Milt Jeffers and the gang roamed through the shop hitting E-stops, shouting, and motioning for the men to leave the factory. There was no persuasion needed, although some of the die makers in the tool room always stood around for awhile before finally locking their tool boxes in disgust and following the rabble out the doors. They were slower than usual today, these recent wildcats coming just after the sixty-seven day national shutdown, which had cost them big money.
The foreman’s kick to Steve Brown’s rump while he was peering through the smoky haze of the battlefield brought him to his feet like the wiry animal Nam had made him. He sprang up and slashed with his knife all in one motion, cutting the foreman in the chest, and then turned and dove into the tree line. Steve Brown landed in the midst of the automatic welders. There were no sparks the next welder cycle, just his head compressing in the weld fixture. The war was over for Steve Brown.
The millwrights were on the conveyor belt cutting Dana loose. “My dick’s cut off…my dick’s cut off,” Dana, delirious now, kept yelling, as he had since they had gotten there. One of them slapped him with a greasy leather glove finally and said, “Shut the fuck up, you moron. Your leg’s cut. You still got your dick.”
The lieutenant saw the wildcat strike unfolding and left the plant quickly. He was opening his car door when a fellow WWII vet came by. The two knew each other from the American Legion. “Hey, Lieutenant. Stopping by for a beer?”
The lieutenant turned slowly to face him. His arm and neck were still hurting, and when he turned, the pain sharpened. He had been thinking again of the events with his son Tommy from the day before. But he shook off these painful thoughts. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be stopping by.” Suddenly the lieutenant slumped to the ground.
Rudolph muttered to himself as he swept his area before leaving. Another strike. Fools, he thought. “Come on, Rudolph. Put the fucking broom down. Let’s go.” He looked up sharply to the speaker, a young machinist who was one of the few to stop and talk to Rudolph now and then. Rudolph leaned the push broom against the bench and fell into line. He had never liked that word and wondered why Americans were so fond of it. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself. What a meaningless word. As they neared the exit, Rudolph reached into his left pocket to finger his gold coin, but couldn’t find it right away. Frantically, he felt every corner of the pocket. It was gone! His one ounce gold coin was gone! He turned to go back into the factory to look for it. Everyone and everything was flowing toward the exits. The forklift driver never saw Rudolph as the old man came running around the blind corner in search of his gold.
Hank Schmidt was locking his bench tool box when he saw the motion off to his right. He watched the steel plate spinning through the air and across the aisle, watched it hit the longhair squarely in the neck, and then it seemed like everything was in slow motion as the young fellow slipped to his knees and then pitched onto the first step of the spotting press. Ernie turned and walked up the tool room aisle, joining the wildcatters in shutting down the place. Hank saw that others were tending to the longhair apprentice and turned and joined his friend. “Fuck it,” he thought. “Just fuck it.”
Milt Jeffers and Crazy Jack walked in the middle of a small group of their comrades. “Bring ‘em to their fucking knees,” shouted Jimmy to the group. “Shut the fucking place down,” shouted El Stinko. Milt gave a faint grin. He was shutting the fucking place down all right, but he was worried. He was fired. The number one right the company always placed first, both in local and national negotiations, was the right to hire and fire. Management did the hiring and they did the firing. It was that simple. By the time the union group got to the executive garage, there was a small army of cops—local police, sheriff’s deputies, and state patrolmen clearing the way for the ambulances.
Big Bill and the guards, joined now by Big John and a dozen other guards who had been called in, were organizing to take control of the sprawling facility before more damage could be done to it. There was always some vandalism during every wildcat strike—bolts in dies, jammed conveyors, busted windows and trash strewn around the aisles.
Sheriff Thomas Greene stood at the top of the ramp, and warily turned to look at the union hall across the busy highway. There were two dead that he knew of in the plant, and a deputy assigned to monitor the radio had just reported a possible third to him. Below on the plant grounds he watched as three thousand men tried to extricate themselves from the parking lot. The air was filled with black smoke from the junkers the guys drove to work. There was honking and yelling and tires squealing. The parking lot looked like a battlefield.
There were already two ambulances in the plant; all the aisles were wide enough to drive down, so the paramedics could get wherever they needed to go. Greene had called in a total of eight ambulances from the surrounding communities, and they sat idling along the highway, their lights slashing through the November gloom. Now word came of a man down in the parking lot, and he ordered another ambulance to go and get the lieutenant.
Tom Finnegan, a notebook at the ready, a photographer shadowing him, spoke to Thomas Greene. “Hell of a mess.”
Greene nodded and waved his arm over the valley before him. “What the fuck is the matter with this place?”
“Can I quote you on that?” They both laughed. They had a handshake agreement that there would be a free flow of information between the
two, sometimes confidential, that would help each do his job better.
“It’s insane….”
Down below, all of a sudden, a fight broke out. The flow of men out of the plant stopped, and the little sphere of activity grew in size, then became an abnormal shape. Several men ran from the struggling group toward the parking lot. Police officers who had been standing around the front of the plant ran toward the group with their nightsticks drawn.
“Ah, shit,” Thomas Greene spat between clenched teeth and ran for his car. Never before had he mixed his men with the strikers. Today had been different, though, because of the deaths in the plant. “Let’s go,” he shouted into his radio mike. “All available men to the ramp on Route 20.” He put his siren and lights on and started down the hill, but by the time he got there, Milt Jeffers and the boys had pulled their guys out of the melee, and the cops, thoroughly pissed off as one of their number was down, reluctantly pulled off to the side.
Then the first ambulance made its way out of the plant and up the ramp to the gate. And everyone involved sensed the gravity of what was happening. They all knew by now that people had been killed in some way or another during the last hour in the plant. Nothing like that had ever happened before during a wildcat. It had just been fuck the place up a little bit, go home for a couple of days, and then come on back for more days and weeks and years of boring shit, whatever it took to keep the fender factory spitting metal out the doors and down the railroad tracks.
Before he went home that night, the sheriff knew that five men were dead. An apprentice had sustained a broken neck from a hurled four inch by six inch steel wear plate during the plant exodus, probably horseplay. A young production worker had bled to death from a sliced femoral artery. And the only one he knew, his old friend the lieutenant, had died of a heart attack in the parking lot. An old German guy had been run over by a forklift. And a young fellow had had his head crushed in a welder.
***
William Trent Pancoast is now retired from the auto industry (after 30 years as a die maker). Since retirement he has taught creative writing and essay writing at the Ohio State University/North Central State College campus in Mansfield, Ohio, and served as first mate on a Lake Erie charter fishing boat. When he’s not writing, he can be found on a vintage motorcycle or fishing on Lake Erie. Born in Galion, Ohio, in 1949, Pancoast now lives in Ontario/Mansfield, Ohio.
