Elissa Strauss | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (4,006 words)

I first noticed “mama” while pregnant with my son in 2012. I was browsing on the internet—familiarizing myself the different types of mothers out there, trying to figure out what kind of mother I might become—when I noticed a number of alternative moms who referred to themselves as “mama.” This was the radical homemaking, attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding bunch, and “mama” was right at home with their folksy, back-to-the-earth approach to motherhood.

This use of mama can be traced back to women like Ariel Gore, who began publishing her alternative parenting magazine “Hip Mama” in 1993. Inspired by her experience as an urban single mom, the magazine became the source of parenting advice for riot grrrl types, tattooed and pierced women who wanted to find a way to embrace parenthood while simultaneously rejecting much of the bourgeois accouterment that comes along with it.

This fringe quality of “mama” stuck, leading to websites like the “Wellness Mama,” the home of a popular alternative lifestyle guru named Katie who is into stuff like, “cloth diapering, natural birthing, GAPS dieting, homeschooling, not eating grains, making my own toothpaste, drinking the fat and more.” For her, being a mama isn’t just about parenting one’s kids, but seeing parenting as a medium through which one can change the world.

“Here’s the thing, I can’t change the health of the world alone, but I’m absolutely convinced that as a group, women and moms can. … Not only are we raising the next generation, feeding them, teaching them, etc but we control the majority of food dollars spent around the world.”

She continues by explaining that being a “Wellness Mama” is a way for women to counter any criticism they might receive for being a stay-at-home mom. “I hope to make being #justamom just a little easier for you.” Mama isn’t just a pet name, it’s a manifesto.

Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves “mama” seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once. And like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of “mama” is about power and discontent. “In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture,” writes Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born, Rich’s influential book examining the institution of motherhood.

Actress Alicia Silverstone is another mama for whom the term messages an almost politicized maternal identity. There’s a “Mama” vertical on her blog the “The Kind Life” where like-minded mothers can share their stories about eating vegan and the magic of unmedicated childbirth, and her book The Kind Mama is anti-diaper, anti-formula, vaccine-skeptical, pro-family bed treatise on how to have “healthier, more beautiful beginnings.”

While the new “mama” may have gotten her start among these more alternative-minded mother communities, she did not stay there. (As with the migration of any word, it is hard to say exactly when and where “mama” went more mainstream.) Eventually the newness of “mama,” its absence of baggage for women looking for a new way to identify as mothers, gave it a broad appeal.

Alicia Jo Rabins, a singer-songwriter and mother of two in Portland, Oregon is drawn to the possibility in the term.

“I feel like mommy infantilizes me and mom makes me feel like the mother of a teenager, but mama makes me feel like a pioneer who bakes her own bread wearing an apron and is otherwise capable and timeless,” she said. “Not that I bake my own bread. I used to, long before I had kids.”

The strength projected by “mama” also appeals to Michelle Barton, a bakery-owner and mother of one in Brooklyn.

“I’ve always felt like a protector to my family and friends before I had [my daughter],” she said. “The term, ‘mama bear’ comes to mind. When I think of mommy, I think of perfection and mommy dearest.”

“I find it to be sort of old-fashioned, and to have strength and authority,” said Cara Paiuk, a writer and mother of three in West Hartford, Connecticut. “Like, ‘don’t mess with the mama bear’. It’s not mom or mother bear, it is mama bear.”

Others, like Maia Poling, a teacher and mother of two in Minneapolis, Minnesota like “mama” for its tenderness.

“When my son calls me mama I feel very close to him,” she said “He does call me mom or mommy here and there; lately ‘mom’ comes when he is trying to be strategic about asking for something, almost as if calling me mom makes him sound more grown up, therefore deserving of the treat or the toy, etc. Mommy comes about more often as a whine or a needy calling. Mama seems to be when he wants me, a cuddle, a hug—affection. Mama is what he calls me when he is being inquisitive and curious, tender and vulnerable.”

For writer Michelle Goldberg, a mother of two in Brooklyn, “mama” is both more endearing and a way to avoid clichés surrounding mothers.

“I am crazy about my kids, but I really dislike the words ‘mom’ and ‘mommy’—particularly when other adults use them to refer to me,” she said, noting that before she had kids, she didn’t realize how often that occurred. “I guess I’ve internalized the way they’re both used as a synonym for ‘lame’—i.e., mom jeans, mommy porn. They conjure something insipid and suburban.”

She said she is aware that there are limits to her ability to dodge stereotypes surrounding moms just by avoiding the term “mom,” but nevertheless, “I still just can’t think of myself as one of them. Mama just sounds both cooler and sweeter to me.”

The cool factor of mama is why women are also using it to address one another as well.

“When I hang out with others moms we usually refer to one another as ‘mama.’” said Raquel Miller, a writer and graphic designer and mom of one in Los Angeles. She said it’s the go-to term among her hipper friends, the “Hollywood moms.”

This edgy sweetness has made “mama” a hit in the mothering blogosphere as well. Mama’s become the go-to term for talking about the sentimentality of the experience without sounding too old-fashioned, and one that mothers can be expected to rally around.

Two years ago, the Jewish parenting website Kveller.com, which often uses “mama” in headlines, had a viral hit with a post entitled “Tell a Friend: You are a Good Mama,” by Tamara Reese. In it she encourages women to remember to praise one another’s parenting, in real life or on Facebook, simply by telling them “You are a good mama.” Here, mama is bigger than any individual mother, a way to call truce on the mommy wars and remind women about the universality of the experience.

“I know that more than I want to be rich, or thin, or successful, or trendy, I want to be a good Mama. … Every Mama I know, working, stay-at-home, work-from-home, one kid, four kids–we all seem to want the same thing,” Reese writes.

* * *

Fathering is not often used as a verb. You’ll never hear the term “working dad.” There is no widely documented repulsion to the term “dad,” or “daddy.” Sure, there are those who find “father” a bit stiff, and there is such a thing as “dad jeans,” but for the most part, being a male with offspring comes with few linguistic, and therefore identity, traps. This is because they are often referred to, and therefore considered, as people separate from their relational roles. “Dad,” “daddy,” and “father,” are not particularly loaded terms because there’s just never been that much riding on it.

Women with children, on the other hand, have a legacy of loaded terms to contend with. The root of this lies with the fact that they’ve long been identified by who they are in relation to men or children. Sometimes this has been their exclusive identity, other times their more formal or public one.

Today in the Arab world, there is a custom still in place to not speak a woman’s name in public after she becomes a mother. In her 2011 book Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics, linguistics professor Sally McConnell-Ginet wrote about how in some historical periods in China, women were only referred to by “relational forms,” names like “oldest sister” or “Lee’s wife,” while men were more often referred to by their individual names. These might sound odd to our modern ear, but chances are most of us have witnessed something similar in our lifetime.

“Labeling practices that de-emphasize women’s status as very particular individuals can be found closer to home. For example, in American and British history, tombstones have often named male children (James, Richard, Kenneth, and Thomas) but not female (and three daughters),” McConnell-Ginet writes. “And Mrs. John Doe names a station, whoever the occupant may be, whereas Mr. John Doe picks out an individual. This point was brought home to me early in my married life when I came across a box of stationery made for my husband’s first wife, bearing what I had until then thought of as ‘my’ new name.”

Mommy is used similarly today, a blanket term used for women that replaces their individual name, and it is a source of frustration for many. Writing for the New York Times, Heather Havrilesky expressed her deep frustration over the frequency with which she is referred to as “mom” by people who are not her kids.

“Why does this word irritate me when the wrong person says it? When my kids call me “Mommy,” I feel a surge of pride and happiness. … But the “Mommy” I say to my mother or hear from my children is a private word, a word that defines the relationship between me and my mother, or me and my kids,” Harvilesky writes.

This is a problem because women now resist these relational terms being used by people they are not related to. And then there is the fact that for many “mom” or “mommy” feels dated, even tainted.

Mom is the sad lady suffering from the feminine mystique. She is a soccer mom. She is a helicopter mom. She wears mom jeans, reads mommy blogs and has a mom haircut. She goes to “mommy and me” during the day, and to “mom’s night out” with her girlfriends, where they imbibe “mommy juice.” Mom is a woman who doesn’t have much in the way of power or choices, and instead just plays the role written for her by a patriarchal society. Mom is just not that fun, to be, or be with.

Mama, then, is a way to, if we are being hopeful, reimagine, if we are being cynical, rebrand motherhood for a new generation, one which perceives itself as having more power and choices—even when, and sometimes especially when, that isn’t entirely accurate.

“Note that in the kind of material you pointed me towards, mama is generally sitting side by side with mother and mom (sometimes mommy, but that’s more specialized),” McConnell-Ginet pointed out to me.

“I haven’t looked at all the websites by any means, but my superficial survey suggests that mama is used relatively sparingly in these sources—the heavy referential lifting is done by mom and even more so mother, but mama swoops as an overall label, used in titles of books and films, website names, and the like. This fits with your talk of ‘rebranding’.”

Mama is used consciously as an identity marker, a phrase of distinction, and a way to label the self and designate a group.

“Mamas are cool. Mamas are hip,” Eve Vawter, an editor at Sheknows.com and former editor of Mommyish.com, told me. “When it comes down to it, it’s just another way of women with kids trying to differentiate themselves from their own mothers, women who may have voted Republican, who may have breastfed but ended up formula feeding and had no idea what the difference between free-range and helicopter parenting was. We all want to be special snowflakes, even moms.”

Much of this hipness is likely due to its roots in ethnic slang, making this not the first and probably not the last time people borrow from Black and Latino cultures in order to make their lives feel edgier and therefore more relevant.

Kimberly Seals Allers, a writer and advocate for mothers of color, said mama goes way, way, back for Black families.

“Mama has African roots,” she said told me. “It was a term of respect that didn’t have to do with you being a mother. I’ll call someone mama and I don’t even know if she has children. In the black community we have a big mama—she is the matriarch and quote unquote leader of the family. Sometimes she is the matriarch because she has children, and sometimes it is because she is the oldest living relative.”

Allers said she wasn’t aware of the rise of “mama” among white women, though does recall a recent moment when a white woman came and said, “hey mama,” and she was taken aback.

“Mothers are constantly redefining ourselves, and part of that comes from words we call ourselves, what people call us,” she said. ” It can be done, but we have to be careful about the way we coop words. There should be some acknowledgment of the culture and context of where it comes from.”

Roxana A. Soto, co-founder of the website SpanglishBaby, said that mama is a common term of endearment among Spanish speakers from the Caribbean and elsewhere.

“They use it for children, not only moms,” she said. “And even between girlfriends you are like: ‘hey mama, cómo estás?’ I think the connotation of mother is always there.”

She said there is also a sexual use of mama, as in “hola mamita!” or “hola mamacita,” which are both common catcalls in certain parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

Indeed, the sexiness of “mama” also made an appearance during the counterculture of the ’60s. The Hells Angels referred to groupies as “mama,” and “sexy mama” was a common phrase in pop music at the time as continues being one today.

Overall, it’s the way in which “mama” has widened the horizons of “mother,” without giving up on a mother identity altogether, that is the key to its appeal. Women still want to be moms, still want to talk about being moms, but they need a new context.

Hillary Frank, host of the WNYC podcast “The Longest Shortest Time” and mother of one, says she decided to call her 10,000-plus member Facebook group “The Longest Shortest Mamas,” as a way to help women feel safe.

“Calling it ‘The Longest Shortest Time Moms” felt too sterile and didn’t have the right vibe. I wanted a place where women can talk shop in an intimate way, because sometimes it is going to be poignant, and sometimes it is going to be ridiculous and sometimes it is all about their boobs.”

Frank says mama felt “wide-open” and “liberating,” which is important for a topic like motherhood, which is often fertile ground for dissent.

“Everyone is trying to figure out how to define what being a mother is for herself,” she said. “I try to encourage women not to judge, but help them figure out how they identify [as a mom]. I do think it is being a feminist mama to figure out what choices work for you.”

* * *

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

This is the opening paragraph of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book, well, really, the book, that helped women feel that it’s okay to want more than what the domestic realm has to offer. Published in 1963, it’s largely credited with setting off second wave feminism, a movement that set out to reimagine a life for women distinct from their roles as caretakers.

Some, like radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, took this objective to its extreme, claiming that we could not have gender equality until we figured out a way to get rid of biological differences. She envisioned a future in which pregnancy and childbirth would be replaced by artificial wombs and offspring would be raised communally. “The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself,” she wrote in her 1970 feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex.

Firestone’s ideas were hardly mainstream, but they were emblematic of a generation of women whose priority it was to untangle themselves from the oppressive institution of motherhood. It was important work, and, thankfully, they largely succeeded. Still, it left for an uneasy relationship between feminism and motherhood, a maze of tensions and contradictions that women are still trying to get through today. And they knew this.

In her 1981 book The Second Stage, Friedan acknowledges that the women’s movement’s “failure was our blind spot about the family. It was our own extreme reaction against that wife-mother role.” While some in the women’s movement had fought for things like childcare and universal paid leave to help moms, Friedan argues that it hadn’t been enough. This wasn’t just about helping families, but also about fairly assessing the value of what has traditionally been “women’s work.”

It’s not an understatement to say that feminists completely struck out when it comes to getting communal protections for mothers; we are one of three countries in the world without a universal maternity leave policy, and we also fall very short when it comes to making sure that all working families have access to safe and affordable childcare. Yet, this doesn’t mean we as a culture don’t place much emphasis parenting, because we do—it’s just all on the parents, and it’s driving them many of them nuts.

At least some of our age intensive parenting can be attributed to women’s bumpy transition into the workforce. Peter N, Stearns, history professor and author of Anxious Parents: A Modern History of Childrearing in America, said that the first generation of working moms didn’t pay too much attention to life side of work/life balance.

“They were the latchkey kid generation,” he told me.

Now mothers today are attempting to juggle both, and, often, overcompensating when it comes to their children.

“What’s going on now is a rethinking about and recommitment to mothering after a couple of decades during which work received more emphasis. ‘Mama’ reflects that desire to regain and retain deep attachment to the children.”

Stearn says highly exaggerated fears about the danger of children combined with our loss of confidence in our kids to take care of themselves has contributed to our current culture of overwhelmed parents. The rise of experts who can now easily dole out their advice online has only made matters worse.

“Many experts claim that they want to reassure parents, but really they scare them because this is how they sell books,” he said.

This culture of experts is largely responsible for the ways in which the bar for parents has slowly risen over the past two decades. Parents today spend more time with their kids than their parents spent with them. In 1965 fathers spent an average of 2.6 hours with their kids and mothers spent an average 10.5 hours. Today, fathers spend an average 7.2 hours and mothers are spend an average 13.7 hours. During this period, the percentage of working mothers rose from 41% to 71%.

As Judith Warner wrote about in her book 2006 Perfect Madness, this new parenting culture has made American moms “a choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret.” For some, the rise of things like intervention-free—including pain medicine!—childbirth, extended breastfeeding and co-sleeping has only added to the pressures.

There’s also a link between the stalled gender revolution—we’ve seen a rise of stay-at-home mothers in recent years, going from 23% of mothers in 1999 to 29% in 2012—and the idealization of motherhood. The bigger, and more important, a job we make motherhood, the harder it is going to be for those women who have the financial choice to go the office to do so. Especially as long as our work culture remains so inhospitable to parents with young children. If it is the “most important job in the world” (mothering) vs. some office job where one constantly feels both undervalued and a nuisance because she made the decision to have children, who, if money is not a factor, would choose the office job?

So is “mama” a sign of progress? It’s a tough call. We’re finding new ways to think and talk about motherhood with pride, unwilling to minimize the importance of raising children. But all the while we are still without real choices. So at what point does this mama pride become, consciously or not, a way to accommodate the fact that mothers still don’t have equal access to economic, political and cultural life?

Amber E. Kinser, a professor of communications and author of the book Motherhood and Feminism said that part of feminism’s job is to wrestle through the complexity of what exactly is a choice and what isn’t.

“So much of is presented to women as ‘here are choices,’ but it can be very difficult to weed out what I am choosing and what I am being forced to choose,” she told me. “Judith Butler tells us that there is no choice, that all our choices are shaped by what came before.”

She said that the focus on individual women and their choices often distracts us from the need to fight for a social structure that supports all mothers. This way, all children have a good education, not just the ones whose moms can take an active role, all children can eat toxic-free food, and not just the ones who can afford expensive ingredients or grow their own, and all children can have high-quality childcare, not just those who have access to nannies, private daycare centers, or are able to have one parent stay home with the children.

Still, there’s something hopeful about mama, if not the term itself but the fact women are trying to see motherhood as something new. As Meredith Michaels, a philosophy professor and co-author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Undermines Women noted, there is something pure about mama. “A little kid comes out saying mama, and it stays that way.” “Mama” is one of the first combinations of consonants and vowels that babies can make, which explains why the word for mom sounds so similar in such a wide variety of languages.

She sees mama as “an effort to escape the tyranny of being a mom with all that that entails. I wonder whether the embrace of the term is an attempt to see the relationship between mother and child as unencumbered by the weight of popular culture’s constructions of motherhood.”

Mama, as it is used today, may not endure. Considering the increasing speed of our cultural metabolism, there’s a good chance it won’t last long at all. Still, the prevalence of the word serves as proof that women are not yet done trying to figure out what motherhood, one for us and by us, outside of the context of patriarchy, might look like. We seek sentimentality without triviality, a bond without the tether, the children without the “strange stirring.” We want to be self-identified as both mothers and not mothers, and the ability to navigate freely between the two.

* * *

Elissa Strauss writes about gender and culture for Elle.com, TheWeek.com and elsewhere.

Antonio Tabucchi | from the collection Time Ages in a Hurry | Archipelago Books | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,194 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a newly translated short story from Time Ages in a Hurry, a collection by Antonio Tabucchi, as recommended by Longreads contributor A. N. Devers: 

“A result of living in a place as inescapably public as New York City is that its people are deeply private in public spaces — eye contact on the street and subways is actively discouraged and conversation between strangers is kept to a minimum — making it easy to forget that its greatest asset is the stories of its people. We’re reminded of this in “Between Generals” a quiet and nuanced portrait of a man by the late Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, in which we learn about the complicated history of one of New York City’s immigrants, a former Hungarian General who realizes he spent one of his best days with his worst enemies. Newly translated into English by novelist Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani  for Archipelago Books, Tabucchi’s stories in Time Ages in a Hurry are careful, nuanced, and smartly skeptical of memory and experience.

* * *

“I’ve never believed life imitates art, that saying’s widespread because it’s so easy, reality always outstrips the imagination, that’s why some stories can’t be written, they’re too pallid to evoke what actually was. But let’s forget about theories, I’ll gladly tell you the story, but then you can write it yourself if you wish – you’ve got the advantage over me – you don’t know who lived it. The truth is he only told me the backstory, I learned the ending from a friend of his, a man of few words; we limit ourselves to talking about music or chess moves, probably had Homer known Ulysses he would’ve thought him a banal man. I’ve come to real ize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren’t the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself. Who knows why he came to this city to die when it doesn’t remind him of a thing, perhaps because it’s a Tower of Babel and he started to suspect that his story was an emblem of the babel of life, his own country was too small to die in. He must be almost ninety, he spends his afternoons gazing out the window at New York’s skyscrapers, a Puerto Rican girl comes each morning to tidy up his apartment, she brings him a dish from Tony’s Café that he reheats in the microwave, and after he listens religiously to the old Béla Bartók records that he knows by heart, he ventures out for a short walk to the entrance of Central Park, in his armoire, in a plastic garment bag, he preserves his general’s uniform, and when he returns from the park, he opens its door and pats the uniform twice on the shoulder, like he would an old friend, then he goes to bed, he’s told me he doesn’t dream, but if he does, it’s only of the sky over the Hungarian plains, he thinks that must be the effect of the sleeping pill an American doctor prescribed. So I’ll tell you the story in a few words just as the one who lived it told me, all the rest is conjecture, but that is your concern.”

***

When the story begins, its protagonist was a young officer in the Hungarian army, and according to the Gregorian calendar the year was 1956. For the sake of argument we’ll call him László, a name that renders him anonymous in Hungary, though truth be told he wasn’t just any László, he was that László. From a purely conjectural viewpoint, we might imagine him to be a man of around thirty-five, tall, thin, reddish-blond hair, gray eyes with a faint glint of blue. One might add that he was the sole heir of a family of landowners on the Romanian border, and in his household, they spoke German more than Hungarian, according to Habsburg Empire tradition. After the expropriation of their land, the family moved to Budapest into the large apartment they were granted by the Communist regime. Perhaps we could say our protagonist was drawn to the humanities at school, that he excelled in ancient Greek, that he memorized entire passages from Homer and secretly composed odes in the manner of Pindar. His teacher, the only person to whom he’d dared show them, had predicted for him a future as a great poet, a new Petöfi, something he himself hadn’t believed, an insignificant detail in any case, merely conjecture. The fact was his father wanted him to serve in the military, like he had when he was young, serving as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and for the father, that the army now belonged to a Communist regime was altogether secondary, because Hungary came before anything else, it was for this land that people bore arms, not for some ephemeral government. Our László accepted the will of his father without protest; he was very much aware that he’d never be a new Petöfi and couldn’t stand being second to any one, he wanted to excel at something, whatever that might be, he didn’t lack willpower, and sacrifices came naturally to him. At the Budapest Military Academy he was soon the best cadet, then the best officer-in training, and finally the first-class officer who, at the end of the training, was entrusted with a delicate command post in a frontier zone.

At this point, a digression might be necessary that no longer belongs to the realm of conjecture but to the imagination of the teller of a story as heard by somebody to whom the story was told in turn. It is permissible to think that László, in the village where he spent his youth and where his father once owned the land, had left his first love yet remained faithful to her. Some emotional clarification is called for concerning our László, otherwise he might seem to be only a puppet in uniform consigned to a story that reckons on willpower and physical force but excludes the mysterious strength of the cardiac muscle. László had a sentimental heart, and to attribute feelings to him that we all feel in our hearts isn’t groundless conjecture, for László’s heart was also beating for a great love, and his lamented great love was a pretty country girl to whom, after an afternoon in a cornfield in his youth, he’d sworn eternal fidelity, and she in her father’s large house protected by a line of trees would have assured him a line of descent. But meanwhile László was there, in Budapest, with all the grand buildings in that city, the general chief of staff had taken a liking to him, the last Sunday of each month he gave a party and all those invited were in dress uniform, after dinner people danced, a pianist in a tailcoat performed Viennese waltzes, the general’s daughter, while dancing, was lost in his gaze, and who knows if she was really seeing László there or the most brilliant officer of the Military Academy as described by her father. But this is altogether secondary, the fact is that after a brief engagement they were married. It can’t be ruled out that for László, imagination was stronger than reality. He loved his wife, who was pretty and kind, but he wasn’t able to find the same love for her that he thought he’d betrayed, that is, the now-blurred image of a country girl with blond hair. So he went searching for that ghost in the brothels of Budapest, at first going with some of his brothers-in-arms, then melancholically on his own.

