new classmate, Mary. Mary was from Jackson, Mississippi, in her early thirties, divorced. She already had an agent and a published story collection. She’d been in McSweeney’s. I thought of her as a lady.
In the middle of the movie, I got a call from Corey’s phone and excused myself to the lobby, expecting to hear a pneumonia-weakened wheeze.
“Hi!” I said. “Corey! How are you feeling?”
“This isn’t Corey. This is Miles. Corey’s brother.”
“What’s that?” I pressed the phone to the side of my face, folded my other ear shut to hear better. “It’s sort of loud in here. I can’t understand you.”
I went out to the sidewalk, and when that was even louder, back inside to the lobby. Eventually, I found a nook near the front door where I could just make out Miles’s words on the other end of the line. Like Elizabeth, I’d never spoken to him besides shouted hellos during my phone conversations with Corey, never seen him except for that picture Corey kept in his truck. Miles would say “Hi, Greg!” in the background and Corey would relay the message. “Miles says hi.”
“Corey is gone,” Miles said. He sounded clinical, more grown-up than you’d imagine possible from a college freshman who had just lost his only sibling.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” Miles repeated matter-of-factly. “I’m looking at him right now.”
The incongruity of this statement made my leg go rigid: Corey was gone but also present. Miles was in the room with him, right then, watching him not breathe.
At the end of the call, I went back into the darkened theater and took my seat on the aisle. The movie dragged on for another hour with bad jokes about rednecks and musical numbers with fiddle and banjo. I kept the screen in my periphery, turning my face away from Mary, feeling, as I picked at the Philly cheese steak I’d ordered, like one of those people who does weird things after committing a crime. Corey was dead. What else was there to do but settle my check and wait for the credits?
I must have been curt with Mary because as we left the Drafthouse and came out into the bright afternoon, she wanted to know, in her soft Southern cadence, if I was mad at her. “Things are about to get very short story-ish,” I said, starting to cry.
I laid out the situation with Corey and told Mary I wanted to keep walking around. The festival ran for only a few more days and I didn’t want to ruin her chance to meet other writers in the city both of us had lived in for just a few months. Mary said, “No. We should get you home.”
On the walk back to my car, I told Mary what a terrible person I was, how I insisted to Corey that we weren’t together after my move to Austin, how I dated other people while I was dating Corey. “We just seemed so casual,” I said.
“How old are you?” Mary asked.
I told her.
“You’re young,” she said. “You can’t blame yourself for not being ready.”
Once I was settled back at home, Miles called again and asked if I was sitting down. Instinctively, I got up and paced around the red couch, Corey’s couch. I sensed what Miles was going to say before he said it: Corey had succumbed to PCP, pneumocystis pneumonia. At the time of his death, he had a T-cell count of twenty-two and what Miles described as “full-blown AIDS.” I found an unopened envelope on the coffee table and wrote “22” and “full-blown AIDS” on the back of it and circled them again and again in pen.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“Not very well,” Miles said. “You?”
“Same,” I said.
I still don’t know if Corey got tested when I met him, or ever. What I do know is that he lied to my face about it half a dozen times. He’d roll on a condom and come inside me or let me swallow his come without so much as a heads-up.
Miles’s tone remained clinical as he relayed what the doctors were telling him and his mom. Judging from Corey’s state of physical collapse at the time of his death, he had contracted HIV in his late teens and fought the disease for years without seeking treatment or, apparently, telling anyone close to him he was sick, an especially baffling thing to do considering he had been out to his family for a decade. The doctors said Corey would have needed to come in four or five years earlier to have a real shot at prolonging his life. He was doomed from the day we met.
After hanging up with Miles, I found Corey’s JetBlue itinerary in my email. He’d flown back to Long Beach on Friday, August 13. That made it seventy days since we’d had sex, almost enough time for me to be through the window period, the time between when you’re infected and when you’ll test positive.
Not for the first time since my move, I missed Harold Way, and not for any of the normal nostalgic reasons but for the Out of the Closet on Sunset. It was open Saturdays. No testing center in Austin could say the same, at least none that I could find, and all the thrift stores were just thrift stores. Out of reasonable options, I called Mary and asked her to drive me to the emergency room. When they wouldn’t give me an HIV test after hours of waiting, we prowled East Sixth Street looking for a testing center on wheels. A nurse had said she thought there was such a thing, a bloodmobile for STDs, that they rolled it out on weekends.
Walking up to food trucks, I’d ask, “Is there an AIDS van around here?”
“Sorry, man,” one guy said. “We do brisket.”
We must have made a funny pair, inching along the busy street in Mary’s white Accord. As if we needed to look more like lost out-of-towners, Mary’s car had a Mississippi license plate in back and a pink Patty Peck dealership plate in front. It was like driving around in the Flannery O’Connor–mobile.
Sunday was agony, not knowing if I was positive, not knowing if my whole life would be different from here on out. I sobbed and wandered around my condo naked, hating my body, missing Corey, hating Corey, staring at my face in the mirror. I tried to write. I tried to remember if the condom ever broke. As far as I could remember we’d always used one. Even when we’d had sex in my mom’s backyard? I dunno, I thought so. It’s not like Corey had resisted the idea. He hadn’t been fanatical about it, either, hadn’t made extra sure, as would be common courtesy for someone at his most contagious. How could he not treat a treatable disease? How could he abandon Miles? I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to ask him why he’d never told me, though of course I knew: it was the same reason I didn’t mention my leg in dating profiles. The fear of an empty inbox. I kept picturing him dead in a hospital bed.
I felt like an idiot for not calling him out on all his fibs, for thinking I could move away from home and live the life of a normal person without contracting a deadly disease. I let dark fantasies overtake me. My tongue was covered in thrush. My lymph nodes were swollen. My groin was spotted in what must have been Kaposi’s sarcoma. I remembered a time in May when I had a sore on my lip, another time when I cut myself shaving. Had he used the razor?
Determined not to panic my mom, I decided to consult her girlfriend Claire. Claire had been my mom’s cancer surgeon when I was in high school, removing a series of basal cell carcinomas from the top of her head. The two had kept in touch over the years, even after Claire moved home to Minneapolis to take a position at a university hospital. When my dad died, she had stepped in to take care of my mom, and as improbable as it was, the two had fallen in love and now found themselves in a long-distance relationship. They wore each other’s engagement rings, flew back and forth for visits. I should have guessed they’d be together.
“Hi, Greg,” Claire said when I called. “Your mom’s right here. Let me get her.”
Before I could stop her, Claire passed the phone to my mom and I broke down.
Mom was surprisingly calm. She told me she’d devote all her time and money to helping me stay healthy. They’d clear out the guest room in Claire’s apartment. I could move to Minnesota and get treatment under her care.
My crying let up a little. “Mom, I’m not quitting grad school,” I said, irritated. “That is not happening. You realize I get a stipend, don’t you? They’re paying me to be here.”
“I know Corey loved you,” Mom said. “You could see it in the way he looked at you.”
“I know.” I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone. “I’m not going out like Corey.” I tried to find the resolve in my voice. “Not without a fight.”
“No, you’re not,” Mom said.
We talked for maybe fifteen more minutes before Mom concluded, with a clarity that startled me, “It isn’t fair you can get a disease just from having sex, is it?”
After we hung up I blew my nose and took a picture of a spot on my hip and texted it to Claire. Is this a lesion? I asked.
Lesions are late-stage symptoms sweetie, Claire wrote back. You’re not late stage.
Once I’d told Mom about Corey, I figured I should call my siblings.
“I can’t lose you, not after Dad,” Danny said, choking up. “You’re my best friend.”
“I’d cut off Corey’s balls if he wasn’t dead,” Chelsea said.
Meanwhile, Katie and I pledged, through laughter spiked with tears, to finish our “Switcheroo” script. “It’s our masterpiece, dude.”
Since we’d lived together the entire time I dated Corey, Katie had hung out with him almost as much as I had. She had memories of the time before Corey, too, when I would barge into the living room after a night at Akbar, asking if you could get HIV from precum. “I doubt the condom ever broke, dude,” Katie said. “I’m pretty sure you would have freaked out about it.”
“What about all the times I blew him?” I asked.
“I googled it,” Katie said. “He would have had to come directly in your eyeball.”
Mary and I arrived at a free testing center on Cesar Chavez a little after nine in the morning that Monday. A church van pulled up next to Mary’s car in the lot and a group of women filed out wearing tank tops and sweatpants. A few had smudged magenta eyeshadow and glitter on their cheeks.
“We better get you in there or we could be here a while,” Mary said.
I complained to the counselor about the runaround trying to get a test. The ER doctor I’d seen on Saturday, the one who wouldn’t test me, had accidentally referred me to a treatment center, not a testing center, a mistake that had cost Mary and me an hour of waiting in the wrong place that morning. I suppose I wanted to air my grievances before I lost the capacity, while I could still play the role of concerned citizen rather than pissed off antibody-positive gay man, as if the disease would taint my opinions as well as my immune system.
The counselor had me swab my cheek and asked about my sex life, whether or not I injected drugs. “Some of these questions don’t apply,” she said.
“He lied to my face,” I told her. “He told me he got tested and that he was negative. Is there any chance he just didn’t know? He didn’t look like a walking AIDS patient. He was pretty healthy and strong. He had bags under his eyes and he was losing weight, but I congratulated him on it.”
“He probably knew,” the counselor told me.
By the time I was finished dumping out my feelings, the test was ready. I held my cheeks in my hands, my body not numb but tingling, like I’d just been hit.
This is it, I thought. This is my life.
The counselor warned that the results were preliminary. The window period for a third-generation antibody test, which is what I’d just taken, could be anywhere from three to six months from last contact. That word seemed weird to me, contact, like Corey was the disease and not the carrier.
I returned to the waiting room with swollen eyes and handed Mary the certificate with the test results, letting her see it in writing.
“You were sure in there for a long time,” Mary said, pulling out her earbuds. She read the results, stood up, and hugged me. I was negative.
The women in the waiting room cheered.
Corey’s mom, Anita, called between classes that week to ask me to come to Corey’s memorial. It was going to be on a boat. I recognized her garbled tone from my mom’s grief-fueled benders after my dad died. “We have to keep him alive. In our hearts,” Anita added, after a long pause.
I parked myself on a patch of dirt under an oak tree on campus and ran my hands over its lumpy roots, looking out at a bunch of carefree kids in flip-flops migrating across the lawn to class. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what,” she said.
Anita was glad to hear that I was OK. She sounded hurt when I asked if she had been in touch with Corey’s other partners. “Other partners?” she asked. There had only been me.
That night I emailed her some pictures I’d taken of Corey. It was hard to find ones where Corey wasn’t sticking out his tongue or gagging or giving the camera the bird. Corey fake-smiling in front of a pen of flamingos at the Los Angeles Zoo. Corey squinting on a bench next to a plaque encouraging patrons to “Join the Wild Beast Society.” And there were the ones I took around the house: Corey brushing his teeth in the bathroom, my head on his shoulder. Corey pulling the comforter over his head in bed. Corey kissing me in the kitchen, his eyes squeezed shut, looking rapturous. I kept those for myself.
“Thank you for being Corey’s friend and everything,” Anita wrote in reply. “I miss him so much, I am in a real fog, but it will take some time. Like you, I am sure.” She’d sent a link to his four-line obituary in the Daily Pilot. It didn’t mention anything about AIDS and was written like an E. E. Cummings poem, with weird spacing, line breaks, and everything. Besides Elizabeth, I was the only one outside the family they’d told. “We want to keep things private,” Anita explained. “Corey was a very private person.”
I flew to Los Angeles the Thursday before Corey’s funeral and crashed on Katie and Danny’s couch. It was my ex-couch now that I didn’t live there anymore. They told me about how the guy who was renting my old room, a former Marine turned cinematographer, had come into the living room to find them crying the day Corey died. When they’d explained why, he’d gone back into his room and flipped the mattress, like a homophobic Hulk. He had scrubbed every inch of our house, tossed my lice shampoo from under the bathroom sink, even done the dishes. Katie had visited her psychic on Gower, who said I was going to be OK. Danny had gone to Out of the Closet and gotten tested.
“I wasn’t aware you were bottoming for Corey,” I said.
“I know, I’m nuts,” Danny said. “We’re all total hypochondriacs.”
As if to prove his point, I returned to Out of the Closet myself the next morning. It had only been twelve days since I had tested negative in Austin, twelve days since the waiting room full of women with glitter on their cheeks cheered.
“Wow, this is a lot of testing,” Jonah, the counselor, said. I’d wanted it to be the same guy who’d given me the Love condoms last winter, but it wasn’t. This was Hollywood. People came and went. “I can test you again but the result is going to be the same.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, pulling out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill as if to bribe him. “Here’s my donation, and I’m planning on buying some shirts.”
If I was positive, I wasn’t going to Corey’s funeral. I was angry enough as it was.
I hoped I wasn’t shaking as I ran the swab along the inside of my cheek. “Total déjà vu, your situation and mine,” Jonah said. “My ex lied to me about getting tested, too. It took him months to come clean. I thought he was going to tell me he was back with his wife.” Jonah let out a theatrical sigh, took the swab back from me. “I don’t know how positives find me. It’s not like I talk to them at parties and they say they’re positive and we go home together.”
“It’s because you have a good aura,” I told him, pointing to the Virgin Mary inked on the underside of his wrist.
“Oh my crazy self,” he said, swatting away my compliment.
The morning of Corey’s funeral I was a plank on the couch, already feeling too sore and exhausted to move. I woke my brother up rifling through his dresser for socks and we got into a fight. I told Danny he couldn’t blog about Corey’s funeral and he told me he could blog about whatever the fuck he wanted.
“I don’t want to go to your gay boyfriend’s AIDS funeral anyway,” he said.
“Yeah, this must be a really hard day for you,” I said.
Danny sat up in bed, not saying anything for a few seconds. When he finally spoke his voice was soft. “Can we not fight? Today is shitty enough already.”
It was just like my brother to be a jerk and then call a truce. But I knew, even at the time, that beneath his anger and worry was the fact that we’d both lost a friend.
While Danny elected to stay home and get drunk, Katie took the day off from her new magazine job to drive me to Newport Beach. We got there early, looking like goons in our sunglasses, and killed time with cheap French roast coffee and croissants filled with Nutella, debating whether or not we should go to Disneyland or the Nixon Library after the memorial, as if the experience wouldn’t leave us totally wrung out.
Miles was the first person to walk up to us, hugging me before I even introduced myself and planting an ear against my chest to listen to my heart. The heat radiated off him. His cashmere sweater was too warm for this sunny November day.
He was the same cherubic nerd I’d seen in his school picture, a miniature Eugene Levy with curls and retro black glasses slipping down his nose. Corey had bought those glasses for him. If Miles had sounded detached on the phone, in person he was full of quiet composure, a state all the more remarkable given the disarray of the rest of his family. He reminded me, just a bit, of a benevolent teddy bear.
“Corey had the best time on your road trip,” Anita said, hugging a shawl tightly around herself. “The best time.” She looked frail in her baggy purple tracksuit and her face was terribly broken out. Corey’s dad, on the other hand, was rocking the laidback California vibe: curly silver hair, short-sleeve shirt, wraparound sunglasses. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was what Corey would have looked like had he made it to the fiefdom of his mid-fifties—red and jowly from a lifetime of hanging out by the water and eating burgers without worrying about instant diarrhea. Corey’s dad was passing around a stack of childhood pictures of Corey—I recognized one from Corey’s gay.com profile—and I suddenly had the urge to throw him against a wall or run over his hand with a truck. Instead, I just teared up and said the pictures were nice.