On certain summer afternoons
when shadows stretch across the lawn
and deer come out—five doe, one fawn—
a distant wood thrush pipes his tunes.
The deer have come to graze on grass
and eat some apples from the tree.
There’s fruit enough for them and me—
the wood thrush song like opal glass.
But not all afternoons are filled
with ease. Some days all song is stilled—
by what? Perhaps I do not hear,
attending only to what’s near,
distracted, itching to be thrilled.
But air born song cannot be willed.
***
Miriam N. Kotzin teaches at Drexel University where she also co-directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. Her work has been appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Shenandoah, Anemone Sidecar, MAYDAY Magazine, Frigg Magazine, and Boulevard. She is the author of the poetry collections Taking Stock; Weights & Measures; and Reclaiming the Dead. “The Itch” was first published in Boulevard, appears in A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised an Expanded (4th edition), and is in her forthcoming collection The Body’s Bride. It is reprinted here with permission from the author.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Medulla Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: Grief Suite, The Book I Never Read, and Letter from the Lawn. Her work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals, including Gulf Coast, New American Writing, Big Bridge, Otoliths and The American Poetry Review. Dancing Girl Press will be publishing her chapbook, to be let in the back porch, in 2012. Her prose can be found, or is forthcoming, in Noir, Dogzplot, Pure Slush, Wilderness House Literary Review, Melusine, Camroc Press Review and others.
Editor’s Note: I love relationship poetry, and Bobbi Lurie maneuvers throughout the subject with a poet’s delicate, imaginative hand. Her words drift in and out of prose, at times using the form as a structure to house the narrative, and at times straining against the form, creating a tension that mirrors that of the story within.
After I die,
let it be said
that my pussy tasted
of children’s unspoiled dreams.
May eunuchs charcoal sketch
me and Miles smoking
brown cigarettes and drunk-swaying, broadcast
all night, all over Barcelona TV.
After I am scattered,
let it be said
that I ate joy.
May the universe not regret me:
clumsy, tip-toeing, gripping, self-involved, now stumbling
with thick-treaded boots and wide steps through
the constellations and laughing, knowing
I knew nothing.
Kat White is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate and Instructor at the University of Memphis. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Phoebe Journal and Photosynthesis Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Blue Collar Review, Axe Factory, Lullwater Review, and Stone Highway Review; she has an upcoming poem in Fade Poetry Journal. Kat is currently at work in Memphis on her nonfiction novel, A Personal Cartography. Contact her at paris_anais@yahoo.com.
Editor’s Note: Kat White is forward-thinking in both her poetic maneuvers and her contemplation. Taking us on a journey from the physical and sexual to the enlightened, she is neither afraid to admit her human flaws nor to laugh at how little one knows in this life. She shines the light of optimism on the way she will be remembered, “After I am scattered, / let it be said / that I ate joy.”
“let’s get together and get some land
raise our food like the man
save our money like the mob
put up the fight, own the job”
–James Brown
Last February, World Bank President Robert Zoellick noted that the inability of poor people to feed themselves and their families contributed greatly to the civil unrest that swept across Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. And even as food prices have eased slightly since their record highs last January, newly appointed Food and Agriculture Organization director, General Jose Graziano da Silva, has already indicated that food prices and their volatility will remain high for the year.
Since 2008, the geopolitics of food, both on the production and consumption side, has become a growing crisis on the one hand, and a call for social revolution on the other. What Lester Brown called the “21st-century Food War” is the inflationary and supply-side unraveling of food prices for many developing nations.
Sharp increases in the four main food staples—wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans—have managed to push many of the 2 billion poorest people on the planet, who already spend between 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, into an even more perilous state of hunger and malnutrition. Arguably the largest player in the Arab Spring revolutions, Egypt alone imported roughly 70% of its wheat in 2010; making Egypt and its 86 million citizens the largest wheat importer in the world.
It should come as no surprise that in the spring of last year, the Egyptian interim government outlined a multistage strategy for improving domestic wheat production by increasing financial incentives to local farmers.
More than just an attempt to undo years of agricultural neglect during President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, the actions of the interim government show its keen awareness of the relationship between food prices and civil unrest. The Egypt government witnessed this during the 1977 “Bread Riots,” when the government attempted to end subsidies of oil, wheat, and other grains, and more recently during the 2008 food riots. Agricultural self-sufficiency seems to be a new attempt by the current government to curb future uprisings.
In December of 2011, head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Shenngun Fan, commented that high food prices were a contributing factor in fueling the Arab Spring. And while David Biello of Scientific American was careful to note that the Egyptian revolution was the result of a number of factors, the inability of the government to rein in spiraling food costs with government subsidies only “added fuel to an already combustible mix.”
Along with macroeconomic shifts in food prices, the relationship between these global movements and food is steeped in symbolic gestures. Take for example the iconic image of a Yemeni man during the protests in Sana’a with two loaves of baguettes plastic-wrapped to his head. Or Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26 year old Tunisian street vendor—scraping out a living selling produce on the streets of Sidi Bouzid—and de-facto martyr of the Arab Spring, who after being spat upon and humiliated by municipal officer Faida Hamdi for not having a proper vendor permit, promptly obtained a can of petroleum and immolated himself in front of the governor’s office.
Out of the Arab Spring revolutions, the importance of food has not only lent credence to realities of inequality, corruption, and desperation, but has also provided an emblematic demarcation for what kinds of abuse people will no longer endure. For author Anna Badken, the attaching to one’s head of breads, tin-pot cervellieres, and frying-pan basinets during street protests in Yemen, Tunisia, and Egypt, was an attempt by protesters to form solidarity through the belief that “food in the Middle East is the most elemental expression of humanity.” It wasn’t, as Badken explained, the idea that these kitchen utensils would protect against the shelling of tear gas canisters, but instead the acknowledgment of food’s central role in Arab culture.
As then-President Jacques Edouard Alexis and the Haitian government learned, after it was overthrown during the 2007-2008 food riots, the inability of a country to manage its food prices will undoubtedly lead to its undoing. When your own population of 9 million, more than half of whom live on a dollar a day, liken their condition of food insecurity to “Clorox hunger”—the feeling that one’s stomach is literally being eaten away by bleach—it is clear that the state has failed to provide its citizens with the most basic needs.
Of course, providing these needs is easier said than done, as the Egyptian government found out. Even after increasing the subsidy for the wheat used in the mandatory production of affordable baladi—the food stamp-like bread program for the poorest of Egyptians—Mubarak was still ousted from power after eighteen days of demonstrations. This is not to mention the 175,000 tons of wheat that the Egyptian government bought from the United States and Australia in the beginning of 2011. Even a six-month wheat reserve did very little to quell dissent.