And meanwhile we’ve arrived at 1956, the year when the Soviet army invaded Hungary. The reason for the invasion, we know, was ideological in nature, but it’s not possible to establish if László’s response was along those lines or had other motivations: the education he had received at home, for instance, because this was Hungarian soil, and as his father had taught him, Hungarian soil came before any government; or was his reaction merely for technical reasons, so to speak, because a soldier must always obey his chief of staff and never question orders. It’s also true, however, that László, raised in a big family, had access to a large library, and this might allow for more specious conjecture, that he knew his Darwin, for instance, and thought that political systems, like biological organisms, have an evolution, and that Hungary’s system, somewhat coarse though rooted in good intentions, could, if headed by a man like Imre Nagy, lead to a better outcome. Or that he’d read Return from the USSR by André Gide, which all of Europe had read and which had also circulated underground in Hungary. Along with this second-level conjecture we can introduce something more: that he took comfort in the possible support of the communist parties of several European countries, and especially in the words of a young functionary of the Communist Party in a country he deemed important, a distinguished man who spoke perfect French and knew everything about the gulags, who at a cocktail party confessed that he was a migliorista communist, a term whose definition remained vague to him but which he’d believed analogous to his own ideas.

The night Soviet tanks crossed the Hungarian border, László remembered the migliorista, and since that young functionary had left him his phone number, he called him right before the Russians cut the lines: he knew that the symbolic support of a democratic country would have been more important against the Russian tanks than the small, poorly equipped army at Hungary’s disposal. The phone rang for a long while, then a sleepy voice answered, a maid, sorry, the onorevole was out for dinner, the caller could leave a message if he liked. László told her to say only that László had called. No one called back. László thought domestic servants couldn’t be trusted, but he wasn’t much concerned, because at that moment he had other things to think about, and then, two days later, when he heard on the radio that the foreign comrade, on behalf of his own party, had called the Hungarian patriots counter-revolutionary, he realized he hadn’t gotten it wrong. What László’s thinking now, instead, as he gazes out the window at the New York skyscrapers, is how curious things are, because he’s just read a poem by Yeats, “Men Improve with the Years,” and he asks himself if it’s really like this, if time actually improves men, or if this improvement actually means they’re becoming other men, because as time carries them along with it, what once was true now seems more like a mirage, and meanwhile he’s listening to Béla Bartók’s music, the sun is setting over New York, he has to take his constitutional up to Central Park, and he’s thinking of the time when he was the one who wanted to improve his era.

How László was able to hold the Soviet army in check for three days, nobody can determine. We can make some conjectures: his strategic skill, his stubbornness, his fervid faith in the impossible. But the truth of the matter was that the tanks of the invading army couldn’t get through, the Soviets sustained many losses until, on the fourth day, their forces finally prevailed over László’s fragile platoon. The Russian commander was a man close to his age, let’s just call him Dimitri, which in Russia ensures anonymity, but he was none other than that Dimitri. A Georgian, he’d studied at the Moscow Military Academy, he loved three things in life: Stalin, because loving Stalin was mandatory and because Stalin was Georgian like he was, Pushkin, and women. A career officer, he’d never been involved in politics, he simply loved Russian soil, he was a hot-tempered, hearty man, who was unhappy, maybe, because while he’d been decorated for bravery as a young man in the fight against the Nazis, he also really hated the Nazis, while he wasn’t able to muster up any hatred at all for the Hungarians and couldn’t under stand why he had to. Yet their unexpected resistance bothered him, he grieved for his dead soldiers but mostly he was bothered by this useless resistance that made no sense to him, the Hungarians knew they’d be swept away like twigs and every hour they resisted was just an illusion made of blood. Why shed blood over an illusion? This disturbed him.

When order was restored in Budapest as Moscow wanted, and the unwanted government was replaced with more loyal men, the Hungarian officers who’d taken part in the rebellion, as the resistance was called, were tried in court. Of course László was among them, he’d been one of the worst rebels and deserved to be made an example of. To support its own charges, that fake court asked the officer Dimitri for a written report, which he sent from Moscow. The sentence had already been set, this was just for show, yet because of the sheer force of the writing, László thought he was being condemned mainly because of Dimitri’s report. He was given the sentence a rebel like him deserved: he was publicly disgraced, then expelled from the army, eventually jailed in civilian clothes, because the Hungarian uniform must remain guiltless. When they freed him he was already an old man, his house had been confiscated, he had no means of support, his wife was dead, he suffered from arthritis. He went to live with his daughter, who’d married a country veterinarian. And so time went along, until the day the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the empire of the Soviet Union collapsed as well, along with the systems of satellite countries such as Hungary. A few years later the democratic government of his new country decided to rehabilitate the career officers who in 1956 had guided the revolt against the Soviet Union. Only a few were still alive, László among them.

* * *

Sometimes the deep meaning of an event reveals itself just at the point when that event seems to be settled. László’s life seemed almost at an end, and his story too. And yet it’s right at this point that the story acquires an unexpected meaning.

His daughter and grandchild took him to Budapest for the solemn ceremony that would reintegrate him into the army and award him the Hungarian medal of heroism. He went to the ceremony wearing the old uniform that had withstood time except for a few moth holes. The ceremony was imposing, broadcast on television, in that immense hall of the ministry: so, like many years before when he’d been demoted from one moment to the next, from one moment to the next he was now promoted, and found himself once again a lieutenant general, with a bunch of medals pinned to his chest. The Defense Ministry had reserved a luxurious suite for him in a fine hotel in Budapest. That night László fell asleep quickly, perhaps because he’d drunk too much, but he awoke in the middle of the night, experienced a long bout of insomnia, and during that sleepless time, he pondered something. It’s difficult to guess the motives behind this idea, but the fact is that the next morning László telephoned the Defense Ministry, gave his name and his rank, said the first and last name of a certain Russian officer, and asked for his coordinates. These were furnished to him in a few minutes: the Hungarian secret service knew everything about this officer and even provided his phone number. Dimitri, too, was a general; gold medal of honor of the Soviet Union, now retired, he lived alone in a small apartment in Moscow. The new Russia offered him a pension; a widower, he’d joined the Russian chess-players’ association and had a Saturday night season ticket at a little theater where they performed only Pushkin. László called him very late at night. Dimitri answered after the first ring, László told him his name, and Dimitri remembered immediately. László said he wanted to get to know him, Dimitri didn’t ask why, he understood. László proposed that he come to Budapest, he’d pay for the trip and lodging for a weekend at a fine hotel in Budapest. Dimitri refused, offering plausible reasons: a Hungary he didn’t like, certain foreign secret services, who knows what could happen to him, he hoped he’d understand. László said he did, and so, if Dimitri agreed, he’d go to Moscow instead.

He left the following day. His daughter tried to talk him out of it, but László told her to go back home, to not leave the vet by himself too much. When he returned, all he told his daughter and son-in-law was that the trip had gone well. They insisted on more details, and he repeated that the trip had gone well, nothing else. It was only later that he explained about that weekend in Moscow, when he was gazing at skyscrapers from a small apartment in Manhattan.

Saturday nights he’d go for dinner at a little McDonald’s on Seventieth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. He went there for two reasons. First of all because he’d discovered that in the elegant restaurants of New York, they served only breast of chicken and disdained the other parts, which ended up at McDonald’s, the restaurant for poor people, and László liked precisely these parts of the chicken reserved for mediocre restaurants. Plus he’d gotten to know a little group of fellow country men who stayed there late playing chess. He’d started playing chess with one of them, someone like himself who’d resisted the Soviets and had the great quality of knowing how to listen. László chose to recount his voyage to Moscow to this man: it was late, snowing, and the only ones left in the restaurant were the two of them and the waiter who was sweeping the floor. Dear Ferenc, he said, three days in Moscow, a city I’d never been to before, what a great city, you’d have liked it too, the people are like us, it’s not like here, where we all feel like strangers.

The first day, Dimitri and I talked about this and that and played chess, he won three times in a row and the fourth time I won, but I had the impression he let me. The following day we took a long walk along the Moscova and that night we went to see a play by Pushkin. The third day he took me to a brothel, it was a very elegant place, the sort you can’t find anymore in Budapest, I had quite a good time there and found a virility I thought dead. Ferenc, I want to tell you something, perhaps you won’t believe me, but it was there in Moscow that I spent the best days of my life.

* * *

From Time Ages in a Hurry, a collection by Antonio Tabucchi, published by Archipelago Books.

Grégoire Chamayou | A Theory of the Drone | The New Press | January 2015 | Translated by Janet Lloyd | Originally published in France as Théorie du Drone by la Fabrique Editions, Paris, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,693 words)

Below are four chapters excerpted from the book A Theory of the Drone, by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

1

Pattern-of-Life Analysis

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials.

—American Defense Science Board

 

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “kill list” validated, the drones do the rest.

The criteria that go into making these lists of people condemned to death without trial remain unknown. The administration refuses to provide any information on this subject. Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, nevertheless tried to be reassuring: “Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise.” In short: Trust us, even blindfolded.

Apart from these “personal strikes,” there are also “signature strikes,” here meaning strikes authorized on the basis of traces, indications, or defining characteristics. Such strikes target individuals whose identity remains unknown but whose behavior suggests, signals, or signs membership in a “terrorist organization.”

In such cases, the strike is made “without knowing the precise identity of the individuals targeted.” It depends solely on their behavior, which, seen from the sky, appears to “correspond to a ‘signature’ of pre-identified behavior that the United States links to militant activity.” Today, strikes of this type, against unknown suspects, appear to constitute the majority of cases.

To locate these anonymous militants, targeters “rely on what officials describe as ‘pattern of life analysis,’ using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations. . . . The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known.” As one Reaper drone operator explains, “We can develop those patterns of life, determine who the bad guys are, and then get the clearance and go through the whole find, fix, track, target, attack cycle.”

Each and every person has a particular form or pattern of life. Your daily actions are repetitive, your behavior has certain regularities. For example, you rise at roughly the same hour and regularly make the same journey to work or elsewhere. You frequently meet up with the same friends in the same places. If you are placed under surveillance, it is possible to record all your movements and establish a spatiotemporal map of all your usual doings. Furthermore, by intercepting your telephone calls, observers can superimpose your social network upon this map, determine which are your personal links, and calculate the importance of each one in your life. As an American army manual explains: “While the enemy moves from point to point, reconnaissance or surveillance tracks and notes every location and person visited. Connections between those sites and persons to the target are built, and nodes in the enemy’s network emerge.” Once this network of places and links in your life is established, it will be possible to predict your behavior: if it is not raining, on Saturday you will probably go jogging in a particular park at a particular time. But an observer may also perceive suspicious irregularities: today you have not followed your usual route, and you have met with someone in an unusual place. Any interruption of the norm that you yourself have established by your habits, any departure from your regular behavior, can sound an alarm bell: something abnormal and therefore potentially suspect is happening.

An analysis of the pattern of a person’s life may be defined more precisely as “the fusion of link analysis and a geospatial analysis.” For some idea of what is involved here, imagine a superimposition, on a single map, of Facebook, Google Maps, and an Outlook calendar. This would be a fusion of social, spatial, and temporal particulars, a mixed mapping of the socius, locus, and tempus spheres—in other words, a combination of the three dimensions that, not only in their regularities but also in their discordances, constitute a human life.

This method stems from activity-based intelligence, or ABI. From the mass of information collected about a particular individual, group, or place gradually emerge patterns, or traceable themes. Activity becomes an alternative to identity. Once a target has been named, instead of trying to localize it, do quite the opposite. Start by establishing surveillance and gathering information. Next, make large-scale graphs to do an analysis of “big data,” picking out nodular points that, by reason of the position and scale they occupy on the diagram, can be identified as threats that need to be neutralized. “By compiling activity-based association data with its metadata over time and adding analysis and reporting from many analysts,” wrote Keith L. Barber of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, “a rich archive will be formed to harvest patterns of life, networks and abnormalities which may have been overlooked otherwise.” The tools of human geography and the sociology of social networks are now enlisted in the service of a policy of eradication in which “persistent surveillance” makes it possible to pick out dangerous individuals. The painstaking work of establishing an archive of lives progressively gathers together the elements of a file that, once it becomes thick enough, will constitute a death warrant.

Officials claim that these methods ensure selective targeting. “You can track individuals and—patiently and carefully—build up a picture of how they move, where they go and what they see,” noted a U.S. counterterrorism official. Those who end up being killed “are people whose actions over time have made it obvious that they are a threat,” added another.

But the whole problem—at once epistemological and political—lies in this claimed ability to be able to correctly convert an assembly of probable indices into a legitimate target.

Both the means and the methodology are patently limited. As a former CIA officer admits, “You can only see so much from 20,000 feet.” A drone can distinguish shapes only more or less imprecisely. For example, in April 2011, American drones were “unable to discriminate the highly distinctive combat outline of two Marines (with full battle equipment) from the irregular enemy.” A telling joke made in the corridors of American power went, “When the CIA sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it’s a terrorist training camp.”

On March 17, 2011, an American strike decimated a group of men meeting in Datta Khel, Pakistan, on the grounds that “they acted in a manner consistent with AQ [al-Qaeda]-linked militants.” The manner of their gathering corresponded to that predefined as resembling terrorist behavior. But the meeting observed from the skies was actually a traditional assembly, a jirga, convoked to resolve a disagreement in the local community. Seen from the sky, a village meeting looks just like a gathering of militants. Between nineteen and thirty civilians are estimated to have perished in the attack.

On September 2, 2010, the American authorities announced that they had eliminated an important Taliban leader in Afghanistan. But in actual fact the missiles had killed Zabet Amanullah, a civilian engaged in an electoral campaign, as well as nine other people. That confusion was possible only because of the excessive faith placed in quantitative analysis (necessary, however, for this kind of device): the analysts had concentrated on SIM card data, the interception of phone calls, and graphs of social networks. Special forces troops told journalist Kate Clark that “they were not tracking the name, but targeting the telephones.”

As for establishing the truth, quantity of indications cannot be converted into quality. And that is certainly the problem since, as Gareth Porter explains,

the link analysis methodology employed by intelligence analysis is incapable of qualitative distinctions among relationships depicted on their maps of links among “nodes.” It operates exclusively on quantitative data—in this case the number of phone calls to or visits made to a pre-existing JPEL target or to other numbers in touch with that target. The inevitable result is that more numbers of phones held by civilian non-combatants show up on the charts of insurgent networks. If the phone records show multiple links to numbers already on the “kill/capture” list, the individual is likely to be added to the list.

In short, according to this theory, group membership and identity can be deduced from the number and frequency of contacts, regardless of their nature. Thus it is inevitable that, as one officer concluded, “if we decide [someone is] a bad person, the people with him are also bad.”

This profiling method works only with schemas. And a single schema may, by definition, correspond to a number of heterogeneous phenomena. Imagine that you see a shadow resembling a huge dog. If you have access only to the shadow, how can you tell with certainty what object created it? It may simply have been made by an arrangement of someone’s hands as part of a shadow play.

It is nevertheless on the strength of such epistemological bases that “signature strikes” are today made by American drones. The authorities have built themselves a theater of shadows, but “the result, way too often, is firing blind based on ‘pattern of life’ indicators, without direct confirmation that the targets are, in fact, who we think they are—killing innocent people in the process.”

That echoed the words of a young Pakistani man, a victim, together with his family, of a drone strike, when he was asked why he thought they had been attacked: “They say there were terrorists, but it was my home. . . . There are no terrorists. It’s just common people with beards.”

Photo illustration by STML

2

Vulnerabilities

These imposters sold charms that made people invulnerable in warfare and fortunate in hunting and preserved them from all danger.

—Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg

 

The great myths of invulnerability are almost all accounts of failure. The heroes are invulnerable, except at one point. Achilles’ body is entirely “impenetrable by iron,” with the exception of his heel. Siegfried, who was bathed in the entrails of a dragon, has a body covered “with skin as hard as scales, unaffected by the blows of an axe,” except for his right shoulder, on which the leaf of a lime tree had alighted. Heracles envelops the child Ajax in the pelt of a Nemean lion, and this makes Ajax’s body invulnerable except in his armpits, which were not in contact with the wild beast’s hide. In Persian mythology, Zoroaster pours enchanted water over the head of Isfendiyar, but the latter makes the mistake of closing his eyes, so Rustam will be able to fell him by shooting an arrow into his right eye. In the Nordic fables, Frigga, the mother of Baldur, makes all beings, both animate and inanimate, swear to spare her son. All swear the oath except for one puny plant, mistletoe, which she had omitted to invite to the meeting.

The message of these myths is that invulnerability is precisely that, a myth. There is always one unforeseen weak point, one flaw. He has felled a dragon but will die from a fallen leaf. The lesson is not only that invulnerability can never be total, but also that any attempt to achieve invulnerability in turn engenders a corresponding vulnerability. It is by grasping Achilles’ body in order to plunge it into the river that Thetis makes it invulnerable and at the same time produces its vulnerable point, which is the spot at which she grasped it. With regard to invulnerability and vulnerability, these two, far from excluding one another, each summon up the other.

This warning may also be read as a prescription: when faced with an enemy who is seemingly invulnerable or who wishes to be so, find the fault, seek out the Achilles’ heel. Everything depends upon discovering in what way the seemingly invulnerable one is vulnerable. Combat presupposes an inquiry, and that inquiry concerns the body of the enemy.

In the Middle Ages, before gunpowder upset the socio-technical conditions for life and death in battle, it was said that the knights had managed “to render themselves almost invulnerable by thinking of joining together their pieces of armor so closely that neither spear nor sword nor dagger could penetrate easily to their bodies and making that armor so hard that no piece could be pierced.” Consequently, however, “part of the skill of combatants, both in battles and in single combat, lay in finding a fault in the armor.”

There is a time lag between what happens on the ground and when the drone operators see the image of that on their screen. The problem lies with the signal’s latency. Space, which it was claimed could be suppressed by technical means, made a comeback in the form of an incomprehensible time lag. All that the operators have to aim at is the slightly obsolete image of an earlier situation. The New York Times reports that targets now make the most of this asynchrony: when individuals think that they are being hunted by a drone, they adopt zigzag movements.

A far cry from the all-powerful image that they wish to convey, drones are fragile weapons, riddled with faults and deep contradictions. They have multiple vulnerabilities. First are the technological ones. Their use presupposes mastery over the airspace in which they move. If this condition, automatically acquired in the context of asymmetrical warfare in which the enemy lacks effective antiair defenses, should disappear, most of the present-day drones would, as David Deptula himself admits, simply “start falling from the sky like rain.”

Mastery over the airwaves is also necessary. In 2009, the press reported that Iraqi insurgents had managed to intercept the video feeds transmitted by Predator drones. To accomplish this, all they needed was a satellite antenna and software that could be purchased on the Internet for $26. Convinced of their own technological superiority, the American military had apparently not taken the elementary precaution of effectively encrypting their transmissions.

The Israeli army recently realized that as a result of similar negligence, Hezbollah had over the past ten years developed the capacity to intercept video feeds from Israeli drones, which enabled that organization to, among other things, pinpoint the position of the Israeli battalions on the ground, the better to ambush them. Armed surveillance was, without the Israelis knowing it, lending its eyes to the enemy. One of the classic principles of guerrilla warfare is to supply oneself with weapons taken from the enemy camp. It is a rule that today is equally valid for the electromagnetic components of one’s arsenal.

If the signals emitted by the drones have been so easily intercepted, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the flows of data that control them could likewise be hacked. The air pirates of the future will use software to crack codes and take control from a distance. In 2011 Wired magazine revealed that malware had infected the Creech Air Force Base computers, including those handled by drone operators. This involved a software spy of the keylogger variety, capable of recording keystrokes and transmitting them to a third party in such a way as to make it possible to recover passwords. That threat remained relatively benign, but it is obviously possible to envisage other scenarios. Just like any other connected computer system, the drone is vulnerable to intrusions. A computer army can be paralyzed by a viral attack more efficiently than by bombs.

The option of having totally robotized drones would certainly eliminate any problems involving humans in the command centers. However, it would have another security weakness: these machines would be dependent upon GPS data, which can easily be jammed or manipulated. In the course of a test organized by the American authorities in June 2012, a group of researchers from the University of Texas demonstrated how easily a drone could be brought down in this way. Thanks to an apparatus put together at the cost of a few thousand dollars’ worth of material, “we fooled the UAV into thinking that it was rising straight up.” The drone’s autopilot immediately compensated, sending the drone toward the ground. If no one had intervened, it would have crashed.

However, the faults are not solely technical. They are also politico-strategic. In 1999, two Chinese strategists suggested that the American preference for “zero dead” offered the United States’ adversaries a rapid, easy, and low-cost means of thwarting the world’s greatest power: “These common American soldiers who should be on the battlefield have now become the most costly security in war, like precious china bowls that people are afraid to break. All of the opponents who have engaged in battle with the American military have probably mastered the secret of success—if you have no way of defeating this force, you should kill its rank and file soldiers.” The dronization of the armed forces further radicalizes this strategic fault. If the military withdraws from the battlefield, enemy violence will turn against targets that are easier to reach. Even if the soldiers are beyond reach, civilians are not. As one American soldier explains, “We must understand that attempts to armorize our force against all potential enemy threats . . . shifts the ‘burden of risk’ from a casualty-averse military force onto the populace. In doing so, we have lifted the burden from our own shoulders and placed it squarely upon those who do not possess the material resources to bear it—the civilian populace.” The paradox is that hyperprotection of military personnel tends to compromise the traditional social division of danger, in which soldiers are at risk and civilians are protected. By maximizing the protection of military lives and making the inviolability of its “safe zone” the mark of its power, a state that uses drones tends to divert reprisals toward its own population.

This type of scenario is all the more probable given that the viability of the security model associated with the principle of “projecting power without projecting vulnerability” rests upon very fragile assumptions. It postulates that the establishment of an effective domestic “safe zone” is possible—that the danger, the threat, the enemy can be absolutely confined to the space outside. This assumption runs up against the problem of the irreducible porosity of frontiers. There is no wall high enough, no barrier sufficiently impassable to guarantee the absolute isolation of a national “gated community.”

The military drone is a low-cost weapon—at least in comparison to classic fighter planes. That has long been one of the principal selling points for such a weapon. But of course the contradiction lies in the fact that it is in the nature of such a weapon to proliferate.

What does Francis Fukuyama do after the end of history? In his leisure hours, he puts together little drones in his garage and then proudly exhibits them on his blog. He is part of an rapidly developing subculture: that of the homemade drone. Following in the footsteps of the model enthusiasts of the 1960s, there today exists a whole little community of amateurs who buy or construct drones at the cost of a few hundred dollars. With their microcameras on board, these machines make it possible to produce unofficial little films, some of which are strikingly beautiful. I am thinking in particular of a flight over New York in which, once over the Brooklyn Bridge, the camera scans the facades of the skyline, ending up by gliding past the flame on the Statue of Liberty. Proof enough of the validity of Walter Benjamin’s thesis that technology, today used for death-dealing purposes, may eventually recover its emancipating potential and readopt the playful and aesthetic aspirations that secretly inspire it.

