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From our Games People Play issue.

Something strange happened to me the second time I moved to Wisconsin. I’ve lived here once before, during and after college, and when my husband and I returned after seven years in New York, we slipped into a crew of friends—some we’d known for years and others we’d just met—who welcomed us into their rounds of dinner parties and farmers markets and movies and Sunday basketball games as if we’d always been there.

When I first arrived in New York I felt no such ease. Instead, I realized for the first time that I was indeed a Midwesterner, and sometimes this made me turn a little insecure and crazy. If I went to a party, within minutes I would hear myself talking about the fact that I was there for graduate school, as if to stake a little claim among the Ivy League. But this was no big thing—everyone had gone to graduate school. Other times I found myself delivering nonsensical twitterings about something I called “reverse provincialism.” I’d lost a little ground, is what I’m saying. And so when we returned to Madison, I now knew enough to appreciate a group of funny, accomplished people who opened their ranks so generously. I invited people over for great vats of fresh pasta and cultivated my limited talent at basketball.

Part of the routine of living in a place like Wisconsin is the ritual survival of winter. Some people flee for months at a time, some set fires, the vast majority drink, and some organize games nights. I thought a games night sounded perfect, so I trekked out into one of the first bitter cold nights of our first winter back and encountered a Wisconsin tradition I had never heard of before: a little card game called Sheepshead.

The name alone is pleasingly strange and perhaps literal in some quarters—that wouldn’t shock me. And although I am generally too lazy and not competitive enough to pay close attention to most card games, I still settled myself at the Sheepshead table with a pleasant delusion of untapped aptitude. It’s just a trump card game, I thought, not so different from hearts or euchre, and how many times had I learned euchre, drunk, in college? (At the time I did not know that euchre is considered the lackwit cousin of Sheepshead.) Apparently everyone I knew could play it and thought nothing of it, so even though I had never heard of the game I decided it must translate well to all people, the analytic and the creative, the public policy people and the counselors and the veterinarians and the restaurant owners. Already I had decided to view Sheepshead as yet another democratic gift from the state that brought us progressive politics and discovered a use for the curd before it was even cheese—a game accessible to each and every one of us! Figuring I would play one open hand and then have it down, I called out rather grandly for another local beer and got comfy. When I suggested the open hand, I received a steely glance from my friend’s father and was otherwise ignored.

Every player had a handful of coins to begin, the less skilled ones a Ziploc full of silver and the more confident ones the buck or so they’d dug out of the glove compartment. The hand commenced in a flurry of unknown language, peppered with the occasional bit of poker terminology. As befits a game whose original name was “Schapfkopf,” Sheepshead carries with it its own Germanic lingo, filled with schmeers, schneiders, and maurers, and all of it put me in the mind to eat cheese and grow a mustache almost immediately. It became evident that one wished to schneider (to gain at least thirty points) but that to be called a maurer (pronounced mauer) was a grave insult. (Subsequent research on the handy Web site Sheepshead.org pinpoints its meaning as the German slur for “coward,” based on its root as “der maurer,” or stone mason, a builder of walls. That got morphed into an association with cautious playing, or in other words, being a pussy. In the context of this game, such a tortuous etymology comes to seem entirely appropriate.)

My first problem was remembering what was trump—a whole bunch of cards are trump, of varying suits and faces in a random, counter-intuitive order. Without trump down, I realized with a touch of cool sweat across my face, I had no idea what was happening in my hand or on the table.

The next obstacle was finding my partner, or figuring out who others’ partners were. In each hand, whoever gets the jack of diamonds is designated the partner to the picker. But it is a point of strategy not to show it if you have the jack of diamonds, to either help your partner anonymously or hurt the others anonymously for as long as possible, and so one must ferret out who this partner is. Here the conversation took on an uncertain, deeply emotional urgency, as if everyone was vetting a prospective FBI agent or an arranged marriage. “I just don’t trust John,” someone said. “It’s just something in his face.” Another player, counting out quarters to the victor after a losing hand, just said mournfully, “I could have been somebody.”

The hands continued. People were chucking cards into the center of the table and crowing, “Play like a sausage, pay like a sausage.” There was a scornful mention of a “Bethesda,” which turned out to refer to a mental hospital near where two of the players had grown up and, impolitically, denoted a hand even an idiot could win. When someone played a heart, it was de rigueur to note sagely, “Every pig’s got one.” Unlike schneiders, schmeers, and maurers, which are accepted terminology, these were simply informal phrases that had evolved over the years within the group around me.

I began to see that this game had a great deal of agriculture in it, and in its dense and complicated rules I could see why such activities pass the Wisconsin winters, played over some sausage and limburger, or why a posse of hunters and ice fishers might pass the time waiting for prey over six amusingly cutthroat hours of Sheepshead. Later I would hear about one person who, during a rainy day at deer camp, had played from 10 a.m. to midnight.

I stayed at the table with a cheat sheet at the ready that explained the trump cards, but things did not improve. Cards that seemed perfectly good to me turned out to be harbingers of doom. We should play leasters, one person said, but was shouted down—apparently leasters always sounds like fun, but no one ever actually has fun playing leasters. By now I had largely given up and was playing a word-associative game in my head, and I decided leasters might be poultry-related.

Amidst all of this table talk—a crucial element of the game—I became uncertain whether people were joking. Everyone had lost the general veneer of good-heartedness and openness that is pretty much a prerequisite to citizenship in Wisconsin. Laughter was common but mocking, and parents were now expressing intense disappointment in the character of their children. I thought at first this was specific to this group, but when I later asked someone else why he loved Sheepshead, he said wistfully, “Well, I only play Sheepshead with my family, so it’s really about sticking it to your brother or dad.”

So I drank my beer and tried to remember what was trump and how I would determine who was the partner. I suspect that for several hands I was the partner without knowing it. I also began to harbor suspicions that maybe I had never heard of this bizarre and Byzantine game not because it was too insignificant to mention but because, like Freemasons, they had all been hiding their rituals from me for years. This is what it would feel like if I discovered all my friends spoke fluent Tagalog in my absence, or performed the odd bit of macular surgery when the need arose, having picked it up as children. I began to perceive that people’s gazes were skirting past me in pity, and it was around this time that I may have informed the group at large, as if it would help, that I had a masters degree.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Sheepshead, despite its archaic language, which calls to mind nothing so much as an old farmer with blood beneath his fingernails and milk souring in the barn, is that in some ways it is a game of the young. While some of my friends grew up playing it with families, most agreed that kids taught kids, rather than wizened headcheese makers teaching kids, as I would have thought. Many learned from friends, in college, or in childhood, from an older sibling. My own older sister taught me swear words and dirty jokes, but then, Ohio was a grittier realm. And like an obsession with the thermostat or previously latent religious beliefs, one discovers an inherited devotion to Sheepshead when one least expects it. My friend Kate once called her father at three in the morning from Puerto Rico, where she and her roommate had suddenly become obsessed with Sheepshead, and, coinless, were playing with dried beans. There were no hellos, just a quick, slurring précis of the hand, ending with, “and I’m down to two beans.” Her father told her to play the ace and that he was going back to bed.

It is a family game, though each family might play by different rules. No one seems to have heard of Sheepshead being played in the United States outside of Wisconsin, though in Berlin, one friend of mine was taught a card game he recognized immediately as a distant cousin to Sheepshead. However one learned, there was generally some element of throwing the child into the lake to teach him to swim. People tended to learn best after college roommates took all their money. Others took it on as a challenge in adulthood, but even years into it were still casting sideways glances at their more knowledgeable friends for strategy. Sheepshead is a point of pride both in terms of skill and regionalism, and as befits a game played solely in the land of eternal winter, it is a time passer, a family ritual, and an obsession.

While I maintain a thorough mental block about the game itself, I have discovered that being around it makes me oddly happy. I have begun just pulling up a chair and listening to the chatter. I like pretending to be part of the generations of family players, and the theatricality of the table talk pleases me. It’s not that a simple round of Sheepshead genuinely makes people rabid—that’s reserved for crazed European soccer fans or anything involving the Green Bay Packers—but everyone understands the fun of pretending that it does. After a few hours of card tossing, taunts about skills and trustworthiness, and the heartfelt wish to destroy one’s closest relatives, life goes back to normal.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Bread and Butter, the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long, and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

From our Portland/Brooklyn issue (all photos by Scott Binkley).

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Faces of Pain

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 And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.—Numbers 13:33

Bell time for the Keizer Klash was 7:30 pm, sharp. A friend and I had driven the hour south from Portland and arrived early. In the dirt-and-gravel parking lot of the local Lions Club was a beat-up moving truck stenciled on either side with “DOA Pro Wrestling.” The acronym doesn’t stand for “Dead on Arrival,” as I first assumed, but “Don’t Own Anyone,” which, although it has a certain Wild West and existential laissez-faire, primarily refers to the promotion’s business model, the fact that it doesn’t put wrestlers under contract and so doesn’t limit where and with whom they can wrestle—with at least three other independent professional wrestling organizations in the Portland area, the wrestlers here have options. But boasting is a big part of the business, and the managers of DOA were quick to assure me that they were the “premiere” outfit in the Northwest. One went so far as to call their competition “just half a step better than backyard.”

Inside the Lions Club, the ring sat portentously in the center of the faux wood–paneled hall, under a ceiling low enough to preclude top-turnbuckle action, it seemed to me. The wrestlers themselves were out of sight, behind a makeshift screen of black fabric hung across a kind of oversize portable clothes rack, on top of which perched an assortment of party lights that looked like they’d been bought on clearance at Spencer’s Gifts.

The card for the Keizer Klash looked promising. Draven Vargas, “The Plus-Sized Playboy,” vs. CJ Edwards, “The Little Chocolate Drop.” Rockin’ Ricky Gibson vs. Eric Right. Jeremy Blanchard vs. Jonas Albert Robinson. J_SIN Sullivan vs. Dr. Kliever, “The Lean Green Love Machine.” And a tag-team match to end it: the Left Coast Casanovas (“Loverboy” Nate Andrews and Draven Vargas, along with their manager, Mister Ooh-La-La) vs. The Illuminati.

A few days earlier, my friend had asked me if I’d come to the Klash with him—he’s a photographer and wanted to shoot the event. “It’ll be fun,” he said. And when I hesitated, he added, “At the very least, it’ll be an experience.” There, with his camera around his neck, he told one of the managers we were press, and we were escorted through the black fabric into the Lions Club’s kitchen, that is, backstage.

Not counting my elementary school plays, I’d never been backstage at anything before, and I immediately understood the thrill. There hung about the wrestlers an unmistakable feeling of anxious and anticipatory giddiness. Every couple of minutes one of them would peek through the screen to check on the crowd filling the hall and then he’d beat his chest or beat the chest of a compatriot or jump up and down or jump into another wrestler or pump his fist. One rapidly slapped his head with both hands like I’ve seen Greco-Roman wrestlers do, in high school and the Olympics. Watching them amp themselves up, I remembered I’d experienced something similar when I played lacrosse, when my teammates and I would bang helmets together and roar testosteronic roars while listening to backward-R Korn, in what now feels like—and what I often wish were—another life.

Maybe it was because we were in a kitchen, but after the initial thrill wore off, I started to feel less like I was backstage and more like I was at a Halloween house party or in the Castro or at a Halloween house party in the Castro. J_SIN Sullivan’s baggy pleather pants had flames down the sides and he wore a T-shirt that read “Gladstone Rub-a-Dub,” which I later learned is an allusion to an old-school Northwest wrestler, not to a business that specializes in car washes and hand jobs.

Rockin’ Ricky Gibson dressed like he was in a Twisted Sister cover band. They’d both bleached their hair the way kids used to in the nineties. “The Plus-Sized Playboy” Draven Vargas’s face paint smacked of the Insane Clown Posse, and he had brushed his hair forward and styled it into a great big ichthyic fin that rose from the front of his head. His tag-team partner, “Loverboy” Nate Andrews, is bald but for a little island of hair at the top of his forehead, yet in a show of team solidarity he had also styled what he had into a fin, which you could see only in the right light, at the right angle.

Wearing a shiny pleather pin-striped blazer, a purple-sequined shirt, matching hat, and googly black sunglasses, holding a lint brush and a portable electric fan, Mister Ooh-La-La was Francophobia reified and looked like a cartoon villain I couldn’t quite place. “The Lean Green Love Machine,” Dr. Kliever, lists his weight as “242 lbs of surgical steel and sex appeal,” and his signature moves include the Autopsy, the Wheelchair Bound, and the Morphine Drop; he had a Marvin the Martian Mohawk so thick and meticulously coiffured that I swear you could do trigonometry on it. It was dyed a shade of neon green I’ve only ever seen on psychedelic posters and maybe, for that matter, on certain psychedelics. Somehow even those who weren’t seemed shirtless.

“Don’t get a picture with me and him together,” J_SIN said, pointing at Dr. Kliever. “We’re wrestling tonight.” Wouldn’t want to spoil the notion that the show’s all real, not staged and scripted. Not a “work,” as they say. In the world of wrestling, this upkeep of the illusion of reality and authenticity, this maintenance of the suspension of disbelief, is called “kayfabe.” With an ambiguous etymology, the word is often said to be a corruption of the Pig Latin for “fake,” and almost all accounts trace it back to carny culture, in which professional wrestling has its historical roots. The opposite of a work is a “shoot,” as in “straight shooter,” and that amounts to the improvised moves and holds the wrestlers perform, the pain they inflict and endure in the ring. The tension between the reality of the match, the shoot, and what the public knows or believes to be an angle, the work, is an integral factor of the audience’s fun. A fan who can’t or doesn’t distinguish between the gimmick and the authentic is called a “mark.”

My friend focused on Dr. Kliever—magnetic of taglines, he’s also called “The World’s Sexiest Doctor”—who had his back to us. When he turned and noticed the camera, his arms shot up reflexively, as though an electric charge had passed through him, and he flexed his muscles in the classic strongman pose and smiled a smirky and startling and weirdly handsome smile. He was missing his two front teeth.

I peeked through the screen and counted seventy-five people in the crowd, give or take. The adults who’d come alone outnumbered those who’d brought kids, I noted. And people were still arriving, finding their spots on the collapsible steel chairs set up around the ring—steel chairs that you could just tell, via some situational sixth sense, everyone present wanted to see used later as weapons.

*

*

An “experience.” I’m not entirely sure what that means anymore. What used to be an obvious and self-evident idea became a phenomenological conundrum for me. A very simple part of the problem is wrapped up in the fact that, in English, we have a single word for two ideas. On the one hand, we register the sensational intensities of the immediate world around us, and this is accomplished through perception of a prereflective sort. On the other, we gain experience over time: experience is an aggregate of everything we’ve gone through, which, with memory’s help, implies a learning process and the development of wisdom of a sort. The Germans distinguish between these ideas—they call the first one Erlebnis, which contains their root for “life” (leben), and the second one Erfahrung, which contains their root for journey (fahrt), as in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous phrase, “Life is a fahrt, not a destination.”

My misgivings started with a vague intuition that my Erlebnis machine had malfunctioned. I wasn’t experiencing the immediate world as I once had. I was a newlywed and had recently bought a house and my puppy had grown into a dog and the grass I’d planted had come in thin and patchy and I was startled to discover I actually cared about that and I was about to turn thirty and had all those clichéd and ramifying little anxieties that attend turning that age and my face had started to look like how I remember my father’s face and my parents had shocked the family by separating after more than three decades of marriage. All the things of promise in my life had become some version of what they’d promised to become, and something about how these possibilities had resolved into reality made me feel as though I were living my life in translation, or as though someone else were living it, really. There it was, my life, my “real” life, and I could see it, watch it, almost touch it, but I couldn’t live it in the fully present way I understood people to mean when they say, “I’m just living my life.” But as I read and thought more about experience, I also came to doubt my capacity for Erfahrung. Outside the obvious temporal continuity, I didn’t sense there was any narrative coherence to my life. And certainly no wisdom. The stuff of my past sat there like an assortment of random events and decidedly was not a record of some concerted effort to become someone or “make something” of myself. And I was overwhelmed by the contingency of the quasi-chaotic chain that stretched behind me through time. In other words, it seemed there was “genuine” or “authentic” experience out there in the world to be had, of both the Erlebnis and Erfahrung sort, just not by me.

During the worst of this, I went to a barbeque at my friend Kyle’s house. Kyle casts an enviable and unmistakable aura. When you’re around him, you begin to feel that life has a certain texture or grain or weave that otherwise—for me, at least—doesn’t exist. He just seems so full of fucking life. And it’s intoxicating. So many people come to his barbeques that his backyard starts to look like the thoroughfare of a shantytown. That night, I wandered around talking to Kyle’s friends, people who play in bands and make art and casually know all about good music, books, and movies, people who ride their bikes everywhere they go even if that means they show up a little sweaty, apparently unbothered by the fact that they show up a little sweaty, people who appear so at home with themselves, and my mind felt buffered, as if it were in a padded cell, and I was hounded by a passage from Henry James’s The Ambassadors, in which Lambert Strether says, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you had your life. If you haven’t had that, what HAVE you had?” By which I really mean to say that I was hounded by that part in Dazed and Confused when Matthew McConaughey says, “You just gotta keep on livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.” I ended up in a corner of the backyard, by the chicken coop, wondering what instinct tells a baby chicken when to peck free of its shell, while Kyle moved from group to group and high-fived all the handsome guys and hugged all the pretty girls and told jokes and laughed and talked plans for his bike crew and his several bands. Everyone looked like they were having the time of their lives.