The boat where the service was held was named Western Pride. It was normally used for whale-spotting tours, not funerals. Corey’s pals at the dock had pulled some strings. For example, we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Corey’s friend Elizabeth was there, but as far as I could tell, I was the only boyfriend, Katie and I two of only a handful of friends, period. Maybe two dozen people total were in attendance. It startled me to see just how small Corey’s world was, small and not dealing with his death. No one sang or prayed or offered fierce rocking hugs. It says something that the nineteen-year-old with Asperger’s was the most emotionally in-tune person aboard. If not for Miles, we could almost have been on a regular whale-spotting tour.
He passed around the manifest and a woman with spiky blond hair approached and handed Katie and me yellow roses to throw in the boat’s wake. “I’m the evil stepmom,” she said, curtsying. All Corey had ever told me about her was that she had paid thousands of dollars to have flames painted on the side of her car, and I don’t think it was even that nice of a car.
I don’t usually go in for the “celebration of life” thing. If a funeral isn’t a mega bummer, something’s up. But I will say it’s hard to stay sad on a boat. Leaving the trashy shore behind, we made our way through an obstacle course of buoys and into the spectacular open water. The captain let us cruise around for a while, the sun on our faces, spume spraying our shades, not a whale in sight, and then he found a patch of smooth blue ocean and cut the engine. I was able to take a deep breath for the first time that day.
As the boat gently rocked, Miles ducked into the captain’s deck, a wad of damp pages in one hand. A voice wobbling between bassy and nasal in that unmistakably teenage way came over the speakers. The way I remember it, he just started talking, like he was on a short-wave radio, broadcasting his brother’s eulogy to the great beyond. Miles quoted Emerson with undergraduate aplomb and talked about how Corey had helped move him into his dorm in San Diego and had checked in with him every night during his first months of school. “That part of my life is over,” he concluded with a finality that should have been illegal for someone his age.
I tottered at the back of the boat, the smell of gasoline still stinging my nostrils, devising a plan for how I would smuggle Miles back to Texas. It had occurred to me on the ride out that Corey wasn’t the only one light in the friend department. Miles didn’t have a single pal on that boat, no one from high school or college supporting him. Now I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him behind. “If anyone wants to say a few words, please come up,” Miles was saying. A few painful seconds passed in which no one made a move toward the captain’s deck, not Anita or Corey’s dad, not Elizabeth or me. This wasn’t cool.
I poked Katie’s leg with the stem of my rose. “I’ll hold your rose, go,” I said, and Katie gamely gripped the railing and strode up to the microphone in her calf-length boots and Joe Biden aviators. Most of her impromptu speech was snatched away by the wind, but she got in a good line about how Corey was excellent at “hanging out.”
Battling a bout of inappropriate laughter, shoulders shaking, I handed Katie back her rose, too emotionally pinched off to cry. “Now we’ll scatter Corey’s ashes,” Miles reported. I’d known this was coming but it still seemed sudden, indicative of a desire to get things over with. My dad has been dead twelve years and we still haven’t scattered his ashes.
Miles hung up the mike and descended the deck, heading sternward with his parents. The engine sputtered to life and the breeze picked up, the boat’s wake spreading its white wings behind us. I remember the urn was lined with a plastic bag that Miles and his parents hoisted over the back of the boat and emptied like a wastebasket, letting Corey’s ashes spill into the harbor, the wind for once, thank God, at his back. I composed myself with a single sniff and threw my rose in with the others.
In college, we called it “going on tour” when a guy came out of the closet and slept with anyone he could get his hands on. Seeing those childhood pictures of Corey that day, it was hard not to think of the angry teenager he had grown into, blaming his dad for making him gay, bleaching his hair, and then going on tour with his broken hand and beautiful dick. To think the simple act of having sex had made him sick. It wasn’t fair.
Feeling a little floaty after our seafaring “celebration,” we decided we needed something in our stomachs besides coffee and Nutella. With Anita’s go-ahead, we carried Miles off to lunch at a restaurant in the harbor—Katie, Elizabeth, and I—watching from our table by the window as a batch of tourists boarded Western Pride. We ate our turkey clubs. Then, honoring Corey’s legacy, we hung out, and kept hanging out. An hour passed without anyone noticing. Afternoon sun sparkling off the water, the four of us walked the pier, a goth funeral procession somehow less wretched than the one we’d just endured. We talked about Waiting for Godot, Quentin Tarantino, and comic books, anything to avoid saying goodbye. Corey hadn’t mentioned Miles even liking comic books, but everything else about him was just as described, this short, sweet savant. We hugged and I let Miles climb into his car to collect his mom only if he promised to call.
“And if you think of it, send me the names of some comics,” I said, hoping this might give us something to talk about on the off chance he did reach out.
I came home from the memorial to an email from Miles. Subject line: Comics Reading List. “So you asked for a comics reading list and while I could think of hundreds of cartoonists who I consider essential, I’ll start you on ten of them. Ten Great Cartoonists, in No Particular Order.”
I spent the rest of that fall and winter placing holds at the public library, scavenging through the university stacks. On the phone past midnight, I might find myself scribbling down an artist’s name to look up later. Miles talked about things like diagrammatic space and minimal line drawing, who it was blasphemous not to like and who was unmitigated filth. The kid had an astounding vocabulary and, it must be noted, some quirky phone habits.
If he called and I couldn’t pick up, if I were, say, in class or hauling groceries up the stairs to my condo, he would try me ten or eleven times in a row, try until I dug my buzzing phone out of my pocket and answered. To my frantic “Is everything OK?” he would offer a casual, “Hey, Greg. Yup, everything’s fine. How’s it going?”
He was just checking in.
The whole thing was a little intense.
“A little intense?” Mom said when I called to talk to her about how to handle it. She’d joined a support group for parents whose kids have Asperger’s and amassed a stack of books on the subject that she kept in a wicker basket by her bed. “The poor kid just needs some stability. Think about how annoying Chelsea would be if you died. We’d have to put her in a straitjacket.”
“Thanks, that’s sweet,” I told her.
I heard Chelsea in the background telling us both to fuck off.
Mom suggested Miles and I set up a time to talk each week and stick to it. Make it part of the routine, text if anything came up. It worked. My phone would ring right at ten every Tuesday night and I made sure to answer. Miles and I talked about movies, comic books, art, the classes we were taking, comic books again. We talked on Corey’s birthday, Christmas, the anniversary of his death. But mostly, we talked on Tuesdays at ten.
I’ll admit I had a lot of questions, though I tried not to put Miles on the spot. Every time he confirmed another one of Corey’s fibs, my right leg would seize up and I’d hobble around my living room feeling stupid all over again, then just sad. There had never been any roommates in Santa Monica or a job as a construction site manager. Corey had lived in his mom’s house with Miles the whole time we’d dated, picking up shifts at the dock. Nor did he go to the fancy Catholic school whose decal he’d stuck in his truck window. Miles had. After coming out, Corey had gotten into some fights and been sent to a remedial high school in Orange County. He’d barely earned a diploma, let alone gone to Berkeley.
In a switcheroo worthy of Roald Dahl, it’s Miles, not his older brother, with whom I’ve developed a long-distance friendship. I knew Corey for eight months. I’ve talked to Miles on the phone for ten years now. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would have come to reduce Corey to a cautionary tale from my twenties: The Jerk Who Lied About AIDS. Instead, I’ve gotten to know, posthumously, the loving big brother who pitched in for school supplies, the guy who may not have thought he was smart enough to go to college but made sure his brother got there. I’m reminded of the man who changed my life for the better.
And for what it’s worth, I like to think that, in those first years, the certainty we would talk freed Miles to live his life, to draw and play Dungeons & Dragons, to switch his major from engineering to art and seek out other comic book lovers. I know it helped me. We still talk a couple times a year, sometimes for hours, though now Miles is in his late twenties with a job at a wedding cake shop and a girlfriend. Baking has replaced comics as his obsession. Other stuff has changed, too, but you’ll have to ask him about that. It’s fair to say the kid is baffling, brilliant, ever evolving, getting older by the day, just like I am. More and more when I call, he offers a friendly hello and excuses himself, promising we’ll catch up when he’s not in the middle of something. I tell him not to worry. I’m just checking in.
“Life is long,” I tell him. I say it into the phone like a wish, hoping he’ll agree.
Greg Marshall is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in prose and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. His essays have been collected in The Best American Essays and recognized as notable in the anthology three times; they have also appeared in Fourth Genre, Foglifter, and Green Mountains Review, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. Marshall is at work on a novel and a memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his husband.
My friend Randy and I like to smoke dope and try to perfect our Esoteric Trail of Mississippi we plan to travel stop by stop one day, even though our state already has far too many gas-guzzling tourist trails, the most popular of which is Blues Trail followed by the Natchez Trace and the Writers Trail, but let’s not forget the Racial Atrocity Trail (forever intertwined with the Fascist Trail), and, for the kids, there’s always the Legendary Quarterbacks Trail and the Shitload of Miss Americas Trail. The Esoteric Trail we keep tweaking is connected by a tone of absurdity and horror and includes such whistle stops as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Crash Sight and the Salt Domes Where They Used To Ineptly Blow Up Atomic Bombs (my mother turned hippie activist at age fifty-five to protest the plans to store America’s nuclear waste inside those same salt domes). And, for those who dare, there’s the Seriously Spooky Pascagoula UFO Landing Site (“Mississippi: Our Space Aliens Can Beat Up Your Space Aliens”) that commemorates the grotesque six-foot-tall extraterrestrials with crab-claw hands and anal-probe eyes who could float through the air and often did so as they approached my childhood bed each night to slaver over me until I awoke screaming. But the very first stop on the Esoteric Trail is much closer to our stoner hearts, and that is the site we will call Bill Hicks’s Extremely Ironic Grave.
If there were a Dead People You Wouldn’t Expect To Find Buried In Mississippi Trail, then that trail and ours would converge in Leakesville at the cigarette-scattered gravestone of the comedian Bill Hicks, who died at age thirty-three in 1994 of pancreatic cancer, although it’s almost certain the cancer saved him from having to be suicided by the CIA. Hicks was a miraculously brave and miraculously self-destructive gadfly who seemed to be daring the Powers That Be (and they do be, y’all) by taunting the military-industrial complex and hammering home how stupid you must be to watch the Zapruder film even once and still believe JFK got shot from behind? (“Back and to the left, back and to the left!”) Yeah, it’s no wonder he got banned by Letterman. And all this was before Hicks traveled to the site of the Waco siege, while it was still in progress, and took up the cause of the twenty children who got set on fire for no good reason by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. So, yeah, the cancer saved everyone a lot of trouble, and after Bill Hicks died, his body was shipped to Freakhole, Mississippi, stuck in the ground, and, according to Cynthia True’s excellent biography American Scream, a few days after Hicks was buried, Carrot Top won the award for Funniest Male Stand-Up from the ACA. So, yes, irony all around, a feast of irony.
Melvin William Hicks (“thanks, Mom and Dad”) was born two months after me in 1961 and for twenty-six years now has been buried in the same county as my grandparents are. My mom’s people hail from Greene County as did both of Hicks’s parents, so I supposed we could even be related. You’d have to be pretty old to grasp Hicks’s influence on the South’s often-bewildering sense of humor (during my twenty years held hostage in frozen Vermont, I often considered getting a T-shirt that said: THAT WAS A JOKE). I’ve heard Hicks called the George Carlin of the South, but I strongly object to that comparison and would instead suggest Hicks was, in a type of history played Satanically backward like a Beatles album, the son of Dave Chappelle, who like Hicks began his professional career while still a child and was raised by comedy clubs. It’s a shame Hicks and Chappelle never got to share a cig on stage because they are two of our bravest, most philosophical comedians. Chappelle aside, it’s hard to compare any performer to Hicks in terms of courting self-destruction while actually on stage. Hicks was the Evel Knievel of 80s stand-up. Nobody who saw his act ever thought he would die of old age.
The reason I bring this up is that my second novel, The Last Taxi Driver, is about to be published by Tin House Books after a blurred twenty-year hiatus I took from publishing in order to spend more time with my family. The narrator of my novel is a full-time cabbie, just like I was for years, who is obsessed with UFOs and Bill Hicks, and there’s a strong connection between those two arcane phenomena. Before he died, Hicks described two different Close Encounters of the Third Kind he’d survived, and on stage he fused this UFO fascination with his disdain for the religious upbringing he’d endured in the Deep South. His initial UFO encounter involved psilocybin mushrooms, a caveat Hicks laments will leave us skeptical.
Three weeks ago, two of my friends and I went to a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, and took what Terence McKenna once called a “heroic dose.” Five dried grams. Without going into too much detail, me and my two friends had a shared vision, while not being together physically, of being taken up in a UFO. With a five-minute UFO experience, I got a taste of holiness I never got in twenty years of religion. To tell you the truth, the reason I quit doing mushrooms was because I had a UFO experience. So that’s a true story? That’s not just a comic riff? No, that’s true. What’s frustrating is that every time I tell the story, the first thing people ask is “Were you tripping?” And I go, yeah. And they go, oh yeah, right. But it was really profound, and I want to experience it again totally straight. So I can tell people I was straight. Why did I quit? Because after you’ve been taken aboard a UFO, it’s kinda hard to top that, all right? You know, they have Alcoholics Anonymous, they don’t have Aliens Anonymous. Fuck you, I’ve been on a UFO! Fuck off! I went drinking with aliens, you fucker! Shut up! “I lost my wife.” I LOST AN ALIEN CULTURE WHO WANTED TO TAKE ME TO THE PLANET ARTURUS. FUCK YOU!
And it was also while discussing UFOs that Hicks best revealed his views on the role of the artist in the modern world.
I, like all artists in Western cultures, am a shaman. Like Hendrix. Man, no one beats Hendrix. Fuck Eddie Van Halen, fuck Stevie Vau—no one beats fuckin’—Hendrix was an alien, okay? His ship landed, they said, “Jimi, show ’em how it’s done and we’ll pick you up in twenty-eight years.”
You see, Jung had this idea of a Collective Unconscious which mankind shared . . . and I agree. But!—I think this Collective Mind is supposed to be conscious, not unconscious. And that is our job as the Agents of Evolution to enlighten—to bring light into the dark corners of that Netherworld and thus awaken our Mind to Truth and complete the circle that was broken with the dream of our Fall from Grace. And if we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might be more compassionate and something like heaven might dawn. I want everyone here to take the five dried grams I taped under y’all chairs right now. Under your chairs: check ’em out. Let’s go, man. The fucking UFOs are waiting in the fifth dimension. Let’s go! We’ll do it later. We’ll do it as a closer.
Hicks was of course far from alone in perceiving a spiritual side to the UFO phenomenon, and it was his hero Carl Jung who’d first described flying saucers as an emerging archetype in our collective unconscious. An old man by then, Jung regretted he would not live long enough to fully grasp the significance of what he termed these new angels of technology. And it was obvious the world needed a new archetype back then. World War II, the ending of which birthed the modern UFO phenomenon, had destroyed the ability of millions of humans to keep faith in a god of love who sacrificed his only begotten son yada yada yada in order to forgive us for being the miserably masturbating monkeys we actually are. Those two unnecessary bombs we dropped on the innocent women and children of Japan, thereby melting their skin onto their skeletons like so much poured paint, forced us as a species to step back and regard ourselves in utter horror after which the influence of Christianity waned in America as it had already done in Europe. Yet our DNA seems hardwired for religion, and to lose one faith often requires the subconscious to latch on to another faith as opposed to going full-force atheist and trading Eternal Damnation for Eternal Nothing, a reality the poet Philip Larkin described as “nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”
UFOs in America have always been a religion. The contactee craze of 1950s helped give us the New Age movement via a series of channeled Hallmark messages, illustrated with photographs of airborne trash-can lids, designed to save our planet from ruin. Yet as the French prophet of UFOs Jacques Vallee has argued, there’s little reason to assume these UFOs come from other planets. It’s likelier their captains are interdimensional and/or time-traveling beings threatened by our capacity to annihilate a shared habitat we call earth. These disparate influences eventually inspired Bill Hicks to devise his own self-negating religion that is perhaps best likened to The Church of Christ Without Christ in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
Folks, it’s time to evolve ideas. You know, evolution did not end with us growing thumbs. You do know that, right? Didn’t end there. We’re at the point now where we’re going to have to evolve ideas. The reason the world’s so fucked up is we’re undergoing evolution. And the reason our institutions, our traditional religions, are all crumbling is because they’re no longer relevant. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! They’re no longer relevant. So it’s time for us to create a new philosophy and perhaps even a new religion. I believe there is a commonality to all humanity: we all suck. I am a Misanthropic Humanist. It’s a weird conflict when you are your own bête noire. Do I like people? They’re great in theory.