Our increasingly globalized food system has only magnified the degree to which food crises, though often experienced asymmetrically among countries, have made us even more interconnected. The adoption of neoliberal trade policies during the 1990s—the “development ladder” experiment that was ostensibly supposed to turn peasants into high-tech, highly educated factory laborers—worked instead to eviscerate domestic crop production throughout the developing world.
It is no wonder that last summer, former President Bill Clinton apologized to the Haitian government for the role that his administration—specifically the importing of subsidized US rice—had on their economy. This wasn’t an attempt by Clinton to revise his place in history, but a reflective awareness on the limitations of free trade policies.
The 21st-century Food War that we are now facing is one of increased bifurcation between the meat-centered, high calorie, packaged food diets of highly developed nations and the volatility of staple crop prices in the developing world.
When the price of wheat hit a record high of $346 a ton in February of 2011, the cost of bread in the United States only ticked up by a few nickels. While people in the developing world are largely purchasing the raw food staple items themselves, the majority of our food costs come from the packaging, advertising, and transportation of the food product—the wheat that goes into making a loaf of bread is a small fraction of the total cost.
From effects of climate change on food production to concerns over the impact of glyphosate-laden corn on the honey bee population, our current global food system has tethered itself almost exclusively to the problematic principles of unbridled market capitalism: cost-cutting mechanization, ruthless efficiency, and ethical hollowness.
We need look no further than the reckless impunity involved in the recent practice of “land grabbing” in many African countries. In 2009 alone, deals for 110 million acres of farmland were sought by wealthy foreign investors, an increase of 100 million acres from the previous year. This has been dubbed the “neo-colonization” of Africa, as foreign nations see these investments as a means of limiting exposure to future price volatility.
Still, when food is talked about in the context of social revolution, it is too often folded into a general discussion of grievances against the state. It is problematic, and, as we’ve seen over the last couple years, false to assume that lowering food prices, along with addressing other basic needs, will be enough to assuage unrest. Undoubtedly, the inability of people to afford daily meals will always be an immediate concern, but food represents more than just fluctuating nickel and dime prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. Food isn’t merely the canary in the coal mine for testing civil unrest, but a proverbial Rubicon, the place where the existential question “can I go on living another day under these conditions?” is finally asked.
What we are now facing seems to represent the beginning of a permanent food crisis. While dipping slightly from 2011 highs, the prices of most major food staples are well above 2005 levels—and nowhere close to costs before 2001. There seems to be no returning to the days of cheap food and invisible hunger disguised in a ruse of free trade and neo-liberal economic growth. Remarkably, from the United States to the Middle East, the importance of food seems to remain at the center of these struggles.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is by no means oblivious to concerns over our current food system. Among calls for ending corporate welfare and reducing the mounting wealth disparity between top earners and the 99%, concerns over our “big Ag” food system lie at the heart of the movement.
On September 29th, 2011, 12 days into the occupation of Zuccotti Park, the General Assembly of OWS published a “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.” Along with a number of grievances, members of the NYC General Assembly declared, “they have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”
How then can these movements take back a dysfunctional and unjust food system?
In the 1969 pamphlet, To Feed Our Children, the Black Panther Party wrote, “hunger is one of the means of oppression and it must be halted.” Out of these conditions of inequity and rampant food insecurity, the Black Panthers even declared the last point of their ten-point plan to include the rights of “land” and “bread” ownership.
Across the country, various Occupy movements have latched onto this notion of food oppression and begun forming relationships with farmers and the sustainable food movement. Occupy Memphis and the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association have recently partnered to protest implied practices of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In occupied Frank Ogawa Plaza, attendees of the 15th Annual Community Food Security Conference gave “soapbox” speeches to Occupy Oakland about our current food system. And last December, food activists and farmers alike organized the highly publicized Occupy Wall Street Farmers’ March from the La Plaza Cultural Community Garden to Zuccotti Park.
Started last October, the OWS Food Justice group has emerged as a powerful voice within the alternative food movement. Meeting every Friday night in the heart of New York’s financial district, OWS Food Justice sees coalition building and organized marches as a way of raising awareness for food rights and inequality.
“The struggle for food justice,” Corbin Laedlein, a member of OWS Food Justice, says, “is about dismantling oppressive institutions, policies, and practices while simultaneously creating a new food system that is based upon the principles of justice and sustainability.”
Here in the United States, a presumptive myth continues to be that our only food problems are that we spend too little and eat too much. As a nation of people who take in, on average, a little less than 3,800 calories per day and, as reported by the USDA, spend 10% of our income on food, the myth has some degree of merit. But this overlooks many of the root problems, and furthermore, oversimplifies the corrosive effect that poverty, overwork, and cheap calories have on our communities and waistlines.
As argued last year by conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, the fact that the obesity rate has increased over the last thirty years is evidence enough to them that food insecurity is no longer a problem in the United States. Even if we disregard the fact that recipients of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), still referred to by many as food stamps, have increased by 64% since 2008, what we’re now facing is a caloric race to the bottom. As we continue to grow poorer, we are forced to stretch our dollars toward the most calories at the cheapest prices.
This isn’t simply a question of personal responsibility, but the frank realities of poverty—something we continue to feel uncomfortable talking about in this country. Since the beginning of the Great Recession, the poverty rate has sharply risen to a record high of 15.1% of all Americans. As Bryan Walsh reported in a 2009 article for Time, a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed thata dollar could buy 950 more calories of chips than vegetables. A year prior to the onset of the recession, researchers out of the University of Washington found that it costs $3.52 a day to eat 2000 calories of junk food as opposed to $36.32 for more nutritious foods. Healthcare costs for obesity already total over $190 billion a year, and feckless statements like “let them eat less” or “have them grow more” are not going to make these problems go away.
In solving these food problems, what we don’t need is platitudes or unrealistic expectations, as another OWS Food Justice member, Lakshman Kalasapudi, explains, “I don’t think OWS will bring on the revolution. Realistically, I think it’s just a platform for like-minded people and people of all different backgrounds to come together and work on issues.”
Just the idea that food truly matters, on some level, might be what helps to bring us all together in the end.
Food must remain at the center of any struggle for social and economic justice. More than just a means for building coalitions, food—whether it is through rising prices, loss of farmland and rural communities, or unlabeled GMO food—provides people with a shared experience for understanding oppression and injustice.
While the severity of hunger and food insecurity is undeniably unequal among nations and people, the reaches of an erratic and all-consuming food system affects us all. Charges of elitism volleyed against this nascent movement are beginning to seem desperate, as people become more aware of our industrialized food system’s failings. If we are to believe that the future of food is not one of constant sickness, scarcity and crisis, then an edible revolution is not only needed, but inevitable.