A few months later, after another party, Kyle and I ended up at a twenty-four-hour Mexican restaurant not far from our houses. It was 2:00 am. We got our food and sat at a booth in the big front window and we could’ve been in a Hopper painting, except we were in Portland, at a Mexican joint, so Hopper would have had to paint us on velvet. Kyle was about to start a new job working for a high-end bicycle company he called the “Rolls-Royce of bikes,” doing a mix of advertising and publicity. For as long as I’d known Kyle, he’d managed a bike shop, and for exactly that long he’d talked about doing something else—whatever they’re doing, twenty- and thirtysomethings in Portland are always talking about doing something else. Kyle’s dream job was to work in a room with a whiteboard, beanbag chairs, a soda fountain, a kegerator, and foos- and skee- and pinball. An ideas room. For five years he’d worked toward making this happen, and that night he talked about his life as if it were a whole, a narrative. Choices he’d made, he would make. And when Kyle asked me, “What about you? You going to stay in town? What are your plans for the future?” I didn’t know what to say.

Listening to Kyle talk about how his plans had come together and what was next for him, I had a mini-revelation. I realized, shockingly and all at once, that I had a history. When I decided to move to Portland on a whim, almost seven years ago, I didn’t realize it would be a life-changing experience. I was young and dumb and myopic and couldn’t yet see that the move would have consequences. It was less a decision than a mindless action. And had I understood the magnitude that attends such a decision, I’m not sure I would have gone through with it. I would’ve been too afraid, staggered by all the possibilities I was shutting down by choosing one. The terrifying thing of it was, this history hardly felt like mine.

This is your life, I told myself. Do it justice.

*

*

In addition to advertising “Live Pro Wrestling,” the fliers for the Keizer Klash indicated that the event was a benefit show for a kid named Hunter Osburn. Hunter’s dad manages a local Jiffy Lube, where “Loverboy” Nate Andrews also works, when he’s not wrestling professionally. Backstage, Nate said that everyone at work, their hearts really went out to his boss and his family. They felt his pain. And he wanted to do what he could to help them.

Hunter has a rare disease called Paroxysmal Skew Deviation, a term all the wrestlers said with studied nonchalance, though none of them could tell me what it means. What they knew was they were there for him, “the sick kid,” and that the proceeds from the event, including their pay, would go toward sending him to the Mayo Clinic.

Before the show, Scarlett, the DOA ring girl, whose breasts and bottom looked as though they’d been inflated and who seemed almost criminally sweet and caring in her role of Team Mom, invited the family into the ring.

She handed the mike to Hunter’s mother, who explained that something is wrong with her son’s brain and brain stem. Doctors know very little about the disease, and don’t know the cause, but it affects Hunter’s eyes, his vision, and his ability to focus. One eye will sometimes move upward spontaneously, against Hunter’s will, and roll away from the other in what essentially sounds like a lazy eye from hell. Worse still, sometimes it happens to both eyes at once. Hunter, who was maybe ten and stood between his mom and dad with his hands buried deep in his pockets, frequently suffers headaches of such terrifying acuteness they reduce him to tears. He experiences blurred vision, weakness, and general fatigue. Seizure activity hangs about him as a when-not-if. He was rarely sleeping through the night because of the pain, which had forced him to be homeschooled this year.

“That’s the story. The short story,” she concluded, giving a sense of her exhaustion, and her own pain.

*

*

I’ve lived pretty much my whole life with a tacit yet strict understanding of pain: at all costs it is to be avoided. Fuck pain, really. Fuck physical and emotional pain. Fuck spiritual pain. Pain hurts, after all. But while it seems an obvious and instinctive stance, in many ways I know that it makes me a coward. And deep down in my dyspeptic American gut, I know my avoidance guarantees a certain measure of unfulfillment, for as our pop culture cliché goes, “No pain, no gain.” Within this gnomic flourish lies the haunting reminder that the road to success of any kind passes first through hardship. It’s funny, because the aphorism also evokes a linguistic resonance: the word peril shares a root with the word experience, which suggests that one lives through and learns from danger, from crisis. From pain, of one sort or another. This adds a nice inflection to C. S. Peirce’s statement “Experience is our only teacher.”

What I figure now, looking back, is that my stance of avoidance, of constantly choosing the smooth road, has prevented me from developing into one of the many people who once lay before me as a possibility to become. Had I been more willing to experience physical pain, I’m sure I would have played lacrosse in college, or I would have been less timid about how big I’d go and made a more serious stab at skateboarding at least semiprofessionally. Fear of emotional pain, of vulnerability, kept me from relational depth and led to empty and meaningless dealings (“experiences”) with women and many thin friendships with men. I might have been a better spiritual being, with a fuller sense of what that means—might not now be a recreant who has lost much of his sensitivity to what he once understood as his soul—had I been able to address and manage the pain of doubt and the pain of alienation and the deep, self-rattling fear that even just the idea of faith bred in me.

Which all brings me to this: when I was nine or ten, I overheard an argument my parents were having. My folks fought infrequently enough for the fights to be memorable mostly by virtue of their strangeness. An electric and dangerous mood would settle on the house and my brothers and I would sit where we’d been caught when it all started and we would listen. This one, I was in my room, and I put my ear to the door I’d closed when I knew things were going to get worse before they got better. Something one of us had done or said must have stuck in my dad’s craw, because in the course of the argument, I heard him say we were getting to be too sensitive. He accused Mom of making us soft. Of turning us into momma’s boys. I don’t remember anything else about the fight, but I remember that. I backed away from the door I’d been leaning against and didn’t know what to do with what I’d heard, so I went on acting as though I’d never heard it at all. But God, that phrase. Twenty years on and the possible truth of that phrase still stings.

*

Before their Three Year Anniversary show, the DOA wrestlers held a meet and greet at Pattie’s Home Plate Café—primarily a fifties diner/soda fountain, Pattie’s is also a music venue, sock-hop dance hall, gift shop, clothing store, video store, costume-rental shop, meeting place, and, I’m pretty sure, more—in St. Johns, one of the northernmost neighborhoods in Portland. St. Johns has always seemed to me to be a living reminder of what Portland must have been like before it was hip and cool to live here. There’s none of the yuppie influence that pullulates in the Pearl District or the hipster-doofus aesthetic that teems elsewhere. There’s no Western-influenced simulacra. No paraphernal flannel or fashion-statement glasses or knowing facial hair. Although it may be read on to the place, irony has not yet invaded and colonized St. Johns as it has much of the rest of the city. When you’re there, you feel it’s safe to take the place at its word. Work boots are worn to work and big-framed vintage glasses are just the glasses people have had for thirty years and mustaches are grown to make a face look better. Pattie’s hosts a regular Bigfoot believers meeting.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon and the wrestlers had set up a card table with two black leather, gold-plated belts; T-shirts; DVDs; and fliers for the Three Year Anniversary show the next day. J_SIN Sullivan sat in a chair built for a much smaller man. To call him simply “big” would be a silly understatement. In the ring, yes, he looks big. But when you’re next to him, he’s beyond big. Upright, he’s just shy of six and a half feet tall and weighs 380 pounds. You’d shudder and avert your eyes and pray little Please God prayers if he boarded your plane. All You Can Eat buffets must factor people his size into their P&Ls. He’s gigantic.

A fan—the only one who stopped by in the two hours I was there—approached for a photo. J_SIN slung the Tag Team Champions belt he and Big Ugly own over his shoulder. Together, they are “Ugly as Sin” and weigh 650 pounds. In the ring, they are like two parts of one person, and are unstoppable. J_SIN posed his menacing pose and pictures were taken and the fan thanked him and walked off.

Now, there’s J_SIN and there’s Jason and the difference between the two is at once subtle and marked. After the fan moved on, J_SIN relaxed back into Jason, the man who works by day at a printing plant and who’s a founder and part owner of an independent wrestling promotion, in which he is a star and for which he writes all the angles—he’s an auteur. Jason’s bigness isn’t really intimidating. Rather, he suggests a soul-comforting equipoise, more Buddha than the bad guy he plays. Part of me really wanted Jason to hug me and tell me not to worry, that everything was going to be all right. I imagined being hugged by a redwood tree or a Mini Cooper. But Jason’s bigness was still intimidating enough for me not to suggest we try it out, a hug.

“Some people just have it,” he said. The “it” he was referring to is the “it” factor, those undeterminable characteristics an entertainer or person possesses that make him compelling, magnetic. Broadly speaking, this is talent, charisma, charm. For some wrestlers, it’s physical, the way they carry themselves, a move they do in the ring. For others, it’s mike skills, swagger, the way they talk. The “it” factor amounts to the way a wrestler manages and engages the crowd—it’s the crowd, after all, with its response or lack thereof, that decides how long a match goes and whether a character makes it. (“If they’re not feeling it,” Jason said, “we cut it short. No one’s bigger than the show.”) As a “heel” in DOA, J_SIN’s job is to inspire the fans’ derision and hate, to rile them up and get them rooting for the “faces,” the good guys.

“I’ve got this thing I do with my eyes,” he continued. He cocked his head to the side and made movements with his brow and then said, “I can’t really do it out here. It’s the sun. Too bright. But you get the idea.”

A few kids rode leisurely by on BMX bikes. They shouted something I didn’t catch.

“Nothing fake about this,” J_SIN called back, patting the belt he still had over his shoulder. “Come over and I’ll show you. Or are you too scared?”

When the kids had passed, he turned to me and said, “People are always like, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, it’s all fake anyway.’ But is this fake?” He held up his forearm and pointed to a four-inch pink scar that looked like a gummy worm. “That’s from barbwire.”

In his seminal essay on professional wrestling, Roland Barthes writes, “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle.” The gist of the essay is that professional wrestling is a “spectacle of excess” and a kind of morality play, an exercise of suffering, defeat, and, most importantly, justice, and though highly athletic, it is decidedly not a sport. Unlike the crowd at a boxing or mixed martial arts match, the crowd at a professional wrestling match wants an image of passion, not passion itself. The shows may be scripted, but they’re not choreographed, and while some of the suffering and pain are amplified for effect, “sold,” that hardly makes it all fake.

Jason said he’s bled in the ring twelve or thirteen times. At an event for which fans bring weapons for the wrestlers to use on one another, he got a cut on his back deep enough to demand medical attention, but he didn’t go to the doctor. He easy-stitched it, which I learned means he simply superglued the wound shut. Two years ago, he partially tore his MCL and he still hasn’t had the surgery he knows he needs, but continues to wrestle regardless. He said Home Boy Quiz (HBQ) just had back fusion surgery—three words that should never be said together—and now two rods and six pins stabilize his spine. He’s set for a comeback in a matter of months. I saw a picture of Wade “By God” Hess from the Taipei Death Match a couple of years ago. He and Thunder had dipped their taped-up hands in glue and rolled them in broken fluorescent lights, then punched and chopped each other until that became stale, at which point they started smashing the fluorescent tubes over each other’s heads and across each other’s backs. In the picture, Hess is on his knees and his back looks like a river delta of pulpy skin and blood. Everyone has a bad back or bad knees or a bum shoulder or a crooked nose or broken ribs that didn’t heal right or sciatica. Dr. Kliever has to do yoga every morning to make it through the day and for a time had burns all over his back from a show where he was slammed onto a table that had been lit on fire and, consequently, caught fire himself. Plus, of course, there’s the situation with his teeth.

“Concussions are so common that they’re, that we, hold on. Wait. Where was I going with that? Every time you’re slammed to the ring, anyway, it’s like you’re putting yourself through a fifteen- or twenty-mile-per-hour car crash,” Jason said. “In order to deal with it you need a lot of mental toughness. That’s more important than physical toughness, really. You have to condition yourself to deal with it.”

One of the managers came out of Pattie’s to tell Jason there was a girl inside who wanted an autograph, but she was too shy or scared or awestruck to ask for it herself. Jason signed a picture of the DOA logo, smiling a smile more private than public.

When I asked why he puts himself through all the pain, what he gets out of wrestling, Jason said, “There’s that, the fans, of course. And I just love the sense of community I get from wrestling. I met my girlfriend through wrestling. I’ve met my friends through wrestling. It’s also just fun as hell.”

The promoter said they should probably wrap up. They had to head to the airport to pick up “Maniac” Matt Borne (of Doink the Clown fame) and Raven, who were coming in especially for the Three Year Anniversary show. Before we disbanded, I asked Jason whether he thought DOA could ever support him and the other wrestlers full time.

“It’s a dream, of course. Because, I’ll be brutally honest,” he said, as though he could be honest any other way. “It’s really humbling, going from being the boss to being the grunt. Monday morning back to work. It’s hard. That’s the reality of it.”

*

*

I had started to worry that the meds I took for depression and anxiety were leveling me into a sort of listless, anhedonic, das Manian existence. So in an effort to purify my experience and gain access to what I imagined were deeper realms of myself, realms more authentic and vivifying than any I’d recently inhabited, I decided to go off them. Because I didn’t know any better, I tried quitting cold turkey. I’d been on them for five years, and on my second day off I started having vertiginous fits so bad I had to lie down for thirty minutes or more. The dizziness was of a deeper, more severe sort than I’d ever experienced, qualitatively different than what happens when you childishly spin around a lot of times. There was then an inexplicable paresthesia in my arms and palpitations in my chest that made me worry (“A stroke and a heart attack? Great.”). There were shocks and jolts that ran up and down my spine, to and from the base of my brain. They’re called “brain zaps” or “cranial zings,” and sound a lot more whimsical and fun—like some cartoon bubble out of Adam West–era Batman—than they really are in reality. Great, gusty mood swings overwhelmed me. Anger and anxiety and fear and a deep unutterable sadness. A kind of akathisia alighted and I felt as though I’d had too much coffee when I hadn’t even had any coffee. I couldn’t keep still. I paced and stomped about. I cowered and shook. I wept at TV commercials, at nothing at all. I was a mess. I felt as if I was going crazy. As if I was turning into somebody else.

*

*

After the Keizer Klash match with J_SIN, a victorious Dr. Kliever stood sweaty and breathless by the ring. He leaned against one of the ring’s posts, signed autographs, and posed for pictures with kids from the audience, most of whom came up to just about his waist. There was something of a thrilling and transgressive cultural exception about all this. Parents letting—no, rather, encouraging—their kids to get close to this man wearing nothing but little leather undies, who’s missing prominent teeth and has a large crustacean tattooed on his chest, which was red and welted from J_SIN’s chops, and who was breathing suggestively and had sweat so much that he glistened and whose verdigris Mohawk had lost its initial pluck and verve and was now flopped over and matted and sad in a way that’s probably best signified by the sound of a slide whistle. The atmosphere was charged.

In line with the kids to have his picture taken was an older fan. Disheveled in his loose jeans and unbuttoned flannel jacket, he walked with a cane and looked like he could be a Vietnam vet. When it was his turn, he congratulated Dr. Kliever and said J_SIN was a whale and a jerk and it took balls to get in the ring with him. He asked Dr. Kliever how he felt, after a win like that.“You never get used to it,” Dr. Kliever said. “You never get used to the pain.”

*

I lied to my dad, said I was getting in on Friday, when I had arrived in Charlottesville the day before. I was in town briefly and wasn’t sure I wanted to see him, what with all the anger and disappointment and shame, the annoyance, confusion, and pity—the rawness of all the shit I’d rather not reckon with. But I felt bad, guilty, and from a friend’s back porch I told him I was calling from the train, couldn’t talk long, but could we meet for coffee later that afternoon. Before he’d subleased a cheap room in a house with UVA graduate students and finally moved out of our family house, he’d asked my friend if he could live with him and his wife. He doesn’t know I know this and even if he did I’m not sure he would see the problem. On the phone he said Mom had Airbnb guests coming that night, and he had to drive out to the house to cut the grass. So we made plans to meet for half an hour the next morning, at 7:00 am, before he headed to College Park, Maryland, to watch a UVA lacrosse game. Later that day I learned the grass had already been cut, that he, too, had lied. And then, feeling bad, guilty, I guess, he went to pick me up from the train station, thus catching me in my own lie. I didn’t answer his phone calls, just texted him that I’d see him in the morning.

We met at Spudnuts, a fifties diner famous in Charlottesville for its dense potato-flour donuts and thin coffee. It seems that the world or someone in it has always executed some injustice against my dad. This time, he wanted to discuss how my brother had shown up late for a lacrosse game someone had given him tickets to. Good seats. Box seats. As far back as I can remember, people have always given Dad shit like this. It wasn’t until recently that it even occurred to me to wonder if maybe all this time he’s been asking, or if all the kindnesses people have shown him over the years have been tinged with altruistic pathos. Even just the thought of this shamed and saddened me. But my brother had missed the first quarter and a few minutes of the second. What did I think of that? Wasn’t it messed up? Rude? (Was this really what we were talking about?) When he asked about the train station, I came clean, said that I hadn’t been sure I wanted to see him, that I didn’t know what to make of everything that was going on, the separation, et cetera. Confusion bloomed on his face, for we are a family that thrives on the surface. I had nudged a door open a crack, and behind it was a world of uncomfortable and knottily complicated emotions. For a moment I felt like I was ten again, waiting for his reaction, calculating his response. After a spell of silence, though, he closed the door. He talked about how my mom needed to get help. “I’m getting help,” he said. “All kinds of help.” I noticed that he said that word, “help,” as though he resented even it. And then our half hour was up, as if this had been some kind of prison visit. We hugged outside and he said, “Pray for your mother, bud,” and I said would, even though I hadn’t prayed in years and probably wouldn’t start again anytime soon. And then I turned away, not wanting to see him get into his dinky little truck and blow into the pneumatic doohickey he has to blow into in order for the truck to start. I didn’t want that experience. Walking back to my friend’s house, a heavy, donut-sick feeling in my stomach and the sun working its way through the morning haze, I wondered what alchemical substance is added to time that makes it possible for us to forgive.