As with Chappelle, or any worthwhile comedian who pushes the limits of free speech, Hicks’s lifetime on stage can be cherrypicked to crucify him by those who henceforth deserve lives bereft of laughter and art. But, yes, there were tirades in which Hicks seemed to become possessed by The Exorcist–level demons of his childhood religion—especially when he was dealing with hecklers or the media.
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing . . . kill yourself. Thank you, thank you, thanks. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe, maybe one day, they’ll take root—I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Ahh, no really, there’s no rationalization for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No, this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming”—there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds.
And as he aged, his misanthropic humanism became interwoven with what most people have been trained by the media to call conspiracy theory, although Hicks begged to differ and did not consider himself a conspiracy nut but a sunglass-donning They Live! Rowdy Roddy realist, who, like the Shakespeare of Caesar and Macbeth, saw conspiracy as the very language of power.
I have this feeling, man, ’cause you know there’s a handful of people who actually run everything. That’s true. It’s provable, it’s not a fucking—I’m not a conspiracy nut. It’s provable. A handful, a very small elite, run and own these corporations, which include the mainstream media. I have this feeling who’s ever elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what your promises on the campaign trail—blah, blah, blah—when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist-capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there, and you’re in this smoky room and this little film screen comes down, rrrrrrrrrr, and a big guy with a cigar goes, “Roll the film.” And it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before . . . that looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And then the film ends, the screen goes up, and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, “Any questions?”
“Ehh, just what my agenda is?”
Back and to the left. Back and to the left.
Yeah, there’s dick jokes coming up, please relax. Folks, here’s the deal: I editorialize for forty-five minutes, the last fifteen I pull my ’chute, we all pull our ’chutes, and float down to Dick-Joke Island together.
And if Hicks and Shakespeare were correct, then perhaps the greatest conspiracy of them all might be this concept of conspiracy theory that we are ceaselessly assaulted with by a corporate media eager to convince us their evil overlords don’t exist. (Pay no attention to the twelve industrial scum-fucks behind the curtain.) But, as Hicks makes clear, these overlords do exist, and just because there’s not a group of them who actually wears red, sacrifices babies beneath owl statues, and refers to themselves as the Illuminati doesn’t mean they don’t behave with an unfathomably Machiavellian mindset—witness Jeffrey Epstein and the whole Dread Pirate Roberts procession of Epsteins that preceded him in obtaining children for rich people to fuck and then toss into trash bins. With Epstein in mind, we might even want to ask ourselves, “Who is it that benefits from this clusterfuck overuse of the term conspiracy theorist within our media?” Or, a better way to phrase this might be “Could Jeffrey Epstein have thrived for decades peddling poor children to powerful, rich perverts were it not for the term conspiracy theorist protecting him?”
Now if we examine this concept I like to call conspiracy-theory theory, we discover that the modern use of the term conspiracy theorist was invented in 1964 after the Kennedy assassination (“back and to the left”) in order to ridicule the people who were questioning the rather fanciful conclusions of the Warren Commission by comparing these skeptics to the mooncalves who believed in Little Green Men. In a sense the term conspiracy theorist is a magic wand of dismissal that saves you from actually having to engage any of the ideas held by these so-called “conspiracy theorists.” Think Kennedy got shot from the grassy knoll? Little Green Men. Believe it unlikely that Bobby got shot in the front of the chest by somebody standing directly behind him? Little Green Men. Believe that George Jr. stole an election or that Paul Wellstone’s plane got brought down by industrial scum-fucks or that Bill Clinton fucked children or that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were conceived inside a think tank funded by the military-industrial complex? Little Green Men. And this method of ridicule via false equivalency works swimmingly well, because, as George Orwell once pointed out, nothing can withstand the elephantine power of ridicule. Even imperialism, as Orwell demonstrated, can be brought to its knees by the sound of peasant laughter.
Orwell’s insights into the amazing power of ridicule were not lost on the intelligence agencies and think tanks that for decades now have been employing those two words conspiracy theorist as a way to neuter our brains and thereby protect some really evil scum-fucks. And what’s sad, and damning, is just how easy it is to control not only what we say but what we dare to think.
Aldous Huxley, in a letter he wrote to his friend Orwell, argued that, inside a democracy, mind control, or what he called mesmerism, was a more economical solution to controlling the masses than brute force, and that it was therefore inevitable that America’s ruling class would seize upon the opium of entertainment to keep us in check rather than the costlier method of torturing us. But for Huxley’s mesmerism to actually work its magic requires a constant re-enforcement of exactly how you will be ridiculed should you fall out of line. The human test subject must be repeatedly threatened however subliminally—Conspiracy theorist! Little Green Men!—with the despised subclass of freakzoids he will be compared to should he question the endless lies of the media—what many call “news”—and along those lines I would not be surprised to learn that the Flat Earthers and Sandy Hookers and Pizza Gaters of Reddit are getting a lot of encouragement via intelligence agencies, with a zillion bots at their disposal, in order to create the necessary illusion of this giant subclass of idiots you will be lumped together with should you think for yourself and speak truth to power.
And if any of this sounds trivial, please recall that the scientists who have been screaming at top lung about climate change have been dismissed for decades now as . . . conspiracy theorists. There’s nothing trivial about how well this method preys on our primal fear of being socially ridiculed and isolated and therefore rendered unfuckable. Conspiracy-theory theory allows lawless factions to get away with assassinations and plunder, and it has been instrumental in creating the normalization of the endless war we don’t even notice any more, such is our enthrallment with the cult of hideous violence we call entertainment. And although this method of mind control works on women to some extent, it was designed to attack the brains of men via our famously frail egos and our staunch refusal to believe in the existence of people in think tanks who are astronomically smarter than us. Yet we men, who are so certain our brains cannot be controlled, also walk around constantly terrified of being exposed for the gullible chimps we secretly know ourselves to be. And this explains why the males of our species will do damn near anything in order to be perceived as intelligent, employable, and therefore fuckable. We will not only agree with the pundits that the sky is green and the grass blue, but we will believe it and start ridiculing and bullying anybody, especially women, who says otherwise, and I strongly suspect if Bill Hicks were alive today, he would be thundering this gospel of conspiracy-theory theory between asthmatic coughs from his wheelchair inside the burning Church of Misanthropic Humanism.
If, like most rubes, you believe mind control only works on people of lesser intelligence, then, hey, congratulations: you are a shining example of how horribly effective this method is, because conspiracy-theory theory works especially well inside academia, where the unrelenting peer-review atmosphere constantly pricks and pinches the primal fear of social ridicule. The bigger the ego, the bigger the stakes, the better it works.
It was sixty years ago when Jung lamented he wouldn’t live long enough to understand the emerging archetype then called “flying saucers,” but today we have a better understanding of these crafts, and even our (ahem) respected newspapers are suddenly acknowledging that, yes, UFOs are real and furthermore it’s undeniable that the UFO phenomenon is and always has been attached to the phenomenon of nuclear proliferation. Leslie Kean’s groundbreaking book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, a New York Times Best Seller, established for any reasonable mind that UFOs have been obsessed with our nuclear-storage facilities since the 1940s. Her reporting was initially published in the New York Times, and her sources are the military brass and servicepersons who guard these facilities and have everything to lose by coming forward to warn us of this disturbing truth. The much ballyhooed “Tic Tac UFO” footage, endorsed by the Navy, reaffirms Kean’s thesis. And just recently, The Washington Examiner ran another article about the military people who keep stepping forward to warn us that UFOs have been infiltrating our nuclear silos for decades.
Not only are UFOs stalking these silos, and sending beams down into them, the crafts are actually hijacking the computers that launch these doomsday warheads. According to firsthand expert testimony (ahem), UFOs have repeatedly shut down entire lines of nuclear missiles—not just in America but apparently in Russia as well—and, far more harrowing, UFOs have even instigated the launch sequences for these warheads before cutting them off at the last seconds. It’s a mind-blowing reality difficult to digest for anybody, but especially for the military officers tasked with guarding these silos.
For decades now my own interest in UFOs, which started with the Pascagoula abduction of the early 70s, has centered on the multimillion-dollar dome of disinformation that has been built over the phenomenon. The extent of this disinformation campaign baffled me until the day I watched Robert Hastings’s documentary UFO & Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, with its parade of military officers coming forward to confirm that our nuclear silos have been breached for decades. That quick, I finally understood why millions if not billions of dollars had been spent to create this impenetrable net of I-Want-To-Believe bullshit meant to distract the curious from the disturbing truth lurking in the grassy knoll. And, with apologies to Bill Hicks, I am sympathetic to the military here. (Full disclosure: my dad was in the army and my mom was a secretary for the navy with a high security clearance.) If you were a general, would you polish off your stars to announce to the cameras that the United States is utterly impotent in the face of a species so technologically advanced that we appear to be precocious bugs to them? No, pleading impotence is not an option inside the military code—nor should it be—and in order to prevent having to make this confession, the military has spent an infinity of our tax dollars to create this protective dome of incredibly creative lies, which in turn has created a UFO mythology as rich as the works of Homer, Virgil, Valmiki, and Vyasa combined.
So, yes, we should be unnerved, although it’s equally true that these beings who are toying with our warheads have seldom acted with overt malice, and that is encouraging, yet all of this raises an obvious point that I have never once heard discussed, which is the likelihood that the our military, and indeed every military on earth, no longer has the ability to launch a nuclear warhead at another country. We have been told by eyewitnesses that our nuclear silos have been infiltrated since the 1940s by at least one incomprehensibly advanced species. Now why would these so-called aliens start playing games with our deadly missiles? Simply to show off and let us know they are superior? A more logical mind might suggest they are letting us know they, and not us, are in control of our nuclear arsenals. If you’ve ever marveled at the fact that our species of only relatively great apes has for eight decades now broken character by not splifficating our planet inside a nuclear holocaust, then here you have the answer to that riddle: we haven’t destroyed Earth because the grown-ups won’t let us. And at the risk of tenaciously clinging to logic, it would follow that not even our generals know for certain if we are capable of launching a nuclear warhead at another country because the only way to find out would be to try it. And if this scenario is true—and logic it could be—then we are spending billions of tax dollar every year to create weapons for space aliens. Which hardly seems wise.
So, yeah, welcome to my world, and now that we’re all glancing tremulously at the sky, let’s turn our telescope upon a less dreadful side of the UFO phenomenon, one that harkens back to Bill Hicks’s idea of artists as shamanic agents of evolution. In the many decades since UFOs stumped Carl Jung, there have been strong hints that these technological angels are not only intent on tweaking our bombs but with tweaking our evolutionary processes, perhaps even our DNA, in order to nudge us toward a more ecologically enlightened mindset. This is not to say that all human interactions with these beings has been beneficial—they haven’t—but I think it’s fair to state that the aliens are behaving with a great deal more maturity than human beings have ever exercised over inferior species. Like our military, these aliens appear to be operating within a code and might even be protecting us from the wrath of less patient aliens (you can’t have good aliens without bad aliens), and it also seems feasible that these good aliens are attempting, if only for selfish reasons, to evolve our species in order to save a planet perched on the precipice of the Book of Revelation.
The Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, prior to his death in 2016, had claimed for years that UFOs are real, experienced a phenomenon while in space that he compared to Buddhist enlightenment. The writer Whitley Stieber and more recently the Quantum Computing prodigy Deep Prasad have both described overwhelming spiritual experiences associated with alien visitations that seem to mimic the electrical phenomenon known as kundalini awakening in Tantric Hinduism. So it’s possible these aliens might be tweaking us humans in an attempt to save us from ourselves by forcing evolution upon us.
But before we get too touchy-feely here, abduction experiences can be horrific in nature, and we should not assume these aliens are spiritually advanced just because they are technologically advanced. The effect of technology upon humans might in fact argue the opposite. We’ve gone retrograde and appear to be slumping backward into monkeyhood. The Elizabethans could memorize entire books, yet I can’t recite my own phone number. The printing press caused us to abandon the memory systems that gave us the Renaissance. I suppose it’s possible a tribe that’s quickly deteriorating intellectually might at the same time be evolving spiritually or morally, but I don’t see much evidence of that happening. And yet, in spite of our failings, these aliens continue to demonstrate a remarkable patience with our war-loving species. We are the Klingons in this script, and yet somebody seems to be holding back the hand that could easily wipe us out of existence with our own weapons. It’s enough to make you suspect we are redeemable, and perhaps we are.
Before he was buried in Mississippi, Bill Hicks got his wish for a sober close encounter with a UFO. But this second experience also comes with a caveat in that it was induced not by magic mushroom but by the New Age music of Yanni. One good reason never to quit drugs and is that the Gods of Irony will stir to life. Informed of his pending demise from cancer, the sober Hicks moved back in with his Mississippi parents, who had given him so much material over the years, and one day soon thereafter went to get a massage during which he experienced a vision that skeptics will dismiss as a dream but which Hicks called a vision.
This dream or vision was Edenic in nature, and Hicks described its beauty inside an essay he wrote just before his death that was included by John Lahr in Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks. In this self-described vison, Hicks found himself living a parallel existence filled with all the conventions of human happiness that he had sacrificed for his career on the road. He found himself living in a traditional house in the woods with his loving wife, who didn’t exist in real life, and his two lovely children, who didn’t exist either. His long-dead childhood dog was there along with two Great Dane pups, one named Crotus, the other Chiron. (Crotus was the Satyr so devoted to the Muses he invented the practice of applause, whereas Chiron was the famously soft-on-humans centaur who taught us the secrets of medicinal herbs.) When these three dogs suddenly ran off barking, and his wife and children chased after the dogs, Hicks decided to follow them over a hill, the top of which gave him a view of a second sun visible in the sky. This second sun turned out to be a small, bright craft circling above a large metal flying saucer. While being flooded with feelings of joy and love, Hicks remained wary until his family started gesturing for him to board the craft with them. “You’ve been waiting for your whole life,” his imaginary wife yelled to him. Eventually he acquiesed, but before actually entering the saucer with his family, Hicks glanced back at the house, so filled with the happiness denied him in real life, and noticed the front door had been left open, and for a moment he stood there imagining his friends and what they might think while examining these last clues left of him on earth. “What happened to Hicks?” All that would remain to answer that question were the footsteps through wet grass leading to a giant saucer-shaped indention left in the field. Laughing at the perfection of those details, he boarded the saucer in a state of euphoria as it lifted into the stars—dogs, gods, and all.
The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question—is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say, “Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.” And we . . . kill those people. Ha ha ha. “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that—you ever notice that?—and let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because . . . it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would do many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Good night.
Lee Durkee is the author of the novel Rides of the Midway (W. W. Norton). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, New England Review, and Mississippi Noir. In 2021 Scribner will publish his memoir, Stalking Shakespeare, which chronicles his decade-long obsession with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. A former cab driver, he lives in North Mississippi. The Last Taxi Driver is his first novel in twenty years.
The place is Mildred M. Fox School, in South Paris, Maine. The time is recess. The game is kickball, the center of your recess universe. The basics of kickball:
1. Soccer-sized ball of red rubber. Springy and forgiving to the toes when kicked, sharp and stinging when you catch it.
2. Field and rules just like baseball, except
3. Pitcher rolls the ball on ground. (Amount of bouncing allowed is hotly debated.)
4. Batter is actually a kicker.
Oh. And.