1
I didn’t find what I expected, musk or ostrich plumes or ivory, only a room in a forlorn mansion where I paced and muttered through curiously long nights, caravans of the lost forming beneath the windows and a flesh-covered dictionary open on my desk.
2
Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face. Why force a giraffe into a flower pot? I keep thinking. I pass a sixth day in bed gnawing my side, but otherwise alone. The gods respond to questions only in the summer when all the windows are open.
3
Along the dark riverbank, moans and shrieks, and nobody with whom to exchange heartbroken glances.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is an exploration of the human animal. Of what it is to be civilized, to be domesticated, to be caged. And of the loneliness and singularity inherent in the human condition. The consequences of awareness that other animals do not grapple with. The advanced intelligence that causes one to contemplate the idea that “Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face.”
Editor’s Note: I recently heard Emily Pettit read at the Readings at Milk&Roses reading series, a PeopleHerd Poetry Cabaret. She read selections from her newly released Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC, 2011) to the clear delight of the audience. When she read the title poem from her book there was audible appreciation of a higher poetic power. Murmurs could be heard, comprised of oohs and ahs and mumblings to neighbors about how very impressed everyone was with Pettit’s work. For her part, Pettit told the tale of how the book was named before the title poem came into existence, and the poem was created as an afterthought. If you have seen Emily read this piece or have read the book, you are probably thinking something to the tune of “Thank god for afterthoughts.” An exceptionally talented up-and-coming poet, Emily Pettit is someone to look out for, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll buy a copy of Goat in the Snow before its first printing inevitably sells out.
Brookgreen Gardens is situated on the Waccamaw River, a slow-moving blackwater river passable only in shallow-draft watercraft. The river gets its name from a little-known Native American tribe that still exists today, albeit in very small numbers (at present, about 400 Waccamaw live in South Carolina). Despite their ties to the land and continuous presence on it, the Waccamaw have, for the most part, been forgotten. One website claims “Nothing is known of their language, and very little else concerning them, as they were never prominent in history.”
When European settlers first came to North America, diseases and brute force had their way with the Waccamaw. Many were enslaved and put to work on the newly established plantations or shipped to plantations in Spain, where it was harder for them to reestablish tribal bonds. In North America the tribe often fought back against this aggression, and once even went to war with the South Carolina colony (a rebellion that was quickly put down by local militia).
In the 18th century, King George II, weary of reports of constant Indian uprisings, ordered all Indian slaves to be freed from colonial plantations. In response to this order, South Carolina’s plantation owners began calling the Waccamaw “African” and kept them in bondage.
As little of their heritage and none of their language has been preserved, today, the meaning of Waccamaw is unknown even to members of the tribe. But Waccamaw nevertheless is the name of a river that runs past Brookgreen Gardens. In the spring and fall migrating snowbirds can be seen up and down its banks. Black bears and sunfish are not an uncommon sight at any time of year. Flowing through pine forests that feature an occasional White Cedar, the river is lined by sandy banks and old plantation homes, and has a legacy as a navigation channel that “was once of particular importance to various indigenous cultures.”
II. Joshua John Ward
At the top of Brookgreen Gardens’ promotional brochure is a quote (attributed to no one) that claims as you walk the Brookgreen property “You Realize You Are Not Just Touring A Garden…You Are Reliving History.” At the bottom of the brochure a quote from the Charlotte Observer, printed in large font, states that Brookgreen Gardens is “One Of The Seven Wonders Of The Carolinas.” In between these two quotes is a block text that describes various features of the property and the property’s history. The text makes one reference to slavery, which occurs in a section titled “The Lowcountry Trail”:
“Interpretive panels provide insights of the lives of the plantation owner, the overseer, and the enslaved Africans.”
What is not in the brochure is the fact that one of Brookgreen Plantation’s most prominent figures was Joshua John Ward, a man once known as “King of the Rice Planters.” Ward was born on Brookgreen Plantation in 1800, and by the early 1850s held over one thousand slaves (while serving as Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina). Eventually Ward became owner of the plantation, and he would live there his entire life.
Today most of the property’s maintenance is carried out by volunteer laborers, many of whom are retirees. The land Ward once ruled over is now less economically viable but better groomed, made opulent by aesthetically-pleasing foliage such as False Indigo, Bloodroots, Spider Lilies, and Swamp Sunflowers.
III. Founders
Gold rush merchant and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington is referred to on the Brookgreen Gardens website as “a forceful man, sometimes known as a ‘Robber Baron,’ but exemplifying the nation’s leadership in this period of rapid growth and expansion.” He first experienced success selling supplies to miners in Northern California during the gold rush. Later on he would help build America’s first transcontinental railroad. Known as one of the “Big Four” railroad magnates, Collis’ investments in the enterprise of railroad construction would make him rich.
Toward the end of his life Collis spent much of his fortune on art and was thought to have one of the greatest collections in the country. When he died, his widow, a woman named Arabella, would become known for a time as the richest woman in America and accumulated her own vast collection of art. Arabella had a son from a previous marriage named Archer Milton. Arabella fostered in Archer her love of art; years later, Archer himself would gain a reputation as one of America’s foremost patrons of the arts.
In 1923 Archer, at the age of 53, married a woman named Anna Hyatt, who at the time was one of the most prominent sculptors in America. She continues to be regarded as such: at present her sculptures adorn not only the grounds of Brookgreen Gardens but museums, university campuses and public squares from New York City to Gloucester, Massachusetts to Clois, France to Washington D.C. to San Diego to Madrid. Anna excelled in large sculptures of historical figures; some of her most famous works are portraits of Joan of Arc, Andrew Jackson, a young Abraham Lincoln, and Don Quixote.
In the late 1920s, Anna became infected with tuberculosis and sought to establish a winter residence in a warmer climate. This illness, plus her success as a sculptor, Archer’s wealth, and a mutual appreciation of the arts would collectively transform the dilapidated Brookgreen Plantation (which had fallen into disrepair after the Civil War) into Brookgreen Gardens. Under their direction the estate was refurbished and converted into a winter retreat, as well as a vast outdoor portfolio for Anna’s work.
Archer and Anna would live at Brookgreen Gardens off and on from the 1930s until their deaths. Today Anna’s statues – and thousands of others – are set up throughout the estate, available for public viewing year-round.