*

I spent my time at the first few wrestling events looking for socially or sexually or politically charged significations and signs I could write about. They’re everywhere to be found. Take, for instance, the wrestlers’ obsession with the microphone. In the face of working-class anonymity, of a system that renders them all but powerless, voiceless, controlling the mike could be read as their way of asserting control over their situation, their lives. All the wrestlers “have something to say,” and that something is always abusively mocking or derisive, of either their opponent or the crowd. When the crowd starts in with chants of “You suck,” the wrestlers are quick to respond, “Shut your mouth” or “Let me finish.” This all seems symbolically complicated by the fact that the cordless mikes often cut out and even when they do work they amplify and distort in equal measure, muffling the wrestlers’ voices into the nonsense language adults speak in Charlie Brown cartoons, and if we hadn’t all been sitting close enough to the ring to hear through the distortion, we’d have been totally lost. I thought of the improvisational nature of professional wrestling as a field of play and an embrace of pain that Nietzsche would have associated with his übermensch, and probably would have admired. Then I thought maybe professional wrestling could be seen as a metaphor for our own normal and mediated lives, some of it real, sure, but a lot of it scripted, posed, fashioned for other people to observe and assess, to “like,” and if they didn’t, we’d tailor it better the next time—that maybe people get so up in arms about pro wrestling being “fake” because they’re really sensitive and insecure about all the ways their own lives are a work.

But after my third event, I thought looking for these signs and “readings” was just another form of avoidance, of distancing myself from the world and my role in it. As Barthes writes, “What matters is not what [the crowd] thinks but what it sees.” And as part of the crowd at the more than half dozen events I attended, I saw a lot.

I saw “Loverboy” Nate Andrews introduce himself by stuttering the first syllable of his name with an overactive tongue—“Luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-LOVERBOY…”—in a way clearly meant to signify cunnilingus. I noticed then that he’d shaved most of his stomach and chest, leaving one long center strip of hair from his neck to under his belly button. When it was his turn with the mike, Thunder called it an “unhappy trail” and we all erupted.

I saw C. W. Bergstrom, who’s fifty-four years old and whose prime dates back to the days when Rowdy Roddy Piper wrestled here, come out and say to another tag team, “I hope you packed a lunch, because we’re taking you to school.” To which his opponent from the Honor Society responded, “My partner and I are the true masters of the double team. Just ask this girl,” and he pointed to a woman in the front row, which drew cheap heat, jeers, and boos, but didn’t seem to register any actual offense.

I learned that when he was eighteen, Mister Ooh-La-La legally changed his name to Mister Ooh-La-La. And I learned that he had starred on an episode of Jerry Springer.

I saw Dr. Kliever throw J_SIN into the ropes and then clothesline him when he bounced back into the ring, and I saw all 380 pounds of J_SIN go horizontal in the air and fall to the mat with the sound of a cannon, after which Dr. Kliever walked around the ring pointing to his chest with his thumbs like He’s the Man.

I saw a number of head butts to the groins of supine and spread-eagled men that looked like deranged and hellish fellatio.

I saw crowd members with what must have been seventy-inch waists hold up homemade signs that said “Food Stamp Tramp” when the Left Coast Casanovas came out with their escort, Mary Jane Payne. As they entered the ring, I saw the Casanovas hold down the middle rope for Mary Jane, who paused for an awkward and long few seconds when her head came close to Draven Vargas’s crotch and her bottom came close to “Loverboy” Nate Andrews’s crotch, at which point the two wrestlers posed a high five to complete the pantomime of a sexual maneuver known as the Eiffel Tower, at which the audience collectively groaned.

I saw J_SIN point to a much smaller opponent and say, “I’ve had bowel movements bigger than him,” and I really almost believed that.

I learned that a 50/50 raffle means the winner splits the take with the promotion.

When I arrived early at an event, I saw wrestlers warming up and going over their moves and they were wearing T-shirts that hung over their little spandex undies in a way that made me think they might not actually be wearing little spandex undies at all, that they might be porky pigging it.

I once sat next to a guy with a thick New York accent who advised, “Never get really stoned and come to watch pro wrestling. Trust me, bro. Unless you can get in free.” Throughout each match, he provided a running commentary, naming every move and every hold that happened in the ring. He’d interrupt himself to talk about the overall state of DOA and which characters “had legs,” who might make it to the WWE. During the main event, after telling me what one move was and who had pioneered it, he said, “God, this is pathetic. I know this is pathetic. I need to get a girlfriend.”

I couldn’t help but see that some of the wrestlers’ little spandex undies looked more full than other wrestlers’ little spandex undies and wondered why the less endowed wrestlers didn’t opt for shorts.

My heart went out to one wrestler, gone generally flabby and a little gynecomastic, when a twelve-year-old girl in front of me started to chant, “Get a sports bra!”

I saw Big Ugly stand in the ring wearing a plastic neck brace and tell a story about having recently been in a bad car accident with a semi. He’d had to spend time in the hospital, where some wrestlers had visited him. Though he was in a lot of pain, he guaranteed that he’d be back in the ring as soon as he could. He made a point of saying that a lot of guys in the business, they spend their lives on painkillers to numb themselves. He didn’t want that life. J_SIN said he would wrestle their tag-team match against the Left Coast Casanovas alone, in honor of Big Ugly’s pain. And I felt a great wave of tension and then shock and then confusion wash over me when, during the match, Big Ugly rushed out from backstage, doffed his neck brace and hastily discarded it, picked up a collapsible steel chair on his way into the ring, and used it to smack J_SIN across the head. The crowd was stupefied. J_SIN lay stunned on the mat and Ugly hit him another time. Then Ugly got another collapsible steel chair and put it on top of J_SIN’s head and hit that chair with the first one. Someone behind me said, “I can’t believe they let this happen.” Another said, “Nothing fake about that.” And I completely marked out. I was genuinely confused. Was he okay? Was Ugly faking? What just happened? After the managers got Ugly out of the ring, three wrestlers came out to help J_SIN backstage. My friend got a picture of the four of them walking away from the ring, and when we looked at the photo later, we saw that Dr. Kliever is smiling at the camera, and his smile is a different smile than I’d seen on him before. It is full of gleaming and perfectly white teeth and he looks movie-star handsome and I didn’t know what to think.

I saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.

*

*

Six months after the event, I found pictures online that a local journalist had taken during the Keizer Klash. There I was in a few of them, standing in the back of the Lions Club, leaning against the faux-wood paneling, an out-of-focus ghost taking notes as grown men pantomime a primal and originary struggle. This picture convicted me. I’d gotten close enough to know just how far I really was from the world. Something had to change. That is, I had to change something. “We moderns,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, “may well be, all of us, in spite of our frailties and infirmities, tyros who rely on fantasies, for lack of any ample firsthand experience.”

The DOA training facility is in Troutdale, Oregon, about a half hour east of where I live in Portland. It also serves as a school where Dr. Kliever teaches new wrestlers the ropes, as it were. I drove out I-84, the Columbia River on my left almost the entire way, and I thought about time and experience and about how one is supposed to go about articulating either, let alone both. And so I was also thinking about my dad. How much of our relationship is a work? How much a shoot? Mt. Hood rose outside my windshield. Clouds crossed it. In the nearly seven years I’ve lived here, Hood has never looked real to me. Against the sky, it looks flat and matted, too much like what it is, and this subtle irreality has always led me to think of it as a symbol. How large and how small. Grandeur. Awe. Ineffability. Far-reaching singleness. Timeless time and eternal return.

Behold! A mountain.

There was an accident on the highway and three lanes became one and traffic slowed to a creeping pace as everyone passing tried to assess the damage, counted their stars. I checked my Instagram account on my phone to see whether any of my seventeen friends had liked the photo I’d posted earlier. Kyle had, and he’d posted a couple new photos for his 360 followers. I thought of posting a shot of the accident. There were a few fire trucks, several police cars, and a couple of ambulances, a dizzying display of spiraling light. I bet I could find a good Instagram filter for that. The rescue workers had lobotomized one of the cars that had come to a crumpled rest on the right shoulder. Its roof was peeled back like the lid of an anchovy tin. On the embankment, an abrasion of fresh red paint stretched behind it. I would put a knowing caption on my photo, an allusion, play to the local crowd with “Randle Patrick McMurphy,” and get tons of likes. I slowed, assessed, and only after I had taken a picture that came out blurry and smeared-looking did I consider that it was probably in bad taste anyway, the situation too real. As I drove on, I thought about how, at an earlier time in my life, I would have prayed for the safety of the people involved.

Hölderlin has a great line that kept coming to me: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.” And where something is covered, hidden, there lies the possibility for revelation. I got off the highway and drove past the semitruck dealership and then the Troutdale airport, where two small helicopters were either taking off or landing, just indecisively hovering there. I passed a sprawling and enervated office complex no different than one I remembered at that moment I used to work in. And then development abruptly ended and I was in the middle of nowhere and I almost missed the turn. I looked for address numbers on a street that had large garages on the left and semitruck trailers behind chain fences on the right and knew I had arrived when I saw an SUV with a DOA sticker across its entire back windshield. I parked behind it. When I got out, I saw hanging from its rearview mirror what looked like shrunken heads. The training facility’s windows and door were cheaply mirrored and I stood a moment in the thoroughfare between the two strips of garages. My face was imperfectly and fuzzily reflected in the DOA insignia on the door. I walked up and my reflection grew larger. At the door, I hesitated, imagining the world of hurt that would be revealed to me in the ring. But I pulled it open, because I had decided that more than anything just then, I wanted a piece of the action.

Cheston Knapp is managing editor of Tin House magazine and executive director of the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Portland, OR, with the choices he’s made.

From our Sex Issue.

*No animals were harmed in the making of this essay (we think).*

hhhh

Sex & The Single Squirrel

gggg

I have been a lot of very different people in my life—a cheerleader and a coke fiend, a good daughter and a bad girl, an exhibitionist and a shut-in, a religious seeker and a nihilist. It is my sickness that I can imagine doing, or being, just about anything. This is complicated by a desire to infiltrate the lives of people much unlike myself, to see how they really live. How else to explain why I would willfully dress up in a raccoon suit and let strangers grope me?

Unlike a true “furrie,” I don’t feel that my best and truest self can be expressed only through an animal alter ego, through sexual or nonsexual role-playing on-line or in person, perhaps through the adoption of furry ears or a tail, or a full fur suit. I don’t have an intense spiritual connection to the animal world, and despite an erotic fondness in my girlhood for a sheepskin rug, I have never had a carnal urge to possess a stuffed animal­­—or, not yet.

For the Anthrocon Furries of Myth and Legend convention in the King of Prussia Hilton, located just miles from the scenic battlefields of Gettysburg, I have chosen to make my debut into the “furrie fandom” as Miss Trixie, enchantress of the night. I am fabulous in my rented raccoon fur suit, which appears to have been crafted out of a 1970s midpile brown-and-black striped shag carpet.

Furrie fans have come from all over the United States, as well as Canada and Australia, to rub shoulders and noses with other lovers of Sierra Club calendars and Sonic the Hedgehog video games, not to mention their on-line furrie sex partners and chat room confidantes. They’ve come for the furrie workshops like “fursuit dancing” and “fursuit sewing,” roundtables on “furrie spirituality,” furrie drawing classes, an erotic furrie art auction and more. The furrie set is vast, encompassing many worlds: there are also sci-fi aficionados, computer wizards, Renaissance folk, gaylaxians, nerds, cat people, dog people, erotic art fans, born-again Christians, lovers of parade balloons, shamans, healers, animal rights activists, bikers, and curiosity seekers.

Elissa Schappell, A.K.A. Miss Trixie

I have chosen Trixie, or Trixie has chosen me, because we share certain personality quirks. Like the Kinko’s employee I met who was a wolf—loyal, dangerous, a loner—or the substitute teacher who was a panther—sleek, brave, and feared—I, like raccoons, have a fondness for the dark and for dramatic eye makeup, plus a jones for spying on the neighbors, inciting the kind of commotion that causes people to throw on their robe and grab a flashlight. Trixie, masked and mysterious, like desire itself, plays to all my worst voyeuristic tendencies. Hidden behind her face I can move undetected, in the darkness of my suit, taking in all the action around me. It is hot in my head, and my breathing is heavy, echoing disconcertingly in my ears. It’s the same sound you hear in slasher movies, the frantic panting of the stalked ingenue hiding in a closet watching the killer, chain saw slung across his back, sniff her panties. Indeed, aren’t I the crazed maniac hidden in the shadows, just waiting for my moment to pounce?

Certainly I do not look scary. Sadly, I am not regulation human-raccoon size, so the suit hangs on my shoulders and bags around my ankles, giving me a kind of hip hop rodent look. My head is a huge plaster cast, fitted inside with what looks like a welder’s helmet. All breathing is done through a narrow slit scarcely big enough to accommodate a cocktail straw and through my big, sexy, heavily lashed eyes, which are made of mesh. Trixie’s wide-spaced eyes are cute, but render me walleyed. I keep bumping into people and furniture, paws out feeling for the walls, like a drunk in a Beatrix Potter book. I catch glimpses of people in bunny and tiger ears, and others wearing bear, iguana, and fox tails. But I have yet to see another fur suit.

….

The mood in the hotel lounge is that of a homecoming reunion. Clearly, judging from all the snuggling and canoodling going on in the lounge, the delighted yips and coos of recognition, most haven’t laid eyes or paws on one another in months. And, unlike at home, where no one suspects that the junior lawyer likes to dress up like a wolf and crash through the forest with other guys dressed as wolves, here they can be out. We’re here, we’re deer, get used to it.

For others, it’s the first time they’ve met snout to snout, and so there is the requisite uneasiness at discovering Big Ben is a petite Jewish woman who wears glasses, and that Kitten with a Whip is not a bossy dominatrix but an obese and meek manager of a health-food store who rode twenty hours on a bus to get here. It intrigues me that there is so much psychic fallout when you find out that the on-line partner with whom you are engaging in frisky fun isn’t the gender you imagined them to be. That a person doesn’t mind having virtual sex with another species but doesn’t want that person to not be of their gender, or to be of their gender, seems odd. Oh, the slippery machinations of lust.

In the lounge there is a bulletin board on which people leave messages searching for furrie friends, offering hugs, or noting who gives the best back rubs in Canada. Stuffed animals are in abundance. I recognize some men I saw in the lobby earlier, middle-aged, solid industrial types, buttoned-down Republicans, I’d guess. The Willie Lomans of the animal kingdom, here they are talking animatedly about hikes they’ve recently taken and books they’ve read, petting the stuffed badgers and otters they hold in their laps like children. While many furries carry and love stuffed animals, most are quick to distance themselves from the “plushies,” also referred to as “Gundies,” “plushisexuals,” or “stuffies,” whom they consider a subspecies of furrie. Plushies are folks whose primary preference for sexual satisfaction is boinking stuffed animals. Their motto: In plush we thrust.

Not unlike other feared or misunderstood minorities, plushies have developed a vernacular all their own. See if you can follow: You’re feeling yiffy, so you’ve lit musk-scented candles and put The Chipmunks Do Barry White on the stereo, because tonight is the night you and Paddinton are finally going to boink.

Tonight, Paddington gets baptized. Paddington is a talented plushie, meaning you won’t have to open up a seam to create an SPH (strategically placed hole), in which one could insert an SPA (strategically placed appendage). Paddington can pose with its legs spread and its ass in the air, begging. All day at the office you can’t stop fantasizing about Paddington’s boink-space, the place on the plushie that is the most rewarding and enjoyable to poke. One of the great things about plush sex partners is that you never have to send them flowers or call them the next day! Which is good, because this morning, walking past FAO, you got a plush-rush just seeing the new plump Gund bunnies—tomorrow after your lunch hour two saucy Flopsy bunnies will be yours. Can you say, plushgasm? Buy pairs for spares. Did I mention plush lovers never get jealous? Your biggest concern is the carpet burn on your crotch.

Later that night, after Paddington is asleep, sweet dear, you feel yiffy again. It’s only nine so you drag piglet out of the closet. Piglet, the old whore, is plushpile gray. While plushplunging Piglet you grab his handle bars, meaning you are gripping his arms or legs in order to give a meal or a gift to Piglet. Soon Piglet will be retired, seeing as he’s almost too worn out to be soiled with spooge to be a regular partner. Give Me Gundies or Give Me Death!

Okay, weird, but is it any weirder than what “mundanes” (non furries) do? What furries disdainfully refer to as meat sex?

…

A downside to wearing the fur suit is the fact that I have to keep drinking water to keep hydrated, and thus have to keep taking off my suit to go to the bathroom. Washing my hands in the sink, I happen to find myself sink to sink with a dominatrix skunk in fishnets, high heels, a black bodysuit provocatively pinned together with safety pins, and the coup de grace: a black thong over the bodysuit.

“Great outfit,” I say, taking in her ensemble, the gloves, the whip.

“I have to have someone feed me my french fries,” the sex skunk says, reapplying red lipstick. “Not that it’s a problem.”

“Of course,” I say, drying my hands. She looked like a real pro. I’d read about a furrie convention in Los Angeles where they sold animal dildos, horses, cows, and best of all—the corkscrewed meat muscle of a pig. I wonder if she might know about such a thing. That would be something to see: I wonder what it would be called: The Poker? The Happy Hambone?