5. All the players are boys.
Mildred M. Fox is a brick square, two stories tall. Behind it there’s a steep drop-off to the Little Androscoggin River, a slope cluttered with saplings, leaves, branches, and trash. The margin of the schoolyard is bounded by a chain-link fence. Anything over the fence and down the riverbank is off-limits. A ball kicked over the fence elsewhere (say, on the side that borders the nursing home) can be, with teacher permission, retrieved. But the slope has been deemed too steep and hazardous.
So, kickball is played out front. Less danger of losing the ball (of which there is always only one). Between the back and the front: a woodchip-covered playground with swings, tires, monkey bars, four-square courts. All of these are for kindergartners and girls. There’s an open rectangle for tag. Tag is co-ed. But only for lame (lame is not the word you would have used then, but you are too embarrassed now to even type the word you would have called them) boys. The front is pavement. It used to be the teachers’ parking lot, but now they park somewhere else. They say they’re going to tear up the pavement and put down grass or woodchips, but they haven’t, and they’ve been talking about it since you were in kindergarten.
It is 1985. It is spring. But it is also Maine, so there are still snowbanks. (You learned to ride without training wheels just last year at this time. It was perfect: whenever you got wobbly, you’d steer for a snowbank and tip over, cold but safe.) Your teacher is Mrs. Burns. You like her. She is tall and wears nylons and drinks from a Styrofoam cup of McDonald’s coffee in the morning. You like her though you hope you won’t end up being like her. You hate nylons, even the thought of them. Once you told Mrs. Burns that she had spinach stuck in her front teeth and she thanked you and told you it was kind to tell someone when they had a flaw that they could fix. She added that it was unkind to comment on a flaw a person could do nothing about—for instance, if someone had spilled coffee on their blouse. You wonder what flaws you might have that no one mentions to you.
But Mrs. Burns isn’t here now. At recess she gets a break, and the teachers’ aides—Mrs. Ripley and Mrs. Gay—supervise all the second and third graders.
You are seven and on days when your mother sends you to school in a skirt and tights, the first thing you do is run so wildly across the playground that you inevitably fall and skin your knee, tearing a huge hole in your tights and turning your knee into a bloody mess (at forty, you will still have scars) so that the school nurse will sigh and say, Take your tights off so I can clean you up. And then she paints your knee with iodine and you look even more gruesome.
That’s what you want. Gruesome. Tough. Not a prim little lady in tights and Mary Janes and two barrettes holding back your hair.
Today, though, is not a skirt day. Today is jeans handed down from your brother and a blue-and-green windbreaker that you love. It is windy. And cold. You spill out of the school with the other kids, down the granite steps where every fall they line up the entire school to take a picture. Third graders on the top stair, kindergartners at the bottom. The photographer tells you all to smile. The pictures line the entry hall to the school. When the newest one is hung, other students clamor to find themselves, to see their faces looking back. You have no interest. It was enough that you were forced into a dress for the photo, enough that you pretended to look happy with your smile. You don’t need to look at someone who looks nothing like yourself.
You run past these pictures and down the steps and out onto the playground. The teachers’ aides stand near the fence that runs between the woodchip playground and the kickball field. The fence marks home-run distance. Once, Tony actually kicked the ball so hard that it went over the fence and over the tag field and hit the brick side of the school. If he had hit a window, kickball might have been banned forever. The teachers’ aides stand with their hands in their pockets, knit caps on their heads. You wear a baseball cap, New York Mets. You don’t care much about baseball, but you liked the M and you liked the blue-purple color, and your mom bought it for you last summer at a sporting goods store in Lewiston. It will show up in two years’ worth of childhood pictures, your face shadowed by the brim, and then abruptly disappear.
The third graders have already staked out their spots. No fair that they got there first. But they can’t play kickball without the second graders; there aren’t enough of them (South Paris, Maine, is small). They wait, bouncing the ball, kicking at bits of snow and ice that still edge the playground. They know that if they pick up the snow, Mrs. Ripley or Mrs. Gay will yell at them.
You stand next to Mark and Bryan. Sam has decided on tag, and you can see him arguing with the girls about what kind of tag to play. You hope you won’t be joining them. The boys at the front—Tony and Shawn and Mike and Pete—are doing rock, paper, scissors. They are the captains. They always are. There are rules and then there is what always happens.
Now they pick. They pick by pointing and saying names: Tim. (Of course.) Ricky. Jason. Mark and Bryan get picked in the middle, both for the same team. Now there are only a few of you standing, waiting to be called. You look at the two clumps of your already-chosen classmates. They are huddled around their captains, whispering. You think that Mark and Bryan are advocating for you, but you can’t know for sure. Last pick, last pick, the teams chant. Mike points at you. Alice. And there are snickers. They aren’t laughing at you, really, but at the four or five boys who are left over. He picked a girl! Instead of you!
You walk toward the team. You are careful not to smile. The four or five boys who weren’t picked shuffle off to tag, or maybe they’ll lean against the fence and watch the game and, if they think Mrs. Ripley and Mrs. Gay aren’t listening, yell rude things. This is how it works. There are always a few left over. The game is only good if some people can’t play. Sometimes you are chosen earlier. Sometimes you aren’t chosen at all. You worry about this often.
The rock, paper, scissors has also decided which team will kick first. Not yours. Everyone knows their positions. Yours is back, to the right. You like this side of the field. It is the side away from the nursing home. It has a tall wooden stockade fence and on the other side stands a dilapidated house with a mansard roof. Mrs. Burns has taught you this term, mansard, has pointed the house out and told your class that it is slated to be torn down. A loss of the town’s architectural heritage. Architecture was a spelling word. The house is still there. You aren’t entirely convinced that anything ever changes, even when adults say it will.
Now you shift your weight from foot to foot as the game gets underway. You do the thing you like to do—let your mind drift and imagine yourself from the outside. How do you look? From above, you look like a boy, with your baseball hat and your jeans. Someone would have to see you face-on to know you’re a girl, and even then, if you tuck your hair up, maybe they wouldn’t be sure. But you know there’s something that gives you away, and you are pretty certain it is your smile. Only girls smile like that, crinkling their eyes, tilting their heads, eager to please. You clap your hands together to keep them warm and bite your lip—a sure-fire way not to look too pleasant.
Mike stands in the middle of the diamond, pitching. He holds the red ball in two hands, up in front of his face, so that his eyes peer out over the top of the sphere, sizing up the boy who stands at home plate. Then he winds up, underhand, like he is bowling, and lets it go.
Each pitch is contested. Too much bounce, too much spin. Too wide. Once, last fall, there was such a fight over pitches that the teachers’ aides intervened and the rule ever since has been five pitches maximum. After that, it’s a walk or an out, depending. (You’re not sure depending on what.)
You look at the roof. At the tag game behind you (freeze tag, your least favorite). There are strikeouts and fouls. One hard kick down the third-base line that sends the teachers’ aides hustling for cover. Look out, look out! the boys call to them, and they put their hands over their heads and run blindly. Everyone snickers. Classic girl move. It’s just a kickball.
There’s the hard smack of foot on rubber, and an arcing shot heads out to center field. You can see boys rounding bases, and you run back and back, behind Pete, who is waiting for the ball to descend. In the event that he drops it, or misjudges it, you will be ready (as a girl should) to make the best of the situation. But he catches it against his chest and in one fluid motion hurls it to the infield. Out! Now your team hustles in.
Unlike baseball, there is no exchange of gear, no tossing of mitts, no quick striptease of catcher’s pads. There’s just the sullen jogging past, the changing of the guard. You keep your face neutral, your elbows tucked in. You’ve heard them snicker at others playing tag—runs like a girl. You wonder if that means it’s impossible for you to do otherwise. You hope you can overcome it, somehow.
Another chain-link fence borders the edge of the former parking lot, is all that separates it from the sidewalk and street. This fence is the de facto dugout, and Mike has everyone line up along it as he organizes you into kicking order. There is a science to this that you don’t quite understand. It is partially popularity, but not entirely. It is not exactly the same as being picked for the team. Sometimes he has you go second. Sometimes he has you go eighth. Sometimes you just end up at the back of the line.
Mark and Bryan aren’t talking to you now. They aren’t even talking to each other. You understand. There’s a topography here, a complex terrain. The three of you are borderline. Pulled out for a special reading group. Positioned at a small table to do math problems on your own. But you don’t walk on your toes, like Sam. And you don’t burst into tears whenever anyone calls you a name, like Greg. But still. Careful.
You set your face into studied indifference. Your gaze fixed somewhere generally near second base, where the other team huddles. You have already discovered mirrors and how useful they can be. At home, you can climb on top of the hamper and then onto the bathroom counter, to kneel awkwardly around the sink and stare at yourself. Only it’s not yourself you are staring at. You are fairly certain that you—the real you—doesn’t look anything like that girl in the mirror.
At home, you make faces. Drawing your eyebrows together, biting your cheeks in. You are trying to find the hollows and the lines of your face. You are trying to get the toughness you feel on the inside to show itself on the outside. But the outside is persistent. It is rosy cheeks and lips a perfect Cupid’s bow. It is light-brown hair that falls doggedly into your face no matter how often you tuck it behind your ears. It is a girl’s face, and it is wrong.
Now you stick your hands into the pockets of your blue-and-green windbreaker, clenching your frozen fingers into fists. Mike has put you at number six. This is, you think, a pretty good number. If you don’t kick this time, you’ll kick next time, and assuredly, there will be another inning before the bell rings.
Tony pitches for the other team. He is good at spin—pitches two-handed, to get it really going. This has been debated and deemed legal. Mark leads off and boots a double. Then Mike gets a single. Then two people strike out. Then it’s the boy ahead of you up to kick, Ricky.
The pitch comes in loaded with spin and Ricky gets his foot on it. Bip! It’s a weird nothing of a kick, but it goes forward. Lands a few feet in front of him and bounces backward, high enough to clear the fence and go into the street. There’s an eruption of noise, scrambling and yelling, and the whole outfield rushes in. Mrs. Gay and Mrs. Ripley emerge on the scene. They grab the backs of coats just like you’ve seen barn cats handle their young. Grip, shake, move aside. You stand, stalwart, on home base. You are kicking next. And no amount of hubbub is going to let someone else take your spot.
Soon enough, Mrs. Ripley has retrieved the ball, and Mrs. Gay has adjudicated the dispute. The kick is ruled a single. The bases are loaded. It is your turn to kick.
You can sense the groan. You can feel the hovering disappointment of your team. Bases loaded, two outs, and Alice is up. It doesn’t help that from the outfield Shawn yells, Girl! Girl! Move in! and the whole team takes a step, another, closer. Despite yourself, you smile. Maybe it is the cold, and you are just wincing. But maybe it is what you have been taught and told to do so often it is ingrained. Smile when you are uncomfortable. Make the person facing you think that it is all okay, no matter how much spin he puts on it.
Tony holds the ball up, then twists his torso in that strange way, winds back, releases. There’s a little bounce (you could protest) as it rolls in. You swing your leg back, hear your father’s voice, Keep your eye on the ball! (Your father, who earned only one JV letter in high school, as assistant manager of the lacrosse team.) You squint your eyes and kick. Your toe meets the rubber and sets the ball ringing.
The ball sails up. It is a beautiful thing. You watch the boys in the outfield running backward. You hear your team shouting at you. Run! Run! And you run, though you can already sense how it will happen. How the ball will rise up, swift, hopeful, how it will tremble at the top, and then tumble, inevitably, into some boy’s arms. But you run. First base, around, wide of the line, your body buoyant. Second base. You can no longer see your kick. But you hear your team erupting in shouts, indistinct at first, and then clearer. Home run! Home run!
You turn and you can see where the ball has landed and rolled across the woodchips, interrupting the tag game. This is your cue to relax into a jog and bask in your success. But the speed feels so good—the blood pounding through you, cheeks afire. You feel so fast. You hit third base, look up to where your team waits. Ricky crosses home plate. He pivots and holds out a hand to you. High five! You can’t believe it . . . the whole team is lined up, not a gauntlet to run, but a welcoming wave of slaps and cheers and you sprint to home plate and lift your hand.
The first slap stings, surprising you. The momentum of your sprint carries you forward, toward a bank of dirty snow; you put your hands out to stop yourself. Cold ice greets your palms, you slip and stumble and can’t catch yourself and you are pitching headlong toward the fence. It’s chain-link; it might hurt a bit, but it’ll give, not like running into a stone wall. But you don’t hit the four feet of meshy fencing. You hit the three inches of steel pipe. Your face explodes with the incandescence of a flashbulb. Something cracks. And you are stunned, seated in the pile of leftover snow.
Mrs. Ripley and Mrs. Gay come back. Assuredly the game is going to be ended now. The boys are yelling. You are crying, but the sort of involuntary tears that might be okay. The sort of tears that just happen and you have seen boys wipe them away, fiercely, and stand back up. That’s what you try to do now. Push yourself up. Your hands are cold, raw, red little claws that don’t even feel the icy snow. You are mad at yourself for crying.
Mrs. Ripley has your arm. Let’s get you inside. The boys fall quiet as you are led past. Tilt your head back. It’s only when she says this that you realize your nose is bleeding. It’s a line you’ve heard so often. Tilt your head back. The bloody noses from basketball, from soccer, from falling off your bike. The taste of iron in your mouth. You know to spit it out. You know how your stomach will ache if you swallow it. You are led past the tag field, along the margin of the four-square court, up the granite steps, and through the green double doors. Past the principal’s office on your left, the kindergarten classes on your right. You cannot smell the mushy wax bean scent of the hot-lunch cart.
The school nurse cleans you up. Your hands are cut (she even has to dig out a bit of gravel) and your nose won’t stop bleeding. It is 1985 and she doesn’t wear latex gloves as she sops up your blood. Hold that. Pinch tight, she tells you. You keep your head tipped back and stare at the ceiling. The blood slides down the back of your throat and you know you will be sick later. No matter. You scored a home run. That thought lets you ignore the annoying tickle of hair against your face—the strands gummy and clotted with half-dried blood.
Mrs. Burns comes in. Have a look, the nurse says as she gently touches your hand, taking the bloody tissues from you. Her mouth. Your lips have a rubbery feel. Can you open your mouth, honey? You open your mouth. Oh, Mrs. Burns says. You should call her mother. The nurse nods. What? you try to say, and as you move your lips and tongue to form this one word, you feel it . . . or, rather, you don’t feel it. Your front tooth. It’s gone.
Was it a baby tooth? the nurse asks. No. Of course not. You lost your front teeth in kindergarten, had the gap memorialized in a school photo: you in a purple snowflake sweater and a broad grin, as ordered by the photographer. Then I better call her mother.
It is just you and Mrs. Burns and the blood clotting in your nose. You lower your head. Nothing trickles out. You put your fingers to your mouth, but Mrs. Burns pulls your hand away. What? you say again, the word heavy on bruised lips, and that strange feeling against your tongue, a rough edge where a tooth used to be.
Let’s get you cleaned up, Mrs. Burns says and leads you to the back of the nurse’s office, to the bathroom that has a tub and a big sink with a mirror over it. There’s a step stool for you to stand on; it gets you high enough that you can put your hands under the faucet that Mrs. Burns has turned on, running the water to get it hot. But not high enough for you to see in the mirror.
You touch your hands to your mouth again, the rubbery lips. Can I see? you ask, the last word a lisp you’ve never had. Mrs. Burns bends down and grips you beneath the arms, hefting you in the air, the way your father did last summer when you went to the top of the Empire State Building. He’d held you up to see the whole city and your mother had issued him a warning, Douglas, as if he might let you drop, and you couldn’t believe how far the world stretched before you.
Now you look into the silvery glass. There’s a bruise blooming across one cheek, faint purple and red, with a small cut in the middle, which has oozed a fine line of crimson. You draw your swollen lips back in a fierce canine grin.