IV. Brookgreen
Brookgreen Gardens is built on four former rice plantations (one of which, of course, is Brookgreen Plantation). It is known at present as a statuary, the former home of Archer and Anna, America’s first public sculpture garden, a wildlife preserve, an aviary, a state park, a historical landmark, a botanical garden, a popular tourist attraction subsidized by philanthropy, tax dollars, admission fees, weddings, tours (both walking and boat), gift shops, and restaurants. Most of Brookgreen Gardens lies entirely on Brookgreen Plantation. As for the other three plantations, one, The Oaks, is the burial place of Governor James Alston; another, Laurel Hill, features a nonoperational rice mill that serves as the only surviving structure from the early days, and the fourth, Springfield, is home to endangered species, protected trees, sometimes migrating waterfowls. Not much information is available on Springfield Plantation, but its website does refer to the property as the product of “people from various cultures and time periods” who “sought ways to optimize the economic use of land, while preserving its natural beauty.”
Brookgreen Gardens is populated with many natural, transplanted, and man-made things, like swamps, beachfronts, Longleaf Pines, Live Oaks, American Beautyberries, Star Magnolias, Flowering Apricots, Winter Jasmine, Ginger Lilies, Virginia Sweetspires, a refuge for wild turkeys and red foxes, and another for barred owls and bald eagles that sits on the estate’s eastern end, as does a butterfly house that is open to visitors for most of the year. This past year, one refuge adopted a sick sea otter.
V. South Carolina
The plantation system has been called a microcosm of the South, an assemblage of productive agrarian institutions, the economic backbone of a region that rebelled against government aggression, a critique of industrial capitalism, productive entities submissive to an industrialized master (essentially, a system populated entirely by slaves from top to bottom). These debates, and the issue of slavery, from the evolution of the plantation system to a war that existed at least in part to preserve it, to modern day tributes to that war, will never cease to boil the blood of many for many different reasons, and all the while, Brookgreen Gardens benefits from a legacy of transnational subsidy, American art, a marriage built on companionship more so than romance, Flowering Dogwoods, Northwind Switchgrass, turtles, swans, and contorted metal, all of which is housed as a dual tribute to pastoral history and bucolic servitude – though bucolic might be too ugly a word to use.
VI. Epilogue
During the Civil War, Brookgreen’s inhabitants set up barricades to deter invading soldiers, primarily on the beachfronts. Later, the place would be more welcoming to Northerners.
***
Works Cited
Hall, Joseph. “The Great Indian Slave Caper” review of The Indian Slave Trade: The
Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 by Alan Gallay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Lerch, Patricia. Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival. 2004,
University of Alabama Press.
Pargas, Damian Alan. “Boundaries and Opportunities: Comparing Slave Family
Formation in the Antebellum South.” Journal of Family History. 33. 2008. 316-345.
This is all true, though it happened over a decade ago, a couple years after Nine Inch Nails came out with Pretty Hate Machine. I was thinking, “Yes, I am a pretty hate machine.” Whatever that meant. It sounded fierce, ironic, like a bittersweet love-struck college-girl in the late eighties and early nineties. I was coloring my hair back then: jet black, almost blue. I had an aesthetic, a code; it involved self-destruction and a sad kind of exotic, erotic, and alienated beauty. Though I was unhappy all the time, life seemed heightened. It was like I was on drugs, but I wasn’t.
This story begins in a Buick.
We’re not talking about a cool car. Rather, it’s an inherited one. The music makes the vehicle throb. It crawls all over you like a violation, like it’s raping you. I’m with a guy people call Jest. Jest rhymes with blessed, with rest, with test. Jest is nineteen, one year older than I. He’s prematurely balding, so he’s got thin wisps of blonde hair over a skull of baby soft skin. I’ve never touched his head, nor do I really want to, but that’s how I imagine it: soft. He has an aesthetic, as well. Despite the fact we live in the desert, he never wears shorts. This is weird because college students in Tucson, Arizona practically live in boxers and tees. Pants are hated. Everywhere Jest goes, he wears dress pants and dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. His hands are always in his pockets too—not in some perv way, but rather like a suave undercover spy or a slick millionaire. He loves Sade because she’s so damn sensual and otherworldly; he keeps his dorm room lights off with candles burning. He cooks his own meals in the dorm kitchen; he runs a full bar from under his sink. Plus, he whispers. His whispering makes me think he knows something I don’t, like maybe he’s in touch with God.
So, I’m with Jest in a Buick and the music is positively earsplitting. This is all part of Operation Get Mickey.
Mickey Rourke, that is.
From my dorm room, I got a phone call about an hour ago, around nine p.m. on this November night in Tucson. “Mickey’s downtown,” Jest whispered. “They’re shooting a scene. Get ready. I’m picking you up.”
Jest understands desperation. In a nutshell, this is his story:
Jest’s brother committed suicide when Jest was thirteen. He discovered the body in the bathtub when he came home from school. Wandering from the kitchen towards the back of the house and carrying one of those orange juice Popsicles that kids make with toothpicks and ice trays, he called out the names of his brother, his mother, his sister. At the bathroom door, he stopped, noticing it was half-open, noticing the light was on. He stood there, licking his orange juice Popsicle. He knocked, calling out, “Phil? You in there? Phil?” Pushing the door open, he discovered the body.
There were several long minutes of mad struggle as Jest tried to pull the lifeless body from the room temperature, blood-red water. The dead body fell through his arms like a slippery fish, slapping the surface of the water and, Jest, a boy, clasped onto limbs, pulled on torso, and screamed out. The anguish and the wetness and the heaviness and the horribleness overwhelmed him so thoroughly that he sunk to the side of the tub, his own clothes wet and pink, his own limbs gently skimming the surface of deceptively calm waters. As the struggle to alter the past subsided, Jest’s fight gave way to weeping; he knew that this quieter, more thoughtful, sobbing would make an indelible mark on his person.
The streets are closed; police patrol. We park near the courthouse. Bright lights, cameras, crewmembers, and Don Johnson claim an entire intersection. While we’re staking out the shoot, Mickey Rourke arrives on a Harley.
I gasp. He looks like—like I don’t know what. A biker. A bad boy. A problem child. He’s dressed in leather; he’s got multiple earrings. I see stubble. I can’t keep my eyes off his jawbone, his minute waist. My God, I think. He looks like scum and I‘m deathly attracted to him.
Jest doesn’t turn to me while he talks, nor does he seem to move his lips. It’s as if he were some kind of ventriloquist. Film people do film things. It’s all a great mystery to us. Jest, staring ahead with his hands in his pockets, whispers, “Do it.”
I take a deep breath. I’m wearing my special Operation Get Mickey outfit: denim short shorts, a tight black top which creates the illusion of cleavage, and the leather jacket I’ve owned since high school. Staring at Mickey and speaking a good octave lower than my normal voice, I croon, “I’m going to seduce him. I’m going to make him beg, and then I’m going to tell him no. That, Jest, is all.” I squint my glam rock eyes in his direction.
“Okay,” he spins towards me, slowly. “Go.”