“Hey,” I say, as off-handedly as possible. “You look like you might know the answer to a question—um, do you know where—if—they sell sex toys here?”

She looks annoyed. “I am a pissed-off skunk, low on money.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. Then, “See, what I am looking for is a kind of dildo.” She stares at me like I’m an idiot. “Um,” I say, “a pig dildo—do you know if they even exist?”

The skunk just looks at me and shakes her head with disgust. “Here? I don’t think so.” She looks at me, Miss Trixies, with disdain. Her? The polecat slut! Then it occurs to me that she thinks I am one of those despised zoophiles, who actually engage in intercourse with animals. A miniscule and dark subculture of furries I hesitate to even mention.

Before I can explain or offer some obviously spurious excuse—It’s not for me, it’s for a friend—she bolts. I suppose I should be thankful the bitch can’t spray.

Outside I walk slowly and gingerly. I could take off my head and see just fine, but I cannot. If the fur suits could be said to have a philosophy, it would be: Don’t take off your head. Don’t take off your head or you will scare the crap out of some kid. Mindful of the innocent, furrie is about fantasy, trust, and play. In truth, no one wants to see my face. I am not important, what matters is my animal other—my own best self, the most me part of me—Trixie. The fun-loving, happy-go-lucky little troublemaker. The furries want to know Trixie, they want to play with Trixie. But mostly, it seems, they want to hug Trixie.

I hear them before I see them. “Ohhh, how cute!” they cry, and then appear like a pack before me. “Do you like hugs?” someone says.

I freeze, as if in the headlights of a barreling school bus.

At first I can’t tell how many there are. But I think I make out four, perhaps five large, docile, flour-white strangers wearing soft-soled shoes, with plushy teddy bears snuggled inside their overalls. I panic as they move in for a hug, a giant squeeze. I can see polar bear key chains girdling a man’s waist, pins that announce: I (HEART) BEAR HUGS, and EVERY TIME A MUNDANE DIES A FURRY GETS ITS WINGS. Off balance, I’m overwhelmed by claustrophobia. My breathing echoes in my ears, like in 2001. Open the pod doors, HAL … and my head rises up off my shoulders. I can’t even run—my ankle is still tender from my slip in the garage last night. I am close to shrieking when, as quickly as they appeared, the gang of huggers tuck off with a kindly wave.

….

I rush to the “fursuit walking” class. My brothers in furs are lined up against the wall as if at an obedience school mixer. While I am grateful to see my fellow fur suits, I am also a little alarmed. It isn’t the big red dog who earlier was posing for a drawing class, or the uncostumed French boy with winged-back hair chatting up a man who is a dead ringer for the guy who slices cheese in our deli. It’s the hyenas.

Instead of wearing a huge plaster head like me, the hyenas (I think they are cousins) have affixed long latex snouts to their faces, wear fangs, and have painted their faces with red, orange, and black face paint. They’ve also glued realistic brown and orangey fur to their arms and legs. Their feet, in Birkenstocks, flaunt their black toenails. Their necks strain against their leather collars. They remind me of the ubiquitous tubby guy at football games who has painted his torso in his team’s colors, the logo scrawled across his poochy man breasts.

They look me over hungrily; my heart beats fast. They are predators, right? The worst kind, they even eat dead things! In costume or out of costume, you can just tell.

I am thrilled and repulsed at the same time. I don’t think I’d like to be ravaged by dogs, or at least not these dogs.

Our teacher, a tall lithe man in black ballet shoes, calls us into four lines and sends us across the floor in pairs. Our first walk is a rocking side-to-side march where we swing our arms like jolly teddy bears. I try not to look at my fellow furries, to just stay in my “Trixie head,” but I can’t help it. I’m embarrassing and uptight. I’m not a gamboling teddy bear, I am a spaz. My hands fly up to steady my rocking head at least once every pass. I must look as though I have a toothache or am reeling in a state of perpetual shock. All these pups for me?!

Nevertheless, those in costume seem to do much better than those in their street clothes. The orthodontists and optometrists, Cub Scout leaders and college debate kings aren’t as loose as those of us in character. Some blush, others actually duck out of class while we furries ham it up, wiggling our heinies and flapping our arms, giggling out of a mix of freedom and silly embarrassment.

After the regal walk, the hyenas converge on me, just as I feared they would. I press myself flat against the wall. What if they have rabies, or, worse, herpes? I catch myself. I have to be cool, think furrie. They begin stroking me, petting my arms, and scratching my back. When one of them starts to enthusiastically massage my right breast—I advertently or inadvertently—I yip and sort of wave my paw menacingly at them, baring my teeth. Miraculously, they back away. Despite more than a decade of bumping hips on the New York subway, I find I am squeamish—no, scared—about being touched my strangers. My heart is beating in my mouth, and I can’t breathe. They sniff at me curiously. I fight to stay still, reminding myself, I am Trixie, I am Trixie, dammit. Trixie is fun loving, Trixie is playful. The boys peer through my eye holes (truly the windows of the soul) to scope me out. Do they think I am a man or a woman? Does it matter? In desperation, I growl. They growl in return, and snarl, rubbing my ears and nuzzling at my neck with their snouts. I want to scream, but instead I growl louder, and they stop and cock their heads with suspicion. My mother’s admonition to never pet a strange dog runs through my head. Obviously animals have different personal-space issues—strange dogs pile up together and lick each others’ balls; squirrels cram into hollow trees like frat boys in a telephone booth. I am just waiting for someone to actually bite me.

I have to confess, I have always been a biter. Always. Even now, I occasionally want to bite people, out of anger, desire, fondness. Sometimes I do. Years ago, when I heard Sylvia Plath had, the first time she met Ted Hughes, but him, I took it as evidence that biting was a sign of genius—not just lunacy. I saw a wolf in the lobby earlier. I think I’d like to bite me. I know, though, that I do not wish to bite or be bitten by these foul hyenas.

…

The highlight of the “furssuit dancing” class comes when our teacher, Coco, the portly mascot of the Hershey, Pennsylvania, hockey team, announces, “A time may come when you want to go to a furrie dance, or a furrie rave, or at some time you might wish to slow dance with your heart’s desire.”

Absolutely. While I’ve adopted the Pogo as the official dance of raccoons, if tonight at the furrie ball, the opportunity to get down with a sulky wolf-boy or a buff gargoyle arose, would I not want to be ready? Or what about my “fursuit walking” teacher who had, for this class, slipped into his tiger suit?

“Everybody find a partner,” Coco says.

Everyone pairs up quickly, leaving me, the only girl alone. Spurned, I am forced to ask Le Tigre to dance with me. He nods his assent though it is clear that dancing with a raccoon and, worse yet, a girl, is beneath his station. It’s all so Jane Eyre!

Despite being a decent dancer, I plod all over Tiger’s big, expensive padded feet. “dip me,” I whisper, “dip me,” after all, I am a lady. Reluctantly, halfheartedly, he does so, which is good as I have to grab my head to keep it from rolling across the floor. For our last dance Coco calls us all into the middle of the floor and instructs us to hold hands in a circle around him. “Know your limits,” he warns us. “It’s hard to dance with big feet and get funky.”

As the song “I’m Too Sexy” begins to shake the room, we set off in a manic ring-around-the-rosy around Coco as he spins, grinds his hips, does the Travolta point, and whirls, then he tags one of the boys. “This is your chance,” he yells over the music, “to just go wild and crazy. No one is going to judge you here!”

Indeed, we cavort wildly. Like a bunch of schoolgirls hopped up on Baby Ruths and RC, we circle fast, fast, faster, while shrieking, I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy!!! When I am finally tagged for the solo (last of course), I don’t care, I go wild in the center. I am the masked mistress in the cage. I am go-go coon.

…

The Furrie Ball is the highlight of the first day. By day’s end I am starting to get used topeople grinning at me, looking me up and down, and taking my picture. I pose like a Vargas girl and I wave coquettish as the calendar girl sexpot I once dreamed of being. I am special, after all; I am a living plush toy. Probably never in my whole life have so many people wanted to get in my pants and had no idea, or even cared particularly, who I was, literally, inside.

I spot a couple who’d taken my picture earlier. They are not in costume and seem to be furrie connoisseurs of some kind, although they don’t wear costumes themselves. Instead, with their longish, frowsy hair, purple-and-turquoise natural-fiber scarves, and hemp clothing, they look like people who run a candle shoppe and make their own cheese.

“Hi,” the man of the couple says.

“Mrow,” I say. I go back and forth between what I can only imagine to be raccoon noises and actually speaking.

“Ooh, what happened to your tail?” the man says, turning me around so he can ogle at my butchered bottom. I had hoped no one would notice that my tail was missing. But perhaps it’s a turn-on.

All day long no one has mentioned it, and now, suddenly, right before the dance, it’s all about the look. I knew it.

“Farmer cut it off with a shovel,” I say. They seem nice enough.

The man winces, then laughs. “Uh-huh,” he says.

“Must have hurt,” the woman says, moving her dark hair away from her face. She licks her lips and laughs.

“Terribly,” I say. Not to flatter myself, but I think they’re flirting with me. They’re both looking at me in the way people do just before they kiss.

“Want to come sit with us?” the man says, gesturing at a recently vacated couch. I wonder how much animal hair is in that upholstery. The girlfriend leans in to me and begins caressing my shoulder. I let her.

“It’d be fun,” the woman says, dropping her head onto my shoulder.

“Maybe later,” I say, suddenly nervous.

“I am looking for a friend, a mouse, or maybe he’s more of a mole. Have you seen him?”

They both shrug, it’s all casual. Why can’t I be more casual?

“We’ll look for you,” the woman calls out as I scurry away. I’m embarrassed at how flustered I am, then later am miffed that my first real invitation to join a threesome has come while I am in Trixie. After they leave, I think, I could have threesome in a raccoon suit, right? It’s a titillating idea. For me, the whole add-a-lover dynamic has always seemed overwhelming and vaguely hilarious; an orgy is just one step away from hairy naked people building human pyramids. I know I would laugh, but in Trixie, as Trixie, wouldn’t that all be okay?

When the ballroom doors open, eager furries pour through the doors. Inside it’s dark and rainbows bounce off a large disco ball. A friendly coyote hands out Cyalume sticks, and I am thankful to have something to do with my hands. No one smokes. No one drinks, unless of course they’ve poured rum into the Coke cans. It’s murder. Insidr, a cheery, older, bland-looking British gentleman I imagine to be a podiatrist or a vicar nods to me. Poking out of the top of his Sansabelt trousers is an appallingly worn looking Elmo doll. Elmo appears to be in either ecstasy or great distress, or both. I can see it now, the gotta-have Christmad gifts of 2003—Come on My Face Elmo and his pal Bend Over Grover.

I cannot tolerate the strobe lights, so close my eyes to dance. I think perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps I will be more graceful undistracted by undulating furries. I enter the throng and manage a jaunty, lead-footed Rex Harrison sort of jig. I attempt the jolly Winnie-the-Pooh-style fanny shake we practiced in class today but lose my footing, staggering blindly into the crowd. I scan the crowd for Coco. Oh, Coco where are you? Rescue me from Old MacDonald’s Mosh pit!

Suddenly I am so tired I am staggering under the weight of my head and I have to go to bed. I share the elevator upstairs with a guy who is wearing      parachute pants engorged with Beanie Babies. In fact, his pants are so weighted down with Beanie Babies he is in danger of losing them. I recall a chat board where people swapped stories of wearing Swampy and Mystic in their underwear like furry benwa balls when they went to work.

Back in my room I shuck off Trixie and lay her carefully across an armchair, her head facing me. I brush her fur and examine her for spills, stains, gum. I am starting to feel attached to her. I fall asleep that night counting Beanie Babies struggling over a fence. Good night, Cuddles, good night, Sparky.

….

I start my morning in the Dealer’s Den, a treasure trove of furrie collectibles and goodies, comics, art, and toys. At first glance, it looks like any convention, with your average-looking joes in Coke bottle glass hunched over cases of classic comics, the occasional dude in camouflage selling war medals and postcards. Upon closer inspection you notice that almost all the comics feature animals or stuffed animals—even the erotic art and porn. Whether its Oui or Bluboy, whether one prepares for a date by gluing faux fur to one’s body and slipping on a dog collar, or splashing on Canoes and slipping into a pinstriped suit, clearly humans are keyed to react to the same kind of stimuli. We are pretty consistent in what turns us on—the only real difference I see between furrie porn and human porn is that furrie porn has more of a sense of humor. Witness a Gulliver’s Travels gang bang: a chained lion overwhelmed by an army of sadistic Beanie Babies wielding dildos. In another pictorial a teddy bear is exploded by the force of a fox’s jism.

Of course, there is the traditional locker room fantasy featuring a huge killer whale with a hard-on, preparing to snap a towel at the ass of a smaller, but equally endowed, baby beluga whale fairly dripping with innocence. Then there are the ubiquitous soft-core spreads—the sort of layouts celebrities do in Playboy. There are rabbits in naughty nigligees. There is a slinky, pink-nippled mouse bathing in a martini glass—very forties—and besotted squids and octopuses doing things only eight armed creatures versed in the Kama Sutra can do. There’s Rudolph in the midst of a seven-reindeer orgy; a wide-eyed reindeer lass in bells being taken from behind by a creature who appears part lion, part wolf, the gift tag around her neck reads, Don’t Wait Until Christmas, while another reindeer, alone on a tropical beach, looks shocked as wild dogs go down on her. Don’t you hate it when that happens? There are foxes with pierced nipples chained to walls, and a mouse engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation with a giant boa constrictor—a little something for everyone.

The implications of interspecies sex are amazing. Forget a utopian society where every human married someone of another races—imagine dogs and cats living together in sin. In fact, not surprisingly, there are also domestic-bliss shots, drawings fit for a close-mated couple’s Christmas card, such as the portrait of two middle-aged male huskies sharing a pizza over a six-pack. It might just as well read, Season’s Greetings, Larry and Carl.

…

I peek my head into the Diversity in Fandom meeting long enough to get the gist of the antimundane patter. The discussion is being led by trickster, a twenty-something guy whose long dark hair hangs down to the middle of his back. I recognize him as the wolf boy I was lusting after earlier in the lobby. He’s all in black, including, of course, a black dog collar.

“I see people in the fandom who are not dealing with mundanes,” says a man in a tie-dyed T-shirt and a studded collar. Some people nod.

“Fuck that, we should isolate ourselves from the outside the world,” quips one of the men who earlier established himself as being particularly well versed in the human-genome-trans-humanism business; part of the fandom clings to the dream that one day the DNA of animals will be successfully grafted to that of humans, allowing for the creation of a true race of lizardmen.

There are murmurs of agreement.

“Hey, on the whole we are more accepting than the general population,” he reminds us. Which seems true, overall–maybe this is why I like them.

In closing, Trickster reminds everyone, “When you talk to mundanes be nice. After all, mundanes are the future furries.”

….

I am so hungry I could eat an entire can of garbage. On my way to the snack bar I stop into a meeting of “The Herd,” which is being led by two cowboys, one outfitted with sinister-looking gold incisors. Some of the men in thr group hold homemade or mail-order hooves in their laps, or stroke a horse tail, tilently nodding as the cowboy talks as if to a bunch of reluctant alcoholics at their first meeting.

“I don’t wear tack and stuff,” says the cowboy they call Whitehorse. “I’m not that tacky. I think it’s a fetish. And, I get my manes from a Hitching Post. I don’t wan to think where it comes from,” he says, “but isn’t it better for the horse to be another new horse instead?”

The men nod.

“Listen, guys, this is all about building friendships,” Whitehorse reminds the Herd. “After all, we’re all horses.”

I am getting better at walking and balancing my head. On the way to the lounge I can even lower my arms almost completely to my sides. I still can’t turn my head, or really ascertain where my body is in space, but I can walk confidently in a straight line. I am forced to stop and turn my head, though, when I hear the loud coarse peal of a woman’s laughter nearby. Sitting at a table are three people. On one side is a nervous and emaciated little man with a sad frizz of coppery red hair and a lion T-shirt. Across the table is one of those classically cute guys whom girls only want to be friends with. Beside him in his lap really, is a big-boned blond in a white tiger suit. She nuzzles and nips at the guy beside her in such a way that is unabashedly, desperately carnal. No one in the lounge can keep their yes off her; it’s like seeing someone hitting their children in public or watching a minor fender bender that could at any moment escalate into someone pulling a gun.

She is dangerous, and because I am not me, I stride right over and say, “You are so beautiful you could make Siegfried and Roy weep.”

The tigres turns her attnetion away from the man and onto me.

“Well, hello,” she says, sitting up straight. “I’m Tigress.”

“You’re gorgeous,” I say. The red-haired man nods in agreement, beaming at Tigress, and then it dawns on that in fact she is his wife.

“Sit down,” she says, pointing to the spot beside her husband. I sit down carefully.

Both of them are wearing wedding bands, and while the lion husband is trying to seem nonchalant that his wife is nibbling this other man’s ear, he fidgets, swallowing and stammering, and trying on occasion to get her attention by reaching out and stroking her arm–which she ignores.

“Male lions have sex like two hundred times,” she says with a laugh. “Twice a month, and then nothing.” She rolls her eyes, “Nothing.” Her little lion husband attempts a faint smile and shrugs. “What do you expect?”

The taking of many sexual partners–having sex whenever you feel like it and with whomever you feel like it, regardless of species–is for some furrie the most appealing feature of the furrie lifestyle. After all, most animals aren’t monogamous. Sure, swans and scarlet macaws and some apes may mate for life, but as for remaining sexually true? Ha. Not to imply that all furries are horndogs–no, many are happily close-mated, but neither is necessarily the only one the other will mount.