But even if the drone can and should be demilitarized, it is also perfectly possible to convert such homemade machines into daunting unconventional weapons at little cost. The Russian researcher Eugene Miasnikov sees in amateur drones a “suicide bomber on steroids”: unlike a suicide bomber, an amateur drone “can easily penetrate security and threaten otherwise safe areas (e.g., the Green Zone) or reach crowded public places like sports stadiums.”

In November 2006, a confidential report produced by the U.S. military noted that a new technique was being used by the insurgents in Iraq. Suicide bombers were now equipped with a camera that transmitted images directly to their superiors. Thanks to this equipment, “a second member of a terrorist cell is able to observe the activities of the suicide bomber via a miniature camera installed in the vest. The second member will ensure the bomber approaches the intended target and actually conducts the detonation. Should the bomber fail to detonate the device, the observer is able to detonate the device remotely.”

A human drone is thus invented: a man, remotely controlled by others, who can be blown up at any moment, thanks to a long-distance detonating device. The irony is that commanders in the opposite camp might, thanks to the video cameras installed on the helmets of their own soldiers, be watching as some individual approaches and makes suspicious gestures. From the snow that simultaneously covers their respective screens, those on both sides will instantly know that their men have perished. Once this stage is reached, the next step in perfecting the art of assassination is to do without the man carrying the bomb: move on from a dronized partisan to, quite simply, a drone.

Photo by defenceimages

3

Drones and Kamikazes

To me, the robot is our answer to the suicide bomber.

—Bart Everett

 

Walter Benjamin did some thinking about drones, radio-controlled planes that the military thinkers of the mid-1930s were already imagining. He used this example to illustrate the difference between what he called the “first technique,” which could be traced back to prehistoric art, and the “second technique,” which was characteristic of modern industry. As he saw it, the distinction between them was not so much the inferiority or archaism of the one in comparison to the other but rather a “difference of trends.” “The first technique,” he wrote, “engages the human being as much as possible, the second as little as possible. The great technological feat of the first technique is, in a manner of speaking, the human sacrifice; that of the second lies along the lines of remote-controlled airplanes that don’t require any human crew.”

On one hand, the techniques of sacrifice; on the other, those of play. On one hand, integral engagement; on the other, total disengagement. On one hand, the uniqueness of a living action; on the other, the limitless reproducibility of a mechanical gesture. Wrote Benjamin, “Once and for all is the motto that applies to the first technique (it deals with the forever irreparable lapse or the eternal vicariousness of the sacrificial death). Once is nothing is the motto of the second technique (it has to do with the experimentation and its tireless variations of the test set-up).”

On one hand, the kamikaze or the suicide bomber, who crashes once and for all in a single explosion; on the other, the drone, which fires its missiles repeatedly, as if nothing happened.

Whereas the kamikaze implies a total fusion of the fighter’s body and weapon, the drone ensures their radical separation. The kamikaze: My body is a weapon. The drone: My weapon has no body. The former implies the death of the agent. The latter totally excludes it. Kamikazes are those for whom death is certain. Drone pilots are those for whom death is impossible. In this sense, they represent two opposite poles on the spectrum of exposure to death. In between the two are classic fighters, those for whom death is a risk.

One speaks of “suicide bombing” or of “suicide assassination,” but what would be the antonym? There is no specific expression to designate those who kill by explosion without ever risking their lives. Not only is it not necessary for them to die in order to kill, but it is impossible for them to be killed as they kill.

Contrary to the evolutionist schema that Benjamin, in truth, only suggested, the better to subvert it, the kamikaze and the drone—the weapon of sacrifice and the weapon of self-preservation—did not succeed each other chronologically, one following from the other as history follows from prehistory, On the contrary, they emerged together, as two opposed but historically simultaneous tactics.

In the mid-1930s, an engineer working for the RCA read an article about the Japanese army that greatly alarmed him. From that article he learned that the Japanese were training squadrons of pilots for suicide aircraft. Long before the tragic surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Vladimir Zworykin understood the scale of this threat: “The efficiency of this method, of course, is yet to be proven but if such a psychological training of personnel is possible, this weapon will be of the most dangerous nature. We hardly can expect to introduce such methods in our country and therefore have to rely on our technical superiority to meet the difficulty.” At that time the United States already possessed prototypes of “radio-controlled planes” that could be used as air torpedoes. Bur the problem was that these remote-controlled devices were blind. Noted Zworykin, “They lose their efficiency as soon as they are beyond visual contact with the directing base. The solution to this problem was evidently found by the Japanese.” That solution was the kamikaze: since the pilot has eyes and is ready to die, he is able to guide the machine right to its target.

However, Zworykin was also one of the pioneers of television. And therein, of course, lay the solution: “One possible means of obtaining practically the same results as the suicide pilot is to provide a radio-controlled torpedo with an electric eye.”

The operator would be able to watch the target right to the end and, through radio control, visually guide the weapon to the point of impact.

Coupling television with the remote-controlled plane, Zworykin had discovered the formula that, much later, would become that of both “smart bombs” and armed drones: remove from the plane any part of the pilot save an electronic retina, with the pilot’s actual body remaining elsewhere, out of range of the enemy antiair defenses.

Zworykin’s text is remarkable because, though his was one of the very first theoretical formulations, he recognized the ancestor of the drone as an anti-kamikaze, and did so not only from the logical point of view of his definition but also and above all at a tactical level. This was the weapon that responded to the kamikaze both as its antidote and as its twin. The drone and the kamikaze constituted two opposed practical options for resolving one and the same problem, that of guiding the bomb to its target. What the Japanese intended to bring about through psychological training and their mores of sacrifice, the Americans would achieve through material technology and purely technical procedures.

The conceptual genesis of the drone takes place within the framework of an ethico-technical economy of life and death in which technological power takes over from a form of undemandable sacrifice. While on one side there were to be courageous combatants ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause, on the other there were to be nothing but ghostly machines.

This antagonism between the kamikaze and remote control reappears today: suicide bombings versus phantom bombings. The polarity is primarily economic. It sets those who have nothing but their bodies with which to fight in opposition to those who possess capital and technology. But these two regimes, the one tactical, the other material, also correspond to two different ethical regimes: the ethic of heroic sacrifice, on one hand, and the ethic of vital self-preservation, on the other.

The drone and the kamikaze stand in contrast as two opposed forms of moral sensibility, two forms of ethos that reflect each other but are each other’s antithesis and nightmare. What is at stake in this difference, at least on the face of it, is a particular concept of one’s relationship to death, both one’s own and that of others; to sacrifice or self-preservation; to danger and to courage and to vulnerability and destructiveness. Involved here are two political and affective economies regarding one’s relationship to death, both the death that one deals and that to which one exposes oneself; but also two opposed concepts or visions of horror.

Richard Cohen, a columnist at the Washington Post, sets out his view of the situation: “As for the Taliban fighters, they not only don’t cherish life, they expend it freely in suicide bombings. It’s difficult to envisage an American suicide bomber.” He asserts: “There is really no such thing as an American suicide bomber. We don’t extol the bomber and parade his or her children before the TV cameras so that other children will envy them for the death of a parent. This is odd to us. This is chilling to us. This is downright repugnant.” Then he adds complacently, “Maybe we have come to cherish life too much.”

So what is “odd,” “chilling,” and “repugnant” is being ready to die in the struggle and find glory in so doing. The old idol of martial sacrifice, falling directly from its pedestal into the enemy clutches, has become utterly repellent, the epitome of moral horror. Sacrifice, at once incomprehensible and ignoble and immediately interpreted as scorn for life (without any sense that it may, on the contrary, imply scorn for death), is opposed by an ethic based on a love of life—of which the drone surely represents the ultimate expression. As an ultimate affectation, we admit that we love life so much that we do perhaps overprotect it. This excessive love would certainly be excusable were it not that so much self-complacency hints at self-love. For, contrary to Cohen’s claims, it is certainly our lives, not life in general, that we hold so dear. If the case of an American kamikaze seems to be inconceivable, that is because it would be an oxymoron. Here life could not possibly be denied, for the very good reason that the only life that is denied is that of others.

When questioned by a journalist in order to find out if it was “true that Palestinians were not concerned about human life, not even that of those close to them,” Eyad El-Sarraj, the director of the mental health program in Gaza, replied, “How can you believe in your own humanity if you do not believe in the humanity of the enemy?”

In what respect might it be less horrible to kill without exposing oneself than to share the fate of one’s victims? In what respect might a weapon making it possible to kill without danger be less repugnant than the opposite? Jacqueline Rose, amazed that “dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior,” asks herself why “dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself.”

Hugh Gusterson adds that an “anthropologist from Mars might note that many people in the Middle East feel about U.S. drone attacks the way that Richard Cohen feels toward suicide-bombers. The drone attacks are widely perceived in the Middle East as cowardly, because the drone pilot is killing people on the ground from the safety of an air-conditioned pod in Nevada, where there is no chance that he can be killed by those he is attacking.”

Talal Asad suggests that the horror provoked in Western societies by suicide bombings lies in the fact that the author of the attack, through his action, a priori rules out any kind of retributive justice. By dying with his victim, coagulating both crime and punishment within a single action, he makes punishment impossible and thereby deactivates the fundamental resort of a form of justice conceived in the penal mode. He will never be able “to pay for what he has done.”

The horror aroused by the idea of death administered by pilotless machines is perhaps connected to a similar perception. Gusterson goes on to say, “The drone operator is also a mirror image of the suicide bomber in that he too deviates, albeit in the opposite direction, from our paradigmatic image of combat.”

Argus Eyes, Interactive video installation by Michel Winterberg, 2013. Via Flickr

4

Psychopathologies of the Drone

In the case of war neuroses, . . . what is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy.

—Sigmund Freud

 

“The trauma of drone pilots” has become a common theme in the media. An early appearance was in an Associated Press article in 2008: “Long-distance warriors are suffering some of the same psychological stresses as their comrades on the battlefield.” But the rest of the article produced nothing to corroborate that statement. In fact, quite the contrary: the journalist reported that in the course of various interviews with drone operators, “none said they had been particularly troubled by their mission.” The same procedure—an announcement followed up discreetly by a vague denial—seems to have been adopted in most press articles devoted to the matter.

Many American soldiers did not hesitate to vent their scorn and anger toward the drone pilots and their supposed trauma: “Fricken cry babies, that’s what they are. . . Fire them and get somebody new if they can’t take the stress of the air-conditioned trailer and going home every night.” Or, in a similar register, “I simply scoff at the idea of some computer nerds whining about ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘PTSD’ when they not only know what they’re getting into but aren’t even in same country getting shot at. It’s a slap in the face to those who really deploy, who really get shot at and who really have to deal with the psychological effects of war.”

By making it a point of honor to distance themselves from those whom they consider to be a bunch of wimps, those self-appointed spokesmen for “classic” soldiers indirectly illuminated the role that this media-promulgated theme played in the debate. The emphasis placed on the supposed traumas suffered by drone operators made it possible to assimilate them, via a common psychic vulnerability, to classic soldiers (fighters suffer from the stress of fighting and so do drone operators, so drone operators must be fighters too) and to humanize them as agents of armed violence (despite the technical nature of their weapon, they were not just cold killers).

The emphasis placed on the psychic agony of the drone operators also made it possible to dismiss the “PlayStation mentality,” according to which putting murder on the screen involves a virtualization of the consciousness of homicide. Before the drones became the subject of daily arguments in the American press, there was a time when drone pilots could still reply more or less honestly to the questions put to them, such as “How do you feel about killing through the intermediary of a screen?” Here is a brief record of the replies:

Oh, it’s a gamer’s delight.

Almost like playing the computer game Civilization, in which you direct units and armies in battle.

It’s like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool.

In the aftermath of such public relations disasters, press officers must have reframed their aim and rebriefed the troops, for nowadays there is no longer any sign of such statements in their interviews. On the contrary, when in 2012 a New York Times reporter visited a drone base, he noted, “As more than one pilot told me, a bit defensively, ‘We are not just playing video games here.’”

This is how the website Airforce-Technology.com, affiliated with the defense industry, describes this discursive U-turn: “While it was initially thought that those operating drones would be more callous about their actions than personnel operating in the battlefield, the opposite now appears to be true. Some analysts argue that UAV operators may almost care too much and that they are experiencing higher levels of combat stress than some units in Afghanistan, with significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout.” We have come full circle: far from living through an experience of murder made unreal, the operators are affected by it so much that there is a serious concern that they “almost care too much” about their victims.

Clearly, if they felt nothing at all, this would raise a moral problem. But given that they kill with sensitivity and even with “care,” they can continue to do so with our blessing. This sensitivity and care, this supposed empathy with the victims, is, paradoxically, what now makes a public rehabilitation of homicide by drones possible. The theme of empathy here undergoes a reversal similar to that of the psychic vulnerability mentioned above. Whereas empathy for the enemy was classically understood as a ferment of possible resistance to murder, as a possible premise for a refusal to kill, in the discourse that we are now considering it serves to apply a layer of humanity to an instrument of mechanized homicide. In the face of this vast operation involving the instrumentalization of ethico-affective categories for military ends, however, there is another image that comes to mind: that of the crocodile shedding tears, the better to devour its prey.

Nevertheless, there is a shadow darkening the media picture of empathetic drone operators suffering psychic trauma: it has no empirical basis. The military psychologist Hugo Ortega recently conducted a vast investigation into the subject. He subjected drone operators to psychological tests in order to determine their levels of stress and discover whether they might be affected by post-traumatic stress disorder. His conclusion:

We haven’t diagnosed any pilots with PTSD—that’s right, that’s right. We had, I think, one sensor operator that we thought maybe . . . but what is one? . . . The major findings of the work so far have been that the popularized idea of watching the combat was really not what was producing the most day-to-day stress for these guys.

On the other hand,

shift work, schedule changes—those are the top number-one issue for stress. And then they have long hours, low manning. It’s really kind of a boring job to be vigilant on the same thing for days and days and days. It’s really boring. It’s kind of terrible. And maintaining relationships with their families—these were the kinds of things that they reported as stressful for them. And if you look through that stuff, they don’t say “Because I was in combat.” They don’t say “Because we had to blow up a building.” They don’t say “Because we saw people getting blown up.” That’s not what causes their stress—at least subjectively to them. It’s all the other quality-of-life things that everybody else would complain about too. If you look at nurses who work night shift, anybody who does shift work, they complain of the same things.

Warfare becomes tele-work with shifting timetables, and the symptoms its agents present are all connected with this.

Apart from that, adds Ortega,

they have more of an existential conflict. It’s more of a guilt feeling, perhaps, or a “Did I make the right decision?” . . . So a lot more second-guessing in this, as opposed to the classic PTSD description of symptoms, which is really related to a physical threat event. . . . One was the feeling of a sort of guilt, that they were watching a battle take place and they could see it in extraordinary detail.

However, that “guilt” is not something that Ortega studies. It lies outside his field of competence. At a theoretical level, it is relegated to the domain of existential matters that lie outside the framework of psychological research. So at a practical level, the notion of guilt is entrusted to the care of military social workers specifically assigned to take care of this kind of moral distress on drone bases—murder being considered as one of these spiritual problems.

So the media buzz around the suffering of drone operators was without foundation. Military psychologists discovered no trace of post-traumatic stress disorder. But it should be pointed out that it would have been impossible for them to find any such traces, for one very simple reason that stems from the categories of disease at their disposal. Let us take a look at their bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. What exactly is PTSD? The DSM is of the opinion that the patient must have been exposed to “an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury or other threat to one’s physical integrity.” Drone operators are by definition excluded from that kind of situation, for there is no threat to their physical integrity. Perhaps it could be argued that the drone operators are nevertheless in a position of “witnessing an event that involves death or a threat to the physical integrity of another person,” but the truth is that they are far more than just witnesses: they are the authors of that death, that injury, that threat. The DSM’s category of PTSD is too indeterminate to cover the particular form taken by their experience. Once again, the drone upsets the available categories, to the point of rendering them inapplicable. As for the more general notion of “combat stress”—defined as stress that is “the result of exposure to the same conditions during military actions that cause physical injury and disease in battle” or to conditions close to those of battle in an “area of operations characterized by continuous action and high danger”—short of deciding somehow or other to change the meaning of the words, one is bound to conclude that that notion too is inapplicable to drone operators.

Military psychologists could well save themselves both time and money, as there is no point in carrying out lengthy and costly inquiries in order to discover whether these pathologies, thus defined, are to be found among drone operators. For it is, by definition, impossible: the technology radically rules out or substantially modifies the only stress factors that are covered by the existing categories of disease.

As is often the case, in order to understand this matter more clearly, it is helpful to reread some of the psychoanalytic literature. In the aftermath of World War I, in a conference on war neuroses that gathered together most of the great names of the period, Karl Abraham made the following comment: “It is not only demanded of these men in the field that they must tolerate dangerous situations—a purely passive performance—but there is a second demand which has been much too little considered; I allude to the aggressive acts for which the soldier must be hourly prepared, for besides the readiness to die the readiness to kill is also demanded of him.”

Abraham was particularly interested in the case of soldier-patients for whom “the anxiety as regards killing is of similar significance to that of dying.” So now the question seems to become: what does the fact of killing, of becoming a killer, threaten to kill within the subject himself? Freud, who wrote the preface to the conference proceedings, suggested a reply to that question: “In the case of war neuroses, . . . what is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy.” What the violent subject sees developing within him in the course of the war is a new self, a “war-ego.” This is a threat that does not come from outside but from within, for what this emerging self endangers is the old “peace-ego.” A war neurosis is a response to that inner conflict; it is an attempt to find a pathological form of resolution.

Closer to our own times, the psychologist Rachel McNair has suggested expanding the overly narrow notion of PTSD by defining a condition called “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress” (PITS). Noting that recent literature has focused almost exclusively on the traumas inflicted on passive victims by external forces, she tries to isolate the active component of the anxiety, the one that stems from the fact of having been the agent of violence, in fact a perpetrator of it. Within the mixed experience of a soldier, it is hard to sort out one particular element from the rest, but McNair studies cases of pure perpetration, for example the nightmares of executioners haunted by images of the last moments of their condemned prisoners. She does not cite the case of drone operators, as her book was published too early for that, but it looks as if that might be a good means by which to test out her idea, for it presents a case of pure perpetration, armed violence reduced solely to its active aspect and without any vital threat to its perpetrator. It is this emerging category of PITS that needs to be tested empirically if one wishes to illuminate debates about trauma suffered by drone operators.

The rapid development of new techniques of violence at a distance will doubtless reorient the psychoethical modes of problematizing the experience of war in Western societies. The first signs of such a reorientation are already detectable. In a state supplied with largely dronized armed forces, one will probably move on inexorably from a study of psychic traumas linked to violence personally suffered to a study of psychic wounds linked to violence personally perpetrated. A kind of clinic for executioners would thus develop alongside psychotherapies for assassins, all of which would be designed to deliver them from their unease.

We are thus faced, for the moment, with two hypotheses regarding the psychic life of drone operators: either this weaponry creates insensitive killers, or else it produces a mental process that involves being tormented by guilt, potentially to the degree of inducing neurosis. In practice, the truth about any given individual probably falls somewhere between those two poles. As for which of the two options is the more desirable, that is a question that remains open.

* * *

Copyright © 2013 by La Fabrique Editions. This excerpt originally appeared in A Theory of the Drone, published by The New Press, and is used here with permission.

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (3,806 words)

Photographer Q. Sakamaki was born and raised in Japan, but he moved to New York City in 1986, and has lived there ever since, covering the nightclub scene of ‘80s and ‘90s New York, documenting political efforts like the anti-gentrification movement, and capturing everyday life through striking street photography across the city.

New York is not his only focus. While Sakamaki has taken photographs around the world, from Burma to Haiti, China to Kosovo, Bosnia to Israel, Palestine to Liberia, and Afghanistan to Harlem, where he resides today—it’s his Instagram feed that has recently attracted many new fans. There, his daily, often-impressionistic images communicate a sense of profundity, even melancholy, in representing the quotidian.

Sakamaki’s photographs have appeared in books and magazines worldwide and have been the subject of exhibitions in New York and Tokyo. Among the many honors he’s received are four POYi prizes, two Overseas Press Club awards, and a first prize World Press Photo in 2006. He has published five books, including WAR DNA, which covers seven conflicts, and Tompkins Square Park, which documents the Lower East Side protests of the late ‘80s to mid-‘90s. Sakamaki is represented by Redux Pictures. We spoke recently about how he got his start and how he aims to combine identity with photography.

* * *

I’ve read that you began your career in photojournalism covering the Tompkins Square Park uprising in New York City in the late 1980s—is that right? Did you take photographs even before that, if not professionally?

I photographed before, but it was more fashion photography [and] portraits. I was doing that and trying to get a job, when something started in the Lower East Side at Tompkins Square Park. It started before ’88, the summer of ’88, and then continued until the middle of the ’90s, depending on people’s definition of what is a movement. It was like a real melting pot, there. The only real melting pot I’ve ever seen in New York City. Not like here [in Harlem] today. But anyway, after [the Tompkins movement in reaction to gentrification and other labor issues], I decided I would like to cover more—I don’t like the term photojournalism. [We’ll return to this later.]

I used to be very political, when I was 13 or 14 year old. Then I loved fashion and entertainment in my late teens. So the Tompkins Square Park movement felt like something of a flashback. Until the mid-’90s I covered a lot of New York political movements, like the anti-gentrification movement. But then the Tompkins Square Park movement was gone—with Mayor Dinkins closing the park. People tried to keep it going, but in the mid-’90s, they couldn’t. So the mid-90s in New York started to feel very boring for me. I started to pay attention more to outside, worldwide. I went to many conflict zones, war zones—to Haiti, Cambodia, and Israel, Palestine, then Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia.

Surrounding Tompkins Square Park, Lower East Side residents show solidarity in hands in hands to protest the forceful Tompkins Square Park closure. June 1991.

Were you on assignment? Were you already represented by Redux?

I was working for J.B. Pictures. Similar to Redux, now it’s gone. Before that I worked for Grazia Neri, an Italian agency. I started to work for Redux in 2003, after the Liberian [Civil] War. I was over there in Liberia.

When you were doing more fashion photography, were you working in Japan? You came to New York City in 1986, is that right?

I was doing fashion photography mostly in Japan. Yes, I came to New York in ’86.

What originally brought you to New York City?

I wanted to expand my photography. Also I wanted to go somewhere where I could feel this sense of culturism, this thing I felt at Tompkins Square Park. Paris was one candidate, and London, also Rio de Janeiro, even though I’d never been there, it sounded nice. But my French is very bad. So my choice was London or New York. Then, New York was very popular for foreigners, especially in Japan. That’s probably why I came. Also, at that time New York had a very strong art movement, starting in the late ’70s, visual arts in general, not just photography. Keith Haring, Basquiat, and many others. There were many small art galleries, especially on the Lower East Side. I showed my work, sometimes had exhibitions. There were many curators then, so we worked together showing our projects.