Ten-fifteen at night. The intersection is cluttered with equipment. Spotlights crisscross the pavement. I shadow Mickey, walking with him, preparing to approach, wondering if anyone will stop me. He smirks. He smokes. He leans against things. He poses, swaggers, wears his leather pants in a serious way.
I step forward. Mickey lights up a cigg and turns in my direction. I let my jacket fall open. I summon all the magic an eighteen-year old girl possesses on a good day. He takes a long, unhealthy, sexually-charged drag of his cigarette. He casts it to the ground while holding his breath, and shifts his eyes to roll over the sideline crowd. He glances my way. He moves on to other spectators. And then, then—as fate would have it—he returns to me, the way eyes naturally return to disaster. He sees ruin, and I have him. For a moment, it’s power, the kind of power I associate with Mickey Rourke: it’s crushing. We look at one another through scars, mascara tracks, red puckered lips, and filmic props. Electric lights drown out stars. We absorb each other on this street corner in a desert college town over a decade ago when I was capable of romantic, whimsical feats. This is a possession, an out-of-body experience. It’s mine.
Mickey Rourke and I have rock-your-world eye contact. Mickey Rourke stares at me.
He walks forward and, even though I’m scared to death, I walk forward too. No one stops me. No one gets in my way. Film crew, security guards, gaffers and best boys—these people are supposed to hold me back. I arrive and I don’t know what to do. I walk this distance between us, this blocked-off road. I bury my hands in leather jacket pockets, finding and clutching a wadded-up napkin from Domino’s Pizza in the left. I walk deliberately, strongly, confidently like this is a Milan fashion show. Right in front of me, like a divinely rejected angel, Mickey Rourke stands, anticipating my very presence.
His raw sexuality is somewhat disarming, and I work to pull myself together. I don’t know what to say, how to act. I’m an honors student; I’m dark, sardonic, witty, a staff reporter for the school paper—Arts and Culture, my beat. Okay, I’ll interview him—I’ll interview Mickey Rourke for the Arizona Daily Wildcat! Operation Get Mickey? Oh, that’s still on, of course, but I have to talk to him first, find out what’s going on with that Nine and a Half Weeks shit. Ask him if he’s psychotic or if it’s just a facade.
Let’s be very honest about all this playacting: I’m a coward and I have no real way of approaching this man.
“Mr. Rourke,” I say, all breathy and sexy. “You’re in town till December?”
He pretends to try to remember. As if one could forget how long one’s supposed to be in Tucson.
To myself, I calculate our age difference. “I’m a reporter,” I blurt out.
Bad move: a sudden flash of disinterest spreads across Mickey Rourke’s face. He seems to have met a few of these before. I’ve blown it. My God, I’ve blown my chance to have Mickey Rourke undress me so that I can say no to him! Oh, if only I had said something else. I’m a gymnast, a body double, a jazz singer, a voodoo princess. I dance on tables. I’m a good-time girl. I play craps, poker, the xylophone. But no. “I’m a reporter.”
Mickey doesn’t let me get any further. “If I have time.” He turns to a large, effeminate, flamboyant man standing next to him, saying, “This is the person you should talk to. She’ll take care of you.”
She’s a he. Well over six feet tall with a clean-shaven face and jowl-like cheeks, he’s a Christmas tree in a green sweater and white pants, a red scarf thrown dramatically around his neck. He looks at me with big I’m your girl eyes.
I have that hideous, you’re-a-loser feeling. “Hi.”
“Hi, Hon.” He flips over a Kleenex box. “Let me get your phone number.” One uses Kleenex to blow one’s nose. We complete the transaction.
Oh, but I’m not done. Mickey stands nearby. He speaks to someone with a clipboard. Gently, like adults I’ve seen often do, I reach out and touch his shoulder. With my eyes a-glow, I say, “It was a pleasure watching you.”
“Thanks.” Mickey smiles at me.
It was a pleasure watching you???
I turn around and join Jest who’s waiting for me behind the sawhorses used for crowd-control.
Operation Get Mickey has its roots.
There’s this guy; let’s call him Keifer—or how about Trey? A brooding megalomaniac type, he thoroughly convinced me upon arrival my freshman year (I’m a young sophomore) that he’s brilliant, he’s sexy, he’s capable of penetrating the heart of many of the world’s great mysteries, and he understands me like no other man ever has or ever will.
To prepare for essay exams, he’d write essays and memorize them word for word. This impressed the hell out of me. They were on things like Chinese history and the Russian humanities.
On a dare, he walked naked to the showers for a month in our co-ed dorm, using shampoo bottles as post-Edenic fig leaves. Girls would sit and watch. I did too.
He was into the problem of evil, the end of the Cold War, and the selling out of U2. This struck me as especially profound.
He’d kiss my lips and it was like he was reading my palm. Those are kisses you don’t forget.
Trey was a good reason to stay in school. In short, I believed in this guy.
In 1986, before our history began, he saw Nine and a Half Weeks. This was when Trey had longish hair and occasionally wore eyeliner. “Mickey’s a god,” he declared decisively from then on.
I never even saw the movie—I wasn’t allowed to.
Trey fixed this—we rented it at Blockbuster and watched it on a Friday night in the spaghetti sauce-scented dorm TV room. As we watched, Trey leaned forward the whole time, glued to the screen, whispering the score in my ear. He talked me through it, explaining things, laying the groundwork for our own future devastation. “Listen to what Mickey says,” Trey instructed, “and how he says it.” Trey got excited as if we were at a football game. “Watch his body language, note where he puts his hands.” Mickey, looking trampled upon but lovely, became a sick model for Trey, who was—after all—just a smart boy with a good CD collection.
Trey did weird Mickey Rourke things. He never tied me up; he never made me crawl. He posed dramatically in dark places on campus—I distinctly remember watching him smoke outside the dorm at midnight, leaning over the rusty green rail, looking very lonely despite the fact I waited inside to take him into my arms and weave him into my being till our organs and sinews were indistinguishable. I remember this.
Once, in my room, we made out/kissed apocalyptically/locked lips/mashed, and it involved food—just like Mickey and Kim Basinger did in the movie. It wasn’t very sexy, though, because I only had a six-pack of Diet Coke and a bottle of papaya juice in my knee-high fridge. We dumped soda and juice all over each other and kissed like we were in a Manhattan skyscraper and we were absolutely desperate for one another. Unfortunately, he had just eaten a hot dog, and I could taste it on the roof of his mouth. For months afterwards, I had ants.
Besides that, he regularly said enigmatic things that sounded slightly warped and twisted. At night, he’d speak softly. “I love you, but I know if I showed you the extent of my love, you’d run like hell.”