Suddenly, I lock eyes with another raccoon. The first I’ve seen! And it’s a boy! Ranger Rick is dark and pretty in a tight, striped top and black shorts, and he, he has a tale! A big long bushy one. I swoon. Instinctively my hand flies back to touch my stumpy rear, ashamed, thinking for a moment, that I feel a tingle in the spot.

I excuse myself and stride right over to him and introduce myself. “Hello,” I say in my most chipper Miss Trixie lilt and lay a paw down on his shoulder as thought we’d been kits together, nestling in a log, not so very long ago.

“Hi,” he says politely. “Can I take your picture?”

“Sure,” I say and pose like Betty Page. I can suddenly imagine Polaroids of me as Miss Trixie at the center of a furrie circle jerk, and I shudder with a mixture of horror and delight.

“So, you want to get together?” I ask I am Miss Trixie, I am bewitched by her magic.

Ranger Rick looks surprised. “I’m sorry?” he says.

“I mean, you want to go outside and run around,” I say, “do some crimes? Maybe tip over some garbage cans? Play chicken on the highway ….”

He laughs uncomfortably. “Maybe, uh, later.”

I feel so ridiculous standing there in my little rented suit. Maybe if I had a nice suit, a good suit, he’d like me more. He just had to get to know me.

“Sure, later,” I say, my face burning red. “Of course, okay.”

As I walk away I think, Thank God he couldn’t see my face! Then I start to feel aggrieved for Trixie’s sake. I wish I’d said, Listen pal, there are plenty of people here who’d kill for some Trixie loving! How many people have come onto you?

Well, I suppose he could sort of count me.

I’m starting to feel depressed, and it’s hot and stuffy in my head, so I head outside to get some air. It’s clear and dark, but not too dark to spot a gang of previously meek-looking furries furiously beating a pile of beanbags with sticks as though the beanbags had enraged them. Later I learned that these “beanbag rats” are created solely for this sort of abuse. I think I could do with a few of them, if only to defuse sexual energy.

When I return, the Costume Ball has begun. It isn’t really a ball in that there is no dancing, only a show and a photo op with entertainers (furries love a photo op).

It quickly becomes clear that the appeal of most of the skits–dogs joyously, awkwardly rocking out to “Let’s Hear It for the Boy”–is of spying on someone gleefully boogieing down in their rec room. Kick out the jams, Curious George! The crown erupts when the belly-dancing cats–about as exotic as hummus–begin their sweet gyrations, then grows silent when a dour warthog in green army fatigues skulks on stage, the scene darkens, and he goes into a creepy lip-synched rendition of The Doors’ “The End.” Afterward, I am actually happy to watch a pair of spunky foxes in spandex and headbands aerobicize to “Let’s Get Physical.”

Everyone in the audience is enjoying themselves, clapping or singing along, two-stepping with their stuffed animals, just living it up. The chemistry changes as soon as the cowboys from the Herd group appear onstage. The cowboy with the golden teeth leads out his buddy “Whitehorse” and chews out the horse for losing the race, calling him terrible things. When the cowboy turns his back, Whitehorse steals his lariat and lassos him, or rather attempts to lasso him–it must have worked in practice a hundred times, but this time the lariat has gotten caught on the cowboy’s ear. After a terrible second, the crowd begins laughing, and you can just feel the man inside the suit seething. After he finally manages to disentangle the rope from his head, he attacks his buddy, knocks him down and in ten seconds flat, has him hog-tied. The room is silent, the rage and humiliation scarily acute.

For the finale, a drag queen, Lola Bunny, appears like a cartoon Venus. She is a vision in her purple microminiskirt, tight pink sweater (balloons pinned on for tits), and black fishnets. Lola would bring down the house regardless of who she followed, but the release of tension from the cowboy’s masochistic miniplay makes her act the perfect climax for the conference. If I could remove my panties and fling them on the stage, I would happily surrender them.

As Lola begins to croon “Fever,” her hips all a-swivel, the crown becomes unhinged, standing on their chairs, waving their stuffed animal pals, some screaming “I love you!” I feel gleeful. After the show, people swarm around me taking pictures, and then the music comes on again, and we all start to dance. I dance the way you can only when no one you know is watching. I dance like I shall never dance again, for this is the last time I shall ever dance as Trixie.

…..

This is what I remember when I am back at the costume shop with Trixie lying limp in my arms like a swooning lover. I have put off returning her for two weeks, band now I have no choice but to either rent her again for a month or say good-bye. I don’t completely understand my reaction. It isn’t that I have a profound desire to zip her skin up over mine and become her: I don’t. There is just something, some–the freedom the suit gives me, the idea that I will never be Trixie again–that strikes me as so sad, and I think, as I hand over her skin, that I might just cry.

Elissa Schappell is a co-founder and editor at large of Tin House, as well as the author of Blueprints for Building Better Girl and Use Me, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award .

David Markson is going down fighting, and he’s not giving an inch to convention, zeitgeist, or potential sales. Born in 1927, Markson found success early with a series of genre novels; it helped that he was friends with Malcolm Lowry (about whom he wrote his Columbia dissertation, in 1952), Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, and Jack Kerouac. One of his early novels,  The Ballad of Dingus Magee,  a parody of a Western, was turned into a mostly forgettable movie starring Frank Sinatra. At the time it would have been hard to imagine that his prose style would evolve, à la Mondrian, from crowd-pleasing genre fiction to spare, postmodern blocks of text, first with Springer’s Progress, a nasty little novel about a middle-aged novelist, then to Wittgenstein’s Mistress, an apocalyptic meta-novel featuring one- or two-sentence thought blasts, a book that David Foster Wallace called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country” and upon which Markson could have built a po-mo empire. Instead, he refined his pointillism into a quartet of “novels,” Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, which feature a near total abandonment of narrative.

Published in paperback by three small presses (god bless you Counterpoint, Dalkey Archive, and Shoemaker & Hoard), each of these end-game novels is made up of one- or two-sentence blocks regarding various intellectual subjects, including:

•Facts about famous writers and artists—“Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared. And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.”

•Anti-Semitism—“Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite. And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.”

•The nature of narrative—“Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.”

•The Classics—“Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae. Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse—to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.”

•Big ideas, mainly in the form of unattributed quotes, many of which are not in English—“Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins.”

•Morality—“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.”

•And, always, the starving artist and his legacy—“Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.”

•With occasional nods to the “author” and “reader”—“Should he give him children, if he is still being autobiographical?”

Reading these novels is like spending hours with a crazy uncle who happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every book ever written, every painting ever painted, and every piece of music ever composed. And who disgorges bits of knowledge in an endless, unfathomable pattern. And yet! Yet, somehow, Markson spins this erudition and intelligence into self-conscious webs, narratives without narratives, micro-poems that miraculously accrue and cohere into meditations on the creative life, art, and intellectualism.

What emerges is a portrait of sickly, lonely, deviant genius, with “nothing now, but my books.” These novels are a remarkable achievement, what should be required reading for anyone aspiring to create.

Here is how Reader’s Block ends:

 And Reader? And Reader?

In the end one experiences only one’s self.

Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

 From issue 40.

Smudge

By Thomas Sayers Ellis

A

In nature, always reality. In art, always nature.

xxxxxxxIf representational,

the recognizable governs technique.

If freer than figurative,

xxxxxxxyou can feel the object

referencing a primitive system of punishment.

Beneath the bruises, brushstroke brushstroke, skin.

To express Expressionism, the thumb of time

smears humanity, blurring history.

Truth, too, contributes to the pain-pulse of memory

as if color, complexion and flesh-spectrum,

as if, only if, the material

is men, women and children,

Before devouring our Summer Reading issue next month, follow us back to Summer Reading 36, where author, Douglas Bauer, looks back on the life of food writer, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. Bauer remembers the week he met Fisher as a young man, when she inspired in him a profound hunger.

I am, as often, tempted to start a personal book, mais a quoi bon? I think my present life is a strange, complicated, interesting one. But my deep distrust—or is it timidity, cowardice even?—of such self-revelations will, perhaps, always prevent me from thus relieving myself.

—M. F. K. Fisher, March 4, 1937

M.F.K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher died fifteen years ago last summer, in the bedroom of her small, graceful, white stone house tucked in a hillocky pasture in the Sonoma Valley, and I suppose it’s that anniversary that has heightened my many memories of her. I’m thinking especially of the week when I first met her, and she showed me how to taste and savor life in ways I’d only started to sense I was hungry for; and also of the time, two decades later, when her life, as I saw it, was a vivid example of how to receive the meaner sustenance of age.

She was just twenty-eight years old when she wrote the entry in her journal I’ve quoted above. She’d left California the previous fall with her husband Al Fisher. The two planned to share a house in a vineyard above the Swiss village of Vevey with its owner, their friend, the painter Dillwyn Parrish, whom everyone called by his nickname, Timmy. And by the following early spring, when she made this entry, her marriage was ending and Al was returning to the States to teach at Smith. Mary Frances would return as well, but only briefly, to tell her parents she was divorcing Al Fisher and marrying Timmy Parrish and that the two of them would continue in Vevey. A strange, complicated, interesting life indeed.

Amid all the domestic turmoil, in 1937 she published her first book, Serve It Forth. Like the majority of Fisher’s writing—more than twenty books, most of them devoted to “the art of eating,” to borrow one of her titles—it speaks of cooking and dining and living, anecdotally reported within the context of her life at the time. And what makes the work unique—as her journal’s early self-reflection foreshadows—was the way in which she shared that life so obliquely, the people and places in her world depicted for her readers with a beguiling incompleteness.

As, for instance, in a piece she wrote for Holiday in 1956: “Eating any meal with this family was fun . . . It might be very simple . . . or it could be elaborate like the annual game dinner served on one occasion for three college presidents, a guru priest, a ship owner from the Islands and two movie belles.”

Leaving us to ask: Three college presidents? A guru? To whom? What Islands? And which movie belles? None of which she answers.

And: “On that night I watched him sitting at a wobbly card table in my new apartment amidst a mess caused by the arrival of most everything I own from Aix-en-Provence, where I had stayed a year.”

This just might be the prototypical Fisher sentence: its picture of her living modestly and making do with no apology, serving her guest at a wobbly card table, but also living an enviable, international, and—particularly to her readers in the forties and fifties and into the sixties—even fantastical life. And offering nothing further about her year in Aix, why Aix, why a year.

*

 In the spring of 1971 I was working as a lowly editor at Playboy, when the executive editor, a thin, perennially agitated man, called me into his office. He sat behind his desk, wreathed as always in a cirrus of cigarette smoke, and excitedly announced that M. F. K. Fisher was going to write a piece for the magazine on New Orleans food and restaurants. I hadn’t heard of
M. F. K. Fisher and he saved me from saying “Who’s he?” by relaying her one demand. She’d explained that a woman dining anonymously and alone would always be given the worst table in the place. She needed a cohort, one who must be male. The editor laughed, adding, “She told me, ‘I don’t care what sex he is, as long as he wears pants.’ ”

I wore pants, and fairly expertly. And that was the sum and substance of my qualifications. I was a few months shy of twenty-six and I would bring to the task of dining partner no sophistication regarding food or anything else. Whenever I tell my story of meeting Mary Frances I inevitably cast myself as an extreme, a very extreme, example of how little of life any of us have lived at that age. And then I pause to think that I was then but two years younger than she was in 1937, when the first of her many books was being published and she was living her supremely complex life in Switzerland.

Which is to say, among other things, that she would bring to New Orleans more than enough sophisticated knowledge of food, and of the world, for both of us.

But she wore her sophistication lightly and offered it easily. As we greeted one another in the hotel lobby I instantly felt that lightness and ease and, with them, the invitation to be myself. She smiled and extended her hand and spoke in her breathy, girlish voice of the grand adventure ahead. She was a tall woman and, at sixty-two, somewhat stout. Pictures of her through the years show her gaining and losing weight, but the changing fullness of her beautiful face always conveys an open, welcoming curiosity. The moment we met I saw and sensed that welcoming.

*

Surely over the course of those seven days I learned something about food and wine and dining. How could I have failed to? For with every dish of every meal, Mary Frances would look across the table and ask, her mood entirely professional, “What do you think? Tell me how it tastes.” What an enormous act of charity that was, suggesting she actually valued my assessment. So I concentrated on what I was eating as I never had, chewing with the care of a Fletcherite and trying to identify flavors as she furtively slipped her notebook out of her purse to jot things down.

Of course we did more that week than simply fulfill the splendid terms of our assignment. We walked, a lot, ambling among the tourists and past their debris on the narrow sidewalks of the French Quarter. Wherever we walked, whether to Preservation Hall to hear the geriatric jazz band or to the Café du Monde to eat its famous beignets, I got used to her coming to a dead stop when something caught her attention. She said she’d always been an unapologetic gawker. Often she stood for quite a long time, not ready to move on until she’d understood completely what she was looking at.

One night on Bourbon she came to a stop at the sight of a woman’s legs swinging out into the night through a high open window of a strip club, then back inside again. Mary Frances watched the stripper on her swing for several seconds before saying, “How beautiful,” her tone purely appreciative of those lovely white legs appearing and retreating in the night-lit sky.

She took in everything that way, all week long, ready simply to receive the sense of the experience, and I saw that the way to be curious about the life of a place is to wander and watch and to look with no apology for as long as it takes to get what you’re seeing.

*

The morning she was leaving, we walked through the waking Quarter to Felix’s and the Acme, the city’s celebrated oyster bars. We hadn’t visited either one and she felt for the sake of her piece we should. When I told her I’d never eaten raw oysters she declared, “Then we must.”

We stood at the counter of one of the bars—I don’t remember which we tried first—and she instructed me to let the oyster slide down my gullet so that I would taste the sea. I did as I was told, savoring the briny freshness of flesh too ethereal to be called flesh. After a dozen at each place, we turned to leave. Just then Moran’s, the restaurant directly across the street, was opening its doors for lunch. Whichever of us suggested a last Ramos gin fizz, the other quickly agreed. It was a drink she’d introduced me to at our hotel bar and we’d been sampling them all over town, searching in vain for the perfect one. Sometimes the citrus taste was too strong. Sometimes the concoction was shaken too vigorously for too long, resulting in a sweetish froth of cream and egg white and powdered sugar that hid the gin entirely.

We entered, ordered, watched the bartender’s technique, sipped, and wordlessly assessed. Need I say we decided we tasted perfection at Moran’s? The ingredients working in balanced harmony, the juniper of the gin like a breeze on the tongue. (And part of me knew even then that its excellence had mostly to do with the drama of when we drank it—just before she had to leave. We’d found gin-fizz perfection in the nick of time.)

We walked, triumphant, back out into a wet May heat. I waved down a cab and we hugged. A last slow stroll through the Quarter; my first raw oysters; the perfect Ramos gin fizz; and all before noon. It deserved a term of commemoration, I told her. What should we call it?

She smiled—I remember both affection and mischief in it—and said, “Breakfast, dear Doug. You should call it breakfast.”

Of her gifts to me that week, this suggestion of permission—that life, if we let it, allows us to discover what we’re hungry for and when we’re hungry for it—is one of the two that stay most vivid. The other was a kind of validation that I still find remarkable. For again and again over the course of the days, I felt she was asking me, about life, what do you think? And, about mine, how does it taste? So prompted, I spoke at least as often about my untraveled life as she did about her incredibly eventful one. And when she did refer to a specific time, or someone vital to it, she did so with only a graceful allusion. In other words, she offered her life to me just as she did to her readers. And only much later did I see that week as my living in an M. F. K. Fisher essay, with its deftly placed ellipses, where food is the axis around which matters of deeper life revolve.

*

I am sincere when I say this book is not for anybody. It is perhaps for myself—to read in ten or twenty years and wonder about.

—June 27, 1934

Here, in the journal she always called “this book,” was where she wrote of life’s hungers directly, and not metaphorically through the art of eating. Here her writing made no graceful allusions for the reader to guess about. She was her reader, writing to and for herself, and so the motive of her prose was not to gloss intriguingly some social episode, but to make transparent sense of much harder stuff.

In Vevey, she and Parrish had nearly a year of idyllic life. He painted. She wrote. They ambitiously gardened. They entertained their rustic neighbors and loved doing so. It was a life that Mary Frances, just then turning thirty, embraced as one that helped to justify and verify her, well, her appetites. “My whole existence,” she writes in the journal in February 1938, “has become more completely physical than ever before . . . I am completely absorbed in myself—but myself as seen through Timmy.” (The ellipses, as one must especially note when quoting her, are mine.)

Then, the next summer, Parrish got sick with what proved to be Buerger’s disease, a rare illness of the veins and arteries in the arms and legs. He was in great pain. A first operation made it greater, and a second, to amputate his left leg, left him suffering even more.

Their life became his pain and the efforts to solve it: clinics visited and medicines tried, punctuated by those rare hours when he could sleep and Mary Frances, who held him and bathed him and gave him his injections and listened to his primal moaning, could not. He had excited her passion as no one ever had, but now she was an invalid’s lover. Their bodies’ intimacy was the nurse’s ministrations to her patient. What to do with those feelings of being completely physically absorbed in him? “Since I can remember,” she writes in February 1939, “I’ve been very clean, but now I spend long serious minutes, after my bath, drying each toe nail; I wash my navel or my ears as if they were Belleek china teacups; a tiny hangnail sends me hurrying for scissors, oil, all the minutiae of a complete manicure.”

It seems to me a ritual both of generous alliance and of necessary self-reward.