During eviction from Tompkins Square Park, a homeless man complains and is roughly arrested. December 14 1989.

Tell me about your time working in conflict zones, starting in the ’90s.

Shooting photography, [it’s important to show] some sense, some spirit that we can’t [always] see. First, [in a photograph] I want to touch some sense, maybe you’d call it a political sense or more like human emotion, that is always my top priority, my first interest. At the Tompkins movement, especially at the beginning, I felt like, “I’ve never seen this kind of human emotion, I’ve never touched this condition.” That’s why I was so interested. Then I lost something of this feeling. I could still visually work, but the point is I wanted to feel something soulful, some spirit or sense, so-called human emotion—or, many people say, human condition. Many visual artists or musicians are always looking for it, chasing it. After the Tompkins movement something was gone, so I looked outside [internationally]. I’d never been to so many countries before then. In the many conflict zones I visited I thought, Wow, what’s going on here, I’ve never felt—the word is not seen but feel—this before, and why? I wanted to catch something of those feelings [in images] but I couldn’t catch it. I saw it over there. For example, in Israel-Palestine, [there are] people fighting, people making suicide attacks. I talked to many people [in both Israel and Palestine]. I felt so much there. Back in New York, I felt like I lost something I’d felt there, which is what made me want to go back again and again and again.

What did you feel you lost? Some sense of understanding?

Feeling and understanding. Understanding is part of my feeling. Some people say war journalists get addicted to conflict journalism, or you’re just looking for excitement, but it’s not that—it’s beyond that. My mind is so cool [when covering a conflict], down, not up [as in a thrill]. Honestly speaking, it’s more a cool-down, a deep understanding, which is hard to keep. It’s hard to get a real answer, even when you’re touching something. That’s why many people get trapped, are addicted, risking their own life and money for this feeling.

So I continued these trips and at some point maybe I started to slow down. In the late ’90s I had ups and downs, stepping back, then traveling more, back and forth until maybe late 2000, or later. But at a certain point, when I tried to go [to cover a conflict] my body felt like an addict—not excitement, but like an addiction to find an answer. Then about three years ago, 2012, I was diagnosed with cancer. Now it’s technically gone, but it made me very depressed.

NYPD’s riot geared forces stand ready to confront protesters of Tompkins Square Park movement, on Avenue B. June 03 1991.

What happened in your work during this period of slowing down?

I wasn’t slowing down really, if I say that I think I’ll be misunderstood. Before cancer I wanted also to expand myself—it was a combination, both. I slowed down and I wanted to expand. It was this sense that I wanted to catch something of real human nature, where we’re heading in the future, including, containing, my own identity. Most people probably naturally, instinctively, want to catch this.

I couldn’t get an answer so I looked inside, to myself. I decided that I wanted to try to combine my own identity and my photography. [The conventional wisdom] of photojournalism is objectivity. At some point I felt like that can’t be true, that it’s hypocritical to aim for objectivity. For example, during the Iraq War, the reality was that U.S. media was not objective; the Japanese media too during World War II. Media says it’s not biased, but it’s a reality—power politics. Maybe it’s not hypocritical, this kind of photojournalism, but I don’t feel satisfied [by it]. So around 2010, I decided that I wanted to combine my identity, my personality, with so-called photodocumentary or photojournalism. I continue to experiment with this desire.

In 2009 I went to Xinjiang, China. That wasn’t too much about my identity, but at the end of 2010, I went to Manchuria, in the north [of China]. The reason is I wanted to combine my own identity, or personality, with those areas. Those areas are related to Japanese history, because during WWII Japan occupied those areas. Then I was diagnosed with cancer, so I tried to deeply put my emotion and identity into photography—something I’m still chasing. Then I found Instagram.

Very established Japanese photographers, like Daido Moriyama, also Takuma Nakahira, and [Nobuyoshi] Araki—those photographers are thought to be personal [in their work], especially Araki. They don’t call it identity, but they’re categorized as personal, in their photography. So I was influenced by them.

People enjoy themselves in the frozen Songhua river in Harbin, China’s frigid remote North East where history had witnessed wars and the related migrations, and now people are facing the economic upheaval.

What did Instagram allow you to do that you couldn’t before, if anything?

I’ve only been on Instagram for something like two and a half years. My colleague [at Redux] Mark Peterson pushed it [originally]. I didn’t even know what it was. During that time I was still a little bit depressed. So I started to try Instagram. For the first three months it was like a diary, not serious. Then I tried to do it more seriously, to take time with it, editing, shooting, uploading.

Do you upload photos from a camera, or just use your phone, or both?

Instagram is my experiment. I do almost 100% on my iPhone, except for photos taken before (for example, the anniversary for the Vietnam War, of the Japanese earthquake, etc.) which if I post I always announce [were made with an] ordinary film camera or DSLR.

So unless you say otherwise, all photos on your Instagram were taken with your iPhone?

Yes, exactly.

A lone man and pigeons. New York.

I’ve read in an interview that when you are using a camera, you prefer film to a DSLR. Why is that?

I still prefer film for the majority of photographs—for that so-called “golden light,” around four or five o’clock, one or two hours before sunset. That golden light. If I shoot the sky with DSLR, it’s impossible. Film is much better. But nighttime, or when it’s very cloudy, overcast like today, DSLR is much, much better.

How did you first start taking photographs? How old were you?

I used to surf, and I wanted to photograph my own action to improve my surfing or skiing technique. [Even] before then I had a camera, but it was more for taking family photos. When I seriously started shooting, it was for sports—to check my action, my ability as an athlete. But at some point I met a friend of mine, who’s also a surfer, who also used his camera for shooting landscape, daily life, beach life, urban life. So this was interesting [to me]. I was in my early-twenties. So compared to other photographers, I was very late to start seriously.

That’s late?

Yes, many start as teenagers.

Homeless cat Tuxedo poses, as she and her homeless owner escape from the frigid weather into NJ Transit Hoboken Terminal.

I read in that same interview that it’s your love for film that draws you to the Hipstamatic app—because it approximates film, digitally, in its way.

Yes, it’s similar to film—light separation, background light, the contrast or gradation. Noise is very similar to film. With Hipstamatic, the noise or image or gradation is similar to film, because it’s an effect. Of course compared to real film it’s different. But it also depends on what I shoot. Hipstamatic is no good for high contrast, it’s bad for color. Why I shoot mostly black & white [on Instagram] is because digital color is awful compared to digital black & white, in my opinion. I love color in film but it’s very expensive. I started shooting color film about four years ago when I moved to Harlem.

The striking images of Harlem on your Instagram feed are what first attracted me to your work.

It’s harder to photograph here. I feel part of a community, but Harlem is—many people are not mixing together. For example we have, in terms of cultures socializing, it’s not mixed compared to how it was in the East Village [during the ’90s]. There’s more class [segregation], a kind of class society in Harlem. There were less barriers in the East Village [back then]. Here, I see many barriers, many conflicts—between class, between race, between cultures, between ideologies, between jobs.

Part of series of “Harlem in the Corner.” 32-year-old homeless man Yuga, struggling with a mental disorder, though he remains calm. Many people hanging out around at the corner are drug addicts, but at the same time many of them are trying hard to detoxicate. Methadone is often used for it at the nearby clinics. It is a double-edged sword, since Methadone often has a strong side effect, including mental disorder.

What made you move to Harlem four years ago?

The East Village became expensive, that was the major reason.

Do you find Harlem a good place to photograph?

It [sometimes feels] superficial to me. Instagramming Harlem is a part of my life, but I have an idea for a project. I want to deeply cover something concrete that exists in Harlem—I have some plans for a project, but it’s…too close. It’s very sensitive.

Too close, how?

I know people, but not like [I did in the] East Village. I’m not deeply connected. I feel like [I’m sometimes perceived as an] outsider here. I was hanging out a lot in the nightclub scene when I moved here, in the late ’80s, early ’90s. The [message of] the nightclub scene was, “Oh New York is one big mixed place.” The reality was that the scenes were totally isolated. The gay club was only gay—sometimes straight people would come for entertainment, but it’s different. Black nightclubs were typically black. Reggae, also typically reggae black. And commercial nightclub scenes were only such kind of people, never mixed. I was especially hanging out with the fashion gay scene a lot, very friendly, but at some point, I couldn’t connect beyond something—I felt a big barrier. Probably because I am straight. There’s something, beyond friendship, that means something. Something, between gay and straight, I couldn’t pass.

Could it be the camera? Do you find the camera intimidates people, or can separate you from them?

No, the camera takes off a barrier. It’s hard to say. Let me explain, at some point, ordinary people who don’t take photos, they have a barrier here [motions with hand at chin]. If you have a camera you can get through the barrier, but then at some point, again you reach another barrier [hand motion at eye-level], which it’s difficult to cross. You can’t cross with just the camera. It’s your feeling, sense, or even fate—your identity. That’s why I became so interested to catch [this intersection]. Superficially, in terms of photography, I saw a lot of gay-related photography in the past ten years that seems superficial.

Was it my identity that couldn’t cross the barrier? Probably. Some camera technique, some different approach—that’s what I’m looking for when I talk about this desire to merge identity with photography.

A couple in Tompkins Square Park. May 1991.

Do you have a favorite place to photograph?

A favorite place, or most interesting place?

How about both?

A favorite place is Israel-Palestine. There exists something called human nature. Seems very simple but it’s not simple, it’s complicated. Over there, Israel-Palestine is my identity too.

The most interesting place—it’s been so many years that I’ve lived out of Japan. Before the 2011 earthquake, I started to feel something—that I wanted to go back. So I went back. But it’s harder for me to find new subjects in Japan, not everything feels new and uncovered to me [as it would for a foreigner].

You’ve mentioned a few photographers, especially Japanese photographers, that have influenced you. Are there other photographers that you consider important to your development?

Deborah Turbeville, a very famous American fashion photographer in the early ’80s. She died recently. I was influenced a lot by her. I didn’t feel influenced from this photographer at the time, but looking back, I was influenced a lot by Nan Goldin in the early ’80s. I thought at the time, “Oh she’s not so good.” Now I feel like she influenced me a lot [laughs]. Also Koudelka, Josef Koudelka. He was famous in 1968, [when he witnessed and recorded the Warsaw Pact military forces as they invaded Prague; his negatives were smuggled out of the former Czechoslovakia and published anonymously]. He made sensational stories—his photography showed his identity, bringing Czechoslovakian identity, former Eastern European identity. That’s why he’s one of the best-respected photographers. Not only his style, but his conception. He did it instinctively. Or it becomes so because of his nationality, his identity.

At the Q&A following the recent opening of your exhibit at The Half King called “China’s Outer Lands” (up until May 24), I thought it was interesting that you described your process as being first about a conception, then you find the visuals, and then the story creates itself. Specifically with your photographs in that exhibit, taken in China, was it your premeditated conception to focus on the ethnic minorities of China—Uighurs, Manchus, Bais, and Mongols. Was that a purposeful focus that you went in with, or did it arise naturally, being there and seeing the visuals?

I went first to Xinjiang in 2009, that was before the conflict existed within me, about human nature and identity. That became a hot news spot during that time, that’s why I went there. Uighur, that’s part of my own identity—Uighur is a pan-Turkish people [a mostly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in western China], and then during that time I started naturally to think about my identity in photography. The next year, 2010 wintertime, I went to Manchuria. And I’ve been back twice since. And also Yunnan—I didn’t count on going, but Jamie Wellford [photography editor and curator, formerly at Newsweek] said to me, why don’t you go over to Yunnan Province? Then last year I was in Mongolia.

With the reflection of China’s last emperor Puyi’s photograph and his imperial uniforms, a hide of a polar bear remains at the former Imperial Palace of Manchukuo, or the Manchu State, where Puyi stayed as Japanese puppet from 1932 to 1945. China’s North East was once called Manchuria. The region was at a crossroads that was manipulated in history, including the occupation by Russia and Japan. And now the area is facing upheavals due to the globalization with China’s rapid economic growth itself, creating the gap between the rich and the poor and even more unemployment.

There’s a quote from you in a National Geographic interview that I found really interesting—you said, “I love the reflection. Because the image of our life is not simple, it’s very complicated.” Do you feel this way about double-exposure and other tools as well?

Not double exposure, well—sometimes accidentally! On a trip to northern Sri Lanka I brought a Holga [camera] and it accidentally double-exposed some of the images. One great picture came from double exposure, at the Tamal Guard. I don’t usually use double exposure purposefully, but sometimes I do for experimental reasons. In late 2000 I did a lot of putting together two negatives in the darkroom. Today I still love reflection. Now many people are doing it, especially with Instragram. It’s getting more popular in the last ten years.

In a different interview, I read that you don’t care about the process of taking a photograph so much as if what’s captured is “true to what I witnessed.” Can you talk a bit about that?

To satisfy myself, or to get some answer that I’m looking for, or to get an answer people in the region are potentially looking for. You understand? Process of course is important but process is probably just self-satisfaction. In Japan we say process is always important, but no, result is more important. In terms of respect, process is super important, but it’s a totally different story. It’s related to why I don’t like to be called a photojournalist, because there are limits to the process. You’re called biased [if you have a sense of] politics. On the other hand, for a job, for means of this society, I have to associate with the term, but also at the same time I try to break it. If we’re looking for real journalism we have to break it. Also, now the audience for so-called photojournalism is shrinking, the industry is shrinking. We are working for a small, small, tiny world, with too much restriction. We should break it to expand, for more freedom. Otherwise we’re killing ourselves.

What are you working on now?

A Harlem project, behind the scenes, touching emotion. Today I shot using 200-quarter film for a portrait project. I’m still figuring out which camera to use. I tried a 4×5, too, but it’s tough to upload, to access. I feel like I got nice access but that I missed a chance to catch something. So I’ll probably use a 200-quarter camera, like a Mamiya, Hassel, or Vlad. But I also use the iPhone for the portrait project. I’m trying to leave the iPhone alone in Harlem for a little—I don’t want to feel like I’m getting bored.

Harlem in snow.

Is there anything else that comes to mind you’d like to add, about anything?

I already mentioned personal identity combined with my so-called conventional documentary—it’s an [ongoing] aim. Something I probably can’t finish in my life[time], but I will always chase it.

So-called photodocumentary-journalism—in the last seven years, the photo industry shrunk. Nationally we have a template, any sponsored work, they already have assumptions of style established. Many photographers are copying these assumptions. It makes for boring photography. Some are very good of course, but still [unoriginal]. We are competing against each other only within a template of style. People feel satisfied, it’s easy to accomplish. [But] that’s killing ourselves. Simple is good, but sometimes simple becomes oversimplified. Not good. We get too comfortable. I try to break out of that. That is my aim for my life because that takes a long time. And personally I try to teach something like that too, in my workshop in Japan. Sometimes I speak as a guest speaker at universities too, or at the ICP.

Instagram is helpful in that way, because most of the audience comes from outside of the photo industry. Some people are very clever instinctively. They feel something, they admire something, and [create an image] from there. In photography we have too many categories—like fine art, photojournalism, fashion, documentary, food etc. We should combine more, and bring more ordinary photographers into it too, to create something together.

Q. Sakamaki. Coney Island during the annual Polar Bear Bating into the water. By Julia Xanthos.

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Lucy McKeon is a writer in New York. Photos by Q. Sakamaki.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach.

In what way are you out of sympathy?

I think the writing programs are illegitimate.

Because they focus so much on craft?

Craft, craft, craft. Yes. Because they are a cash cow, because they are indiscriminate in their admissions, because they need to constantly keep feeding themselves with mobs of people who are either mediocre or less. There are a few talented people at one end and there are a few people who are so bad you don’t know how on earth they got in at the other end. And in the middle is this mass of people who have tiny amounts of writing capacity, nothing will come—

Even at a place like Iowa?

Even at a place like Iowa. Or years ago, I was teaching at Bread Loaf [a summer graduate program at Middlebury College] and I thought that was just intolerable, really intolerable. The whole place has this atmosphere of utter boosterism. Everybody is great, everything is brilliant, everybody is wonderful and they clap and scream at each other’s readings and I thought it was beyond the beyond. This woman from The New Yorker was there and at the end of the week, she asked, “How are you liking it?” I said, “This place is a fucking parody of these programs.” She put it in The New Yorker and they disinvited me for life.

It sounds like you wouldn’t feel so sad about that.

No, I didn’t feel anything at all.

Your book is called The Odd Woman and the City. Can you talk about that phrase, “the Odd Woman”?

It has been the phrase in my head ever since I read Gissing’s The Odd Women in the ’70s. I thought he nailed it, and it became my mantra. It is the term that I have always found the most congenial for my generation of feminists. We were probably the most psychologically self-conscious generation of feminists ever. All generations, like all great writers, have psychological wisdom, but to concentrate on that, especially all those internal self-divisions—nobody before us really did it as much as we did. And I did it in spades, since the very beginning. I remember Ellen Willis and I were both working at the Village Voice in those years, and she got hooked on women’s sexuality. I didn’t give a shit about women’s sexuality. I cared about work.

Why not sex?

I never felt repressed. I had orgasms easily. It just wasn’t on my mind. It wasn’t where I lived. Experiencing myself through sexual love was not where I lived. I did it like everybody else, blissed out like everybody else, but it didn’t feel like self-definition. I was sensual, but without being a sensualist, and it was never an organizing principle for me.

Because it had not ever been something that was difficult for you?

Right. So for thousands of us, and certainly for me, the subject was work. The question of not having made myself a serious worker became and remained my deepest sense of what had been done to women: we weren’t raised to know that you had to work, whether you wanted to or not. You had to work. And in the end, that you need to work became men’s definition of being human, and they profited from it, and we lost.

Rhoda Nunn, the woman in The Odd Women, feels the same way, only she is terrified of losing herself sexually. Now, in the nineteenth century, you had a right to be terrified of it, because men exercised will up the kazoo. For a woman to lose herself—in other words, to run the risk of feeling deeply humiliated if a man left her—that went so deep for any woman who had become anything of a person in her own right. She dreads losing herself to him. She dreads it so much she’s willing to lose it. I thought, that’s us.

I’m curious about the word “odd,” because it suggests outsiderness and alienation, too. Do you feel a kinship with that phrase in a personal sense, or solely as a description of your generation of feminists?

Being odd? Well, I guess it’s both, but I generally mean it in the framework of feminism. I don’t generally describe myself to myself as an odd woman with a small “o.” No, when I use the term I mean it in that sense. In other words, we are the women who can’t make our peace with the world as it is.

Years ago a relative of mine, a young woman, was heterosexual and then homosexual and then heterosexual, she didn’t know which. During a lesbian period of hers, my mother said to me, “Is she a lesbian?” I said, “I don’t know, you have to ask her. Why are you asking me that?” She said, “Because she’s never with a man.” I said, “Well, Ma, look at me. Look how long it’s been since I’ve been with a man!” She said, “Oh, you!” She knew I wasn’t a lesbian and she knew at the same time I was what she called such a difficult woman. So I call it Odd. There are a lot of people like me who are alone because we have never been able to make our peace with things as they are. That’s exactly how I mean it, nothing else.

The book is structured around your interactions with your longtime friend, Leonard, a gay man. How did you decide to make your friendship the framework?

It was my intention for many years to write a book about our friendship, because I saw it as paradigmatic. He was gay, I was me, and we lived the lives we lived. We met in feminist and gay politics many years ago. In the book, I know him longer than I do in real life, but it’s long enough. Thirty years is long enough. And I always thought ours was a paradigmatic friendship. Years ago, a man like Leonard would never have come out. He probably would’ve gotten married and suffered horribly his whole life and been a terrible husband. But now he came out. And I would have been an unhappy wife.

Well, you were, twice.

I was, yeah, yeah. But I would have stayed married, no doubt. So we recognized ourselves as complicated beneficiaries of this time. And I was going to write a book about it, but it turned out I had a situation, but I didn’t have a story. I didn’t really know what to do with it. And then suddenly, one day, I found myself writing one of these incidents about the city and I thought, that’s it, I’ll braid them together. It shifted from me and Leonard to the city and friendship in general. Then I felt excited and good, and as soon as you feel good you know you’re on the right track. But still, it took me a long time. It took me around two years when I thought it would take six months. It’s always like that, though.

That seems fast.

Well, not when you’re sitting there every day. You put in enough dead time sitting there, depressed and not a thought coming, your head full of fog and cotton wool, and it always seems long.

You have written a great deal about your mother, and very honestly, but you’ve never written about her death. Why is that?

I don’t have anything to say. I said it all in Fierce Attachments. My mother’s death did not impinge upon me as our relationship did in life. When my mother died I really went under a black cloud, but I knew exactly why: it was because we had loved each other so badly. But I knew who she was and I knew who I was and there was no guilt, there was no anxiety. And the fact of the matter is, I didn’t miss her. That was the reality. Not that she is not with me all the time. I’m always thinking I see her, and I used to dream about her. In these dreams, she was like a child and I was the mother.

Which was the reality of your relationship in certain ways, too, right? As you describe it, in Fierce Attachments, you were caring for her when she was mourning your father.

Yes, yes, certainly. But I’ve been told that’s quite common when you’re mourning properly; I’ve been told that what happened to me is Freud’s notion of actual mourning. But anyway, when my mother died, I went into this black cloud and I got really deeply depressed. So depressed I couldn’t take any pleasure in anything. And then, after six months or so, it passed. I didn’t think about her. I deliberately didn’t think about her for about a year. And then one day in the spring I was crossing Madison Square Park and I suddenly saw her sitting on a bench we used to meet at often. And I said, “Ma!” And then I realized she was dead. It wasn’t her.

You said that aloud?

Yeah. “Ma!” as I’m walking. Somebody turned around. I realized it wasn’t her. And then I burst out laughing. I thought, “Oh, you bitch, you’re gonna be with me forever!” [We both laugh] And in a way, that’s exactly what has happened. I’ve internalized her. I think I see her, and I feel warmth and affection for the ghost. And I’ve been told that that’s internal freedom. I am free of her.

I remember things that I did badly. I remember ways in which I acted badly and that can still make me cringe, but I’m only cringing over myself, I’m not cringing over her. But sex and death are not my subjects.

What about money?

It’s meaningless to me. I found, as the years went on, I was very lucky not to have a bourgeois bone in my body. I don’t want anything, and that has really stood me in good stead. If you’re a writer and you’re living on the margin and you hunger for the so-called good things in life, for material stuff, you’re really in trouble. And I discovered I don’t. All I ever wanted was to just make enough to stay alive. So yeah, sex, money—and age and death, to my amazement, don’t hold my attention either.

Why do you think that is?

I don’t know. I’m really lucky. It’s just so boring.

That’s a radical thing to say, that one’s own death is boring.

Is it? No. It doesn’t arouse my anxiety or hold my interest. It’s not generative material for me.

In The Situation and the Story, you describe the distinction between the writer and the narrative persona she constructs. You have experience in psychoanalysis, which aims in part to enable the patient to get critical distance from her own raw experience. To me, this seems like a parallel, and that you’d need to have a certain amount of self-reflection and remove from your own experience in order to be able to do that on the page. But you hold that the construction of the narrative persona does not depend on the writer’s self-knowledge.