This would cause me to respond in kind with similarly enigmatic things that also sounded slightly warped and twisted. Before slipping into my room for the night where a retainer for the teeth awaited, I’d whisper back, “Show me. See if I run.”
Well, it ended rather badly after eight months of unbeatable melodrama. I mean, who can maintain clever conversation for that long? Who can be sexy every minute of every day? We had homework to do, classes to take, college philanthropies and fun-runs in which to participate. Much of our disintegration had to do with the inability to reconcile our creepy charade with rituals ranging from taking prerequisites to watching re-runs of “Cheers.” When all was said and done, the Mickey Rourke routine proved to be rather, well, insubstantial.
Rourke was the other woman.
Had Trey and I bonded without eccentricity and false pretense, had we eaten pizza and frozen yogurt, had we held hands in movie theaters and played miniature golf, we may’ve been happy. I’ll never know. Certain trappings got in the way.
But I do know this: a capricious rejection of Mickey Rourke will be a small victory for true love. If I do it quickly and suddenly, like murder, its symbolic value will resonate over the course of my entire life. I’ll be conquering flimsy erotic nonsense; then I’ll get on with things. I’ll get on with love.
When Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson come to town to make their movie, it’s a god-sent. And I believe in God.
Things happen at night. For two weeks, Jest and I are nocturnal. I had no clue Tucson is so activeafter dark. Mickey doesn’t call, so Jest and I try to keep track of the film. This nighttime world is like Blade Runner, like a John Sayles’ film, like a Lou Reed song. We go downtown where tiny little cafes stay open till four a.m. We hit empty bars where lone figures drink dry martinis. We go to diners, the bus station, Hotel Congress, Café Quebec. I drink Mexican coffee and wait for Mickey to show up. I walk over railroad tracks to Dunkin’ Donuts where Jest buys me powdered sugar munchkins.
He says, “We’ll find him. Tomorrow.”
My elbows propped on the Dunkin’ Donuts’ counter and my lips dusted in white, I say, “What makes you think so?”
Jest, whispering, only mumbles one word. “Fate.”
Of course I believe him.
Jest finds out they’re shooting at the Tucson Convention Center. Arriving around nine at night, we park in back. Two trailers parallel a huge stage door. One is for Don Johnson, the other for Mickey Rourke.
I’ve changed outfits. This time I wear a dress. Also made of denim: acid-washed, backless, a dog-collar neck.
Jest is quiet. Sitting in the front seat with the lights from the Convention Center bouncing off the Buick’s windshield, we stare at the trailers.
“I’m going in,” I say.
Jest puts his hands on the steering wheel, peering out. “Show some leg.”
I open the car door and put a foot on the ground. “Thanks. I will.”
It’s important to know that, in all this, I never have a plan. I walk to the trailer. Its door is open, and chatter emanates from within. Rourke’s name is written on the side. I slowly climb the four steps to the entrance.
Sucking sharp air into my nostrils, I reach my fist inside and knock.
Scampering, shuffling, and arranging sounds emerge. A voice says, “Come in.”
So I go.
I walk into Mickey Rourke’s trailer, ready to interview, seduce, and reject. Billy Squier sings in my head. I can do this; I can carry this off.
I head inside the trailer. The Christmas Tree with the Kleenex box meets me before I get very far. Over his shoulder, I see Mickey drinking Evian with a white towel hanging around his neck. “Oh no you don’t,” Christmas Tree says.
“I thought I heard someone say, ‘Come in.’” My eyes plead; my shoulders sink.
He looks at me with pity. “You did. Sorry, our mistake.”
I gulp and try to make it look coy. “I just wanted to talk to Mr. Rourke.”
He checks me out. I feel undone, see-through. “Aren’t you the reporter?”
I back up. I step onto the stairs. “I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry.”
And that’s that.
Rejected by a sex symbol, I return to Jest in the Buick. The whole thing took five minutes max. Jest puts his hand on mine. We sit like that for ten minutes.
Jest breaks the silence. “I need to do something. When I leave, I want you to slide over and start the ignition, okay?”
I’m a little emotional, having been discarded by Mickey Rourke on top of the travesty that is my life. “Fine,” I say. Not only has Trey forsaken me, but so has Mickey Rourke.
Jest gets out; I slide over. When the motor’s running, I lower the windows and blast the radio. I flip through stations, vacillating between Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Modern English.
I figure Jest is getting me an autograph. I figure we’ll have to settle for our range of possibilities. I guess we’ll have to get real.
I sing “Come On, Eileen” at the top of my lungs, accepting harsh reality. I hit the steering wheel and shake my fake black hair all over the place.
Then I see him.
Jest, running like he’s in Chariots of Fire, like he’s Indiana Jones and there’s a boulder chasing him, like he’s trying to outrun a raging Dorothy-in-Kansas tornado, dashes for the car. I swear to God, the guy, dress pants and all, can really run. I watch him, not completely grasping the situation. He opens the car door, hops in, slams it, breathes heavily, and gasps, “Drive!”
A two-second delay ensues. My mind isn’t digesting the events. Something is in his arms. Jest shouts, “Drive!”
I shift the car and do just that. Though I have to slowly brake over a few Convention Center speed bumps, I race away. Jest has, in his hands, a leather bomber jacket. I look at Jest; I look at the road; I look at the jacket. “What’s going on?”
Jest breathes heavily. “I got you something.”
Again, I look at Jest, at the road, at the jacket. “What do you mean?”
“I got you this, so you’re not empty-handed.”
It takes a minute; I’m extraordinarily dense. “You stole that?” I furrow my brow. “You stole that jacket?” I was once a girl scout; I went to private Christian schools.
He holds it up. “It’s Mickey’s Harley Davidson jacket in the movie.” I look at it out of the corner of my eyes. First of all, it smells like leather, like warm bovine. I can almost taste the open highway in my mouth. Second, it’s got presence. It’s beaten-up black and orange in color. The words Harley Davidson are written on the front, on the sleeve, and sprawled across the back. A deck of cards revealing a full house fans out over the right breast. Under the full house, a skull with R.I.P. and the word Evolution are written. A pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter are in its pockets. I feel like I’m Dennis Hopper and I’m riding a motorcycle to Venice Beach.
“You stole a prop?” I’m utterly confused.
“It’s a one-of-a-kind,” he nods.
I look in the rearview mirror. No one’s behind us. I gave Mickey my phone number. I am suspect number one. Pulling into a university parking lot, I tremble.
With lowered heads, we walk past the front desk to my dorm room. Jest carries Mickey’s jacket. Inside, he sits on my pink bedspread. James Dean, Depeche Mode, and Gunther Gable Williams from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus look down on us from their smug places on my wall.