There’s a hole in your mouth. A ragged edge of tooth. You clamp down, joining your bottom teeth to your top teeth. The hole remains, a black gap all the way to your throat. You expect it to hurt, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like anything.
Mrs. Burns is behind you, her reflected face worried, but you like what you see. They can fix it, she tells you. But you don’t want it fixed. The water is running hot now, steam rising up to cloud the glass, and Mrs. Burns sets you down on the step stool. Wash your face. But you don’t want to do that either.
The nurse returns and the two of them confer, leaving you to soap and scrub and rinse. You push yourself up on the edge of the porcelain sink, your arms trembling with the effort. You have to see one more time, before they come in and make you pretty again. You have to see this broken open, rough-edged, bloody person, who someday just might be you.
Alex Myers is a teacher, speaker, and writer who works with schools and other organizations to be gender inclusive. His essays have appeared in the Guardian, Slate, Salon, and Good Housekeeping, and in literary journals such as Hobart and Cutthroat. His debut novel, Revolutionary (Simon & Schuster, 2014), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and his novel Continental Divide is forthcoming (December 2019) from University of New Orleans Press.
Illustration by Erin Schwinn
On Friday, January 4, 2002, I was charged with “misconduct for refusal to take a drug test” the previous week. The charge was leveled, in person, by the disciplinary counsel for my employer, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). A little over a month later, on Tuesday, February 12, I received by certified mail a United States Coast Guard complaint against my merchant marine master mariner license. The charge was the same: “misconduct for refusal to take a drug test” on December 27, 2001.
In my capacity as a marine captain, I was required to submit to random, without-cause drug tests. And since this was the fifth time I was being drug tested over a nine-year period (the first drug test was in 1992), I knew what to expect—trouble. It’s not that I used illegal drugs. In fact, I rarely used any drugs. Perhaps I took over-the-counter pain relievers on several occasions, likewise for prescription medication. If there were a dozen occurrences of medicinal drug use over the past twenty-five years, that was a lot for me. The problem was that I once again found myself in the embarrassing position of not being able to provide a sample for urinalysis, the only testing method allowed, even under the threat of loss of livelihood. I didn’t know exactly why I couldn’t, so I just assumed it was an idiosyncratic psychological anxiety that was temporarily shutting down my excretory system. Since I was not a substance abuser, I always went into a drug test optimistically thinking that things would eventually sort themselves out, and I could then get on with the rest of my life.
By this time, I had been a city employee for over thirteen years, having signed aboard New York City’s fleet of municipal tankers in October of 1988. I had lost a good job working tugboats and coastal oil tankers to the bitter and ultimately devastating (from the union’s perspective) New York Harbor boatmen’s strike, which began in February of 1988. I enjoyed life as a harbor man, and hauling sludge for the city seemed a more glamorous endeavor than scabbing on Union Local 333. Upon graduating from the United States Merchant Marine Academy in 1975, I didn’t plan on spending so many years at sea, but for whatever reason the profession seemed to agree with me. Over the intervening years, I developed a genuine respect for the seagoing life and for those individuals who were successful in meeting its sometimes harsh demands. Few other professions foster the independence and self-reliance required on the bridge of a merchant vessel. During my early years at sea, I sailed on the decks of oceangoing freighters and tankers that traded to all corners of the globe, which allowed me weeks and even months away from home but also equally extended periods ashore. The profession provided not only a decent income but also something more important to me—the time to navigate some of the backwaters of life instead of being swept along with the subtly enslaving currents of superfluous consumption and appearances. Because of my seagoing career, I had the time to hike, bike, canoe, or drive through forty-seven of our fifty United States.
But then there were the drug tests. For some, as one major newspaper was to write, “it might sound like the stuff of late night comedy,” but for me the drug tests were a series of unfortunate and disconcerting events. During the first one, which began on Wednesday, September 30, 1992, I found myself sitting across from the city’s medical review officer (as in truant, parole, or police officer). She was a middle-aged, pleasant-looking woman who was wearing a white lab coat with the initials “MD” after her name. The doctor brusquely asked why I was unable to provide a sample for the drug test urinalysis.
“I don’t know—I must have some sort of mental block concerning these drug tests. Isn’t there some other type of drug test I could take?”
“No!”
I could, however, sense her powers of deduction click into gear, undoubtedly searching for a panacea. After a few brief moments, she moved slightly forward in her chair and leaned over her side of the desk. I, taking her cue, did likewise on the opposite.
“You’re just going to have to get over it,” she stated.
What could I say? It was not a bad idea. Her prescription was to confine myself to a bathroom stall until the sample was produced. Actually, it did work, as I eventually provided the sample for the drug test on the second afternoon of the two-day debacle.
Succeeding random drug tests proved equally confounding. Admittedly I did solve the stall-confinement dilemma—which, before my own situation, had been reserved only for farm animals—by simply handing off tap water in lieu of the sample requested. It worked wonderfully the first time but backfired the second time and, if I may speak frankly, seemed to greatly inflame the hypersensitivities of the urine authorities. It was only retrospectively, after a series of encounters with drug-testing operatives, that I began to realize there was more to drug testing than its stated goal of worker safety and productivity—ultimately it was a system of control. On my fifth and, as it turned out, final random drug test, after I easily shattered the newly imposed three-hour time limit for providing a sample, I was whisked off the job site in an official city vehicle, accompanied by senior management. This all took place before a wide-eyed and open-mouthed marine crew. I’m sure the jokes and innuendoes were flying. It’s difficult enough for a captain to maintain respect and authority over a crew without having to deal with this situation. Perhaps even masculinity issues were raised. We all know of the big male felids marking their territory with urine, or of male canids defiantly squirting any inanimate object that can possibly be reached on three legs. I’m not quite sure what this has to do with Homo sapiens, but who would be willing to take any chances on this account?
I was told I was being escorted to a “downtown” location, and shortly thereafter I found myself in a rather stark medical room of sorts, before another white-coated medical review officer. The look of contempt on his dry, bony face capped by that balding head still reverberates with me. I realize now that, prior to the meeting, he had probably been informed by someone that I was trying to game the system.
“You’re a doctor, right?” I asked, to no response. He did, however, seem confident concerning my prognosis. “You are going to lose your fucking job,” he stated as a matter of fact. He then scribbled “No medical reason” on a small notepad and quickly scurried out of the room. I was eventually escorted by city personnel to another gentleman, impeccably outfitted in business attire, who introduced himself as Peter Brucas, executive vice president of NEDPC Drug Testing and Background Checks.
“Why wouldn’t they accept the urine sample?” I asked. (I had produced one by this time.)
“It’s after the three-hour limit.”
“Can’t I take a blood test?”
“No, there are no alternative tests allowed,” he shot back triumphantly.
“Look, I’ve always had trouble coming up with these urine samples.”
“Well, you are the only one out of about ten thousand.”
I sensed Mr. Brucas was a man of satisfaction—satisfied with himself, with the present situation, and with life in general. And why not? He had a right to be. As executive vice president of NEDPC, he was one of a new breed of entrepreneurs. He was providing a valuable service to society as well as undoubtedly making a good buck. Life can be beautiful—for some. I’ve seen that same self-satisfied look on men as they strain to hold aloft a thirty-pound striper or a pool winning codfish. Brucas had reeled in a nice one today—a captain who refused to provide a sample for a drug test and was no doubt covering up abuse of a controlled substance. He gave me a set of instructions for a physician referral and told me to see a doctor within five days.
I did not go to the doctor of my own volition very often. In fact, I avoided doctors whenever possible, even though I thought I had found a good one in Dr. Calderbank. He was an elderly gentleman who worked in a nondescript office. He had a kindly, unpretentious, small-town demeanor and appeared to be anywhere but on the cutting edge of the medical profession. Yet on my initial visit, I could tell immediately from our interaction that he was smart and enjoyed his work. I was not looking forward to this visit, however, where I would have to relay details of a delicate nature about a condition that, according to Brucas, I was the only employee of New York City to have. I watched Dr. Calderbank closely, waiting for his jaw to drop as I imparted the details of my history with the urine mavens. The raw fact of the matter is that I have never been a good urinator, particularly when coerced by doctors, nurses, other assorted urine collectors, or long lines at restrooms. I expected him to begin writing the names of medical and psychological specialists I would have to see to undergo who knows what kind of diagnostic tests. Instead he responded, “Oh, that’s nothing. It’s called shy bladder syndrome. It’s not cancer, you know.”
It was embarrassing, but from the way Dr. Calderbank described the condition, I knew the diagnosis was accurate. He was also right on another account, the fact that it was “nothing”—nothing that the drug-testing officials would accept. His medical diagnosis was rejected on the premise that it did not meet the federal requirements as prescribed for personal, prior documentation of a preexisting problem with a psychological component. In other words, I wasn’t allowed to have the condition I had unless I knew I had it and accounted for having it ahead of time. Thereafter, I found myself in the realm of the irrational. The many Kafkaesque twists and turns lasted for almost a decade. They included three formal sets of misconduct charges and a charge of incompetence. And counseling by substance-abuse professionals for substances I didn’t abuse.
“Mr. Kinneary, you mean to tell me you have been to sea all those years, and you have never used drugs?”
“Never.”
“You have been all over the world on merchant ships, and you mean to tell me you have never used drugs?”
“That’s what I mean to tell you.”
“All those ships and no drugs?”
“Mr. Chestnut, I will bet you my bottom nickel you are closer to being a substance abuser than I am.”
And there were myriad surreal and confrontational New York City administrative meetings and conferences held on the sixth floor of DEP headquarters in LeFrak City. As I sat waiting for the start of the first meeting and sensing that I was about to receive some sort of admonishment for not being able to urinate in a timely fashion, I wondered how I was going to react. Would I whimper softly as I promised to pee better next time, or would I burst out laughing? I was beginning to have flashbacks to the Coney Island funhouse where, as a child, I did both laugh and cry. At another informal conference with the DEP disciplinary counsel, I was melodramatically given an article from the New York Times that detailed the problem other non–drug users and I were having with the random drug-testing system.
“Let’s talk about all the inaccuracies in this article.”
“I don’t know about the other people mentioned, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s an accurate and well-written article.”
“What about the misquote concerning the water?”
“It’s an accurate and well-written article,” I responded once again.
“Mr. Kinneary, we are going to have to convene a fact-finding interview concerning the water to determine if any federal laws have been broken or any criminal acts have occurred.”
And, at a United States Coast Guard hearing before an administrative law judge: “Let the record show I have been tendered the Master license of the respondent, and it reads as follows. . . . This matter involves an action brought by the United States Coast Guard against Joseph Kinneary seeking revocation or suspension of license for the charge of Misconduct.”
And finally, there were the federal courts: the district court and the court of appeals (for the Second Circuit). I was found to be drug free by separate, forensic-quality hair, blood, and saliva tests, but they were not accepted by the urinalysis-only system. Instead I was urged by medical and legal professionals to use prescription drugs, with who knows what side effects, in order to prove that I didn’t use illegal drugs by the only testing method allowed.
Am I the only one who sees a perversity in a system that, on one hand, increasingly subjects its private citizens to random, without-cause drug testing and, on the other, directly markets prescription medications, some of which are highly addictive, to consumers? In 1985, the FDA, which regulates the approval and marketing of medications, lifted a moratorium on this type of advertising (the United States and New Zealand are the only industrialized nations that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications). A central theme has arisen: if you are alive, you are in the process of dying, and this inevitable state should be staved off by using some sort of pharmaceutical.
Ironically, when the Andrew J. Barberi, a New York City ferry, crashed on approach to its Staten Island terminal on October 15, 2003, the use of prescribed medications (including tramadol, a narcotic-like analgesic) was noted as a contributing factor in the marine disaster. Eleven passengers were killed, and approximately seventy others were injured. An article in a recent issue of the US Coast Guard’s Proceedings of the Marine Safety & Security Council (Winter 2015–2016) focuses on a growing concern over prescription drug–related marine incidents and the potential for these types of drugs to impair a mariner’s faculties. In addition, the Coast Guard issued an important safety warning regarding mariner medication use in April of 2016.
At about the same time the marketing of medications to consumers began in earnest, so did drug testing. In 1986, President Reagan and several advisors very publicly submitted urine samples to be tested for illegal drugs. This was their way of actively promoting drug testing as a solution to a perceived drug crisis that was harming worker productivity. By the end of that year, urinalysis drug testing had grown to an estimated $300 million per year industry. Approximately two years later, on June 9, 1988, the president delivered a keynote address at the launch of Hoffmann–La Roche’s “Corporate Initiatives for a Drug-Free Workplace.” The Swiss pharmaceutical giant had become a major player in the drug-testing business. In his address, the president called upon the corporate sector to “partner” with the government in the battle against illegal drugs. He called for “zero tolerance” regarding illegal drug use by employees. While there were reasonable utilitarian arguments for the program, the president was also sending an implied message to the business community that day. His directive gave the employer unrestrained control and power over the employee.
Profits associated with drug testing for banned substances accelerated annually by 10 percent through the 1990s. Today’s testing enterprise is a multibillion-dollar industry that has arguably taken on a life of its own, finding its way into schools and lobbying hard for access to other social programs, such as welfare and unemployment. Momentum is generated by institutions that have sprouted to support the drug-testing programs. Multiple professionals are involved, including researchers, administrators, employee-assistance program staffers, laboratory technicians, urine collectors, and, finally, the lawyers—lawyers who write drug-testing policies, lawyers who defend employees, and lawyers who defend companies. All of this generates a positive economic feedback loop that fuels more testing programs, as workers and others are conditioned to automatic docility by drug tests without sufficient cause. The common denominator for both direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription medications and random drug testing is huge profits for the pharmaceutical and associated drug-testing corporations.
In a vain attempt to appease an unappeasable system, I saw a psychiatrist, a urologist, and a research physician. I spent thousands of dollars for legal assistance in fighting the palpable stigma and draconian ramifications of the charge of “refusal to test.” Over a two-year period, I was suspended, reinstated, terminated, rehired, and reinstated to my marine captain’s position and terminated again by the City of New York. The US Coast Guard suspended my master mariner’s license for a year and then brought further charges seeking permanent revocation of the maritime credentials I had worked on for almost thirty years. (They withdrew the associated charges at the eleventh hour, before a scheduled administrative hearing, after I refused their unilateral settlement offer.) We eventually wound up in federal court before a jury. The entire episode was a nightmare for me, my wife, and my two teenage daughters. I will never forget my younger daughter’s comment as we climbed the courthouse steps at 346 Broadway in Manhattan on October 16, 2002, for a US Coast Guard administrative hearing: “Mommy, this building says ‘criminal’ court.”
According to the federal drug-testing regulations that were interpreted by the Coast Guard in my case (49 CFR 40, Department of Transportation, which have been adopted by much of the corporate sector), if an individual is subject to random drug testing and for a first time does not supply the required urine sample in a three-hour period, he or she can be considered to have refused a drug test. This incurs the same drastic sanctions as testing positive for an illegal drug. One’s life can be ruined. There were no alternative testing methods allowed, and no regulatory protection built into the system to protect the dignity of the individual. If one is not properly documented as having an officially sanctioned condition, as I was not, one becomes dependent solely on the good graces of urine collectors, low-level administrators, and a medical review officer—a medical doctor whose primary allegiance is to a powerful, corporately run antidrug campaign.
Many of the officials I came into contact with through force of circumstance wore blank faces while droning on with trancelike incantations about federal urine regulations. I realize that they were simply serving a system, and that their own livelihood was at stake, so I don’t want to be too judgmental—at least not any more than I would be of a dog who fetches a stick for the accolades and patting of its master while giving no conscious thought to the appropriateness of the activity. These individuals appeared to be suffering from some sort of disorder or maladaptation of their own, which I have identified as Small People with Large Power Syndrome (SPLPS). They have abdicated their internal sense of moral responsibility to a group or agency. Conversely, they have assimilated and incorporated the sense of power inherent in groups into their own personality.