Well, look at all the great fiction writers who have such brilliance about the characters they create, but know very little about themselves. Here’s a perfect example. Doris Lessing is a great writer in my view, but also very limited in some ways. There are novels and stories she’s written that are extraordinarily perceptive about men and women, but when she writes her own memoirs, she is stupid. She doesn’t know how to create out of her own unsurrogated self a narrator who knows how to be honest. So her memoirs are dishonest in the sense that where self-knowledge is required, it doesn’t work.

Now, in Fierce Attachments, I created the daughter. That daughter really did become as honest as she could be, because she had no fear. She did not fear what was required of her in encountering her mother, or their neighbor Nettie. She was free in some way.

In a way that you, in reality, were not.

You could ask me a question that would make me blush, and you would say, “Gee, you’ve written about stuff like this, why can’t you say it now?” And I’d say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It is a funny, odd thing. It really is. What is required is that the writer know herself in relation to the subject.

Lillian Hellman was an extraordinarily successful playwright from about the ’30s through the ’60s, and a big time Hollywood screenwriter and a communist, too. Around the ’70s, she started writing memoirs. An Unfinished Woman was a startling success; everyone in the world was declaring it the most honest, searingly honest—they love those words, “searingly honest.” And I was young and I read her memoirs and I thought, “searingly honest. ”

Years later, I decided to teach An Unfinished Woman to MFA students in Arizona who had never heard of Lillian Hellman, they didn’t know what the Cold War was, they never heard of anything, they knew nothing. But they read this book and I reread it and I was shocked at how dishonest it felt. They said, “I don’t like her, I don’t trust her.” “Why?” “She always comes out looking good and everybody else doesn’t. It always seems like she’s trying to tell you she’s the smartest person in the room.”

She had a very theatrical manner, but even if you didn’t know anything you could tell she was whitewashing it so that she came out looking a lot better than she looked in life. So she is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. She has the patina of truth. She seems to be telling you the raw truth, but in fact she is concerned with her dignity more than anything else.

Purchase the book.

Much of both The Odd Woman and the City and Fierce Attachments take place on your long walks throughout New York City. Can you describe your walking style?

For many years I did a twenty-minute mile.

Do you put on sneakers?

Yeah, yeah. I’ve never strolled. I never set out to encounter, I set out to walk. I set out to dispel daily depression. Every afternoon I get low-spirited, and one day I discovered the walk. I had some place to go on the Upper East Side, and I lived downtown on 12th Street. I decided to walk on impulse and it was three miles and it took an hour and I thought, “Oh, this is great, I feel so much better.” Lots of people know this, but I never knew it until I just stumbled on it. And then I began to make deliberate use of it. So I am always walking somewhere. I set myself a destination, and then things happen in the street.

Do you pity the person who walks around with headphones in?

I don’t pity, but I dislike intensely what’s happened, that everyone is walking around with a cell phone or texting or using earplugs. It’s really so shocking to me because they don’t hear anything. It seems very dangerous.

In the book, you describe drawing much of your social interaction from the urban crowd. But I think it’s equally possible to feel quite isolated in the city, with no attachment to the strangers around you. How did you come to see the city as this interconnected web of people?

I am urban to the core. I grew up in the Bronx, in a thick working class neighborhood. I have never experienced anything remotely like a street absent of people. The stores were always filled with people, the kids hung out at the corner. We came from homes that were not pretty and not good to be in, and the only reality for us was each other on the street. It was from the street full of people that I know I became a writer. I have always enjoyed so deeply the encounters between strangers in the street.

There were several moments, reading, when I laughed aloud at the interactions you describe. I wondered if somebody who didn’t live in a city would laugh.

Believe me, they don’t laugh aloud. They don’t know what to make of it. They don’t see the depth, the acuteness of those exchanges, of what they reveal and how much they reveal. And how sturdy and marvelous is humor, how varied is the human response to crisis. And what a joy that is.

I never, ever have failed to feel revived, refreshed, revitalized at something that happens in the street. That book came out of thirty years of notes. Half of what’s in that book was written twenty years ago. So many of those encounters, I just typed up and saved in folders here and there, which I never threw out. “What are you doing with this?” “Nothing. But someday…” And sure enough, someday arrived.

Would you have felt very upset if you hadn’t found a way to use these notes in a piece of writing?

Yes. A good part of the satisfaction of this book was my finding myself able to make use of all this stuff, which I found just ingenious and enjoyable.

At a talk at Goucher College in 2003, you revealed that you had taken some liberties with facts in Fierce Attachments, which stirred up controversy. Could you talk about what liberties you think are warranted to get at the emotional truth that you’re looking for?

My idea of a memoir is obviously not the idea of people like the woman at Goucher who ran off to announce that I was a liar. I wasn’t admitting to anything in that talk. I was describing what I thought was perfectly legitimate usage, which was the composition of a scene delivering narrative drive rather than factuality. The most important thing was for that scene to play out.

I don’t think of that as lying. I think of it as composition, and I think of the memoir as a legitimate literary genre which has to be composed. If you look at memoirs from time immemorial, a man in his fifties will repeat a whole conversation the family had when he was eight years old. What? He’s making it up. And there’s nothing wrong with it.

The only thing that I do believe is owed is not to make up anything out of whole cloth. Don’t claim, “I grew up in a castle,” or “I grew up in a mud flat.” Otherwise, it seems obvious to me. A memoir is your experience and what you are responsible for is the shaping of that experience. And this kind of writing needs an educated readership. A memoir should be the shaping of a single piece of experience and the memoirist should have the right to shape it in any way he wants except, I think, to make things up. And the other very important thing is it’s obvious to the reader that the writer is the narrator. The narrator is not a made up figure. And that narrator has to be reliable. I believe that really firmly.

Like George Orwell, for instance. Now Orwell himself was a son of a bitch. He was really a bad guy. He was narrow, grudging, sexist; he was a lot of terrible things. But when he sat down to write, the narrator he had created took over, and that creature is responsible for all the great essays that we so admire him for. That’s a perfect example of making a persona. What matters in Orwell is that he has persuaded us he is a truth speaker. Without the narrative persona, there would be no pleasure in any of the writing.

Well, it would be just like life.

Yeah, right. It would be like a police blotter, or a transcript from an analyst’s office.

Pity the analyst.

Pity the analyst is right.

Is there anything that you regret writing in Fierce Attachments, or that you would have done differently?

Oh, no, no. Fierce Attachments? No. I hardly ever look at it, but every now and then I look at it and I think, “God, did I write that? That’s pretty good.” The only book I have ever regretted is a book I wrote many years ago called The Romance of American Communism. That was my true apprenticeship. That’s a book in which I did not know how to solve writing problems and I ignored that fact. Instead of solving them, I let it be published, and I regretted it bitterly.

When you write as well as you can, you’re making terms. No matter what happens after that, you’ve done your job. But I didn’t make terms with that book, and everybody hated it and humiliated me in reviews. It didn’t take me long to see they were right.

But could you have come to that understanding without having written that book and working it through?

No, I guess not. I guess not.

It sounds less like you were willfully ignoring these things than that you just didn’t know yet.

That’s right. I mean, I did the best I could. I used to know a guy who was a professional seducer—there wasn’t a woman he met that he didn’t feel compelled to seduce. But I grew up with him, I knew him well. And he once said to me, “You know, it’s not as easy as it looks.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You know, it’s really just as awkward for me the first time. I often wish we could go to bed on the fifth date instead of the first!” I wish I could start on the fifth date. I feel like that about The Romance of American Communism. I wish I could have started past it. But indeed you are absolutely right. There is no way out of that apprenticeship.

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Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Alysia Abbott | Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father | June 2014 | W. W. Norton & Company | 17 minutes (4,188 words)

After his wife died in a car accident in 1973, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moved with his two-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco, a city bustling with gay men in search of liberation. Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father is that daughter’s story—a paean to the poet father who raised her as a single, openly gay man, and a vivid memoir of a singular and at times otherworldly girlhood. As noted in The New Yorker, the memoir, which vividly recalls San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, “doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history.”  Our thanks to Abbott for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here.

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I called him Eddie Body. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.

A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.

Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay.

 ***

By 1974, the Castro was emerging as the political and commercial center of gay San Francisco, with future supervisor Harvey Milk already running campaigns out of his camera shop at 19th and Castro. The post-hippie Haight was a gay-friendly alternative. Unlike the Castro, where gay men put their sexual identities front and center, the Haight’s gay residents fit into a larger bohemian mosaic. They got checkups at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, shopped for crafts at Far Out Fabrics, joined the Food Conspiracy co-op, and patronized Mommy Fortuna’s, a restaurant which hosted cross-dressing musicals featuring members of the psychedelic, nationally renowned theater troupe the Cockettes and their offshoot, the Angels of Light. This diverse community, which favored aesthetics over activism, gave my father a sense of belonging he hadn’t experienced in Nebraska, or even in post-Stonewall Atlanta. It was in this world that Dad and Eddie Body met and fell in love.

In his journal Dad described Ed as “a joy, a help, a comfort and often-times frustrating as hell.” When Eddie Body first moved in, he had ambitions of musical stardom. He played guitar beautifully and wrote songs, including a tender ballad for my father. Ed had a job downtown selling high-end pots and pans. But after a few months in our apartment, he’d quit the job and dedicated his waking hours to getting stoned, strumming on his guitar, and halfheartedly watering ferns around the apartment. By early 1975, Eddie Body mostly lived off Dad and the Social Security checks we received after my mother’s death.

Dad, Eddie Body, and I lived with two roommates, Johnny and Paulette, on Oak Street. Johnny had spent two years in a Buddhist monastery before moving to San Francisco. After smoking several joints, Dad and Johnny would listen to Tibetan bell music and engage in lengthy conversations about the afterlife. But while spiritually enlightened, Johnny showed little interest in the material aspects of the house. Dad alone scoured neighborhood stoop sales and thrift shops for the mirrors, rugs, plants, and Indian fabrics that decorated the apartment. Dad also picked out colors—Indian earth brown and imperial jade green—and painted all the rooms himself.

Johnny was known in the Haight as Joan Blondell, a drag character named after the old Hollywood star famous for her sarcastic wisecracks. Joan would get all dolled up and yell things like, “Don’t you feel hot?” then kick over a chair for everyone’s amusement. Dad fondly described Joan as “the bitch of death.”

Paulette was our roommate who replaced Suzan, who replaced Wade. Like Johnny, she enjoyed dressing in drag; unlike him, she did it full-time. Originally from Alabama, Paulette embraced a Southern Gothic aesthetic mixed with 1940s film fantasy. She decorated her room like the inside of a casket, stapling drapes to the ceiling and outfitting the corners with mahogany antiques and funereal plants.

Paulette also expected everyone to be her servant, an honor Johnny—and Joan—resolutely declined, precipitating many quarrels. Perhaps Paulette was jealous of Joan’s local fame. In a letter, Dad recalled New Year’s Eve 1974-75, when Paulette couldn’t get into the bathroom and had to wait forever before Joan was ready to come out. “You should have seen the feathers fly,” he wrote.

“You actually don’t look forties at all, Johnny. You look like a—well, a whore!”

“I know,” Joan replied. “Isn’t it divine?”

 ***

As we settled into 1975, our household calmed down, with each of us living in our own world: Eddie strumming his guitar, Paulette grooming herself in the mirror, Johnny meditating in the sunroom. Dad was happy to be left alone to read and write while I drew mermaids by the window.

My mornings were spent at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center. Through the center Dad became acquainted with some of the neighborhood’s more colorful single moms. Lola’s mother, an actress with the Angels of Light, had performed in a Warhol film. Moonbeam’s mother sold grass out of her apartment on Oak Street. She had a knack for dating young guys, getting them on General Assistance, and then pocketing their checks.

When I wasn’t playing with Moonbeam or Lola, I was often left to myself. “Faggots find her cute but are afraid of her,” my father wrote in a letter. “Child=responsibility, the ultimate freak-out for the selfish and the escapists.”

But not Eddie Body. Each afternoon he’d pick me up from child care, a big smile on his face. On one occasion, he arrived wearing a dress. The attendants wouldn’t allow him into my classroom until I heard his voice and then ran into his arms. After day care, Ed and my dad would take me on long walks in Golden Gate Park.

When I was a little girl, the sun was always shining in Golden Gate Park. Entering the park seemed otherworldly. I knew well the papery, banana-shaped eucalyptus leaves and tiny acorns that littered our path. e walked down a hill to a murky pond framed with fern trees and pointy bushes. I imagined it was inhabited by a lady of the lake, who’d only reveal herself after the sun went down and we’d left the park. After the pond we’d descend into a tunnel designed to resemble a cave: brown painted walls toothed with sculpted stalactites. The home of a wayward dragon. Past the cave, the path spilled into an emerald field where towering eucalyptus and pine trees cast long shadows.

To the right of the field was Hippie Hill. Music was always playing; there was a drum circle, maracas, and someone dancing, limbs flailing loose and free. Dad, Eddie, and I would lie on the grass among the clusters of wanderers. In the 1970s, to be aimless, even homeless, was still considered more a philosophical choice than a product of economic destitution. Eddie would patiently thread daisy chains for me while sitting cross-legged in the grass. Sometimes he teased me.

“Eddie Body, I’m hungry,” I said one afternoon.

“Hi, Hungry.”

“Nooooo, I’m hungry.”

“How are you, Hungry? My name is Ed and this here is Steve.”

“Noooo. Nooooo. That’s not good.”

Dad chastised him. Then Eddie Body gathered me into his arms and squeezed me to his bare chest, his whiskers tickling my neck. He smelled of Egyptian musk and BO.

The three of us stayed in Golden Gate Park as long as the day would have us. When the light faded and the air cooled, we began the long walk home together. The leaves of the eucalyptus trees shimmered in the early evening light, looking like rust-colored sequins.

At home, Daddy made din-din while Eddie Body took a bath. I watched him lounging in our rust-stained claw-foot tub. He washed himself with a thick white bar of soap, the same soap Dad used to wash me each night. Eddie was leaner and browner than my dad. He barely had any hair on his chest and a small migration of whiskers sat precariously above his mouth. When he bent forward, his shoulder-length hair hid his face. Eddie watched me watching him and laughed.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“What is what?”

“That.” I repeated. “There!” I pointed to two egglike spheres I could make out in the dark mass of hair between Eddie’s legs.

Eddie coughed and adjusted himself in the bathtub. A small streak of water spilled over the tub’s porcelain edge.

“Those are testicles,” he said.

I tried the word on for size. “Tess. Tess.”

“They’re also called balls.”

“What do they do?” I asked.

“Um . . . they help make babies,” he answered. “Didn’t your dad tell you about this yet?”

“No.”

“They help make babies. Men have them.”

“I won’t have them?”

“No, you won’t have them.”

After dinner, Eddie and Dad took turns reading me stories before tucking me in to sleep. The next morning I woke up, opened the door to my dad’s room, then crawled into his bed. Eddie Body was always there, always happy to see me. “It’s wake­up time!” I announced. I cuddled between them and lay there, awake but with my eyes closed, while the two of them fell back asleep. Feeling warm and safe, I didn’t want to disturb this special time. Often when I crawled into Dad’s bed I’d slow my breathing so that it moved in time with his. Together we’d breathe like one. But on this morning Eddie Body’s sleep was less steady. Behind me I could feel his breath move from slow to fast. So I tried to adjust my breath to match his. I then moved between the two of them, always trying to reconcile the difference, but always failing.

In the mornings at school I liked to draw. My drawings at four and five were generally the same: an ocean scene. On the surface of the water two boats bob attached by a rope. The girl boat is full of girls, rendered as triangles with stick legs and arms, each topped with a smiley face circle and long hair that curls at the end. The boy boat is populated with rectangles with stick arms and legs and smiley circle heads. Under the water, vast mermaid families swim together: grandma and grandpa mermaids, dogfish and catfish, and birdfish with wings. This mermaid world was fluid, endless, and real to me.

Living in a boy boat, I wanted to do everything the boys did. Every few weeks, Dad would put Lou Reed’s Transformer on the turntable. Then, together with Johnny and Paulette, he’d dig into the big closet and pick through baskets of jewelry while Lou Reed seductively serenaded them, calling them “slick little girl[s].”

While Dad dressed up with Johnny and Paulette, wrapping a white scarf around his neck and pulling a plantation-style picture hat over his head—”Very Juliet of the Spirits, don’t you think?” he asked— I draped myself in sparkly scarves and a heavy faux-Egyptian necklace Dad had found at the local junk shop. The fairies may have outnumbered me, but I was still the reigning princess, able to primp in the mirror along with the best of them.

But it wasn’t enough to dress up with the boys. I wanted to be a boy and told Dad I wanted to be called a boy.

“You have a vagina,” he patiently explained. “Boys have penises.”

“Can’t I get a penis at the store?” I asked.

“No, you can’t.”

I also noticed that Eddie Body and Daddy peed as easily among the thicket of conifers in Golden Gate Park as in our toilet at home. When I had to pee in the park Dad had to take me through the tunnel, past the pond, and up the hill to the McDonald’s, just beyond the entrance, my bladder barely containing itself. After watching Eddie retreat to the bushes one afternoon, I told Dad that I wanted to pee like him. So that night, in our chilly bathroom, he taught me to pee standing up. With gentle hands he helped thrust my pelvis forward while keeping my legs straight and steady so I could better aim into the toilet. I was small in relation to the seat, so it wasn’t hard to pee into the bowl, or at least onto the bowl. After several days of practice, I managed to make it in, not getting any on the floor or down my legs.

“Far out!” my dad said. Then he ran into the bedroom to share the news with Ed.

“It’s a bad kind of life you’re giving Alysia, growing up around queers.”

“What do you mean? She’s happy,” said my father.

“She needs a mother. You should get married to a woman.”

“Like you and Mary Ann?” my dad asked.

 ***

Roommates (queer or otherwise) weren’t simply a way for my dad to save money on housing; they were a source of free child care. On any given night Dad would ask Johnny or Paulette to watch me so he and Ed could go out dancing in one of the many bars that were swelling with excitement in post-Stonewall San Francisco: Sissy’s Saloon, the Mineshaft, the Stud. On one occasion Paulette reported that I’d turned on all of the kitchen burners, which she’d discovered only after the smell of gas had permeated the apartment. Another time I drank half a bottle of medicine and suffered a minor tummy-ache.

Reading about these events in my dad’s journals, it’s hard not to feel angry. My father expressed resentment because I asked him to fix me breakfast when, at age four, I was “perfectly capable of doing it alone.” Maybe Dad couldn’t understand my needs because our life was populated by so many needy wanderers like himself, young people escaping bad homes and bad marriages, all searching for their true selves and open to anything that might further that quest: Hollywood, bisexuality, cross-dressing, meditation, Quaaludes, biorhythm charts, bathhouses, Sufi dancing. Renegades all, but few truly suitable for raising kids, let alone watching them for a night or two.

Eddie Body said I needed a mother. In truth, everyone in that apartment needed a mother, someone to cook and clean, someone to settle the quarrels and to dispense the love and acceptance that was so elusive to these men when they were growing up. I liked to play the role when I could, a Wendy to Dad’s lost boys. I’d call him “my poor little Da-da” and serve us bowls of Jell-O, saving the biggest serving for myself. When Eddie Body and Dad were tripping on drugs and dressed in drag I came up and said, “You can be a boy or you can be a girl, you can be whatever you want to be.”

But, of course this was just pretend. Ours was a defiantly motherless world. Sometimes we were like Huck and Jim, beyond law, beyond rules, eating with our hands. We were unkempt but happy, with Dad affectionately calling me his “Wild Child.” Other times we were like Tatum and Ryan O’Neal in Paper Moon, a traveling father-daughter act pulling schemes, subsisting on our charm, and always sticking together.

We hoped that Eddie Body could share this life with us, but their fights became more frequent. More and more he went out without my dad. And, according to my father’s journals, Ed became less interested in sex. Lonely and dejected, Dad remembered my mom:

Sometimes I think of Barb and how callous I was to her for so long, so maybe it serves me right that Ed’s like that to me sometimes. I had a dream about her the other night. I was going around to all the bars alone, feeling lonely, and she brings me the car in the parking lot. We feel so good being together. “But this really isn’t happening you know, you’re dead.” She looks hurt. “It’s not that I don’t love you,” I say.

One afternoon, at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, I didn’t see Ed at the classroom door. Dad met me and we walked to the park. Back in the trees beside Hippie Hill, we started playing our game of hide-and-seek, a favorite from the time I was a toddler hack in Atlanta. I called, “Where you are, Daddy?” He answered, “Here I am,” and I followed the sound. When I found the tree where he’d been hiding, I circled around it while he circled in the same direction so that he was always just out of reach.

“Where you are, Daddy?”

“Here I am!”

Until, finally, I ran and caught him. When I became hungry and tired, we walked home together hand in hand. As we entered the tunnel leading to the opening of the park, Dad told me about Ed.

“Eddie Body and I are having problems,” he said.

“What kind of problems?” I asked.

“Well, Ed doesn’t seem to like me anymore. He doesn’t want to sleep with me.”

“I’ll sleep with you,” I said. And I pulled his hand and started skipping, so that he would be forced to join me, which he did happily.

As we skipped through the tunnel, I began to sing a song I’d learned at day care: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Dad tried to sing along but I yelled at him. I wanted to do it alone. “Let it shine! Let it shine! Let it shine!”

Alysia Abbott with her father Steve Abbott in 1979. Photo courtesy of Alysia Abbott.

The next morning, I went to the airport to spend a week with my maternal grandparents in Kewanee. After my mom died I spent almost every school break at my grandparents. The week I was away, Dad wrote in his journal that Ed had received a letter from the wife he’d left behind in New York. He’d learned that she’d given birth to a baby girl and now wanted a divorce. My dad held Eddie while he cried.

At the end of the week, my father picked me up from the airport. Driving home on Highway 101 at night, San Francisco looked like a glittering diamond necklace strung across the sky. Dad turned to me and asked, “You didn’t tell Munca and Grumpa about Eddie Body and I, did you?”

I looked out the window. “I didn’t say nothing.”

Back at home, we climbed the stairs to our apartment. Dad put down my suitcase and I pulled off my coat then searched the house for Johnny, Paulette, and Ed, but no one was home:

“Where’s Eddie Body?” I asked.

“He’s with Mary Ann.”

“Why?”

“He loves Mary Ann.”

“He loves Alysia,” I said.

“He does love Alysia. But he also loves Mary Ann. And she has a baby.”

“Why can’t Mary Ann and Eddie live with us?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really work that way,” Dad answered.

“But I want Eddie Body.”

“So does Daddy.”

“Daddy is sad?” I asked.

“Yes. Now Daddy doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“I make you feel better.” I crawled into his lap. “I’ll be your boyfriend.”

When I left Dad’s lap to go to the bathroom, he noticed through the open door that I didn’t pee standing up. When he asked me about it I answered, “Munca and Grumpa said little girls should sit down.”