I cross my arms over my chest and pace. I’ve got stolen merchandise in my room and I left my phone number with the victim. “I’m calling my dad.”
My father picks up after three rings. I tell him what happened.
“You’re an accomplice,” he declares, sternly. “Probably to a felony.” His volume rises. “Where’s the damn jacket right now?” He’s really angry. “Where’d you put it?”
“It’s here.” I whimper. I’m near tears. “In my room.”
“And you gave that joker your phone number?” he shouts into the phone.
“Yeah,” I admit.
“I don’t believe you—I don’t believe you did this. And that ‘Jest’ character—doesn’t that idiot have a real name? You give him the jacket. You make him take it. You tell him to return it. Tell him to go back and return what he stole. Do you understand? I don’t want you keeping stolen property in your room. Do you understand me?”
I sniffle. “Yeah.”
When I get off the phone, I push Mickey Rourke’s Harley Davidson jacket into Jest’s arms. I tell him I can’t keep it. I tell him I can’t keep stolen property.
Later, he lets me know how it was, how the film medic took it back unknowingly, how Jest made it look like an oversight, something missed in the scuffle.
Two years pass.
Trey lives off-campus. We rarely see each other, but I think of him often.
I don’t like to hang out with Jest anymore because he scares me, but occasionally we’ll have Mickey Rourke Film Festivals in my room. We’ll rent Wild Orchid and Desperate Hours, I’ll make microwave popcorn, and Jest will sneak in beer. We’re serious critics of Mickey’s performances; we understand method acting and Mickey’s many, many moods.
Right before graduation, Jest takes me to Mina’s Red Pepper Kitchen for lemongrass chicken and Pad Thai.
“I have something for you back at my apartment,” Jest whispers over coconut-scented drops of soup. Jest, too, has left the dorm; we are separated, all of us.
“What?” I ask, picturing his apartment. He has silly black sheets he stole from Sears and a shrine to foreign-born women.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.” My tone is dry and indifferent; by twenty, I’m morose and apathetic.
“You’ll like this one.”
I have grown to hate Jest. That voice triggers something ruthless in me. If there’s a reason for war, it’s that voice. It makes me want to point my finger at him and assault him with enemy words. When I hear him speak, I know magic is just a sleight of hand.
Back at his apartment, I sit on his bed, the one with the stolen sheets. “Well?”
“Will you do something for me?” he asks.
“What?” I jiggle my leg up and down.
“I want to blindfold you,” he whispers.
He’s serious. He’s completely serious.
“Why?” I ask.
“It’ll add to the surprise.”
“Okay.” I pause. “Blindfold me.” One wonders why I allow it. Besides unrelenting curiosity, it’s part of being a girl: at some point in your life, a man’s going to want to blindfold you and, rather than risk false accusations, you’ll let him do it.
“Stand up,” he demands. It’s part of a plan he’s concocted in the wee hours of the night. I can tell. I see it in his face.
I stand up.
“Turn around.” His tone hasn’t changed, but I sense strategy.
I turn around. I hear him move behind me. A tie swings in front of my face, bringing darkness, and he carefully arranges it over my eyes, smoothing the silk over the bridge of my nose. He presses my eyelids lightly, making sure that my blindfold is comfortable. “Is that too tight?”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“I want you to be comfortable.”
“I know you do, Jest.”
I hear sounds like jars opening and flames flickering. Jest passes things under my nose. “Smell this.”
“What is it?” I ask, hiding fear.
“Just smell it.”
I do. Flowers not in season.
I hear the sizzle of a match and know he’s passing it by my face. “Don’t move.”
“What are you doing, Jest?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer me.
I feel a chill against my skin, metal on my arm. He traces a cold wire along my shoulder. “Raise your arms,” he says.
“Like this?” I lift them above my head, the way kids do when they can’t stop coughing.
“No. Straight out.”
“Like Jesus on the Cross?”
“Yes.”
The cold wire moves over my wrist, past my elbow, across my shoulders, and down the other arm till it touches my fingertip and disappears.
“Do you know what that was?” he asks.
“No.”
“Guess.”
“I can’t.”
“Guess.”
“A hanger,” I moan, feigning detachment. My mind is reeling.
“You’re right.” He presses leather against my skin. “And this?”
“It’s leather,” I answer.
Jest drapes his surprise over my shoulders and I feel heavy leather cover me.
“You’re a madman, Jest.”
“Let me take off your blinders,” he declares.
Jest unties me in front of a mirror. I’m wearing Mickey Rourke’s Harley Davidson jacket. “Why did you do this?” I address his image in the mirror.
“You can forget Mickey,” he says, standing behind me while we look at ourselves. “But I want you to remember me.”
And this is our final hoax; this is how we say goodbye. We use props and call it quits.
Over ten years have passed, and the Statute of Limitations has expired. I keep the jacket in a closet, dragging it out sporadically at parties, bridal showers. My dad likes to wear it for pictures. He poses like he’s the Fonz.
Years ago, I went back to my natural hair color, a forgettable brown. Divorced and childless, I’m still at a loss when it comes to the company of men.
Jest and I barely keep in touch, but I know he’s in the Peace Corps. When he writes, he tells me about the llama jerky he makes in Bolivia while the people wait for revolution. I’m not sure whether or not he continues to wear dress pants. He’s still trying to save his brother’s life.
Trey is lost. I don’t know what happened to him.
Three years ago, though, we met in a hotel room near LAX when our business meetings converged. The room smelled like maple syrup and the carpet was a disturbing shade of gray. We met and, this time, Mickey was neither here nor there. We were alone. Undressing one another and approaching each other’s naked bodies, we searched for that old passion, that melancholic obsession that used to make us feel so alive. We stopped having sex right in the middle, because it seemed ridiculous, as if we were strangers and not strangers at the same time. Instead of the excitement of unfamiliarity or the comfort of the beloved, we found only disgust and drudgery. When we parted, we kissed like cousins. I haven’t seen him since.
I rent Mickey Rourke films rather than seeing them in movie theaters, not wanting to pay for a ticket. I can’t figure out that plastic surgery business either. He’s like an old friend, like Jest—someone I care for but really don’t want to talk to.
Finally.
This, too, is true: Like Kim Basinger in the movie, I would crawl for love. I would get down on my hands and knees and inch across hardwood floors. I would suffer rug burn. I would crawl and crawl. I would crawl for miles. I would humble myself and let any candle flame, any fire, graze my cheek, if love were truly at stake.
***
Jennifer Spiegel‘s stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nimrod, Harpur Palate, The Seattle Review, and others. The above story originally appeared in Nimrod and will be included in Spiegel’s forthcoming collection, The Freak Chronicles (Dzanc 2012).
As It Ought To Be 