This disorder was readily apparent in the medical review officers (MROs) involved in my case. It is frighteningly disconnecting and downright creepy to be sitting across from a medical professional who is wearing a white coat, who uses the abbreviation MD, and who one has been socialized to believe is going to be a humane benefactor, and then suddenly come to the realization that you are no longer being treated as an individual but rather as a means to other ends. I have never met or even spoken to the third medical officer who was involved in my drug-testing fiascoes. At the US Coast Guard license suspension and revocation hearing held on that wind-driven, rainy Wednesday in October of 2002, this third MRO testified that he had a family medical practice located on Broadway in New York City. It was also established that he was being paid by a corporate drug-testing contractor to serve as its MRO. As I sat before him in the courtroom, I wondered why this medical doctor would want to be a review officer for a drug-testing company. It seemed so far removed from being a healer of the sick. He was self-assured in manner, apparently used to having his words carry great weight and effect. In face and voice, however, there was a softness that would not have served him well as a seaman, particularly when the tide turned against him, as it did with my attorney’s very first query. As the questioning continued, his answers were preceded by longer and longer periods of silence. It almost seemed as if he were trying to overcome a stubborn disability as he searched the courtroom ceiling for an appropriate response. I thought tears might flow at any moment. Then the doctor proceeded to flat-out lie under oath while throwing me to the merciless urine police.
Clearly I wasn’t being treated as a patient or even as a person by these MDs. But what was I? I had to be something. Had I spent less time attending to ship handling, navigation, the weather, and other relatively mundane maritime tasks required by my job, and more time studying the drug-testing regulations, I would have known. It was all right there before me on page 79,501 of the Federal Register, volume 65, no. 244, dated Tuesday, December 19, 2000. I was not a patient, a person, or even an experimental subject. I was an “employee,” an economic entity, and as such could simply be added to or—as in my case—subtracted from an equation. I suppose from their perspective, these medical professionals deserve some measure of commendation for extending their considerable expertise and power over and beyond the individual sitting before them to the more utilitarian benefits of the war on drugs. Given the primary police function of the medical review officer, some ethicists have wondered if it’s even appropriate for physicians to function in this capacity. However, if the medical professional can sidestep this seemingly minor moral inconvenience, the not-unhealthy fees collected for MRO services can make it an altogether satisfying lunchtime diversion.
Thank God for our sacrosanct right to the courts, the last real power with the ability to level the playing field for an individual. Walking with my wife into the federal courtroom at 70 Pearl Street on a Monday morning in late September of 2007, I experienced a sense of patriotism I hadn’t felt since singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a kid attending St. Clare’s Grammar School in Queens, New York. There was a high-vaulted ceiling, flags and emblems, expert attorneys for both sides, and a jury of eight ranging from black to white, young to elderly, and male to female. A black-robed judge towered above it all, appearing to be a regal gatekeeper of justice. All of this evoked an unexpected sense of calm. As I sat in the courtroom that first morning, awaiting my call to the witness stand, I was humbled by the realization that throughout the history of civilization, there was probably not a better institution created to serve justice than trial by a jury of one’s peers.
After an exhaustive week of testimony, which included every nuance of evidence, the jury rendered the verdict I knew any reasonable, unbiased group of people would decide. The City of New York had violated city, state, and federal human rights laws, and we were awarded $225,000 in damages and back pay. In addition, because of the civil-rights nature of the precedent-setting case, the court would handle all legal fees. My family and I were overjoyed at our triumph of individual rights over the powerful and profitable drug-testing establishment. It was not only a validation of our resolve not to bow before an irrational and ignorant system but also a restoration of our faith—which had been lost somewhere along the way—in “liberty and justice for all.”
And then the verdict was overturned. Approximately two and half years after our hallowed day in court, a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the jury verdict. Some background information might be useful here. Several months after the trial, I turned down a “nice package,” as the city attorney called it (consisting of money and pension benefits), to settle the case. My chief concern at the time was that a settlement would not create a public record and that others would follow and find themselves in a similar, downward-spiraling quagmire. By this time, I was aware of other drug-testing situations like my own. And wasn’t it disrespectful to the magnificent process we had been through to put a monetary price on the result and essentially treat the federal jury verdict like any other commodity, something to be sold and bought? I also wanted my job as a marine captain back; it was a good job, and I wanted it back. The federal judge who presided over the jury trial eventually took me aside and warned me that the appellate process was a “crapshoot,” and that if I didn’t settle the case, I could walk away with nothing. I guess he wasn’t kidding.
More than forty-five years ago, Umberto Eco, the famed Italian novelist and semiotician, published Travels in Hyperreality, a collection of essays investigating America’s obsession with fabrications and the faking of reality. Eco considers a wide range of specimens—from holograms, wax museums, restored homes, and fabricated art all the way up the food chain to Disneyland. He claims that what sets these objects at a distance from other forms of pop art is their “hyperreality,” a trait “we can identify . . . through two typical slogans. . . . The first, widely used by Coca-Cola but also frequent as a hyperbolic formula in everyday speech, is ‘the real thing’; the second, found in print and heard on TV, is ‘more’—in the sense of ‘extra.’ ” In his essays, Eco is not interested in the “snobbery” of high art that generally seeks to hide the seams of its production. On the contrary, he examines those phenomena that call attention to their own artificiality—“instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred.” Because they make no claim of authenticity, hyperreal simulations are therefore not bound to realistic expectations, and they call into question whether the real thing matters in the first place.
To be sure, Eco’s purpose was not to suggest an appreciation for fakery; rather, he expresses a fascination for it, if not a warning for hyperreality’s dangerous potential. Not surprisingly, considering the exponential growth in technology since Travels was published, the American appetite for hyperreality has only increased. In the 1990s, the casino construction boom in Las Vegas inspired the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable to lament that “surrogate experience and synthetic settings have become the preferred American way of life.” After all, what else could explain the popularity of such megahotels as New York–New York, The Venetian, and Paris Las Vegas? Likewise, art critics Kristin G. Congdon and Doug Blandy, reacting to Las Vegas and other surrogate environments, have claimed that “living in place is no longer associated with common sense conceptions of reality.” Congdon and Bradley go on to explain that we are inclined toward a world “where the real is fake and the fake is real.” By today’s standards, these statements might seem obvious, or even quaint, but they are perhaps less than they should be. The continual creep of fakery into modern society should be cause for great concern. There are few facets of our lives—political, social, or financial—that are free from the threat of it.
One modern antidote to all this fakery has been the popular notion of tradition. Of course, definitions and concepts of tradition can be fluid and complicated; for simplicity’s sake, however, I refer to it here by its most conventional meaning—the passing down of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. Traditions are often used to authenticate membership in a group: a fraternity’s secret handshake or the sidelocks of Hasidic Jews. Other, more ritualistic traditions confer value on an action or a decision: spiking the football after a touchdown or tapping a sword on a candidate’s shoulders to bestow knighthood. Although tradition can be a useful tonic against fakery, the purpose of some traditions eventually becomes outmoded, even if the traditions themselves continue. For example, British knights are no longer needed for their battle skills on a horse, and yet Rod Stewart was dubbed Sir Rod with a sword just two years ago. Does this make Rod Stewart a lesser knight? In terms of what it meant to be a knight during the Middle Ages, almost certainly. But how should we value the title bestowed on him by Prince William? Shortly before Travels was published, Eric Hobsbawm coined the term invented tradition to mean “a set of practices . . . of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” In other words, one way in which old-fashioned ways of thinking become ingrained is through a repetition of symbolic gestures that preserve their value. For those that accept this process in Western society, then in terms of tradition Rod Stewart is simply a knight among knights.
Suppose for a moment, however, that the British monarchy has been suddenly abolished. Would it be possible to perform a knighting ceremony with a surrogate prince? Perhaps a lawyer or a banker? If so, how would it affect the value of the title? In other words, what are the implications of tradition without the power of authenticity? Is it only the faking of a tradition? The British monarchy still exists though, which is lucky for Rod Stewart, so this example doesn’t allow for a useful analysis. Fortunately, there is another, far more familiar tradition that began to lose its relevance only decades ago—the wedding celebration. Or more specifically, the decline of the Catholic wedding tradition in Argentina, where a group of young Argentinians is attempting to ensure it continues.
Spanish colonization of Argentina began in the early 1500s and ended only two hundred years ago. As a result, much of Argentine culture and religion has been heavily influenced by European customs. This is especially true of weddings, where Catholic ceremonies, although usually brief, still cling to longtime traditions: the bride wears “something blue” beneath her wedding dress, the grandmother of the bride passes down her wedding ring on the day of the service. What is less European, however, is the reception that follows. Wedding parties often extend into the small hours of the morning, with hundreds of guests forming conga lines to the thrum of DJ music, swilling glasses of Fernet and cola, and pausing only to visit the parrilla to stuff themselves with barbecued meat. The bacchanalian atmosphere of Argentine wedding receptions has inspired at least one online survival guide to advise would-be guests to “have a siesta—a big one” because “stamina is key.”
Despite the popularity of these events, however, Argentina has experienced a dramatic decrease in the rate of marriage. Although 92 percent of the country identifies as Roman Catholic, the number of weddings involving a priest has declined from roughly 155,000 in 1990 to 60,000 in 2011. There is little need to dwell on the reasons for the decline, which should sound familiar to Americans. Less than 20 percent of Catholics in Argentina faithfully practice. In response to the dearth of religious faith, there has been an attendant rise in the popularity of civil unions, which have the added benefit of being much cheaper than a traditional wedding. What the decline in traditional weddings means for young Argentinians is that there are fewer occasions to perform the ritual of the wedding ceremony and celebration—to break out their wedding attire and form a conga line. The threat of losing this tradition motivated a group of young entrepreneurs to take action. As Gastón Gennai recalls,
We were five bachelors talking about the fact we’d only get to go to a wedding together if we had girlfriends in common. That’s when we had the idea of organizing a mock event, complete with a script. We rented a space—imagine the owner’s face when he found out no one was actually tying the knot—and around three hundred people came to that first Falsa Boda.
Falsa Boda, literally “fake wedding,” is a touring event put on by the production company Trineo Creativo, headquartered in La Plata, a suburb of Buenos Aires. At each event, usually held at an upscale hotel, hired actors play the roles of bride, groom, witness, and priest. During a staged ceremony, vows and rings are exchanged, and the guests consume all the trappings of a real wedding—many for the first time—for a ticket price between $35 and $50, around the cost of a typical wedding gift. The experience seems to pay off for those looking to party with friends without the singles atmosphere of a dance club. A guest at an event in Mendoza explained how “the atmosphere of a wedding party is different, more familiar. . . . It’s cuter, more sincere. In short: I like to dance, but not in clubs.” Of course, there is also the spectacle of the ceremony. According to the same guest, the element of a wedding offers “a different emotional charge—you go with another spirit and arranged in another way.”
The mixing of social expectations—revelry for a fiesta and reverence for a stage—was not a happy accident. Indeed, Gennai and the other original organizers of Falsa Boda were aware of what they were doing, or at least they promoted it that way. According to Gennai, “Everyone who comes to Falsa Boda has a part: besides being a party, it’s also theater.” Joaquín Alterman, another of the founders, has stated that “this type of event is like a hybrid” and that the production is “a mix between a play and a party.” To be sure, these insights from Alterman and Gennai might have been more about differentiating their product than about Falsa Boda’s slippery relation to concepts of performance. Nevertheless, their observations are worth examining. Both men suggest that the wedding experience they offer is dependent on an interactive mixture of performers and spectators that approaches the intimacy of a “real” wedding. Although Gennai’s description of the first Falsa Boda indicates that this might have once been the case, subsequent productions reveal a move away from this modus operandi. As I hope to demonstrate, the kind of interaction between performers and guests of Falsa Boda begins to shift as the organizers move away from traditional depictions of a wedding ceremony toward productions that would support Eco’s vision of a Western society eager for “more than the real thing.”
Falsa Boda is not the world’s first production of a fake wedding. In the 1980s the comedy troupe Artificial Intelligence created an audience-interactive play called Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. The play was immensely popular and toured worldwide over three decades, eventually spawning a spinoff featuring a lesbian couple. However, the current fake wedding phenomenon in Argentina is different for two significant reasons. First, the point of inspiration for the Tony n’ Tina productions, in contrast to Falsa Boda, occurred in the theater. Nancy Cassaro and Marc Nassar came up with the idea for the play while attending drama school at Hofstra University, and according to Cassaro, the play was an attempt to “satirize the real world.” Second, the characters in Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding (over-the-top versions of New York Italians), the play’s script, and, in large part, the mise-en-scène remained consistent from production to production. In fact, Artificial Intelligence eventually published an acting edition of the play for use in the amateur market. In the case of Falsa Boda, what began as an effort to salvage the Argentinian wedding tradition quickly evolved into a performance fit for a Las Vegas casino.
Trineo Creativo began uploading videos of Falsa Boda after its fourth production in Mendoza in December 2014. Although the audio from the event has been overlaid with theme music, the video includes scenes from before and during the ceremony, which takes place in an enormous and dimly lit canopy tent. Judging from the venue and mise-en-scène, it is clear that the organizers were attempting to closely mimic an authentic Argentinian wedding. The ceiling of the tent slopes dramatically upward, recalling the architecture of a traditional church. Before the ceremony begins, a flower girl enters, spreading rose petals over the red carpet leading to the altar, where the priest waits solemnly behind a pair of candelabras and a thick Bible. As the bride and groom walk down the aisle, dressed in full regalia, a wedding photographer kneels before them to capture the moment. Images of a rapt crowd are interspersed throughout the video, with many of the guests capturing the scene with their cell phones. As the ceremony unfolds, there is a bit of drama—the bride becomes upset and flees the altar right before saying “I do.” However, the guests are treated to a happy conclusion when the witnesses decide spontaneously to tie the knot.
Nine months later, a similar—if more rustic—event was staged in Neuquén. Here the ceremony takes place on the wooden floor of a ballroom, and the wedding band’s equipment peeks out from behind a curtain. This time the posted video includes audio from the event, allowing viewers to gauge the reaction of the guests. During this production, the groom is late, and the bride paces before the altar as she tries to explain his absence to the priest. The guests can be heard murmuring to each other, and the din of their voices makes it difficult to hear the bride. When the groom finally appears, there are a few whoops from the guests, but the dramatic moment seems to go largely unappreciated. Despite a clear effort by Trineo Creativo to stage a wedding that seems real, the inattention of the guests indicates that they are not interested in the faux drama preceding the ceremony. Or perhaps having arrived with expectations of a traditional wedding, they are merely confused. When the priest begins the ceremony, there is a shushing from the guests, and the noise dies down. At least part of the crowd is attentive, although they are perhaps not as rapt as the edited video from Mendoza had implied. When the noise starts up again, more shushing occurs, but the talking never goes away completely.
It is likely that Trineo Creativo noticed the disinterested guests and decided to adjust. This is evident when Falsa Boda returns to Mendoza two months later. The most obvious upgrade is the addition of a small stage. As the bride and groom approach the priest (standing behind a much smaller table), they must climb several stairs, literally placing them on an altar above the guests. The priest still presides before a Bible, but a pole structure has been added; it is draped in chiffon and lit from below with floodlights. The effect is something like a proscenium. These theatrical elements must have altered expectations for the ceremony. The separation created by the stage, proscenium, and lighting likely made those in attendance feel less like guests immersed in the gravity of a traditional wedding, and more like an audience, ready to be entertained. If that weren’t enough, the performers on stage are using handheld microphones, further distancing the event from authenticity and making the actors more akin to pop stars. Not surprisingly, the change in the audience’s response is pronounced. According to a guest, “When the bride arrived, everyone was crazy, pulling out their phones and snapping pictures like she was a Hollywood star.” Alterman explains that “in the ceremony there is always a backstory, and people get very involved, take sides.” As the ceremony begins, there is no shushing, although the priest’s amplified voice easily carries over the din of the crowd. However, as the bride begins to show signs of distress, the crowd noise intensifies. Finally, the bride turns from the altar and gazes directly at the crowd, as if appealing to them for a reaction. Her gesture prompts whistling and several catcalls, and the crowd continues to egg her on until she finally bolts from the stage to a chorus of cheers.