“Okay. You can do it that way if it’s more comfortable for you. But if you want to pee standing up, you know how!”

“Little girls sit down,” I repeated. “I don’t know how to pee standing up.”

“That’s fine, too.”

Later that night, after putting me to bed, Dad went out to the Stud, leaving me in the care of Paulette. In the back of the club, he got stoned, took two carbitols, and met a rangy eighteen-year-old named Jimmy, whom he took home.

The next morning, I climbed into Dad’s bed, squeezing myself inside the small space between him and the man beside him. My dad was asleep but I didn’t recognize the other man with his shaggy blond hair. I fell back asleep and started having nightmares. I called out to him in my sleep, “Daddy, let me in!” He reported on the night’s aftermath:

February 15: Alysia’s been in upset and cranky mood this afternoon. Maybe upset about Ed leaving. She was more clingy than usual. Her eye hurt. She wanted to be held and cried a lot. I thought it was just because she was tired, not having had a nap. Put her to bed around 4-5. Don’t want to go to bar but may go to a party. I think I’ll stay home because Alysia may wake, and maybe no one will be here with her unless I stay.

That night after putting me to bed, instead of going out, Dad drew me a Valentine’s Day card. In his journals he wrote about making the card as a way to help me cope with the loss of Eddie, which was still so confusing and painful after my mom’s death. But looking at it now, I think he really made the card for himself, as a way to articulate his philosophy on love. I see him especially in the angry dog.

Two of my father’s lovers—his most passionate love affairs after my mother—were with men who ended up leaving him to return to women. Each of these men explored physical love with my dad, either because of his charisma or because of a moment that encouraged sexual experimentation. But these men, with girlfriends and wives, were still anchored to society in a way that Dad no longer was and never would be again. My father wrote about this coincidence in a letter to John Dale that February:

You know, it’s so weird I chose Ed as my lover, a man like you (I say man because he’s refused to become another bitchy queen like so many gay men do – refused to shut himself off from the rest of society). And now, like you, he’s going back to his wife. In his case it’s somewhat different. He has a kid too now, a little girl who he loves terribly much even though he’s never seen her. I love Ed & need him but he wasn’t able to find a job here & hated feeling dependent on me. Also maybe his wife & baby need him more, & he them. So I’ve encouraged him to go . . . I hope [his wife] forgives him & helps him to his feet.

Given how much the breakup hurt Dad, I was surprised to learn that he had actually encouraged Ed to return to his wife. In the back of his journal I even found a seven-page unsent letter Dad wrote to Ed’s wife pleading with her to take him back. I can’t help but think this letter came from some unresolved guilt Dad still felt about the way he’d treated my mom in the end.

After Ed split, Dad tried to orchestrate a room switch in the apartment, arguing that if he was still paying the most rent he should have his pick of rooms. Johnny didn’t want to trade rooms, accusing Dad of “economic imperialism.” Dad then moved us to a flat on Page Street, a few blocks away and without roommates. He regretted losing the Oak Street place he’d put so much time and energy into, but, as he wrote in a letter: “Just living in a houseful of screaming faggots was driving me up the wall . . . I wish I could find some really together people for Alysia to grow up around, instead of all the neurotic, selfish shit-faces that so abound.”

Eddie Body moved to New York but returned to San Francisco only a few weeks later. He’d lived with his wife and daughter but left them after deciding it was “too much.” He started dating women again, and even moved in with Moonbeam’s mom. Since my father had introduced them, their coupling was especially painful for him. He visited us a few times but he never stayed very long, and it always confused me. I missed him and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t with us anymore.

In the years that followed, Dad had other boyfriends but none lived with us. And after Eddie Body, I stopped paying close attention.

 ***

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father, winner of the ALA Stonewall Award and named one of the best books of 2013 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Goodreads, Shelf Awareness, among others. Her work has appeared in Vogue, TheAtlantic.com, Real Simple, Slate, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She’s also a cofounder of TheRecollectors.com, a site and community dedicated to remembering parents lost to AIDS. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston

Nadim Roberts | Maisonneuve | Spring 2015 | 12 minutes (2,885 words)

The following Longreads Exclusive comes from journalist Nadim Roberts and Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine.

* * *

One morning in March 2014, shortly after returning to his home in Iran, sculptor Parviz Tanavoli awoke to the sound of his daughter’s screams. About twenty men had broken the locks on his front door and entered his house. It looked like the clumsiest art heist in history, but this ragtag group worked for the municipality of Tehran. They were there on strict orders to confiscate Tanavoli’s artwork.

The men ignored Tanavoli’s plea to show some identification or documentation. They carried millions of dollars worth of sculptures to the front door, where cranes waited to lift them onto trucks. One of the heaviest pieces, a bronze rectangle inscribed with indecipherable calligraphy, was hoisted on a rotting wooden pallet. The platform groaned as it cracked under the weight of the sculpture. “Bring it higher,” said one of the men. With a feeble thud, it hit the pavement. The works, many of which were damaged, were driven to city-owned warehouses, places where things go to disappear.

Twelve years ago, Tanavoli partnered with Tehran’s municipal government to create a museum in his name. His work is displayed in the world’s greatest galleries, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but he had always dreamed of having a permanent Iranian home for his sculptures.The city purchased and displayed fifty-seven pieces. The museum was open for nine days. On the tenth, following the orders of Tehran’s newly appointed mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a group of men shut it down and appropriated every sculpture.

Tanavoli took the city to court to get his works back. Only eleven of the fifty-seven pieces were returned and then the municipal court of Tehran reversed its decision without explanation.

From the moment Prophet Muhammad smashed the idols at the Kaaba, sculptures have been a controversial art form in the Middle East. In 2001, the Taliban declared that two ancient Buddha statues carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan were idols. They were promptly blown up with dynamite.

Tanavoli was the first person to mount a solo sculpture exhibition in modern Iran. His sales at auction in the past eight years total over $8 million US.

A decade after Iran’s 1979 revolution, Tanavoli left the country that had inspired his greatest work. The artist, now seventy-eight, spends most of the year in his West Vancouver home overlooking the Howe Sound. He works out of a small studio attached to his house, with posters from his many international exhibitions displayed on the walls. Tanavoli’s hair is still thick, many shades lighter than his dark eyebrows. His is the compact body of a man who has spent six decades on his feet, working with his hands.

There is a system of politeness in Iranian culture called taarof. Iranians protest any compliment and belittle any accomplishment so as to appear humble and meek. Every Iranian knows that it’s all a big spectacle, but they all still play along. In the many hours I spend with Tanavoli, he doesn’t taarof once. His humility is not contrived or manufactured. Reflecting on his life, Tanavoli thinks of himself as both a skilled craft worker and a world-renowned sculptor. One title he has given himself is that of the heech-maker: the maker of nothing.

The heech is depicted in Tanavoli’s most iconic sculpture. It is composed of three letters in calligraphic form which spell “nothing.” He has been making versions for fifty years. Through the dramatic changes that successive regimes have wrought on his home country, Tanavoli and his heech have survived. Artists, Tanavoli says, “are born to analyze whatever is experienced in life. Art is the most honest phenomena of our time.”

Photo by See Wah Cheng

* * *

Tanavoli was born in 1937, a few years before Tehran’s ancient walls and gates were replaced with wide streets influenced by the gridiron plans of modern cities. The new shah was eager for Iran to catch up to the west, and that meant more than urban planning: he invested in culture, founding Iran’s first arts high school. Tanavoli’s parents were part of an emerging, less-traditional middle class. At sixteen, after reading a book about the life of Michelangelo, Tanavoli became one of the first students at the school. There was no one in the country who could teach sculpture, so a painter was hired instead. By the time Tanavoli graduated, he was eager to learn more. He found a spot on a cargo plane and, armed with two dictionaries (one Persian-English and one English-Italian) he headed to Carrara, Italy. Carrara marble had been used to build everything from the Pantheon to Michelangelo’s “David.” Here, Tanavoli was known simply as the “Persiano.” Tanavoli jokes that no one had seen an Iranian in Carrara since the time of the Romans. It was his first time travelling to the west, and while it opened up countless new avenues for him to learn his chosen craft, he missed Tehran. He found solace in his art and a book by the Sufi poet Rumi.

Within a year, Tanavoli ran out of money. His parents sent him silk embroideries from Iran that he could sell in Carrara, but he soon had to return to Tehran. He arrived home in 1958 with a plan: he would set about creating the country’s first solo sculpture exhibition, and with the money made from the sale of his work, he would return to Italy.

Tanavoli compares his discovery of south Tehran’s blacksmith and welders’ workshops to El Dorado. But it wasn’t gold that Tanavoli found, it was scrap metal. Using the materials, he began weaving together historic figures from Persian folklore. One piece reimagined King Darius the Great in irregular dimensions. When Tanavoli mounted the works, patrons became enraged at seeing beloved characters depicted like broken robots. Heated debates filled the exhibit halls. Some of the sculptures were smashed. “Iranians believed in fine art, fine silk and fine carpets,” Tanavoli says. “They did not expect me to take their heroes and love stories and present them using junkyard metals.” He only sold one or two pieces, but to Tanavoli, the exhibit was a success. His work had provoked the conservative cultural scene.

Tanavoli fell into debt after the exhibit, and there was little hope he would return to school abroad. But a few days later, some optimism appeared on the front pages of Iran’s newspapers. The Shah decided that his mission to modernize the country required a new strategy. Scholarships in one hundred fields from medicine to liberal arts would be offered to Iran’s brightest students so they could attend elite universities in the west and return home to educate an entire generation. Sculpture was one of the areas of study considered essential for the country’s future. Tanavoli received a scholarship and went back to Italy, this time to Milan.

Brera Academy, where Tanavoli would study, was home to some of Italy’s finest sculptors. But the city lacked the excitement of the workshops in south Tehran. “In Iran, I had access to all sorts of resources: the bazaars, the mosque, the shrines. And every day I came back with some ideas,” Tanavoli says. During this period, there was one character he kept recreating. It was a man, stretched out horizontally, stiff and motionless.

The subject would remain with Tanavoli for many years. His name was Farhad the Mountain Carver.

* * *

The tale of Farhad, a young sculptor who worked in the court of King Khosrow II, is one of Tanavoli’s favourites. Farhad was hopelessly in love with an Armenian princess named Shirin, who also happened to be the King’s love interest.

When Khosrow learned of Farhad’s love for Shirin, he sent him to Mount Behistun and struck a deal. If Farhad could sculpt a tunnel through the mountain, he would be allowed to marry Shirin. For years Farhad chiseled his way through unyielding rock. When it seemed he may actually complete the challenge, Khosrow sent a messenger to fool Farhad into thinking that Shirin had died. Farhad climbed the summit of the mountain and fell to his death. Shirin was heartbroken when she learned of the sculptor’s fate. “Farhad is a lover who remained faithful in his love,” says Tanavoli. “He is also a man of resistance who made the impossible possible.”

Not long after the sculptor’s fall from the mountain, the King received a letter from a man who claimed to be a messenger of God. The missive asked Khosrow to embrace a new religion called Islam. Khosrow, a Zoroastrian, tore the paper to shreds and commanded his governor in the province of Yemen bring this messenger, Muhammad, before him. Muhammad refused and, instead, predicted that Khosrow would soon lose his throne and his empire. The words came true. “Farhad falling off the mountain was the death of the art of sculpture in Iran,” Tanavoli says. “After Farhad’s passing and the spread of Islam, all sculptures were banned.”

Tanavoli began to see himself as a resurrected Farhad, risen from the grave to revive an art form that had been lost for a millennium. By sculpting the Mountain Carver over and over again, Tanavoli was chiseling off the influence of every teacher and government official who had ever criticized or tried to direct his work. He was creating a new tradition of sculpture in Iran, and finding his own unique voice.

* * *

At the Tehran Biennale in 1960, Farah Pahlavi, Iran’s young and glamorous new queen, took notice of Tanavoli’s sculpture of Farhad, and he made his first major sale. Pahlavi was an architecture student living in France when she first met the Shah in 1958. “Art for me was very important,” says Pahlavi, who now lives in exile in Potomac, Maryland and Paris. “I believed that a country could not move ahead without culture. Our poets, painters, sculptors and filmmakers were just as important to modernization as our economy or infrastructure.” While her husband went about building roads and the military, the Queen brought back thousands of historic Persian artifacts from private collections and galleries and built scores of museums to house these recovered artifacts.

In the 1970s, when the country’s oil revenues increased, Pahlavi founded the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Here she displayed what would eventually become the most expensive collection of modern art outside Europe and North America, estimated to be worth over $2.8 billion US. It included over one hundred works by artists such as Bacon, Gaugin, Johns, Lichtenstein, Magritte, Picasso and Pollock. Most important for the Queen, however, was that the works of the great artists of the west should sit next to those by Iranian artists such as Tanavoli.

The Queen’s eight-thousand-square-foot private library at Niavaran Palace was home to a collection of twenty-three thousand books and more than 350 paintings and sculptures from her personal collection. One of her favourite pieces sat in the corner: a two-metre-tall bronze heech sculpture by Tanavoli.

Tanavoli has compared his heech with the blank canvases of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. When asked about his images of the cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.” For Tanavoli, heech is the nothingness through which life and ideas come to be. “Great poets like Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez had all looked at heech, and it is not a concept to underestimate,” Tanavoli says. “Nothing is the other side of everything.” Over seven hundred years ago, Rumi wrote, “Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

* * *

Only two years after Tehran’s world-class museum was inaugurated, Iran was in the throes of a violent revolution. The Shah’s regime was seen by Iranians as oppressive and corrupt—overly ambitious programs had also led to economic bottlenecks and inflation and stories of torture at the hands of the secret police were common knowledge. As demonstrations against the monarchy continued and riots became more frequent, the Shah and his wife fled the country. They would never again return, and before the end of 1980, the Shah was dead. Pahlavi’s home in Potomac has none of the art that once adorned Niavaran Palace.

On her finger, however, is a ring. A gold heech, designed by the sculptor whose career she helped launch. It rests on her left ring finger, touching her wedding band.

For Tanavoli, the Islamic Revolution meant a different form of exile. Public works of art, including his own, were torn down and destroyed. At the time, he was teaching sculpture at the University of Tehran, but art schools were soon shuttered. “The revolutionary artists took over everything,” Tanavoli says. “They were making art which glorified war and blood. It had no value artistically, but politically it did, so it was encouraged.” Tanavoli refused to begin repurposing his art for political aims. His studio closed and he was banned from exhibiting and selling his work. Tanavoli describes these years as the darkest of his life. Because of his former connection to the Queen, Tanavoli was blacklisted by the new regime. In many ways, he was lucky that it wasn’t worse for him following the revolution. Many Iranians with ties to the royal family were thrown into prison or executed. By 1989, Tanavoli was almost broke. He could no longer make a living as an artist in Iran. He sold most of his collection of art and many of his properties and, with his wife and three children, immigrated to Canada. Once in Vancouver, he started all over again, from nothing.

Gradually, wealthy Iranians, many of them also living as expatriates in the west, began purchasing Tanavoli’s sculptures, and soon were inviting him to show his work in New York, Paris and London. In 2008, a sculpture by Tanavoli set a new auction record for a Middle Eastern artist at Christie’s international art sale in Dubai. The piece, titled “The Wall (Oh, Persepolis),” was nearly two-metres tall and covered in figures that look like hieroglyphics. It fetched $2.84 million US. After the sale, his work was in such high demand that he had to unplug his phone for a week.

In 2013, Tanavoli’s pieces were displayed as part of the Iran Modern exhibit at the Asia Society Museum in New York City. Spanning three decades, the works on loan from the United States, Europe and the Middle East told the story of the modern art scene and its pioneering years. Dr. Layla S. Diba was one of the curators of the exhibit. She describes Tanavoli as a “cultural impresario” in Iran. Beyond his own art, he was a devoted collector and teacher who worked tirelessly to push forward government support of the arts. “Parviz is also a patriot. He loves his country, but as much as one loves Iran, whether in the past or present, you are under a state-controlled art scene,” she says, speaking of the country’s museums. According to Diba, Iranian art has always been an “art of allusion” that one must learn to read.

Though Tanavoli’s work seems to be about subjects based in the past, such as Farhad, it is a reflection of the present. Tanavoli’s Wall series, large bronze monoliths that commemorate Persepolis, were created in this vein. “I have seen this beautiful country deteriorate day by day,” says Tanavoli. “Picasso said ‘art is a lie that makes us realize truth,’ that is a nice way of putting it.”

Tehran City’s Cultural Organization, which supervises many of the municipality’s museums, announced recently that it would “cleanse venues of works that do not comply with the spirit of the museums.” One target, according to news reports from Iran, is the Imam Ali Museum, where a number of works by Tanavoli are currently on display. In a recent interview with the Iranian Students’ News Agency, national arts expert Asghar Kafshchian Moghaddam stated, “I think what the Imam Ali Museum managers mean by cleansing is just the elimination of Tanavoli’s works from the museum collection.”

* * *

In an open letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in May 2014, Tanavoli wrote that “in accordance with civil, religious and customary laws,” the artworks taken from his home should be returned to him. “I will fight for them with all my power as long as I am alive,” Tanavoli wrote. “And after I go, I ask my children to keep after them until they are returned to their rightful owner.”

Tanavoli’s bronze heech still sits in its same spot in the Queen’s library in Niavaran Palace, which is now a museum. It has been fifty years since Tanavoli produced his first heech. When he began making them, he imagined that one day a heech would adorn every home in Iran and be accessible to anyone, regardless of financial status. It was never his intention for them to be exclusively exhibited in palaces and the world’s best museums. He wanted his creations to be sold in supermarkets, and held the dream of one day opening a factory that would mass- produce heeches. This never came to pass, though poor-quality knock-offs can be purchased on the streets of Tehran. Instead, in his small studio ten thousand kilometres away from the place of his birth, the sculptor continues to make nothing.

* * *

Originally published in Maisonneuve, Spring 2015. Subscribe.

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art.

* * *

A young man concerned that the police will take him into custody comes to see danger and risk in the mundane doings of everyday life. To survive outside prison, he learns to hesitate when others walk casually forward, to see what others fail to notice, to fear what others trust or take for granted.

One of the first things that such a man develops is a heightened awareness of police officers—what they look like, how they move, where and when they are likely to appear. He learns the models of their undercover cars, the ways they hold their bodies and the cut of their hair, the timing and location of their typical routes. His awareness of the police never seems to leave him; he sees them sitting in plain clothes at the mall food court with their children; he spots them in his rearview mirror coming up behind him on the highway, from ten cars and three lanes away. Sometimes he finds that his body anticipates their arrival with sweat and a quickened heartbeat before his mind consciously registers any sign of their appearance.

When I first met Mike, I thought his awareness of the police was a special gift, unique to him. Then I realized Chuck also seemed to know when the police were coming. So did Alex. When they sensed the police were near, they did what other young men in the neighborhood did: they ran and hid.

Chuck put the strategy concisely to his twelve-year-old brother, Tim:

If you hear the law coming, you merk on [run away from] them niggas. You don’t be having time to think okay, what do I got on me, what they going to want from me. No, you hear them coming, that’s it, you gone. Period. ’Cause whoever they looking for, even if it’s not you, nine times out of ten they’ll probably book you.

Tim was still learning how to run from the police, and his beginner missteps furnished a good deal of amusement for his older brothers and their friends.

Late one night, a white friend of mine from school dropped off Reggie and a friend of his at my apartment. Chuck and Mike phoned me to announce that Tim, who was eleven at the time, had spotted my friend’s car and taken off down the street, yelling, “It’s a undercover! It’s a undercover!”

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“Nigga, that’s Alice’s girlfriend.” Mike laughed. “She was drinking with us last night.”

If a successful escape means learning how to identify the police, it also requires learning how to run. Chuck, Mike, and their friends spent many evenings honing this skill by running after each other and chasing each other in cars. The stated reason would be that one had taken something from the other: a CD, a five-dollar bill from a pocket, a small bag of weed. Reggie and his friends also ran away from their girlfriends on foot or by car.

One night, I was standing outside Ronny’s house with Reggie and Reggie’s friend, an eighteen-year-old young man who lived across the street. In the middle of the conversation, Reggie’s friend jumped in his car and took off. Reggie explained that he was on the run from his girlfriend, who we then saw getting into another car after him. Reggie explained that she wanted him to be in the house with her, but that he was refusing, wanting instead to go out to the bar. This pursuit lasted the entire evening, with the man’s girlfriend enlisting her friends and relatives to provide information about his whereabouts, and the man doing the same. Around one in the morning, I heard that she’d caught him going into the beer store and dragged him back home.

It wasn’t always clear to me whether these chases were games or more serious pursuits, and some appeared more serious than others. Regardless of the meaning that people ascribed to them at the time or afterward, these chases improved young men’s skill and speed at getting away. In running from each other, from their girlfriends, and in a few cases their mothers, Reggie and his friends learned how to navigate the alleyways, weave through traffic, and identify local residents willing to hide them for a little while.

During the first year and a half I spent on 6th Street, I watched young men running and hiding from the police on 111 occasions, an average of more than once every five days.

Those who interact rarely with the police may assume that running away after a police stop is futile. Worse, it could lead to increased charges or to violence. While the second part is true, the first is not. In my first eighteen months on 6th Street, I observed a young man running after he had been stopped on 41 different occasions. Of these, 8 involved men fleeing their houses during raids; 23 involved men running after being stopped while on foot (including running after the police had approached a group of people of whom the man was a part); 6 involved car chases; and 2 involved a combination of car and foot chases, where the chase began by car and continued with the man getting out and running.

In 24 of these cases, the man got away. In 17 of the 24, the police didn’t appear to know who the man was and couldn’t bring any charges against him after he had fled. Even in cases where the police subsequently charged him with fleeing or other crimes, the successful getaway allowed the man to stay out of jail longer than he might have if he’d simply permitted the police to cuff him and take him in.

A successful escape can be a solitary act, but oftentimes it is a collective accomplishment. A young man relies on his friends, relatives, and neighbors to alert him when they see the police coming, and to pass along information about where the police have been or where and when they might appear next. When the police make inquiries, these friends and neighbors feign ignorance or feed the police misinformation. They may also help to conceal incriminating objects and provide safe houses where a young man can hide. From fieldnotes taken in September 2006:

Around 11 a.m., I walked up the alleyway to the back of Chuck’s house. Before I reached the porch, Chuck came running down the iron stairs, shouting something to a neighbor. Reggie followed him, also shouting. Their mother, Miss Linda, came to the top of the second-floor balcony and told me the law was on the way, and to make sure that Reggie in particular did not come back until she gave the green light. I recalled that Reggie had a warrant out for failure to pay court fees, and would doubtless be taken in if the cops ran his name.

I watched Chuck and Reggie proceed up the alleyway, and then Chuck turned and yelled at me to come on. We ran for about three blocks, going through two backyards and over a small divider. Dogs barked as we went by. I was half a block behind and lost sight of Chuck and Reggie. Panting, I slowed to a walk, looking back to see if the police were coming. Then I heard “psst” and looked up to see Chuck leaning out the second-floor window of a two-story house. A woman in her fifties, who I immediately guessed to be a churchgoer, opened the door for me as I approached, saying only, “Upstairs.”