The following year they moved back to California, to a crumbling house they named “Bareacres,” on several acres of the Mojave Desert. The journal speaks of the barren beauty of the place and of plans for expanding the house. But still: “Behind all my pleasure and well-being about Bareacres is the miserable reality of his pain.”

And then, scattered among descriptions of somehow enjoyable, mundane life, entries such as these begin to appear, incremental in their power, compelling in their eerie tranquility:

May 7, 1940: I know that I could never blame T. for whatever he might feel that he must do to settle this problem that no one else seems able to settle for him. I am deadened by the very thought of it. And yet I must think of it with the same routine thoughtfulness that it takes to recognize hunger or peeing.

May 30, 1940: Last night T. asked me to hide the .22 bullets. I do not mention this from any martyr complex
. . . Pity me, oh pity me . . . but because I think I had better . . . Now I find that I have been living with the constant thought of suicide in my mind ever since September 1, 1938.

June 18, 1940: Last night was a hard one for T. and he said once that he wanted to know where I had hidden the bullets. I told him I would tell him this morning. Finally he went to sleep.

This morning we both woke rather early to a beautiful hot bright morning . . . Finally, he said, “I . . . would like to see Mother, so I think when the next check comes we’d better get an Oldsmobile and drive east and maybe show you the Grand Canyon . . . and then come back and finish it up, after a really good time.”

Suddenly, talking so positively about killing himself in the morning, not during the night, made me sick.

It’s like the surrender of France or T.’s having his leg cut off. I know these things have happened, but I don’t realize it. This morning, for just a minute, I realized T.’s possible escape from this business.

And they did make that trip, though by train, not in a new Oldsmobile, across the country to Parrish’s family home in Delaware. They traveled elsewhere that year too, including a visit to the Mayo Clinic for tests that offered no more encouragement than they’d gotten elsewhere.

But the explicit subject of suicide fades from prominence in the journal, replaced in part by family letters reporting on their travels. Until September 3, 1941:

I drink a too-hot, too-strong toddy in bed, and if my luck holds I get to sleep after some dutiful trash reading (Mystery of the Police, Death Holds the Cup, et al.), and then in a while (I have no watch) I wake cold and sober and my unwilling minds leaps like a starved dog at the poisonous meaty thoughts . . . Then, about one morning out of three or four, I sleep heavily until 8:00 or so without hearing the shot. I try to live (even asleep?) with what dignity I can muster, but I wonder if there is much in this abject procedure.

And six days later, on September 9: “It is four weeks and three days now . . . Pretty soon I’ll write about T.’s death, because I think I should . . . There are too many things that I can’t write yet. They’re in my head, but I am afraid of writing them. It is as if they might make a little crack in me and let out some of all the howling, hideous, frightful grief.”

*

Her youngest sister, Norah, wrote of her, “Mary Frances, of course, had to live on, day by day, after the loss of her love. Although she always considered herself a ‘ghost’ after Timmy’s death, she was very much a person who continued to love and be loved during her long productive life.” This wise valedictory concludes the introduction to Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933–41, the first of two books—Last House: Reflections, Dreams, and Observations, 1943–91 was the other—published after her death.

In her last years she was increasingly crippled by arthritis and Parkinson’s disease, her energy greatly compromised but her mind vigorously intact. Forced to dictate her thoughts, and wanting, perhaps more than ever, to speak to readers, she spent hours sorting through letters and notes, through bulging files and unpublished manuscripts. And also rereading, or having someone read to her, the journals she’d kept over the years, including the one I’ve quoted throughout, which became Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me. Finally she was ready to offer the world a personal book, and it was the very book in whose pages she’d once written that she was too timid or too cowardly ever to write one. But she was twenty-eight when she wrote that, and though—as the beauty of the language in what was then a journal shows—she already possessed the sensibility and wisdom to convey the hardest matters with a clean, brave grace, she was many years away from outliving her timidity or cowardice or whatever else fed her reticence to write fully for readers other than herself.

For the strength of its candor alone, never mind the language, Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me is, I think, her finest book. Like Last House and Sister Age (the last book she published while she was alive, a powerful collection whose stories blur memoir and fiction), Stay Me confronts and embraces and, in the best sense, exploits M. F. K. Fisher’s true subject, which is another kind of hunger than that which she’s best known for. It’s the hunger to make meaning of one’s days when age and illness loom and then descend. This is the hunger that moved her prose to a deep, delving, unfussy sensuousness that it never quite conveys when she speaks of food in adjectives surprisingly uninspired: “good” bread, a “good” olive oil, a “light, clean” wine. But food, the art of eating, was finally, for her, a literary figure, while age and steadily gathering illness were visceral, her ever more vital sensual companions. And I have to think she was mindful, constantly, of living her long and slowly declining life for Timmy as well, he who endured three brief, and endless, pain-wracked years and went from life into death in the time it took the bullet.

*

The passage in Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me that most selfishly compels me was written as a letter to her mother from the New Monteleone Hotel, in New Orleans, on December 11, 1940, when she and Parrish were taking that last train journey across the country to Delaware:

The New Monteleone is a typical convention hotel, complete with hordes of supercilious clerks, fat drunks with cigars and buttons saying, “Call me Joe—or Butch—or Gus.” . . . However, the room is fairly quiet—and I doubt we could do better in “Nawlins,” which after some six hours reminds me of a mixture of salesmen’s conventions, the American Quarter in Paris in 1929 (full of shoddy bars and whiskey-voiced blond divorcees), and the brothel district of Colon.

We caused a minor revolution by refusing to go to Antoine’s our first night here, and went instead to a fine place recommended by our cabby . . . We’ll remedy our heresy by going to Antoine’s tomorrow night. We may even order oysters Rockefeller—but I’ll be damned if I’ll have crepes suzette, guidebooks or no guidebooks.

I’ve wondered so often whether, in the week I spent with her, she did make some oblique mention of this trip—the last they took that gave them any pleasure, the words of his surrender surely traveling with them. And just what she might have offered if I’d possessed her gawker’s confidence, if I had come to a dead stop in the flow of conversation to “look” at what she’d told me and asked her to say more.

*

“Now and then,” she wrote to me in April of 1972, “one meets a person who can last for two months or twenty years and suddenly be there and Time has done more good than harm. I think we are like that. I have a few friends like that in my life.”

We stayed in touch over the years through a fitful correspondence, exchanges of notes and letters back and forth for a year, two years, then long lapses, and I visited her a few times in Sonoma in the early seventies.

Then, in the late eighties and early nineties, my wife and I began to cheat the end of the New England winter, renting places for a month or two in Northern California, and briefly, on a handful of occasions, I got to be in Mary Frances’s life again.

*

On a warm September day, in 1988, I sat at her large round dining table with six or seven others, members of a television crew who’d come up from San Francisco to interview and film her for a documentary. Though she’d long been admired by an audience of readers, she became in her last years a kind of cult figure as well, both in the world of food and among a generation of women who saw her life as a model of courageous independence. Especially in California, the devotion of the foodies and the middle-aged feminists merged and it made her an icon. It was a status, I should say, that she was happy to accept.

We’d talked that morning and she’d invited me to lunch (“Don’t bring any wine. I’ve got buckets of it”) and now I sat in her huge sun-filled room with the television crew, sipping wine and joining the chatter and watching Mary Frances assemble a large tray of cheese and cold cuts. With the stiffness of her arthritis and her Parkinson’s tremors, she was very slowly rolling the ham and the salami into tubes and fanning out the slices of cheese onto the platter. She was by then very thin and small, so much smaller than the tall, stout woman I’d met in New Orleans, and the penciled-in eyebrows she’d drawn with her unsteady hand rose like profit lines on a corporate graph almost to her temples.

She was mostly listening to the table talk. She’d been talking a lot for the interview and she needed to save what voice she had left. Her Parkinson’s greatly weakened it and she often couldn’t speak at all after early afternoon. But she was obviously monitoring the conversation keenly, smiling at a private thought sparked by something she’d overheard.

And then she slightly raised her index finger, as though signaling very subtly for a waiter’s attention. Everyone paused.

“I want,” she whispered hoarsely, “to talk about addictions.” Who knew why, perhaps something one of us had said, though the subject seemed to me to have come purely from within her, whatever she’d been thinking or remembering or yearning for, and not from anything in the air. “Let’s go around the table,” she said, “and say what we’re addicted to.”

The mood among us had been chatty and relaxed, and whatever addictions were confessed to came from that same easy attitude.

I was sitting directly across from her. When it was my turn, I admitted that I really couldn’t claim to have any interesting addictions.

“No,” Mary Frances said. “I think that’s right. I don’t think you do.”

“Routine, I guess,” I said lamely. “I’m addicted to routine.”

She smiled at that, and gave the slightest nod. Someone else confessed something safe—M&M’s or junk TV—and someone else did too.

Until it came back around to her. She waited a moment, an exactly effective beat, her raconteur’s timing as perfect as ever, and whispered, “I used to be addicted to sex.” Another perfectly long beat. “Now,” she added, smiling, “I’m addicted to breathing.”

*

I saw her again in the spring of 1992, two months before she died. My wife and I were about to leave Sonoma, and I understood that it was surely the last time I would see her.

She was lying in her bedroom in the hospital bed that had been brought in for her. The nearness of death had made her incredibly tiny. What I remember noticing, as I sat down beside her, was her long, lovely nose in profile, still strong and now disproportionate on her small and withered face. That and her eyes, milky and searching, which seemed to be trying, as in New Orleans, to see and understand and hold in her memory whatever she was looking at.

She had only the faint breath of a voice left. I took her hand and told her not to try to talk, an instruction she didn’t need or want, and weakly waved away. I remembered with her our last New Orleans breakfast. I suppose it’s what one does, a sentimental instinct, summon the most memorable occasion. If so, she seemed happy to have it and lie with it a while. I watched her reach for a plastic glass, a kind of sippy cup, of pineapple juice and labor mightily to get some through a bent plastic straw. A perverse irony of her final days: she whose finest charm was conversation, whose livelihood was made by tasting food, lost not just her voice, but the ability to swallow.

Then she said, a slight exhale of infant sound, “We ate oysters, didn’t we.”

A short while later I could see that she was fighting sleep, and I got up and bent down to kiss her forehead.

At the door I stopped and looked back and I saw her hungrily, ravenously, breathing. In my mind’s eye, there was something combative, carnal, something lustful, in her effort.

Douglas Bauer is the author of three novels, Dexterity,The Very Air, Book of Famous Iowans, and two non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa, The Stuff of Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared through the years in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Smith, The University of New Mexico, Rice, and since 2005 at Bennington College.

Exhibit A, her wonderful Readable Feast from issue #28.

Eating Fish Alone

Eating fish is something I generally do alone. I eat fish at home only when I am by myself in the house, because of the strong smell. I am alone with sardines on white bread with mayonnaise and lettuce, I am alone with smoked salmon on buttered rye bread, or tuna fish and anchovies in a salade niçoise, or a canned salmon salad sandwich, or sometimes salmon cakes sautéed in butter.

I usually order fish when I eat out. I order it because I like it and because it is not meat, which I rarely eat, or pasta, which is usually too rich, or a vegetarian dish, which I am likely to know all too well. I bring a book with me, though often the light over the table is not very good for reading and I am too distracted to read. I try to choose a table with good light, then I order a glass of wine and take out my book. I always want my glass of wine immediately, and I am very impatient until it comes. When it comes, and I have taken my first sip, I put my book down beside my plate and consider the menu. My plan is always to order fish.

I love fish, but many fish should not be eaten anymore, and it has become difficult to know which fish I can eat. I carry with me in my wallet a little folding list put out by the National Audubon Society that advises which fish to avoid, which fish to eat with caution, and which fish to eat freely.

When I eat with other people I do not take this list out of my wallet, because it is not much fun to have dinner with someone who takes a list like this out of her wallet before she orders. I simply manage without it, though usually I can remember only that I should not eat farmed salmon, or wild salmon, except for wild Alaskan salmon, which is never on the menu.

But when I am alone, I take out my list. No one will imagine, from a nearby table, that this list is what I am looking at. The trouble is, most kinds of fish on restaurant menus are not fish one can eat freely. Some fish one cannot eat at all, ever, and other fish one may eat only if they come from the right place or are caught in the right way. I don’t try to ask the waitress how the fish is caught, but I often ask where the fish is from. She usually does not know. This means that no one else has asked her that evening—either no one else is interested, or some are not interested and others know the answer already. If the waitress does not know the answer, she goes away to ask the chef, and then comes back with an answer, though it is usually not the one that I was hoping to hear.

I once asked a completely pointless question about halibut. I did not realize how pointless it was until the waitress had gone off to ask the chef. Pacific halibut is fine to eat, while Atlantic halibut is not. Even though I live on the Atlantic Coast, or near it, I asked her where the halibut was from, as though I had forgotten how far away the Pacific Ocean was, or as though halibut would be shipped all the way from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic just for reasons of health or good fishing practices. As it happened, the restaurant was busy and she forgot to ask the chef, and by the time she returned I had realized that I should not order the halibut and was ready to order scallops instead. Scallops, my list said, were neither to be avoided nor to be eaten freely, but to be eaten with caution. I did not know what caution might mean in a restaurant situation, except perhaps that one should ask the waitress and the chef a few more questions than usual. But since even simple questions often did not produce very good answers, I did not expect good answers to detailed questions. Besides, I knew that the waitress and the chef did not have time for detailed questions.

Certainly, if scallops were offered on the menu, the waitress or chef would not tell me they were endangered or unclean and advise me not to eat them. I ordered and ate them, and they were good, though I was a little uncomfortable, wondering whether they had been collected in the wrong way or contained toxic substances.

When I eat alone, I have no one to talk to and nothing to do but eat and drink, so my bites of food and my sips of wine are a little too deliberate. I keep thinking, It’s time to take another bite, or Slow down, the food is almost gone, the meal will be over too soon. I try to read my book in order to make some time go by before I take another bite or another sip. But I can hardly understand what is on the page because I am reading so little at a time. I am also distracted by the other people in the room. I like to watch the waiters and waitresses and other customers very closely, even if they are not very interesting.

The fish on the restaurant menu is often not on my list. Turbot in champagne sauce was offered one night at a very good French restaurant near where I live, but turbot was not on my list. I might have had it, but I was told by the waiter that it was a very mild fish, so I thought it was probably not very tasty. Also, it came with a cheese crust on it. I said I thought the crust would be too rich. The waiter said it was a very thin crust. Even so, I decided against it. There were other fish on the menu: red snapper, which my list instructed me to avoid; Atlantic cod, which was endangered; and salmon, but not wild Alaskan salmon. I gave up on fish and ordered the restaurant’s special plate of assorted vegetables, which arrived with small portions of many different vegetables, including fennel bulbs, arranged clockwise around a beautiful golden-brown molded potato cake. The different flavors of the vegetables were unexpectedly exciting, even though so many of them were root vegetables—not only carrots and potatoes, but also sautéed radishes, turnips, and parsnips.

The restaurant was owned by a couple from France. The wife greeted the guests and oversaw the service, and the husband cooked. As I left the restaurant that night, on my way to the parking lot I passed the windows of the kitchen. It was brightly lit and I stopped to look in. The chef was alone. He was dressed in white, wearing his chef’s cap, and he was slim and active, bending over his chopping block. As far as I could see from that distance, his features were finely modeled, delicate and intense. As I watched, he tipped his head back slightly and tossed a bit of food into his mouth, pausing to savor it. A younger man came in from my left carrying a tray of something, put it down, and went out again. He did not appear to have anything to do with the cooking. The chef was alone again. I had never before seen a real chef at work, and had never imagined that a chef would work alone in his kitchen. I could have watched him for a long time, but I felt it would be indiscreet to stay, and I walked away.

The last time I ate by myself, I was in a restaurant I chose because there was no alternative. I was far out in the country and it was the only one open. I thought it would not be very good. It had a loud, popular bar in the front. I ordered a beer this time, and looked at the menu. The fish special was marlin. I tried to think what a marlin was. I had not thought of a marlin for a long time. Then I pictured the fish sailing through the air with a large fin on its back, and I was almost sure it was popular for sport fishing, but I could not imagine what it tasted like. It was not on my list, but I ordered it anyway. Since I did not know whether I should avoid it, there was a chance that it was all right. Even if it wasn’t all right, of course, I could still occasionally have a fish that I should not have.

When she brought the fish, the waitress passed along a message from the chef: he would be waiting to know how I liked it; it was such a beautiful steak, he said. I was impressed by his enthusiasm, and as I ate, I paid more careful attention than usual. The chef had time to be interested in this marlin steak, I suppose, because it was a Monday night and only one other table in the large dining room was occupied, though as I ate my meal, a few more people came in. Even the bar had only two customers, small old men in plaid flannel shirts. But with the loud television and the laughter of the barmaid, who was also the hostess and the wife of the chef, the bar was still noisy.

The marlin was good, if a little chewy. When the waitress came by to see how I liked it, I did not tell her it was chewy. I told her it was very good, and that I liked the delicacy of the herbs in the sauce. At one point in the meal, as I continued eating slowly, this time without reading, the chef emerged from the kitchen in the distance. He was a tall man with a slight stoop. He walked over to the bar to have a drink and say a few words to his wife and the old men, and then walked back. Before he pushed through the swinging door, he turned a moment to look across the dining room in my direction, curious, I’m sure, to know who was eating his beautiful marlin steak. I looked back at him. I would have waved, but before I thought of it he disappeared through the door.