Further embellishments occur in subsequent productions. In La Plata in April 2017, projection screens were installed. Prior to the ceremony, guests are treated to video messages from Falsa Boda fans supporting the bride and groom. The stage has also grown taller by a couple of steps, and the altar is fronted by an enormous and fully illuminated Falsa Boda logo. Just before the groom’s entrance, a baritone-voiced announcement is made over the PA system while the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey plays ominously in the background. The announcer welcomes the guests and tells them to prepare for Falsa Boda.
Four months later, again in La Plata, the 2001 score is used again, but when the music ends, the baritone voice counts down (in English, no less), “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.” An air-raid siren goes off, announcing the arrival not of the bride and groom but of a breakdancing extra. One wonders what became of the flower girl. A troupe of dancers then takes over the stage/altar and performs a highly choreographed routine to the thrum of electronic music. After the routine is completed, the bride and groom are finally rushed down the aisle to an up-tempo dance version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” a song commonly played at the end of the service, not at the beginning, perhaps giving the guests a sense that the ceremony is over before it has had a chance to start. The effect on the guests is clear. When the priest announces the names of the bride and groom, he pauses dramatically to allow the crowd to voice their approval, not unlike a ring announcer at a boxing match. The crowd is eager to oblige the priest’s cue, and the bride and groom turn to receive the cheers.
In one of the most recent events in Buenos Aires, staged in October 2017, the transformation away from Falsa Boda’s more authentic productions reaches its apex. The stage has been raised even higher, so high, in fact, that the stairs leading up to the altar require a metal railing. A giant projection screen—a jumbotron—is now located behind the altar, showing a kaleidoscope-like display of digital images as the dancers perform their pre-ceremony routine. The bride and groom are again rushed to the stage, where the ceremony takes place at the altar, but now the ceremony is also broadcast to the audience via the jumbotron, complete with close-ups of the bride and groom as they react to the drama they portray. The scene that is enacted is striking if only for how it recalls Eco’s sense of hyperreality: the real thing, but more. The real thing, but extra.
The bride in this production is Lorena, and the groom is Nicolas. The witnesses are Victoria and Federico, who are also boyfriend and girlfriend. During the ceremony, both Lorena and Nicolas break away from the altar to perform short soliloquies to the audience. Both express their love for each other and their desire to get married; however, neither wants to be with just the other person for the rest of his or her life. During Lorena’s aside, an idea strikes her. She tells the priest that the four of them should all marry each other. The priest, incredulous, asks, “Like swingers?” Victoria and Federico intervene, explaining that it would be a marriage entre los cuatro (between the four). The four of them attempt to convince the priest, providing several reasons for why a group wedding would be best. The final point, delivered by Lorena, is that the marriage would be por siempre (forever). The priest, apparently satisfied, agrees and continues with a modified ceremony. However, he pauses before the final vows and instructs the audience to voice any objections before he proceeds. Victoria wags her finger toward the audience, a warning to keep all objections silent—a playful take on an old tradition. The reaction from the crowd is mixed; although most seem supportive, there is some jeering and whistling. Victoria and Federico make dismissive gestures, waving away the crowd’s apprehensions, and the unconcerned priest completes the ceremony with the extra wedding couple. If any in attendance had lingering doubts about whether they were participating as guests or being entertained as an audience, this production should have laid them to rest.
It is tempting to wonder why the organizers of Falsa Boda chose to move their productions so drastically away from authenticity, though in terms of ticket sales, it is hard to argue with the results. The number of fake weddings they have produced per year has increased from just three in 2014 to nine in each of the following three years. At two of these more recent productions—in La Plata and in Mar del Plata—attendance approached seven hundred people. One might argue that the ceremony simply became an afterthought for the guests, but that would not explain the thousands of views the ceremonies have received on Facebook Live. For one thing, we might question the idea of a fixed authenticity. Christopher Balme, a theater and performance scholar, has posited that “performance . . . by definition, creates alteration through repetition.” To perform a wedding ceremony today, after all, is certainly different from what guests experienced during the wedding at Cana. The changes over time have been too subtle to notice, resulting in an illusion of continuity.
Perhaps one reason for the quick evolution of Falsa Boda is because its simulated experience is undeniably hyperreal. The organizers never promoted their product as an actual wedding and therefore were not constricted by the expectations of tradition. As it happens, this is an attractive feature for many people. Eco describes an audience’s encounter with hyperreal simulations as universally pleasing and averse to criticism: “for the cultivated visitor, [there is] the skillfulness of the reconstruction; for the ingenuous visitor, the violence of the information—there is something for everybody so why complain?”
Humanity’s tendency toward the simulated experience has been a notion explored by other scholars. Hillel Schwartz, a cultural historian, points out that the ability to replicate is what makes us, literally, human. According to Schwartz, “The most perplexing moral dilemmas of this era are dilemmas posed by our skill at the creation of likenesses of ourselves, our world, our times.” Congdon and Blandy note Schwartz’s “affinity for our capacity to immerse ourselves in, and enjoy . . . surrogate environments and synthetic experiences.” Our coziness with simulation, however, is often met with skepticism by critics, who see it as a gateway to a world of total illusion. Eco, for instance, in his analysis of Disneyland, discovers that it “not only produces illusion, but—in confessing it—stimulates the desire for it.” This is the lure of fictional worlds, or what Eco calls Possible Worlds. He continues:
When, in the space of twenty-four hours, you go . . . from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, and from the wild river of Adventureland to a trip on the Mississippi, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don’t see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don’t have to be coaxed.
Although the essays in Travels focus on American tourist sites, Eco’s anecdote about the “real” New Orleans can help us understand how a fake wedding phenomenon could further erode how much Argentinians value real weddings and, as a result, marriage. Guests at a Falsa Boda event don’t just witness a couple taking their wedding vows—they are guaranteed much more. The bride and groom are attractive and charismatic, and they enact scenes that seem plucked straight from a telenovela. The guests dress in wedding attire, but with extra flair since there is no risk of offending that conservative uncle. As one of the organizers put it, “Our guests get all of the fun of a wedding party with none of the commitment.” With no relatives and the freedom to role-play, there are also more social opportunities. “It’s easier to meet someone at a fake wedding,” said one guest. “I’d walk up and introduce myself as a cousin of the groom, and the girls immediately fell into their role. It’s like a game everyone joins in.” And since it’s all spectacularly fake, there’s no drama that can go too far. According to one of the organizers, the brides of Falsa Boda endure constant wooing from male guests at every event, especially after the ceremony. In this Disneyland version of a wedding, there are alligators lining every step of the aisle. If one imagines a young Argentinian who attends a fake wedding one week and a real wedding the next, it is easy to see how she might become “homesick” for Falsa Boda, especially if she has never been to a real wedding. According to Huxtable, “For those without memory, nostalgia fills the void. For those without reference points, novelties are enough.”
In his essay “Culture as Show Business,” Eco describes “disturbing events” in which throngs of counterculture types have begun taking over lectures and conferences in his native Italy. Eco notes that these “new masses . . . behave as if they were at a show. . . . They come partly for the collective occasion, or in other words . . . to be together.” He goes on to lament what has already happened in the United States, where he suggests “cultural showmanship” has transformed intellectual conferences into a “theatrical event,” a “cultural show organized like a singles bar.” The parallels between “culture shows” and fake weddings are obvious, although in lieu of high culture as theater, Falsa Boda puts tradition on the stage. Eco does not mince words about the implications of these types of events, stating that “if cultural performance is going to follow this road, then we have little to be content about. Not because the show is ‘cultural,’ but because it is a ‘show’ in the worst sense of the word: a false life depicted on the stage so that the witnesses . . . may have the illusion of living, through an intermediary.” At first blush, this assessment seems severe—that is, until one considers that guests of Falsa Boda are attending a fake wedding, posing as relatives of the bride, and posting videos of “themselves” on social media. However, perhaps this doesn’t give the guests enough credit for their awareness of their participation.
Condon and Blandy take a less pessimistic view in their critique of living with ubiquitous simulation. The authors contend that they “may not always agree with the personal and social motivations to which fakery has been attached,” but they do maintain a belief that “the impulse to replicate . . . is a part of who we are as a species and should be appreciated and critically understood and evaluated as such.” Within this appreciation, Congdon and Blandy place an emphasis on “discovering personal and communal authenticity” that might occur in a world filled with “contradictions, seductions, illusions, incongruence, and shape shiftiness.” In other words, they are interested in how authenticity can exist in a fake world. Their essay includes excerpts from an online forum of folklorists discussing the often ambiguous line between traditional and revival forms of cultural objects. Several posters point out that, given time and the correct context, it is possible for revivalist art to become traditional: “In other words, fakes . . . can become real.” While that may be true for objects of art and architecture, the question becomes whether it can be applied to a performative event.
Sharon Mazer’s fascinating essay “The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling” provides us with a guide. Mazer’s research centers on the bizarre world of professional wrestling in the late 1980s, which parallels Falsa Boda in some surprising ways. She argues that pro wrestling is a hybrid, “not accepted as a legitimate sport, nor . . . legitimate theatre, it intersects, exploits, and, finally, parodies both forms of entertainment.” And just like a production of a fake wedding, “each participant in the wrestling event has a role to perform,” including the spectators, who are the “privileged players to whom these participants . . . cater. Their response is essential to fulfill the performance objectives.” Throughout her essay, Mazer makes it clear that although professional wrestling is fake, there is a shared sense of community between the participants—one that can exist only within the cultural bubble of the ring: “By creating, sustaining, and then resolving the ‘friction’ between performers and spectators . . . the wrestling performance simultaneously incites and controls the release of everyday frustrations in a safe, socially sanctioned space.” In essence, fake wrestling can become real in the correct time and context. Whatever “real wrestling” is, or would be, is no longer necessary. In fact, the simulation of “real wresting” is preferred because it is somehow better. It is somehow more than real. It is hyperreal.
Admittedly, it would be difficult to argue that Falsa Boda, in its current iteration, shares the same sort of community that existed in professional wrestling when Mazer was gathering her research. For one thing, there does not seem to be the same level of fanaticism for fake weddings or a similar intense camaraderie between the performers. At least not yet. However, as marriage rates in Argentina continue to fall, fewer and fewer young adults will have experienced a real wedding. At the same time, as guests continue to demand more and more upgrades and extra attractions, Falsa Boda will continue to drift further and further away from the authentic original. One could imagine a future in which Falsa Boda no longer means “fake wedding.” A future in which Falsa Boda simply means Falsa Boda. Unlike professional wrestling, however, the transition to a “traditional” Falsa Boda has the potential to leave the real experience to die in its wake. Dr. Megdy Zawady, a psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires, already sees this trend, noting that “the majority of people no longer believe in eternal love or a commitment forever.” For Zawady, Falsa Boda exacerbates the problem, “making a fun parody out of something that used to be solemn, that of accepting a commitment for life. And I don’t think it just applies to Argentina.” On this last point, Zawady seems prescient—Falsa Boda has already made international plans.
video and photography by Luke Duncan
A native of the storied Delta region and a musician from the age of six, I have met quite a few veteran bluesmen. The one who towers tallest in my memory is J. R. Hamilton. When I met J. R., in 2005, he was a slender, sturdy man in his sixties with the spark of a twenty-something. Six days a week, he worked on a 4500-acre farm near Marvell (pronounced like marvel), a small town on the Arkansas side of the Delta. Sundays, he played the blues. In the years 2005–2008, I played guitar and harmonica regularly at his Sunday parties. Shortly thereafter, J. R. moved to Memphis, I to Missouri, and my days as a member of his band came to an end.
I met J. R. the way folks meet folks in the Delta. The first part of this story, I warn you, sounds rather cartoonishly Southern, but is nevertheless true: One evening, just before dark, I stopped for pulled pork at a place in Marvell called Shadden’s Barbecue. A woman I had never met, named Pudding, sat down next to me at the communal table where diners dig in. We fell immediately into lively conversation. Toward the end of the meal, when I mentioned in passing that I played music, Pudding said if I wasn’t in a hurry, I should follow her out to “J. R.’s jook house” and sit in with the local blues band. I didn’t know exactly what I was in for, but it’s a matter of principle with me that when a delightful stranger named Pudding says to follow her to a jook, I say yes, ma’am.
To get me there, my poor old rickety vehicle had to jostle down a dirt road between cotton fields whose distant tree lines were barely discernible in the hazy light of dusk. J. R.’s tin-roof house stood alone in a spacious yard without a neighbor near.
It was clear we were well outside of Marvell’s city limits. On multiple occasions in the years to come, I would ask J. R. the name of this patch of land, only to get a different answer each time: Kingtown, Sand Hill, Turkey Scratch—once, J. R. said it had no name at all.
Dozens of friends were gathered on and around the raised porch, which doubled as a stage. The edges of its wooden planks looked like crooked mummy teeth, hackly where folks had long been scraping mud off their boots. Some planks were loose or missing entirely, but boards had been laid across the most treacherous trapdoor spaces.
J. R. sported cowboy boots and a feathered cowboy hat with his ample hair puffing out over his ears. A small, golden African mask, attached to a necklace, dangled against the chest of his colorful Southwestern button-up. He wore a large ring on his chording hand and blue jeans with a belt buckle so big and bright it called to mind a boxer’s title strap.
Microphones, amplifiers, instruments, and cables arrayed in readiness on the front porch, J. R. not only asked me to man one of his guitars but also invited me to play his “harps,” a gesture of trust between harmonicists. To make music on his harps, I would have to maneuver around several blown reeds, but I was used to that, since my own harps were often similarly damaged. He handed me a homemade guitar pick, knifed out of a piece of plastic. The shape resembled that of Arkansas.
Pudding slung her arm around me and shouted, “J. R.! If this boy can blues, remember: I’m the one invited him. If he can’t blues, it’s all your fault for handing him this guitar.” J. R. howled a boisterous laugh. But then he said with a serious, almost-preacherly voice, “Listen. We tickled to have this young man here tonight. I believe we done found us a new friend in blues.”
“Don’t you mean I found us a new friend in blues?!” Pudding said.
“That’s right, Pudd’n,” J. R. conceded with a grin. “And I’m mighty thankful you did. I’m mighty thankful you did.”
With that, J. R. said, “Let there be blues,” and struck his black electric guitar. I smooched a harp, stepped up to a mic, and waited. J. R.’s intro sounded big, mouthy, and irrefutable. As the bass and drums kicked in tight behind him, I made my first note warp like a train whistle dopplering through the darkness. The music was a rustic rendition of Chicago blues. On the mangy grass all around the porch, revelers danced as if they had wasps up their pants legs. It was a peak moment in my music-making life.
Bob Dylan says of Muddy Waters that he plugged Mississippi into an amplifier but never forsook “the dark woods.” Swap out “Mississippi” for “Arkansas,” and we’re talking about J. R.
NOT EVEN PAST
“The past,” William Faulkner famously wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Until I experienced the scene at J. R.’s house, I thought his kind of jook party was a thing of the past. Old folks in the Delta had often told me I was eighty years or so too late to find an old-time jook, but there it was in 2005: live blues on the front porch of someone’s home, drinking and dancing, card games for money, and barbecue. J. R. was the chef for his parties, and his smoke-and-tang sauce tasted like his guitar sounded.