Chuck and Reggie were in her dressing room. This quite conservative looking woman had converted what is usually the spare upstairs bedroom into a giant walk-in closet, with shoes, purses, and clothing arranged by color on the kind of white metal shelves that you buy and install yourself.

Our getaway had produced a mild euphoria. Reggie brushed past Chuck to examine the shoe collection, and Chuck wiped his arm off dramatically, teasing his younger brother about how sweaty he was.

“Look at yourself, nigga! You don’t run for shit now with that little bit of shell in your shoulder,” Reggie responded, referring to the partial bullet that had lodged just below the back of Chuck’s neck when he was shot the month before.

Chuck laughed. “I’m in the best shape of my life.” He explained that his shoulder hurt only when he played basketball.

Reggie sat on a small leopard-print stool and said, “Name a fat motherfucker who runs faster than me. Not just in the ’hood but anywhere in Philly.”

“Oh, here you go,” Chuck complained.

Chuck joked about the extensive shoe collection, saying you’d never know Miss Toya was like that. Reggie pulled out a pair of suede high heels and attempted to get one onto his foot, asking me to do up the straps. He got on her computer and started browsing pit bull websites, then YouTube videos of street fights. Chuck cringed and exclaimed loudly as Kimbo, a well-known street fighter, hit his opponent repeatedly in the eye, revealing bloody and battered tissue that Chuck called “spaghetti and meatballs.”

I asked Chuck why he made me run, and consequently dirty my sneakers, when I’m not even wanted.

“It’s good practice.”

Reggie grinned and said, “You be taking your fucking time, A.”

“You’re no track star,” I replied.

“What!? I was haul-assing.”

Chuck got on the phone with his mother and then a neighbor to find out how many police were on his block and for whom they had come. Apparently they were looking for a man who had fled on foot after being stopped on an off-road motorbike. They didn’t find this man, but did take two others from the house next door: one had a bench warrant for failure to appear, and the other had a small amount of crack in his pocket. Into the phone Chuck was saying, “Damn. They got Jay-Jay? Damn.”

About an hour later, his mother called to tell Chuck that the police had gone. We waited another ten minutes, then left for Pappi’s, the corner store. Chuck ordered Miss Toya a turkey hoagie and BBQ chips and brought them to her as thanks. We then walked back to the block with Dutch cigars and sodas.

Running wasn’t always the smartest thing to do when the cops came, but the urge to run was so ingrained that sometimes it was hard to stand still.

When the police came for Reggie, they blocked off the alleyway on both ends simultaneously, using at least five cars that I could count from where I was standing, and then ran into Reggie’s mother’s house. Chuck, Anthony, and two other guys were outside, trapped. Chuck and these two young men were clean, but Anthony had the warrant for failure to appear. As the police dragged Reggie out of his house, laid him on the ground, and searched him, one guy whispered to Anthony to be calm and stay still. Anthony kept quiet as Reggie was cuffed and placed in the squad car, but then he started whispering that he thought Reggie was looking at him funny, and might say something to the police. Anthony started sweating and twitching his hands; the two young men and I whispered again to him to chill. One said, “Be easy. He’s not looking at you.”

We stood there, and time dragged on. When the police started searching the ground for whatever Reggie may have tossed before getting into the squad car, Anthony couldn’t seem to take it anymore. He started mumbling his concerns, and then he took off up the alley. One of the officers went after him, causing the other young man standing next to him to shake his head in frustrated disappointment.

Anthony’s running caused the other officer to put the two young men still standing there up against the car, search them, and run their names; luckily, they came back clean. Then two more cop cars came up the alley, sirens on. About five minutes after they finished searching the young men, one of the guys got a text from a friend up the street. He silently handed me the phone so I could read it:

Anthony just got booked. They beat the shit out of him.

At the time of this incident, Chuck had recently begun allowing Anthony to sleep in the basement of his mother’s house, on the floor next to his bed. So it was Chuck’s house that Anthony phoned first from the police station. Miss Linda picked up and began yelling at him immediately.

“You fucking stupid, Anthony! Nobody bothering you, nobody looking at you. What the fuck did you run for? You a nut. You a fucking nut. You deserve to get locked up. Dumb-ass nigga. Call your sister, don’t call my phone. And when you come home, you can find somewhere else to stay.”

* * *

When the techniques young men deploy to avoid the police fail, and they find themselves cuffed against a wall or cornered in an alleyway, all is not lost: once caught, sometimes they practice concerted silence, create a distraction, advocate for their rights, or threaten to sue the police or go to the newspapers. I occasionally saw each of these measures dissuade the police from continuing to search a man or question a man on the street. When young men are taken in, they sometimes use the grate in the holding cell at the police station to scrape their fingertips down past the first few layers of skin, so that the police can’t obtain the prints necessary to identify them and attach them to their already pending legal matters. On four separate occasions I saw men from 6th Street released with bloody fingertips.

Avoiding the Police and the Courts When Settling Disputes

It’s not enough to run and hide when the police approach. A man intent on staying out of jail cannot call the police when harmed, or make use of the courts to settle disputes. He must forego the use of the police and the courts when he is threatened or in danger and find alternative ways to protect himself. When Mike returned from a year upstate, he was rusty in these sensibilities, having been living most recently as an inmate rather than as a fugitive. His friends wasted no time in reacquainting him with the precariousness of life on the outside.

Mike had been released on parole to a halfway house, which he had to return to every day before curfew. When his mother went on vacation, he invited a man he had befriended in prison to her house to play video games. The next day, Mike, Chuck, and I went back to the house and found Mike’s mother’s stereo, DVD player, and two TVs gone. Later, a neighbor told Mike that he had seen the man taking these things from the house in the early morning.

Once the neighbor identified the thief, Mike debated whether to call the police. He didn’t want to let the robbery go, but he also didn’t want to take matters into his own hands and risk violating his parole. Finally, he called the police and gave them a description of the man. When we returned to the block, Reggie and another friend admonished Mike about the risks he had taken:

REGGIE: And you on parole! You done got home like a day ago! Why the fuck you calling the law for? You lucky they ain’t just grab [arrest] both of you.
FRIEND: Put it this way: they ain’t come grab you like you ain’t violate shit, they ain’t find no other jawns [warrants] in the computer. Dude ain’t pop no fly shit [accused Mike of some crime in an attempt to reduce his own charges], but simple fact is you filed a statement, you know what I’m saying, gave them niggas your government [real name]. Now they got your mom’s address in the file as your last known [address]. The next time they come looking for you, they not just going to your uncle’s, they definitely going to be through there [his mother’s house].

In this case, their counsel proved correct. Mike returned to the halfway house a few days later and discovered that the guards there were conducting alcohol tests. He left before they could test him, assuming he would test positive and spend another year upstate for the violation. He planned to live on the run for some time, but three days later the police found him at his mother’s house and took him into custody. We had been playing video games, and he had gone across the street to change his clothes at the Laundromat. Two unmarked cars pulled up, and three officers got out and started chasing him. He ran for two blocks before they threw him down on the pavement. Later, he mentioned that their knowledge of his mother’s new address must have come from the time he reported the robbery, and he bemoaned his thoughtlessness in calling them.

Young men also learn to see the courts as dangerous. A year after Chuck came home from the assault case, he enrolled in a job training program for young men who have not completed high school, hoping to earn his high school diploma and gain a certificate in construction. He proudly graduated at twenty-two and found a job apprenticing on a construction crew. Around this time he had been arguing with his babymom, and she stopped allowing him to see their two daughters, ages one and a half and six months. After considerable hesitation, Chuck took her to family court to file for partial custody. He said it tore at him to let a white man into his family affairs, but what could he do? He needed to see his kids. At the time, Chuck was also sending thirty-five dollars per month to the city toward payment on tickets he had received for driving without a license or registration; he hoped to get into good standing and become qualified to apply for a driver’s license. The judge said that if Chuck did not meet his payments on time every month, he would issue a bench warrant for his arrest. Then Chuck could work off the traffic tickets he owed in county jail (fines and fees can be deducted for every day spent in custody).

Five months into his case for partial custody in family court, Chuck lost his construction job and stopped making the payments to the city for the traffic tickets. He said he wasn’t sure if he had actually been issued a warrant, and unsuccessfully attempted to discover this. He went to court for the child custody case anyway the next month, and when his baby-mom mentioned that he was a drug dealer and unfit to get partial custody of their children, the judge immediately ran his name in the database to see if any warrants came up. They did not. As we walked out of the courthouse, Chuck said to me and to his mother:

I wanted to run [when the clerk ran his name], but it was no way I was getting out of there—it was too many cops and guards. But my shit came back clean, so I guess if they’re going to give me a warrant for the tickets, they ain’t get around to it yet.

The judge ruled in Chuck’s favor and granted him visitation on Sundays at a court-supervised day-care site. These visits, Chuck said, made him anxious: “Every time I walk in the door I wonder, like, is it today? Are they going to come grab me, like, right out of the day care? I can just see [my daughter’s] face, like, ‘Daddy, where you going?’”

After a month, the conditions of his custody allowed Chuck to go to his baby-mom’s house on the weekends to pick up his daughters. He appeared thrilled with these visits, because he could see his children without having to interact with the courts and risk any warrant that might come up.

* * *

If, in the past, residents of poor Black communities could not turn to the police to protect themselves or settle disputes because the police were so often absent and uninterested, now it seems that residents face an additional barrier: they cannot turn to the police because their legal entanglements prevent them from doing so. The police are everywhere, but as guarantors of public safety, they are still out of reach.

The hesitancy of legally precarious men to turn to the authorities has some important implications. First, steering clear of the police and the courts means that young men tend not to use the ordinary resources of the law to protect themselves from crimes committed against them. While those on probation or parole may make tentative use of these resources (and sometimes regret it later, when the police arrest them using new information they provided), men with warrants typically stay away. During my first year and a half on 6th Street, I noted twenty-four instances of men contacting the police when they were injured, robbed, or threatened. These men were either in good standing with the courts or had no pending legal constraints. I did not observe any person with a warrant call the police or voluntarily make use of the courts during the six years of the study. Indeed, these young men seemed to view the authorities only as a threat to their safety.

Ned, age forty-three, and his longtime girlfriend Jean, age forty-six, lived on Mike’s block. Jean smoked crack pretty heavily, although Chuck noted that she could handle her drugs, meaning she was able to maintain both a household and her addiction. Ned was unemployed and for extra money occasionally hosted dollar parties—house parties with a dollar entrance fee offering drinks, food, and games for a dollar each. He also engaged in petty fraud, such as intercepting checks in the mail and stealing credit cards. The couple’s primary income came from taking in foster children. When Ned and Jean discovered they might be kicked out of their house because they owed property taxes to the city, Jean called Reggie’s cousin, telling him to come to the house because she had some gossip concerning his longtime love interest. When he arrived, a man in a hoodie robbed him at gunpoint. Reggie later remarked that his cousin should have known better than to go to Ned and Jean’s house: as the only man on the block with a warrant out for his arrest at the time, he was an easy target for a couple under financial strain.

If young men known to have a warrant become the target of those looking for someone to exploit or even to rob, they may resort to violence themselves, for protection or for revenge.

One winter morning, Chuck, Mike, and I were at a diner having breakfast to celebrate that the authorities hadn’t taken Mike into custody after his court appearance earlier that day. Chuck’s mother called to tell him that his car had been firebombed outside her house, and that firefighters were putting out the blaze. According to Chuck, the man who set fire to his car had given him drugs to sell on credit, under the arrangement that Chuck would pay him once he sold the drugs. Chuck hadn’t been able to pay, however, because the police had taken the money from his pockets when they searched him earlier that week. This was the first car that Chuck had ever purchased legally, a 1994 Bonneville he had bought the week before for four hundred dollars from a used-car lot in Northeast Philadelphia. He didn’t speak for the rest of the meal. Then, as we walked to Mike’s car, he said:

This shit is nutty, man. What the fuck I’m supposed to do, go to the cops? “Um, excuse me, officer, I think boy done blown up my whip [car].” He going to run my name and shit, now he see I got a warrant on me; next thing you know, my Black ass locked the fuck up, you feel me? I’m locked up because a nigga firebombed my whip. What the fuck, I’m supposed to let niggas take advantage?

Chuck and Mike discussed whether Chuck should take matters into his own hands or do nothing. Doing nothing had the benefit of not placing him in more legal trouble, but as they both noted, doing nothing set them up to be taken advantage of by people who understood them to be “sweet.”

A few days later, Chuck drove over to 8th Street with Mike and another friend and shot off a few rounds at the home of the man who he believed was responsible for blowing up his car. Although no one was injured, a neighbor reported the incident, and the police put out a body warrant for Chuck’s arrest for attempted murder.

Hesitant to go to the police or to make use of the courts, young men around 6th Street are vulnerable to theft or violence by those who know they won’t press charges. With the police out of reach, they sometimes resort to more violence as a strategy to settle disputes or defend themselves.

The Net of Entrapment

It isn’t difficult to imagine that a young man worried that the police will take him into custody learns to avoid both the cops and the courts. But young men around 6th Street learn to fear far more than just the legal authorities. The reach of the police extends outward like a net around them—to public places in the city, to the activities they usually involve themselves in, and to the neighborhood spots where they can usually be found.

Three hospitals serve the mixed-income Black section of the city within which 6th Street is located. Police officers crowd into their waiting rooms and hallways, especially in the evenings and on the weekends. Squad cars and paddy wagons park outside the hospital, officers in uniform or in plain clothes stand near the ambulances, and more officers walk around or wait in the ER. Some police come to the hospitals to investigate shootings and to question the witnesses who arrive there; others come because the men they have beaten while arresting them require medical care before they can be taken to the precinct or the county jail. Sitting in the ER waiting room, I often watched police officers walk Black young men out the glass double doors in handcuffs.

According to the officers I interviewed, it is standard practice in the hospitals serving the Black community for police to run the names of visitors or patients while they are waiting around, and to take into custody those with warrants, or those whose injuries or presence there constitutes grounds for a new arrest or a violation of probation or parole.

Alex experienced this firsthand when he was twenty-two years old and his girlfriend, Donna, was pregnant with their first child. He accompanied her to the hospital for the birth and stayed with her during fourteen long hours of labor. I got there a few hours after the baby was born, in time to see two police officers come into Donna’s room to place Alex in handcuffs. As he stood with his hands behind him, Donna screamed and cried, and as they walked him away, she got out of the bed and grabbed hold of him, moaning, “Please don’t take him away. Please, I’ll take him down there myself tomorrow, I swear—just let him stay with me tonight.” The officers told me they had come to the hospital with a shooting victim who was in custody, and as was their custom, they ran the names of the men on the visitors’ list. Alex came up as having a warrant out for a parole violation, so they arrested him along with two other men on the delivery room floor.

I asked Alex’s partner about the warrant, and she reminded me that the offense dated from Christmas, when the police had stopped Alex as he pulled up to a gas station. Since his driver’s license had been revoked, driving constituted a violation of his parole.

After the police took Alex into custody at the maternity ward, it became increasingly clear to his friends on 6th Street that the hospital was a place to be avoided at all costs. Soon after Chuck turned twenty-one, his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend was due with their second child. Chuck told her that he would be at the hospital, even though he had a detainer out for a probation violation for breaking curfew. He stayed with her up until the point that she was getting in her aunt’s car to go to the hospital. Then at the final moment, he said she should go ahead without him, and that he would come soon.

Later, Chuck sat with me on the steps and discussed the situation. “I told her I was on my way,” he said. “She mad as shit I ain’t there. I can hear her right now. She going to be like, ‘You broke your promise.’ I’m not trying to go out like Alex [get arrested], though. You feel me?”

As we spoke, his girlfriend called his cell phone repeatedly, and he would mute the sound after one ring and stare at her picture as it came up on the screen.

Just as a man worried the police will pick him up avoids the hospital when his child is born and refuses to seek formal medical care when he is badly beaten, so he won’t visit his friends and relatives in prison or jail. Some prisons make it a general practice to run the names of visitors; others employ random canine searches of visitors’ cars, and run the plates and names from the parking lot.

Funerals also become risky for men worried that the police may take them. Each of the nine funerals I attended for young men who had been killed in the 6th Street neighborhood featured police officers stationed outside with a tripod camera to film the mourners as they filed in. More officers stood across the street and parked on the adjacent blocks. When I asked an officer of the Warrant Unit about funerals, he replied that they were a great place to round up people for arrest. “But we try to stay a block or two away, so we don’t get our picture in the paper.”

Like hospitals and funerals, places of employment become dangerous for people with a warrant. Soon after Mike got released on parole to a halfway house, he found a job through an old friend who managed a Taco Bell. After two weeks, Mike, twenty-four at the time, refused to return to the house in time for curfew, saying he couldn’t spend another night cooped up with a bunch of men like he was still in jail. He slept at his girlfriend’s house, and in the morning found that he had been issued a violation and would likely be sent back to prison, pending the judge’s decision. Mike said he wasn’t going back, and they were going to have to catch him. Two parole officers arrested him the next day as he was leaving the Taco Bell, where he had gone to pick up his paycheck. He spent a year back upstate for this violation.

When Mike got booked at the Taco Bell, Chuck chewed him out thoroughly. Didn’t he remember the time Chuck got taken?

Chuck started working at the local McDonald’s when he was nineteen. Later that year he caught a probation violation for driving a car, his driving privileges having been revoked as part of his probation sentence. Though he had a warrant, Chuck kept working, saying that if the police came he would simply run out the back door.

A couple of weeks later, a former employee got into a fight with three other workers, and the police shut the McDonald’s down while they questioned witnesses and looked for the women involved. When the fight began, Chuck had been in the storeroom, talking on the phone to his girlfriend. He came out, he said, and saw six police officers staring at him. At this point he phoned me to come pick up his house keys, fairly certain he would be taken into custody. When I got there, it was too late—Chuck was leaving in the back of a squad car.

A man worried that the police are hunting him—or at least may take him into custody should they come upon him—also comes to see friends, neighbors, and even family members as dangerous. First, he must avoid people who are “hot.” After Reggie robbed a convenience store and the security camera footage appeared on the nightly news, the cops came looking for him with much more determination than when he only had a warrant out for a probation violation. He became so hot that other men on the block didn’t want to be seen with him, worried that he’d bring heat on them. Mike gave me this advice:

I’ll only tell you this one time, A. Do not be around Reggie. He’s hot right now, he’s on the run. Don’t get caught up in it. They’re going to come for that nigga, and I don’t want you nowhere around there. Don’t let him get in your car, don’t even talk on the phone. If he calls you, bang on [hang up on] that nigga. They probably tracing the calls, and you could fuck around and catch a ya’mean [be arrested on conspiracy charges, for harboring a fugitive, etc.] or something. Don’t come through the block, don’t even wave at the dude. I already told that nigga don’t call your phone no more, but just in case.

Young men’s distrust extends beyond those who are particular targets of the police. Cops may exert significant pressure on a man’s relatives or partner to provide information about him. Out of frustration and anger at his failures as a father, spouse, brother, or son, his partner or family members may freely call the police on him, taking advantage of his wanted status to get back at him or punish him.

Whether a man’s friends, relatives, or girlfriend bring him to the attention of the authorities because the police pressure them to do so or because they leverage his wanted status to control or punish him, he comes to regard those closest to him as potential informants. Like going to the hospital or calling the police, spending time with friends, family, or romantic partners places men at risk.

Cultivating an Unpredictable Routine

Mike, Chuck, and their friends came to see danger and risk in the routine doings of everyday life. They learned to fear the police, and to regard the courts, the hospitals, their workplaces, their residences, and even their own family members as potential paths to confinement. To limit the risks that mundane places, relations, and people posed, they learned to practice concerted avoidance: to run and hide from the police, steer clear of hospitals, skip work, and hang back from their families and close friends.

Another strategy that young men on 6th Street adopt is to cultivate a secretive and unpredictable routine. I first noticed this strategy when Ronny shot himself in the leg when he was fifteen. Six police officers were occupying the ER lobby when he arrived; two of them quickly handcuffed the young man who had brought him in.

Ronny’s grandmother, aunt, cousin, and sister sat in the lobby and waited for news. Some of the young men from 6th Street who had warrants at the time didn’t show up at all, explaining to others that they couldn’t take the chance, even though they “loved that lil’ nigga” and wanted to be there. The men who did come, including Mike, stayed outside the hospital, hovering at the edge of the parking lot. They discussed which local police officers were inside, and what their chances were of going in to see Ronny without being spotted. One of Ronny’s friends waited for a few minutes some yards away from the emergency room doors, heard the status report, and left. He returned periodically throughout the night, motioning through the doors for someone in the waiting room to come out and give him an update. Mike asked me to stay and keep in touch with him via cell phone:

MIKE: Yo, just stay here till you hear something. I’m about to leave out.
ALICE: Okay.
MIKE: I’m not trying to get locked up off of Ronny and then they run my record and I got, like, three warrants out for me, you feel me?

When Ronny’s cousin was shot and killed later that year, the men from 6th Street attended his funeral in the same fashion that they had gone to the hospital—quickly and quietly, ducking in and out:

REGGIE: We couldn’t really stay, you know, at the funeral or whatever, you know they’re on my ass [the cops are looking for him]. But we ducked in and out and saw the body and everything. We ain’t go to the gravesite though, but we saw his [the dead man’s] grandmom, and she saved us a plate [of food] from after [the get- together at her house]. Lucky it was so many people at the church, because the cops was definitely out, boy.

Cultivating unpredictability not only helps with evading the police; it also helps to reduce the risk of friends and family informing. Simply put, a man’s neighbor, girlfriend, or mother cannot call the police on him if she doesn’t know where he is.

Chuck, twenty at the time, explained the dipping and dodging sensibility to his thirteen-year-old cousin:

The night is really, like, the best time to do whatever you got to do. If I want to go see my moms [mother], see my girl, come through the block and holla at my boys, I can’t be out in broad day. I got to move like a shadow, you know, duck in and out, you thought you saw me, then bam, I’m out before you even could see what I was wearing or where I was going.

Young men are so wary that their relatives, girlfriends, or neighbors may set them up that they may take any request from those close to them to show up or stop by as a potential threat. Mike noted:

Nine times out of ten, you getting locked up because somebody called the cops, somebody snitching. That’s why, like, if you get a call from your girl, like, “Yo, where you at, can you come through the block at a certain time,” that’s a red flag, you feel me? That’s when you start to think, like, “Okay, what do she got waiting for me?”

When Chuck’s nineteen-year-old neighbor had a bench warrant out for failure to appear in court, he was determined, he said, never to go back to jail. He slept in a number of houses, staying no more than a few nights in any one place. On the phone, he would lie to his family members, girlfriend, and fellow block members about where he was staying and where he planned to go next. If he got a ride to where he was staying, he requested to be dropped off a few blocks away, and then waited until the car was out of sight before walking inside. For six months, nobody on the block seemed to know where he was sleeping.