The serving of food on my plate, the marlin steak and baked potato and vegetable, was generous, and I could not eat all of it. I ate all the vegetables, at least, tender slices of lightly sautéed zucchini with thin strips of red pepper and herbs, and asked the waitress if she would wrap up the rest for me to take home. She was worried; I had eaten only half the fish. “But you did like it?” she asked. She was young. I thought she was the daughter of the chef and the barmaid. I assured her I had. Now I was worried; the chef might not believe I had truly liked the fish, though I had. There was nothing more I could say about it, but as I paid my bill, I told the waitress I had loved the vegetables. “Most people don’t eat them,” she said, matter-of-factly. I thought of the waste, and the care with which the chef prepared, over and over again, the vegetables that no one would eat. At least I had eaten his vegetables, and he would know that I had liked them. But I was sorry I had not eaten all of his marlin. I could have done that.

With this in mind, we roll out Sonya Chang’s essay about her correspondence with the author, which originally ran in our Beauty Issue.

I disembark the train at Bridgehampton on the coldest morning yet this winter. As I make my way down the platform, tote bags full of his books, I spot him, standing at the top of the stairs, hands in pockets, shoulders squared, wearing dark sunglasses. I wave a hand but he remains still. Embarrassed, I fix my eyes on the concrete, hurrying toward him. When I come within a few feet, I see that he’s relaxed his posture, and we each reach out a gloved hand. “Well,” he says, doing a kind of mock grouchy-old-man, “it must be you.”

A year after my first correspondence with James Salter, we are finally meeting. Later that night, when I return to New York City for a faculty holiday party, my colleagues and I will laugh as a few share crushing stories of encounters with elder writers whom they’d admired: venerable poet X grumble-coughing at one young poet after he’d expressed affection for a particular poem; novelist Y drunkenly scolding a (now Pulitzer Prize–winning) essayist for interrupting his intermission at the ballet.

But James Salter is nothing but polite, if a bit subdued, as he drives me the quarter mile from the station to his Hamptons home. Behind the wheel of an old compact Benz that seems as fitting to his person as his wool pants and navy blue parka, he asks me about the train ride and comments on the weather. It occurs to me only later, on the dark ride back to the city, that he may have been as nervous as I was.

The house is a simple, light-drenched cottage that he and his wife, Kay, built in 1985, after renting a few different houses in the area. (These were the early years of his second life, with a second wife twenty-some years his junior.) It is a house in which I feel immediately comfortable—spacious but thoughtfully proportioned, tidy but not immaculate. The walls are lined with bookshelves, but not all of them, and not in the imperious way I’ve seen in other writers’ homes, as if the books preside over the people.

Kay Salter appears, fresh and brisk, and welcomes me with a smile and handshake. She is a warm host, taking my coat, offering tea, asking me about my novel and my teaching. A journalist and playwright, Kay tells me that she is working on her first novel and that she commutes to the city often, as she will this morning, making use of a pied-à-terre as a writing office. “So he can have the solitude here,” she says, and I remember something from an interview about his preferring a completely empty house.

Thanks very much for your essay, which I just read, a bit late—apparently we’re deeper in the woods here than I thought . . .

I agree with the comments about Hemingway always writing about sex, or something to that effect, meaning it was a subtext. He wrote a startlingly sensual English, very male and very sensual, alive to the senses, and sex, as we like to call it, is sensationally alive, both in the flesh and/or in the mind. I don’t like Hemingway, in part because he looms and also I don’t like the man. He’s a type you run into.

Women have more or less tipped the cart over—you probably don’t realize that because you’re, I assume, just a kid—and some confusion is the result. I don’t mean that it shouldn’t have been tipped, there is no should or shouldn’t. I always liked Robert Phelps’s citation—he must have been quoting someone—first the flesh, then the spirit.

Again, with thanks. JS

We sit down to tea and talk for a while without pencil or paper, the digital recorder I’ve borrowed switched to the off position and nestled in a fold of the tablecloth between us. “Oh let’s not start that,” he’d said, “we’re just getting warmed up, we’re going to talk about you for a bit.” He asks about my book, how is it going with sales and so forth. I demur, not wanting to bore him with debut-novelist drama, though he nods gravely, knowing better than I the frustrations of literary publishing—having bounced from publisher to publisher over the years and bearing the “writers’ writer” label that must over time start to feel like a branding of one’s hide. The subject moves to teaching, which he did in spurts in the eighties at Iowa, Williams, and Alabama. “It can be enjoyable, but it was a lot of work; you earn your money. I don’t want to discourage you, I mean, it was glorious—the students were interesting, I met many writers, [Frank] Conroy brought everyone [to Iowa]. But your own writing? There was precious little writing going on. And that, in the end, is what you’re graded on.”

I notice a few books stacked at the end of the table and ask how he decides what to read these days. “These days? Well, let’s see . . . these days.” He says this in a way that makes clear his age—eighty-five years, with attendant fatigue—is central to “these days.” We talk briefly about Ivana Lowell’s memoir (“This is a good book”); essays by M. F. K. Fischer (“Not as good as I remember them”); and a library copy of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I ask him what he thinks of Diaz’s novel, and he says, “We were at the Institute Alliance Française for a panel on Jean Genet, and across the street there was a line all the way around the block. We asked the people—mostly young people—what they were waiting for, and they said Junot Diaz was speaking. That was impressive.”

It’s awfully kind of you to write. I am thirty-seven years old, so am not sure if that qualifies as a kid these days. I teach a fiction workshop . . . and I notice that a certain phobia of physical-sensual writing has crept in for literary women—a bubble-wrapping of their intellectually perceptive, emotionally remote female protagonists from sex, really anything sensual; as if the full-force entry of women into intellectual life has come at the expense of bodies. I like Tan Dun’s words: “If you are too sophisticated, you lose courage.”

Re: Hemingway, and in general, I am interested in how or whether you think the quality of the man and the quality of the work are related. And what “very male” means in writing, or “very female” for that matter. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The essay was called “Sex, Seriously: James Salter Trumps the Great Male Novelists.” Published in the online magazine The Millions, it was, ostensibly, my response to a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay by Katie Roiphe, “The Naked and the Conflicted,” in which she asserts that our twenty-first-century young literary men have lost their sense of sexual potency; that is, their belief in the power of sexuality to ignite, and to immortalize. “[I]nnocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex,” Roiphe wrote. “Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.” Her observations resonated, and I argued in my response that we should look not to Roth/Bellow/Mailer/Updike (Roiphe’s touchstones) for this lost potency, but rather to Salter.

The book—A Sport and a Pastime—appeared in our apartment about five years ago. My partner, J., reported that a friend of his, a frustrated corporate writer, had given him two of Salter’s books (the other was Light Years), saying, This is the kind of writer I want to be and endowing them with a kind of tragic longing. J. seemed to avoid the books as if they were contagious; I decided I had to read them.

It’s been said of John Cheever that, as a teacher, he had one of two words for you when he read your work: Yes or No. With Sport, for me, there wasn’t much else to say but Yes. Even more striking was the sense while I read that I should be repulsed, that it was a book I should find objectionable. As a woman. This is pornographic. This is misogynistic. But I did not. Oh, no. Not at all.

One legacy of the novel may be that it features, as Chris Offutt wrote in a 2004 interview with Salter in these pages, “the greatest anal sex scene in literature.” I prefer a different assessment, from the 1967 New York Times review: “Arching gracefully, like a glorious 4th of July rocket, [Sport] illuminates the dark sky of sex. It’s a tour de force in erotic realism . . . a continuous journey of the soul via the flesh . . . This is a direct novel, not a grimy one. Salter celebrates the rites of erotic innovation and understands their literary uses. He creates a small, flaming world of sensualism . . . We enter it. We feel it. It has the force of a hundred repressed fantasies. And it carries purpose: Salter details lust in search of its passage into love.”

But really I prefer, simply, Yes.

Salter’s short stories are perhaps his most masterful work. In Dusk and Other Stories the prose is superfine, more demanding; Europeanist, in both subject matter and sensibility. The stories in Dusk (written between 1967 and 1987) are populated by peripheral artists, or otherwise not-quites, compelled to wander Europe, longing for greatness and purity, the romantic and the brutal. (“Europe gave me my manhood or at least the image of it,” Salter once wrote.) Many of the stories were written while Salter lived in Aspen, in the midst of a divorce and building a new life, his own wandering days behind him; yet there is a rawness in the stories, the same sensual force of Sport. The protagonists of Dusk may be lost and longing, but the pulse of desire throbs—inexorably, consolingly.

A second collection, Last Night, was published in 2005. In these chilling stories, the lush eros of Sport and Dusk and of his 1975 novel, Light Years, is displaced by the starker truths of life lived. Whatever had compelled the sexes to erotic celebration and tenderness, quests for greatness and purity, is now submerged; foregrounded is the tragedy of isolation, male from female, self from self. What persists is the compulsion of desire—desire as all we have and all we are. The prose leans toward severe, and yet every word seems to burn and glow, an argument for beauty as bare essence. As a rendering of post-romantic adulthood, Last Night is a lamentation. There is brutality in these stories, both quiet and feral, but we feel it ultimately as loss—for all of us, male and female, anyone who has known or longed for sensual abandon, anyone who has loved to love.

As to the quality of the man and the quality of the work, there must be a connection, though perhaps not of the obvious kind. Men with what might be thought of as faults or vices can be wonderful writers. Alcoholics aplenty, thieves, murderers, slave owners are among them. Philanderers too numerous to count. So it is not the virtue of Sunday school or even the Ten Commandments, although I myself admire the cardinal virtues—prudence, fortitude, justice, and mercy.

As to “very male,” I think male characteristics are too well known to discuss. I was looking for a wonderful sentence from Isak Dinesen that succinctly describes it, as I recall, but couldn’t find it.  [He later e-mailed it to me: “The love of woman and womanliness is a masculine characteristic, and the love of man and manliness a feminine characteristic.”]

Are there great women writers? Are they different than men? Oh, yes.

“Well, then,” he says. “I suppose we should get to it. What do you have on your agenda?”

Despite the eight typed pages of questions, follow-up questions, and page references with which I’ve armed myself—and despite the hospitable kindness of my hosts thus far—I grow nervous and begin to wish Kay (who’s now en route to the city) were still in the house. I’d watched recent interviews in which Salter seemed irritated by his interviewers’ lines of questioning, and, with the recorder now on, I watch him lean back in his chair, and I perceive a kind of armor flip into place like a welder’s mask. Acutely aware of my inexperience as an interviewer (Remember, it’s an interview, not a conversation, a journalist friend warned; Just think of it as a conversation, advised another), I proceed cautiously—perhaps too cautiously.

Half an hour in, I feel him begin to stonewall. Precision is all for James Salter, and if the semantics are mushy, if the question fails to get at something true, it is simply not to be answered. This morning he is prone to silent staring—a look somewhere between doubt and weariness—rubbing his hands over his face, cutting himself off in midsentence with “Let’s just leave it at that,” and responding curtly to my questions with “That depends” or “Possibly.”

By noon, I’m not sure what we’ve covered, if anything. There is too much to read and not enough time, on this we agree. He has been working on a new novel for almost ten years; he struggles with energy and productivity. He invokes Roth’s hyperproductive daily regimen, the one Roth (eight years Salter’s junior) himself has described. “Can this be so?” Salter asks, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” The tone of the conversation slips intermittently into futility; the specters of resignation and mortality hover. I’ve asked him about the “manhood” he found in Europe (“Ah, but I’m a romantic writer, remember—I don’t really know what that means”); about this word pure, which infuses all of his work (he laughs off the question, referencing Chekhov’s protestation that asking What is life? is like asking What is a carrot?). I’ve come here to talk about these things—about romanticism, about manhood (and womanhood), about purity—but how? How to talk about them?

Oh God, I think. I am Richard Yates’s Frank Wheeler, talking talking talking the hell out of that which is better left unspoken, better lived and experienced than discussed.

I take a breath. The jig may be up. Really, I am no interviewer. Okay, well: what, then, is something true?

The truth . . . is that I have been watching an awful lot of Mad Men and this notion that we—the Gen X literary set—watch it to celebrate how far we’ve come, how progressive our gender identities, is, I feel, hogwash. Salter is an octogenarian white male, a former fighter pilot who flew in Korea; who wrote an erotic tale, a hundred repressed fantasies, of rich boy and poor girl; whose descriptions of women almost invariably offer legs, breasts, hair, shoulders, skin to evoke character essence. There is nothing “right” about my looking to him (or to Don Draper, for that matter, who would be just Salter’s age if he were both real and alive today) for insights into sexual essence. At the same time his stories and novels move me—as a woman—in ways I have struggled to understand.

He is also—I remind myself now—a man who has deeply, expressively loved another man and shared that love, in the form of their unedited letters, with the world.

Dear J Salter:

I received Memorable Days, which I’ve finished and have been rereading in sections over the past weeks. Thank you for sending it. I read it hungrily, and with envy . . . the notion of a “pure voice” in one’s life moved me . . . It’s a rare and beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing it with us.

His correspondence with the writer and critic Robert Phelps began in 1969. “These are love letters,” writes Michael Dirda in the foreword to Memorable Days (2010), a collection of some two hundred letters over twenty years; and indeed they are. Phelps dwelt in literature, and in the wonder and heartbreak of a writer’s life. “I saw in him the angelic and also something, call it dedication, for which I yearned,” Salter wrote in his memoir, Burning the Days (1998). “I longed to know him . . . I have never passed [the Chelsea Hotel] without remembering [our first meeting] in the manner of a love affair.” Upon Phelps’s death in 1989, Salter wrote to his widow, Rosemarie Beck, “I loved Robert. I love him still and always. He was an anchor to seaward for me and one of the few pure voices of my life.” To Phelps himself he wrote: “You are my beacon, my idea of life,” and “Yours is the correct life.”

The bulk of the letters is literary talk—books, plays, screenplays, stories, films, travel plans (and fantasies), personalities, and gossip; to read them is to take a whirlwind tour through a pantheon of the great uncanonized—Colette, Glenway Wescott, Cyril Connolly, Marcel Jouhandeau, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Brigid Brophy, Violette Leduc, Cesare Pavese, Paul Léautaud. Phelps introduces to Salter, the late-blooming autodidact, “some of the marvels of my life,” and Salter is for Phelps (a literary Europhile) the American romantic he’s been missing. “The most romantic writer we have,” Phelps wrote. “You restore a sacredness to profaned aspects and relations . . . you are tender, and unperverse.” A free-flowing passion infuses these exchanges, an amorous purity, to use Salter’s word. I miss you. I am lonely. I love you. The light is where you are, Robert. “From the first moment, I recognized him for what he was,” Salter wrote in Burning the Days, which was to say, bisexual, and living a painful double life. (While Phelps never detailed these struggles explicitly, according to Salter, they were “not difficult to perceive.”) But the love between the two men in these letters is not in the sexual realm; it is somewhere else—somewhere in the light where art and longing meet.

I begin again. “When we first corresponded . . .”

“Yes.”

I remind him of the Roiphe essay. Yes, yes, he remembers. What, I ask, does he truly perceive in all this evolution of the sexes?

He takes a moment, genuinely ponderous, to consider, then speaks slowly, deliberatively. “It’s very hard to look at culture qualitatively—this is better, this is not better. The culture is what exists. You say take it or leave it. This is it. The same thing applies to these questions about masculine, feminine. Sex. Homosexuality. I mean all of this has evolved. Is it good? I don’t think the question fits the situation.”

“Okay, forget good or bad,” I say. I think now about what brought me here—lamentation, the compulsion of desire, lust in search of its passage into love. “What about . . . real? What about . . . loss?” I swallow a ridiculous lump in my throat. Is my voice shaking? What is it in his work that does this to me, and why is it so difficult to speak of?

“I think your young men have made a real attempt to accommodate themselves to . . . women’s freshened ideas of themselves. Is this a permanent situation? I don’t know.”

I don’t either. “Is anything a permanent situation?”

“Well. That’s a good question. Is anything permanent.” But he says it like a statement, followed by a thick pause. Then a burst of energy, somehow fierce and reluctant at once. “Yes, yes, sure. I believe . . . the sexes are permanent.

“Now, you’re going to say, Oh for Christ’s sake, this guy is stuck with archaic ideas. But I believe . . . maleness and femaleness are qualities, there is something unadulteratable . . . there is something that cannot be . . . something immutable at the center of them.

“And I think this is so obvious.

“But, I understand this attitude isn’t acceptable, and I don’t express it. Is it in things I write? Well, I suppose so, inevitably, since it’s what I feel. You can’t write . . . you can’t be false to your own feelings. Are these ideas crude and . . . no. No, I believe . . .”

He detours now into praise of a female writer—Nora Ephron—whose pluck and wit he finds appealing (“She has unclouded vision”), particularly regarding the sexes. This lightens the mood, but not much.

How strange, I think, how remarkable: the difficulties, all the shadows, in affirming an unqualified heterosexuality.

“You know, I think I’ve already belabored this. I don’t think it merits that much.” Let’s be careful now, he seems to be saying. Let’s be truthful. Okay, I think; let’s. It merits something. We both believe it does.

If it is possible to be exhausted and energized at once—well, of course it is—here is where we’ve arrived. It’s after 1:00 PM. The orange recorder light blinks.

“Well, then,” he says. “Shall we go have some lunch?”

The day has brightened and warmed. Before lunch, we’ll tour the Hamptons in the Benz. “Since you’ve hardly been here,” he says. “I’ll show you around a little.”

Driving through a tony section of East Hampton, our next subject seems inevitable. “I want to ask you about something you might find . . . disagreeable,” I say.

He nods, pulls down the sun visor.

“I want to ask you about money.”

“Ah, but why are you considering this disagreeable?”