Parents brought young children, who climbed around on J. R.’s tractor while men and women of all ages danced, ate, and shared stories, the women playing card games called Deuces Wild and Georgia Skins. On weekends I often drove from my apartment, across the river in Mississippi, to join the festivities. J. R.’s particular style of blues party had died out almost everywhere else, but somehow the jook tradition had negotiated the dramatic vicissitudes of modern American life and found its way into twenty-first-century Phillips County, Arkansas. Weekend after weekend, there I was, harp in hand, smack in the middle of the past-not-even-past.
Or at least that’s what I thought. Shortly before my first night there, I had read Zora Neale Hurston’s description of the jook as she had experienced it. In many particulars, right down to the dialectal usages Hurston highlights, the scene at J. R.’s matched her account. I could feel her words coming to life around me. Looking back, I see that my initial take on J. R.’s jook house was the interpretive equivalent of a bad pun on Marvell: without questioning the accuracy of my reading, I marvelled at this blues scene ostensibly uninterrupted and unfazed despite the thousand unnatural shocks of modernity. As I learned more about J. R. and his story, I realized some of my initial assumptions did not square with the facts.
MORE ON MARVELL
What was it about Marvell that had helped it hold on to its jook tradition? First, let it be said: if we tried to imagine a community that might act as a time capsule, preserving the old-school Delta jook house, we’d probably think of a place like Marvell, Arkansas. According to the 2000 census, Marvell, with a population of 1395, had a black majority of 58 percent, with roughly 30 percent of the population living below the poverty line. The lives of J. R. and his friends were dictated by agrarian rhythms, so that, for example, during harvest season they couldn’t make time for parties.
In addition, Marvell possesses a rich blues history—and a rich sense of that history. J. R. once told me, “When I was a kid, we used to make guitars upside the house. We’d nail some nails upside the house and tighten the wires up, you understand. And then we’d cut a little piece of wood, slant it, and then, as we’d play, we’d push it over the wire, you know, and it makes a sound.” J. R. also said that blues musicians around Marvell “used to play washtub bass, and they would blow bottles, too.” In a downtown nightclub, one of the walls was lined with high-quality black-and-white photographs of Delta bluesmen, some internationally famous and some, such as the late John Weston, known primarily in Arkansas.
Just down the road from Marvell lies the famous blues city of Helena, home of the Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival. Helena is also home to King Biscuit Time, a blues radio show on KFFA and—with its ninety-one-year-old host, “Sunshine” Sonny Payne—the longest-running daily radio broadcast in America. J. R. was born on a plantation in the Helena area, which many blues greats, including Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson, once called home. Certainly, this region, if any, boasts the kind of blues heritage that might have sustained a jook culture from the post-Reconstruction era clear into the mid-aughts. But the real story, with its many hidden twists, is far more complex than that.
When J. R. was growing up, house-party jooks were common in and around Marvell. He remembered hearing of them at the age of fourteen or fifteen. “Peoples would talk about them,” he said, “and they would tell me what all went on out there. But my parents wouldn’t let me go, because I was too young.” Many Deltans think of blues as the Devil’s music. J. R.’s father and paternal grandmother, who jointly taught him to play piano when he was five, were both gospel musicians who disapproved of secular music, especially the blues. J. R. said, “I was such a wild kid at the time. They was a old bluesman called Piano Red, and that dude could rare some blues on a piano, and every time [my grandmother] would tell me to play ‘Precious Lord,’ while she was in there I’d hit it, but when she leave out, man, I’d hit Piano Red. She come back in there and tear them knuckles up with one them big ole, long pencils—just tear my knuckles up.”
J. R.’s folks were not wrong to see some danger in the jook. Blues scholar Adam Gussow writes that
blues culture is, or was until recently, a culture permeated by intimate violence, both figurative and real, threatened (or promised) and inflicted. When I speak of “blues culture,” I am referring to an African American blues culture that evolved in southern jooks during the post-Reconstruction years, spread to the urban north with the help of a race-records boom and several Great Migrations, and remained relatively intact into the 1960s. When I speak of “intimate violence,” I am speaking … about the violence that black folk inflict on each other.
Gussow lists “cuttings, shootings, razor slashings, beatings, and murders” as examples of intimate violence. Despite the danger, J. R. longed to experience the jook scene, and he never forgot about it. By the 1960s, when he was old enough to go and do as he pleased, Marvell’s blues-party tradition had died out. The area’s music scene had moved to the local clubs, several of which drew enthusiastic black crowds, but at these venues blues was being supplanted by newer genres as black musical tastes changed.
BABY, DON’T YOU WANNA GO
By 1960 most of Marvell’s finest bluesmen had moved to Chicago. J. R.’s uncle Leon Boyd (a.k.a. Big June), known as a powerful vocalist, and a great blues guitarist named Vernon Anderson migrated north a few years before J. R. In the early ’60s, when J. R. was twenty-three years old, he followed Boyd and Anderson in hopes of making a better living. “Down here,” J. R. explained to me, “the hours was too long and the pay too little.” Also, Chicago promised him the personal freedom to play whatever music and frequent whatever places he wished. He could finally escape the protective vigilance and sometimes-stifling religiosity of the homefolk.
What J. R. found in Chicago was a Marvell away from Marvell. “A bunch of my friends was up there,” he said, “and we partied with Marvell people, did business with Marvell people, and played music with Marvell people. Every year, peoples from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee would gather in the park for a big event called the Arkansas Ball.” At this point in his life, J. R. had many years of playing piano and harp and a few years of drumming under his belt, but he “didn’t know a thing about guitar.” He said, “I couldn’t shake a tail feather on piano ’cause you had to sit still to play it. I wanted something I could strap across my chest and go.” In Chicago Anderson taught J. R. how to play guitar. “He was the guy,” J. R. said, eager to credit his mentor, “who really sat me down and showed me all my licks and chords. Vernon and Leon and them knew more than I did, and I wanted to learn.” Although J. R. was making inroads as a lead guitarist, he normally played bass when he and his buddies from Marvell jammed.
“What I found out was,” J. R. told me, revealing a fascinating piece of blues history, “the house parties that had left Marvell had done moved up to Chicago with Vernon and Leon. We would get together at somebody’s place and rehearse, ’cause we was playing a gig every weekend. The rehearsal would turn into a party, with all our friends from down home dancing and cutting up like they used to do in Marvell at the jooks; only, up north it was usually indoors. I finally got the chance to be a part of that scene.” This account points up the social importance of the music, which sparked the distinctive rituals of the jook.
J. R. became a jack-of-all-trades in Chicago. He worked as a chef, an interior decorator, a roofer, and a manager and deejay at two nightclubs. In his work as a deejay and a musician, it was J. R.’s business to learn the musical tastes of his audiences. By the time he reached Chicago, the Blues Revival had begun. The days of blues as a hot commercial genre were past. Blues had instead become a “folk” music championed by white fans who had only recently discovered it. At the clubs where J. R. played gigs as part of Vernon’s band, he was surprised to find himself entertaining enthusiastic white listeners. They made pilgrimages to Chicago to hear the blues pioneered by Delta natives like Muddy Waters, Luther Allison, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf. In 1964, close to when J. R. arrived in town, legendary Delta bluesman Son House played a concert at the University of Chicago. A university concert of this sort was a far cry from the jook scene over which House had once presided in Mississippi. It was also much different from the Chicago clubs where Muddy Waters had played commercial hits like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “I’m Ready” in his heyday a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the tastes of black fans in Chicago were moving increasingly toward soul and R&B. A similar trend emerged concurrently in the Delta, where a genre known as Southern soul—a mix of blues, soul, and R&B—gained ascendancy.
GOING BACK DOWN SOUTH
“The city wasn’t my bag; Arkansas is home”—that was J. R.’s answer when I asked him why he had left Chicago in 1998 and returned to Marvell. Another time I asked the question, he mentioned the dissolution of his marriage as a key factor. The woman he married in Chicago replaced his mother and grandmother as an assertive presence discouraging his involvement in the blues. “My wife didn’t go for it,” J. R. said, with reference to his weekend work as a bluesman in Chicago. “She was a jealous kind of a person. I finally got to the place I just quit playing blues altogether—trying to keep my family together, you know.” In the late ’90s, after he and his wife divorced, J. R. moved back to Marvell. “When I first got back down to Arkansas,” he said, “it was hard for me to adjust. It’s still hard to make money down here.”
But there was an upside: his return to Arkansas in the ’90s, like his move to Chicago in the ’60s, earned him musical freedom. With his marriage in the rearview, he could play blues again without having to field complaints at home. J. R. needed the comfort of his native culture, and Marvell needed him just as much. He said, “When I got back here, man, peoples was leaving town, everything going downhill, and I wanted to make a U-turn with that, ’cause this is home. I thought to myself, I’d feel good if I could bring some fun to town. Everything was quiet and dead, and on Sunday there wasn’t nothing to do.” (That comment says a little something about J. R.’s relationship with church.) “I started asking around, digging up some instruments, talking to peoples. I started thinking about the old country jook, and I was curious how it would work nowadays if somebody brought it back to life, so I did it, and so far things been kicking pretty good.”
Following Vernon Anderson’s example, J. R. began mentoring local musicians who had worked mainly in other genres. Just as in Chicago, rehearsals started turning into parties. J. R.’s first set of band members—drummer, bassist, and backing guitarist—left him. “They wanted to be in the spotlight,” J. R. said, “but I didn’t care who was in the spotlight. Peoples would ask me, say, ‘J. R., we having a cookout down here in our yard. We’d like to have y’all play.’ And they started calling us ‘J. R. and the Band.’ Well, I changed that to ‘J. R. and the Fellas.’ But the guys I was playing with, see, they wanted some kind of weird name. I done forgot whatever kind of crazy band name they was wanting, but we wasn’t that kind of band. We was a blues band, supposed to be. But they wanted to do Southern soul and then rap, and that wasn’t me.” J. R. played a few gigs at local clubs as a solo act. “I wanted to show [my former bandmates],” he said. “I did it before them and I could do it after them.” The next drummer and bassist he found, C-Murder and Juice, stuck with him.
Many times I’ve heard J. R. say, “I’m strictly bluesman.” He once told me, “I don’t play with all them sax and extra music in it. I don’t play them Temptations love songs either. I’m strictly bluesman.” His “strictly bluesman” identity was sometimes a source of tension between him and his fellow musicians, and between him and the folks who came to party at his place. Juice often caviled about J. R.’s strange, staticky guitar tone, telling him to “lose the fuzz.”
This idiosyncratic distortion (which reminded me of the scratchy sound an elderly harp-player friend of mine achieved by jabbing holes in his Gorilla amp’s grill cloth with an ice pick) was part of J. R.’s rusticity. Perhaps it was meant to allude to the rattle and buzz of a medicine-bottle slide from the days before amplifiers. In any case Juice preferred a warm, clean, urban tone. Also a Marvell native who had spent some time in Chicago, Juice once said to me, “To tell you the truth, Greg, this simple stuff we play ain’t even me. I’m just humoring these bumpkins.” He picked up an acoustic guitar and played a beautiful, arpeggiated rock progression in minor chords. “I made that up,” he said. “That’s what I’m about.”
Sometimes at J. R.’s, when the band was between songs, someone would grab a mic and start singing Southern soul, urging the musicians to follow along. J. R. occasionally showed his irritation toward these soul-singer types. Though he usually put a stop to their crooning, the ex-deejay met his friends halfway by pumping Southern soul favorites through his stereo system during breaks between sets. Once, during a break, someone grabbed a guitar and started playing “House of the Rising Sun.” Another day, an elderly man implored me to sing “Hound Dog.”
Aesthetic tensions notwithstanding, when the band kicked in, playing J. R.’s music J. R.’s way, the complaining ceased and the dancing commenced. Young people who came to J. R.’s parties got swept up into the blues. I once heard a conversation between J. R. and a teenage girl named Audrey, a native of Wisconsin and the daughter of J. R.’s then-fiancée, Pat. Audrey said she wanted to learn drums so she could play in J. R.’s band.
A DEEPER AUTHENTICITY
When the bluesmen left Marvell in the ’50s and ’60s, they took with them their rich musical and social traditions. Around the time J. R. reached “The City of Big Shoulders,” as tourists and purists began to fill blues venues, he and his friends had no need or incentive to switch from the music they knew. In a place where a bluesman could make good money playing for white fans, the Marvell contingent had a strong economic incentive not to stray from their wonted genre. Though J. R. never explicitly told me so, I imagine nostalgia was also a factor: blues must have felt like a dose of home. Most important, these were bluesmen. They wanted to play the blues. Whatever the precise combination of reasons might have been, J. R. played straight blues in Chicago for almost thirty-five years. Even as Southern soul gained ascendancy in Arkansas, his hometown’s blues sensibilities were preserved among him and his crew in Chicago.
In some respects what happened at J. R.’s jook house around the turn of the twenty-first century was as natural as could be—the survival or revival of a tradition, depending on how you view it. In 1998 J. R. brought the blues home. By resurrecting the region’s old-time jook, he took a fading cultural memory and turned it into “Hey, y’all—party at my place Sunday.” There was nothing forced or contrived about the dancing, the storytelling, the laughing, the drinking, the gambling, or, for that matter, J. R. himself. Yet here we have a very complex case of authenticity. Imagine that J. R. had never left the Delta. Imagine his move to Chicago hadn’t coincided with the flowering of the Blues Revival, which encouraged him to play the blues, the old blues, and nothing but the blues for all those years. What if Vernon Anderson hadn’t taught J. R. guitar and made him part of a band? What if J. R. had never moved back home? None of the key events and circumstances was inevitable or even probable. If any of them had failed to materialize, that unforgettable jook house down a long dirt road near Marvell might never have existed.
And what a loss that would have been—for the Delta, at least. J. R. often said, “Blues bring folk together.” For him this wasn’t just some feel-good expression—it was experience talking. It was also everyday cultural work. J. R.’s authenticity is characterological, and far more interesting than the kind of time-capsule culture I initially thought his jook house represented. He helped me understand that the white audience for his music in Chicago had played an important role in his complicated history with the blues. He once predicted that if he ever recorded an album, most of his fans would be white. Yet when I met J. R., his audience in Marvell was exclusively black, and he took pride in having reignited a love of the blues among his old friends in the Delta. He also celebrated the chemistry, musical and personal, between us. Sometimes, at the end of the night when everyone else had left, he’d pour the two of us some homemade corn liquor out of a Bacardi bottle.
In 2007, I’ll never forget, he called my mother (whom he had never met) on Christmas morning just to wish her a happy holiday, sweetly calling her “doll” throughout the conversation. That same year, with J. R.’s encouragement, I started bringing to his parties a bunch of my Mississippi friends, mostly whites and Latinos. In a region still racially segregated in many respects, much more so than the scene J. R. had helped create up north, his house became a beautiful exception.
Willie Dixon, another Delta bluesman who made his way to Chicago, wrote a song called “Wang Dang Doodle” about the glory of blues parties. The last verse goes like this:
Tell Fats and Washboard Sam
That everybody gon’ jam.
Tell Shaky and Boxcar Joe
We got sawdust on the flo’.
Tell Peg and Aunt Caroline Dye,
We gonna have a time.
When the fish scent fills the air,
There’ll be snuff juice everywhere.
We gon’ pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.
Reading these lyrics, I go back to that first night—eating pulled pork with Pudding, then trailing her into the country with no idea what to expect. I remember J. R., how he greeted me with a grin and soon handed me an Arkansas-shaped guitar pick, like the key to a city or to a magical ignition. I remember maneuvering around blown harp reeds and gaps between porch planks as the whole crowd fell to dancing on the grass. And I remember the blues, the smoke-and-tang flavor of the music we made together. To use Dixon’s colorful terminology, J. R. Hamilton pitched some first-rate wang dang doodles there in Kingtown, Sand Hill, Turkey Scratch, or whatever it was called, if it was called anything. I believe I speak for all of J. R.’s jook-house friends when I say I’m mighty thankful he did. I’m mighty thankful he did.