Something opens up now, a looser, easier feeling. Maybe it’s the sun, the feeling of motion and speed. I’d hesitated to ask, but on some level I sensed we have in common this relationship to privilege—close up but never fully inside.

As we drive, he speaks at length, goes into a kind of storytelling mode:

“Money. Well. At the military academy, the big figures were not the ones who had money. There was no money; it’s like the priesthood. Those were formative years for me. The heroes at West Point were the athletes. That was influential, unquestionably, to me, because I wasn’t a football player, or a boxing champion, and I wanted that feeling of manhood. That was why I became a fighter pilot, you know.

“And in the air force there was also no money. So that lasted a long time in my life. I was thirty-two when I left the military. Now, when I got out, this was a different world. Suddenly money was important. It’s the trump card in a lot of ways. But I never quite accommodated myself to that, I suppose. Because all of that time, the twig was bent a different way.

“Now, intellectually, I understand all this, but I still have trouble with it. So I’ve never been tremendously comfortable with rich people. Why is that? I don’t know. Some of my good friends have been rich, but that aspect of it is difficult for me. It represents a certain kind of achievement and position that is inaccessible to me. And whatever achievement I have is invisible to them.”

“And yet you’ve managed to live a very rich life,” I say. “You have three homes [in Aspen, Bridgehampton, and Manhattan]. You’ve traveled the world; you’ve lived in Europe. You’ve enjoyed fine things. Somehow you’ve disentangled ‘riches’ from ‘wealth’ in your life.”

He laughs. “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that.” I sense that he enjoys my comment, even as he begs off. “I wasted a lot of time, making money.” He is referring to the fifteen years he spent writing screenplays (including the acclaimed Downhill Racer, with Robert Redford), the majority of which were never produced. “And I mean, we don’t drink great wines; we don’t travel first class. I remember Joan Didion said in an interview, ‘I would love to go off and go to the Bristol Hotel.’ Well, see, that’s another life.”

We drive down a wide street lined with English-style hedges and, behind these, mansions, one after the other. “They call this Gin Lane; you can imagine why. The parties.”

“And you are invited to these parties?”

“Oh, no. I must be giving you a wrong impression. This isn’t our world at all.”

It’s an odd statement, given that he’s just pointed out the former homes of John Irving (a friend) and George Plimpton (who first published Sport), along with the house of Jean Kennedy Smith’s (also a friend). “You said you considered Robert Phelps’s life to be glamorous . . .”

“Well, I was intrigued by how well he was connected to a lot of things that seemed galaxies away from me—Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times. That was rather glamorous, I thought; and doubly glamorous because he was threadbare, he was simple, himself. He had certain elegant tastes—he had velvet trousers, he liked Tanqueray, he knew something about the forks on the table; but as he admitted readily, he came from, wherever it was, a small town in Ohio.”

“But didn’t you ever consider your own life glamorous? You were also having dinner with Saul Bellow, and Edna O’Brien. Susan Sontag was an admirer. You were hanging around with Robert Redford.”

We come to a stop at an intersection, and he turns to me, looks down over the rims of his sunglasses. “Ah yes, but I knew those people, you see.”

Lunch at 75 Main in Southampton. We talk of food, travel in France, holiday plans. I muse inwardly at the fact that he has ordered a burger and fries, and I am picking at an elaborate salad. He returns to the subject of what he is reading, specifically the memoir by Ivana Lowell, the adopted daughter of Robert Lowell and biological daughter of Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood. Lowell, he tells me, described being sexually abused by her nanny’s husband when she was six years old, not primarily as trauma, but rather as an episode of empowerment over an adult male. “I found that very interesting,” he says.

We revert to talk about teaching, his concern about the quality of what young writers are required to read, and about other writers of “my generation.” He asks about the Brooklyn literati, and I tell him that I am not much a part of that—that, like him, I am a literary late bloomer, and essentially an autodidact.

“Autodidacts, in my experience, tend to be unreliable,” he says. He looks away, tracing back some line of memory. He tells me that he never shows his drafts to anyone. “Too embarrassing.”

We pass on dessert but linger over coffee, and suddenly it’s two and a half hours later and near time for my return train. He pays the check, ushers me to the car, stepping aside to open doors, and we rush off. Back at the house, it becomes clear I won’t make the train, so we plan for the next bus, which leaves in twenty-five minutes.

“How are we doing then?” He gestures to my pile of questions, tea-stained pages scattered on one side of the table.

We sit again, still wearing our coats, and I flip through the pages. I realize we haven’t focused as much on Memorable Days as we’d planned when we initially arranged the interview, and I want to hear more about this love, this passion, between him and Robert Phelps.

“There is a lack of an appropriate word in English. The word love may be too suggestive of something I don’t think we’re referring to here. There is no component of sexual attraction in what I am expressing. Robert Phelps I can’t speak for, though I can say that I never felt I was desired. At the time I didn’t reflect about it. The letters are extemporaneous. It seems to me evident in the letters themselves that they have no self-consciousness. It’s what’s great when you first fall in love—you’re not thinking about it.

“His importance to me was his feeling about what writing meant, and what certain writers and books meant. There was no one like him in my life. I was by myself, in a figurative sense, and it was important to me to write to him. You write your best letters to people you feel will understand them. Just as in talk. He understood every word, and more.”

He has described Phelps as an angel, and as a saint. Perhaps James Salter himself is no saint in life—I suppose I know too much of his personal history to go in for that—but on the page, on Salter’s page, the mark of the autodidact seems to me that of a kind of chasteness. A solitary boy (only child), man (fifteen fish-out-of-water years in the military), and artist (“I was by myself; there was no one like him in my life”) cultivates a priestly reverence for words as both truth and consolation; he understands his vocation as beholding, apprehending, rendering—the holiness of a pure soul, the ecstasy of the flesh, and the desolation of estrangement from these.

A final question.

“Now, you’re going to say none of this is conscious, you can’t make any claims,” I say, sparring gloves up a little, mimicking his previous anticipation of my counterresponses. My question comes out long and winding; he is patient and even helps me along. We both toss out and trip over words like evolved, sensitive, advanced. The essence of my question is Where does it come from? —this finely tuned knowledge of the way in which the sexes are, must be, cannot be, so deeply desire to be. His higher-profile peers— Mailer, Roth, Updike, Bellow—have a way of notoriously alienating the female reader, sexually and psychically, with male protagonists of the piteous, wretched variety. Salter, not so. How? Why?

“Well, that covers a lot of ground, many years.

“As a boy, you are superior to and afraid of girls at the same time. Then, I suppose, you continue that way for quite a while. Then there comes a point in life when the superiority fades. Because you see and understand more. I think there’s always a little bit of fear. I mean you are simply not of the same stuff. You are a man. And she is a woman. Yes, a great deal is the same. But you can’t be made the same. There are fundamental, unalterable things that stand between you; I don’t mean things to be overcome, but that were placed there to make your . . . your absolute adoration of each other greater than anything . . . it just doesn’t go in a straight line. I mean, you’re afraid. Here, again, the word is not quite adequate—but you feel a trembling, and it’s not mere passion that makes you tremble.

“In the writing, it comes down to Will it be embodied somehow in what you’re writing? All writing is, in a sense, an approximation—that’s why I sometimes go to other books, Gogol, or Dostoevsky—you say to yourself, Ah, of course, it’s so simple. Just tell . . . the . . . truth. Can you do that? Try.

“But I don’t think I know more than anybody knows, really. In fact, there’s only a certain amount you can know, and I don’t know any more. If I did, it would be truly remarkable. I can’t believe that I know something that other people don’t know.”

I beg to differ, but not out loud. I think through my bookshelves: Rilke. Sherwood Anderson. Jack Gilbert. Cavafy. The romantic writers are fading into the past. And echt romantic—tremblingly sensual, direct, not grimy—truly rare.

The bus leaves in nine minutes and counting. As we gather papers and bags and keys, I ask—because I just have to ask—how it was meeting Matthew Weiner (the creator of Mad Men), who introduced Salter for the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award he received just a few weeks before.

“Well, he was as nice as could be. Open, intelligent.”

“I’m sure he’s read your books.”

“Well, no, he hadn’t. Or, he said his father had A Sport and a Pastime on a shelf where the children couldn’t reach it.”

Later, I watch a video clip of the introduction, which Salter himself didn’t see or hear, as he was backstage. Weiner confesses that, in preparation for the awards, he “placed [him]self in a Salter immersion program.” “The one thing that I’ve learned about James Salter over the last few weeks is that he is interested in the truth,” Weiner says. “His investigation of the desire or the ambition to be better, to be honest, to find love, to kill one’s enemies, to not be alone, is unflinching and brave.”

“Have you seen his show?” I ask. Salter lowers his chin, shakes his head gravely. I tell him that he might be hard pressed to find a literary writer under the age of forty who doesn’t watch it.

His eyes open wide in mock, and to some degree genuine, fascination. “Please, more.” In the car, we decide together that the appeal may be nostalgia for an apparent (glamorized) simplicity—each sex tightly and explicitly packaged. “Of course that had its own problems, you understand. It wasn’t Arcadia. And neither is this now. It’s just a different part of the thing. It may have an appeal because it looks simpler, because it’s past.”

In the dark, in the cold, on the shoulder of the Montauk Highway, we shake hands —“Well, the day went quickly,” he says, “It was a pleasure”—and I hurry onto the bus seconds before it pulls away. I scribble notes all the way back—notes of a most memorable day. The three hours flash by like no time at all.

The next morning, I receive an e-mail:

Dear Sonya, It was a long day for you. I hope the trip back was okay. Perhaps I was too dismissive of the idea that I know more than others about women, men, and their deep feelings regarding each other. It’s the “knowing” I have trouble with. I’ve jotted down a lot on the subject. I think I understand a lot of it. And, of course, I’m always drawn to it. I know I have a man’s point of view, but not exclusively. À bientôt. —Jim

Sonya Chung is the author of the novel Long for This World. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in the publications Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, Asian American Literary Review, and BOMB Magazine, among others. You can learn more at www.sonyachung.com.

This poem was first published in issue 7.  

Congratulations to all of the winners. 

On the Hearth of the Broken Home
by Sharon Olds

Slowly fitting my pinky-tip down
into the wild eggshell fallen
from inside the chimney, I feel as if I’m like
a teenage boy in love, allowed
into the beloved’s body, like my father
with the girl he loved, who loved him. If he
had married her… I lift it up
close to my eyes, the coracle dome
hung with ashes, rivered with flicks
of chint, robes of the unkown—only
a sojourner, in our home, where love
was sparrow-netted to make its own
cage, jessed with its jesses, limed
with its radiant lime. And above the tiny
tossed-off cloak of the swift, in the deep
reaches of the old dutch oven, on a bed
of sprung traps, the mince in them
long gone to meltdown, and to maggotmeal,
and wet dust, and dry dust,
there lies another topped shell, smaller,
next to it its doffed skull
tressed with spinneret sludge, speckled with
flue-mash flecks, or the morse of a species,
when I lift it up, its yolk drops out, hard
amber, light coming through it, fringed
in a tonsure of mold and soot. If I ever
dreamed, as a child, of everlasting
love, these were its shoes: one dew-licked
kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one
sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead,
which I wore, as I dreamed.

Sharon Olds has published several volumes of poetry, including, Stag’s Leap , which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Dead and the Living, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000.

So . . . what the fuck?

So why does a guy best known for portraits of half-naked punk-porn chicks decide one day to sit down and illustrate every single page of a relentlessly difficult classic of twentieth-century literature?

Last year a newspaper wanted an article out of me on roughly that topic. If there was a punk-porn/Pynchon connection I didn’t know what it was but I told the guy I’d give it a shot and hung up the phone. I did know there was a go-go dancing, fire-eating, tattooed anarchist lying on my bed, and I knew she was busy reading Vineland out loud—and that was about it.

A few days later, I went to Los Angeles and met lots of pornographers. The first pornographer had the muted post horn from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 tattooed on his arm. He told me to read Steve Erickson.

The second pornographer told me about a third pornographer who I had to talk to because he was like the original punk pornographer and he was doing it before anybody so I asked what’s this guy’s name and he said, “Benny Profane.” I called Benny:

“Benny Profane, you’re named after a character in V. and you make dirty movies. Can you please explain to me the secret connection between Thomas Pynchon and punk-porn?”

Benny said nobody’d ever recognized his stage name and said some stuff about hmmm . . . maybe, the concept of preterition and girls with chipped teeth and stuff. I mailed him a disk of all the Gravity’s Rainbow pictures I’d done; he mailed me some porno movies.

Benny then says he’s a big fan and it’d mean a lot to him if he could maybe use the Gravity’s Rainbow pictures in a movie he’s doing for Hustler. I say no problem and I say it’d mean a lot to me if I could fuck some girls in the movie he’s doing for Hustler.

Six months later I have a vigorous second career as a porn actor and Steve Erickson is writing the introduction to my book.

The Pynchonish Style of Thought.

Now I suspect Pynchon fans will find all that thoroughly gratifying and not just because it ends with one of them getting to have sex a lot. It’s gratifying because it pretty much validates the real-world utility of the Pynchonish style of thought: go off looking for the answer to some maybe-meaningless question, collect and connect the obscure clues, find out that the world is weirder and wider than you’d imagined and so are you.

Or, to put it another way: Pay attention to everything interesting because everything is connected.

People often call this style of thinking “paranoid,” but that word connotes something pathetic rather than something that might be creative or useful. Gravity’s Rainbow in particular seems to have been written by someone who began with no other project than to observe, write essays about, and know the history of nearly everything that interested him in the one-eyed hope that, in the end, it would all be connected—the hope that after 760 pages some thread connecting warfare, behaviorism, and bad limericks would emerge and that this thread would be relevant, if not to the entire world, then at least to the life of the author.

Painters do that, too. The one who lived near the mountain painted the mountain, the one who liked bullfights painted the bullfight, the one who watched the light pass through the greasy glass and hit the orange peel on the kitchen counter painted the light passing through the greasy glass and hitting the orange peel on the kitchen counter—not because they knew that looking closely at these things would tell them something but because they hoped it would.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, this style of thought extends all the way down to the language—all those long, detailed, poetic, discursive, intricate, elusive sentences. Sentences that demand to be examined inch by inch and always do much more than they say.

So, like a lot of people, I sat down one summer and read 760 pages and the style of thought contained in those pages inspired a powerful shock of recognition and the shock bounced around my head for years afterward like a ball of fireflies. Unlike most of those people I had both an urge to catch as many of those fireflies as I could and a job that turned this activity into a pleasant and fascinating way to spend my working hours instead of a cranky, dorky, and borderline-psychotic waste of spare time.

But that’s a little deceptive—I didn’t really do “spare time” during the GR project. People often ask how long it took—I worked on it during nine months of fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks. I threw away tons of drawings. I did a few other pieces during that time but mostly it was Gravity’s Rainbow all day every day. Some days, looking up the Mendoza rifle on the Internet at three in the morning or trying to figure out a new and interesting way to draw two people having a conversation in a room for the twentieth time, it seemed like the stupidest art idea on Earth. I initially tried to draw every page in order, but after a while I pretty much went after any image I could get excited about and then went through at the end and filled in the gaps. I could only pushpin about a third of the pictures to my bedroom wall at any given time and so I was constantly hanging and rehanging the pictures. My wall looks like a termite city.

People ask about my “obsession” with Gravity’s Rainbow, but I wouldn’t say I was obsessed—I was just doing the thing the way it needed to be done. The book is, above all, complex and gorgeous; the pictures had to be complex and gorgeous.

The book was in my head as much as some Bible scene or bunch of grapes or Peruvian factory-worker plight was in the head of some other artist, and I decided to deal with my subject in the hope that, once dealt with, it would make sense, and so I dealt with my subject, as all artists do, with the only style I have, and my style is nothing if not thorough.

. . . which makes these illustrations a
little complicated.

What the Book Is and Is Not

Page 49: “. . . the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery . . .”

. . . and there I am in the drawing, the blood spurting from what’s left of a skinny, tattooed arm. Because when I read that sentence (or one of the very few others in which Pynchon uses second person) I think of me—just as when you read it you probably think of you. So in trying to be thorough as well as faithful to my understanding of the words, I very occasionally ended up making pictures that simply wouldn’t do if I’d actually been hired to illustrate this book. Instead of drawing some sort of WWII-era British everyman or -woman mutilated for that picture, I chose to be faithful to what I saw in my head when I read that sentence rather than to what some art director would’ve demanded.

That having been said, I am conventional and sober-minded enough that when Pynchon writes, say, “ambulance,” I see an ambulance in my head, not a washrag. I might even go look up a 1940s German ambulance to make sure I get it right. So don’t worry, this book is not some hippie word-association game.

On the third hand—“Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the meridians of acupuncture” (page 699). OK, dude, you draw that. Sometimes—maybe half the time—Pynchon’s language requires interpretation, which is one of the reasons it was fun to draw (How can I make a thing that looks like a benzene molecule and a snake at the same time? How can I make an angel in the sky that you’re not sure you’re actually seeing?), and one of the reasons it might be fun for you to compare notes with me as you read, and one of the reasons that any attempt to make a definitive set of illustrations for Gravity’s Rainbow would be doomed from the start.

That’s why there are no words opposite the pictures in Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated. There is nothing official about what I saw when I read. It is just my end of a three-way conversation about a book between you, me, and the guy who wrote it.

Zak Smith lives in works in Los Angeles. His work is, somewhat surprisingly, included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, where his work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His work has also been exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In addition to his memoir, We Did Porn, two books of his art work have been published–Pictures of Girls and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.