Young men looking over their shoulder for the police find that a public and stable daily routine becomes a path to confinement. A stable routine makes it easier for the police to locate a man directly, and makes it easier for his friends and family to call the police on him. Keeping a secret and unpredictable schedule—sleeping in different beds, working irregular hours, deceiving others about one’s whereabouts, and refusing to commit to advance plans—serves as a generalized technique of evasion, helping young men avoid getting taken into custody through many of the paths discussed here.

Paying to Pass Undetected

When Mike and Chuck and their friends had a little money, they spent some of it securing an array of underground goods and services that would help protect them from the authorities or postpone their admission to jail and prison.

One major item they sought was a clean ID.

Many readers may not be aware of how often they are asked to present some form of ID, or to hand over a credit card or proof of address, throughout the course of a day. Those who have these things, and who are free from the threat of the police, tend not to think about it when these documents are required of them. For young men around 6th Street concerned that the police are tracking them or will take them into custody on the spot, legitimate identification is the source of considerable concern.

On the one hand, Mike and Chuck and their friends feared discovery and didn’t want their identity known. They hesitated to carry ID, to tell people their real name, or to write that name down. Around 6th Street, it is considered improper for even close friends to ask each other their last names, and young men routinely give fake names to people they meet, just to be on the safe side. Close male friends sometimes go years without knowing each other’s last names. Yet at the same time that young men wish to conceal their identity, and fear using it, they need proof of it for all kinds of life’s necessities, but can’t get it. The formal documents needed to apply for a job, enter a building with a guard in the lobby, buy a cell phone, or put a car in the shop elude them through a complex combination of their poverty, residential instability, and legal entanglements and fears.

For the eleven years that I have known Reggie, he has been sitting in jail or prison, dealing with a pending court case, a warrant, or a probation or parole sentence, or working through some combination of the three. During a rare month that he was newly paroled from prison and had no pending court cases or warrants, he asked me to help him obtain a state-issued ID. Not a driver’s license, which seemed an almost unattainable goal, but a non-driver’s state-issued identification card. In addition to allowing him to apply for jobs, visit family and friends in jail, and check into hotel rooms, this ID would mean that when Reggie got stopped by the police, they could run his name immediately and verify that he had no pending warrants.

We first needed to apply for his birth certificate, which his mother had only a vague memory of possessing before she left the homeless shelter in which the family had spent the first few years of Reggie’s life. Obtaining this document required many trips to the government offices downtown and other proofs of identity: a social security card and two pieces of mail (not letters but something more formal, such as a bill). After three weeks of collecting these items and two long days spent in fruitless trips to the Division of Vital Records downtown, Reggie shook his head, noting that ID is basically for rich people. “Because you have to have ID to get ID,” he said. “Just like money.”

Having gotten nowhere, we found a man in the 6th Street neighborhood who specialized in applications for birth certificates and other ID. People showed him their proofs of identity and he sent away for their birth certificates from the downtown office, taking forty dollars for this service. Ultimately, this man wasn’t satisfied with any of the documents Reggie could come up with to apply for the birth certificate, and finally suggested we use a close relative’s death certificate to prove his identity and residence. His mother at first refused to allow Reggie to take the death certificate out of the house, so we were stalled once again.

After six weeks of hard effort and considerable expense, Reggie had a birth certificate, two pieces of mail that would count for his proof of address, and a social security card. With these precious documents in hand, we drove to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

As we approached the parking lot adjacent to the building, Reggie began to move around in his seat, fidgeting and adjusting his clothing. Once I’d parked the car, he made no move to get out. I turned to him and asked if he wanted me to go in first and get a ticket for the line. He sat silently for a while and then began to explain his concerns. Showing up and applying for this ID would lead employees to run his name and bring up some outstanding ticket or warrant. He eyed the security guards warily, saying that undercovers probably hung out at the Department of Transportation as well. “It’s like, I’m home now, you feel me? I don’t want to be back in there tomorrow . . .”

We sat in the DMV parking lot for over ten minutes while Reggie attempted to get up the courage to walk through the door. In the end, he couldn’t go through with it, so we drove back to the block.

Like Reggie, a great many people living in the 6th Street neighborhood don’t have government-issued ID, fear using their ID if they do have one, or have ID but can’t do much with it because of their unpaid tickets, outstanding warrants, or the restrictions of their probation or parole. Local entrepreneurs recognize this core problem of poor and legally compromised people, and attempt to solve it in two ways: first by selling fake IDs and documents, and second by supplying the goods and services that typically require ID as part of the sales transaction, with no questions asked.

In the early 2000s, Mike and his friends bought fake licenses, social security cards, car insurance and vehicle registrations, and birth certificates. Merchants around 6th Street offered these goods under the table, if customers made the request appropriately. Salesmen on foot also offered these items as they made their rounds at bars, barbershops, and corner stores.

Mike used fake registration and car insurance documents when he got stopped in the early 2000s. The police didn’t run his real name and so didn’t discover that he had no license or registration for the car. Nor did they find out that he was on probation and prohibited from driving a car in the first place. Chuck was once able to get through an entire court case using a fake name and identification he had purchased from a man operating a stand outside a sneaker store. This fake identity allowed him to be tried for the case at hand without his previous cases coming into play.

Improved law enforcement technology has made it more and more difficult to use a fake identity to get through police stops. Indeed, giving a false name to the police has become all but impossible: beginning in the mid-2000s, squad cars were equipped with computers for running IDs. Philadelphia police around 6th Street now refuse to accept a driver’s license or non-driver’s state ID, asking instead for the man’s photo number. This number is issued at a person’s first arrest, and as one officer told me, “Any guy who says he doesn’t have one is lying.” Through the photo ID number, the officer can pull up an extensive description of the man, along with pictures of his face and body, from the computer in the police car. Some police cars in Philadelphia are now also equipped with finger print machines, so that a man’s prints can be run quickly and on the spot without the trouble of taking him down to the police station.

As another strategy for passing under the radar, young men around 6th Street pay those with legitimate identities to put things in their name, such as apartment leases, utility bills, even accident claims. This makes it significantly harder for the police to track them. Before Mike was sentenced to a year and half in prison, he was doing very well financially. He had two used cars in two different women’s names, lived in an apartment in a friend’s name, had a gun registered to a friend of his uncle, had a cell phone in his children’s mother’s name, owned a dirt bike in the name of the previous owner, and rented furniture in his mother’s name. In exchange for borrowing their identities, he gave these relatives and neighbors cash, food, drugs, and DVDs. Some also had occasional use of the items.

Five times over the six years I spent in the neighborhood, I observed people stopped by the police successfully use the name of another person they knew to be “clean.” Once Mike gave a friend’s name to get through a traffic stop and then went to court to pay the tickets for the moving violation, still using the man’s identity. As compensation, Mike lent this man his leather Eagles jacket for a season.

A number of neighborhood businesses allow people to make purchases with no questions asked. Wanted people seek places to shop that don’t require any documentation, because getting an ID in the first place could lead to an arrest; buying things using an ID would make it easier for the police to track them; and their dealings with the criminal justice system have rendered unusable the identification they have (for example, their licenses are suspended). These places where items ordinarily requiring identification may be bought without showing ID, signing one’s name, or showing proof of insurance are known as ducky spots.

A man concerned that he may be taken into custody also fears using the hospitals, and so purchases a variety of medical goods and services from people in the neighborhood who work in health care and who supply drugs, medical supplies, and their general expertise to legally precarious community members. Chuck paid a neighbor working as a custodian at the local hospital around forty dollars for antibiotics when his foot got infected after he ran through some debris during a police chase. After two weeks of severe tooth pain, Chuck’s neighbor, a twenty-year-old man, pulled his own molar with a pair of pliers and paid his cousin, who worked at a doctor’s office, eighty dollars for a course of antibiotics. Reggie broke his arm when he tripped over the curb while running from a man trying to stab him. His neighbor brought over material for a cast from his job at the VA hospital, heated it in a pan of water on the stove, and made a hard splint that Reggie wore for five weeks. Reggie gave him a large bag of marijuana as compensation.

Mike and Chuck and their friends around 6th Street also paid friends and neighbors for their silence and cooperation, and for news about the police. In a community filled with suspects and fugitives, every resident is a potential conduit of information, either for the police or for the men they’re after. Mike and his friends tried to ensure that neighbors who could alert the authorities to their whereabouts or activities were instead helping them hide.

In the same way that payments for sex can be placed on a continuum from prostitution to marriage, the money that legally entangled people pay others in the neighborhood to help protect them from the authorities ranges from explicit, short-term, quid pro quo exchanges, in which a set fee is paid for a single piece of information or a single refusal to talk to the police or testify as a witness, to longer-term relationships, in which the arrangement is largely tacit, and the legally precarious party provides extended financial support in exchange for silence, watchfulness, and general help in evading the authorities.

The most extended relationship of this kind that I observed on 6th Street involved two brothers who sold marijuana in the area. The pair had grown up in the neighborhood but had long since moved away. They didn’t mention their business or anybody else’s illicit doings over the phone, they came and went quickly, and to my knowledge, no person on 6th Street had ever been to their house—or even knew where it was.

When the two brothers came around in their dark SUV to drop off drugs or pick up payments, they gave back to the community. They helped pay for the funerals of three young men who were shot and killed during my time there. They also contributed grocery money to the mothers of the deceased, rent money to their girlfriends, and haircut money for their sons. They gave cash to people who had recently come home from prison: a kind of get-started money. They put money on the books of neighborhood men who were fighting cases in county jail.

As these two brothers coached and mentored younger guys on the block, they often discussed the importance of giving as a core obligation to those less fortunate. But they also occasionally mentioned that their generosity encouraged others to protect them from the authorities. In particular, they made sure that those neighborhood residents with frequent dealings with the police didn’t feel angry or resentful toward them. The older brother explained it like this to a younger boy on the block:

What makes a nigga call the cops? Hate [ jealousy]. It’s only a matter of time before they see your picture or your name comes up [during a police questioning]. You want them to pass right by [the picture], you want them to choose the other guy, the guy who never did nothing for them.

Mike and Chuck regarded this practice with admiration, acknowledging that it’s smart to send money to a man in jail who, if he gives you up, will see his commissary account quickly dry up. But like a marriage, this relationship requires consistent income, and most men in the neighborhood have only sporadic work in either the formal or the informal economy, with quite uneven and low returns.

Mike and Chuck certainly couldn’t afford to maintain long-term relationships in which a steady flow of cash or other resources guaranteed the ongoing cooperation of neighborhood residents. But they did occasionally scrape together enough money for one-time payments, mostly to witnesses during trials.

According to Mike, about two years before we met, he had been walking home from a dice game with a large wad of cash when a man put a gun to his head and ordered him to give up his money. Mike told me that he refused, and attempted to draw his own gun when the man shot him. Other accounts have it that Mike attempted to run away and shot himself by accident, whereupon this man took his money and then stripped him of his sneakers and watch. Whatever the details of this encounter, Mike emerged from it with a bullet lodged in his hip. His mother looked after him for five months while he was unable to walk, and then drove him to the outpatient clinic twice a week for months of physical therapy.

By the time we met, Mike could walk normally, though he said his leg hurt when he ran or stood for long periods, or when the weather changed. He believed this man had left the neighborhood, but about a month later he thought he spotted him driving around in a Buick. Mike told me that the man looked at him, he looked at the man, the man tensed, and Mike opened fire. Mike said, “I ain’t know if he was going to start chopping [shooting], you know, thinking I was going to come at him. Better safe than sorry.”

Two days later Mike saw him again, this time while driving with Chuck and another friend. Although I wasn’t present, Chuck told me immediately afterward that the men in both cars opened fire, shooting at each other as they drove by in opposite directions. I couldn’t confirm the shots that Mike, Chuck, and another friend fired, but the glass in the side and back windows of Mike’s car was shattered, and I counted seven bullet holes in the side doors. Mike quickly towed the car to a friend’s garage, worried that the police would see it if they hadn’t been alerted to the shootout. This was around noon.

That afternoon, Chuck and this friend came to my apartment, took some wet (PCP), and lay on the couch and floor with covers over their heads. They didn’t eat, drink, or get up for almost twenty-four hours, occasionally murmuring curses at Mike about how close they had come to death.

Two nights later, the police came to Mike’s old address, his uncle’s house, to arrest him for attempted murder. Mike’s uncle phoned his mother to let her know they were coming for him, so Mike left her place and hid out in various houses for the next two weeks, including my apartment for four days. The police raided his mother’s house twice, then his grandmother’s house, and then his children’s mother’s house. After two weeks he scraped together what money he could, found a lawyer, and turned himself in. He didn’t know who had called the police, but the lawyer showed us the testimony of the man who had robbed him, explaining that this man would be the main witness at the trial.

When Mike made bail, the man got in touch with him through a mutual acquaintance. He explained that he wanted only three hundred dollars, which was what it would cost him to repair the shattered windows in his car. Mike considered this a very low sum to get out of an attempted murder charge and happily paid him. He also paid for a hotel room for this man to stay in on the appointed court dates, in case the police came to his house to escort him to court. This man then failed to show up as a witness for three court dates, and the judge dismissed the case. To my utter astonishment, Mike and this man now appeared to be “cool.” The night after the case ended, we had drinks with the man and played pool together at a local bar.

People in legal jeopardy can pay others not to show up as a witness at a trial; they can also pay people in the neighborhood to alert them if the police are coming, or can pay those who know of their whereabouts, activities, or identity not to give this information to the police. With such a large number of wanted people in the neighborhood (as well as people committing illegal acts who are liable to be arrested should those acts be brought to the attention of the authorities), 6th Street engages in a brisk trade in this kind of information and cooperation.

It should be noted that the payments legally precarious people make to the purveyors of false documents, or to those who might inform or testify, are in addition to the money they pay to lawyers and to the state directly in court fees and fines, bail, probation and parole costs, and tickets. These payouts for their continued freedom represent no small portion of their income.

Informing

If a young man exhausts the avenues discussed above, he may attempt to avoid confinement by giving the police someone they want more than they want him. In contrast to fleeing, avoidance, cultivating unpredictability, or paying to pass undetected, this strategy carries heavy social judgment. Indeed, informing is understood to be such a lowly way to get out of one’s legal problems that men tend not to admit when they have done it. Since young men and women typically inform inside police cars or interrogation rooms, behind closed doors, it was difficult for me to study.

Chuck and Mike were close friends with a young man named Steve, who was about a year older than Chuck and a year younger than Mike. He lived across the street from Chuck with his mother and grandmother, his father having moved down south when he was a small child. Steve’s mother worked in administration at Drexel University, so the family was better off than many of the others on the block. With his small build, light skin, and light eyes, Steve looked sneaky, Chuck’s mom said, someone to keep your eye on. He was also notoriously hotheaded, pulling out his gun at inappropriate moments, like birthday parties for Mike’s children.

Chuck and Mike hadn’t thought that anyone could make Steve give up the bachelor life, but after high school he fell in love with Taja, a young woman who had grown up a few blocks away. Their stormy romance lasted longer than anyone expected—longer than they expected, they sometimes laughed. For almost the entire time I knew Steve and Taja, they were trying hard to have a baby, but Taja would miscarry every time Steve got locked up: three times in their six-year relationship.

Steve was a drug user more than a drug seller; when we met he was nineteen, and under house arrest awaiting the completion of a trial for possession of drugs.

In the spring the police stopped Steve while he was carrying a gun, and charged him with possession without a license to carry. He made bail, but then got picked up soon after for drinking while driving, revoking his bail. Steve sat in county jail as the court dates dragged on.

To our great surprise, Steve came home on house arrest three months later, still in the middle of his trial dates. He explained that the court released him for the remainder of the proceedings because the jails were overflowing, and the judge determined that he didn’t pose a flight risk.

In confidence, Mike admitted to me that he did not believe Steve, since he’d never heard of a person coming home on house arrest during a trial for a gun case. He suspected that Steve had likely cut a deal to be at home during the lengthy court proceedings, most likely by giving up somebody the police seemed more interested in.

A week later, a local man on trial for murder phoned Reggie and told him that his lawyer had shown him Steve’s statement. Apparently, Steve had signed an affidavit that he had been present at the time of the murder. A younger friend of Reggie’s was at his house when he got the phone call, and soon began spreading the news that Steve was a snitch.

Faced with the public and personal disgrace of his betrayal, Steve spent three days threatening violence against Reggie’s young boy, and then he told him to come to his house so they could discuss it. As the young man entered, Steve began yelling, “Who the fuck told you I was a rat, nigga? Who?”

“You just going to sit here and act like you ain’t say shit,” the young man said coolly. “They got your statement on file.”

Steve said he would kill him, and the young man made a move toward Steve. Mike attempted to pull the two apart, but Steve pulled his gun and pistol-whipped the young man in the face and then in the back of his head.

“You been home less than a week!” Chuck admonished, as the young man covered his bloody face with his hands. “You can’t pistol-whip a nigga that calls you a snitch. Plus, that makes you look like you really did do that shit.”

“You ain’t mature in jail at all,” Mike added.

Mike asked the young man if he could go to the hospital, and he replied that he had a couple of open cases, but no warrants. We took him to the ER for stitches. Mike, who had a bench warrant for failure to appear in court, hovered in the parking lot, checking in every half hour or so via cell phone.

To my knowledge, this young man never again mentioned that Steve had snitched. A few days later there was another shootout, and the whole affair took a backseat in the local gossip.

Most of the time, young men don’t resort to violence to rebuild their reputations after they snitch. Instead, they attempt to regain the trust and goodwill of the person they wronged.

When he was sixteen, Ronny and a few other young men from 6th Street drove to Montgomery County late one night and tried unsuccessfully to break into a motorcycle store. When they couldn’t get in, they returned to their ’89 Bonneville, only to find that the car wouldn’t start. Ronny called Mike to come get them.

When Mike got the call, he and Chuck and I were watching movies in the apartment. It was around 2:00 a.m. I heard Mike on the phone to Ronny as follows: “Where the fuck is that at? Okay. Gimme like, a hour [to get out there].”

Mike turned to me.

MIKE: This lil’ nigga out in the middle of nowhere. Car ain’t starting. We still got them cables [jumper cables]?
ALICE: No. Who is he with?
MIKE: The boy Dre, couple other niggas.
ALICE: Why is he out there?
MIKE: I don’t fucking know—probably because he trying to steal something. I’ma beat his lil’ ass to the ground when I see that nigga. Now I got to get up. [shakes his head as he puts on his boots] Fuck it. I’ma just wear my long johns.
ALICE: I’ll see you later.

Mike cursed the boys but went out anyway to retrieve them, saying that he couldn’t refuse his young boy anything. Chuck and I waited until around four. Mike didn’t come back. The next afternoon, I got a call from a cop at a Montgomery County police station, asking if I knew a man named Keshon Jackson. After a beat I realized that this was likely the fake name that Mike had used when he got booked so that any outstanding warrants wouldn’t come up.

Apparently, when Mike pulled up, the dealership’s silent alarm had already gone off, and the cops were waiting behind a hill for the boys to try to break in again. The cops ran out from behind the hill and chased Mike and Ronny, along with the other boys, across covered pools and sandboxes and through bushes. Two of the boys got away; Ronny, Mike, and another young man were caught and taken into custody.

According to the signed affidavit that Mike’s lawyer read to us later, Ronny and his friend, both sixteen, were separately interrogated and agreed to name Mike as the one who had put them up to it. In exchange, the police dropped the charges against the minors and drove Ronny and his friend home. Mike, who was twenty-one at the time, was charged with attempted breaking and entering, vandalism, and trespassing.

When Ronny got back home, he fervently denied that he had informed, claiming he would never betray Mike like the other boys had. But Mike had seen the police report. On the phone to me from jail, he said he was deeply hurt by Ronny’s betrayal, since he considered Ronny a younger brother:

Even if they [the police] was telling him like, look, just say it was Mike and we’ll let you go home tonight, he should have played his part [remained silent; done the right thing] just on the strength of everything I done been through for that lil’ nigga. Almost everything he got on his back was shit I passed off [gave to him], you feel me? Any time he need a couple dollars, who he coming to? He ain’t going to his nut-ass pop, he ain’t going to Nanna [his grandmother]. He come straight to me like, “Yo, Mike. Let me hold [borrow] this, let me hold that.” I done broke him off, like, so much change. Who he think keeping him fed out here? Nigga, you ain’t eating [making money] by yourself! Ain’t no other motherfucker out here looking out.

Mike spread the word that Ronny had snitched. It was worse than that, in fact, because Ronny had blamed Mike for a crime that he didn’t even commit. For almost two weeks, Ronny didn’t come out of his grandmother’s house except to go to school. Then he took Mike’s gun and robbed a house in Southwest Philadelphia. He sold the TV, stereo, and jewelry, and paid Mike’s bail.

Mike came home and still refused to speak to Ronny. He wouldn’t allow Ronny to come to the apartment where he was staying, though Ronny came to the door a number of times.

By the time Mike drove out to Montgomery County for the preliminary hearing, he and Ronny appeared to be on better terms. In fact, Ronny accompanied him to all the subsequent court dates to show his support. As we were walking out of the courthouse on one of these occasions, Mike said to me:

I know, you know, he a snitch, but that’s my little nigga. I raised that nigga from this tall. Plus, like, he don’t have no real family, like, his pops gone, his mom out there in the streets. Nigga had to look out for himself.

The support Ronny gave Mike during his court dates, and the money he risked his life to obtain to pay Mike’s bail, seemed to have prompted a reconciliation between them. Though Mike treated Ronny somewhat coldly in the following months, he stopped telling people that Ronny had snitched.

Two years later, Mike was in state prison for a gun case, and Ronny’s botched motorcycle theft came up in conversation in the visiting room. Mike and I had a good laugh about how stupid Ronny and his friends had been to try to break into the motorcycle store, and Mike recalled that he had run across a covered pool for the first time in his life. Then Mike cursed Ronny’s friend for snitching on him. He said that if he ever saw the kid again, he’d beat the shit out of him. I didn’t mention that Ronny had snitched, too, and Mike didn’t, either.

Five years after this initial snitching incident, Mike was back home, and Ronny got into a fight with a young man who, after Ronny had beaten him soundly, began talking about how Ronny had snitched on Mike a while ago, though “a lot of niggas don’t know that.” Mike handed Ronny his T-shirt to clean himself off and said to the offending young man, “Get your fucking facts straight, nigga. Everybody knows Ronny ain’t do that shit.”

Ronny’s strategy to repair his public persona and his relationship with Mike after he had informed on him was to post Mike’s bail, attend his court dates, and slowly regain his trust and forgiveness. He also denied that he had snitched, and after a time Mike denied it along with him, even sticking up for Ronny when others tried to revisit this piece of history.

* * *

For young men around 6th Street who worry that the police will take them into custody, the everyday relations, localities, and activities that others rely on for their basic needs become a net of entrapment. The police and the courts become dangerous to interact with, as does showing up to work or to places like hospitals. Instead of a safe place to sleep, eat, and find acceptance and support, their mother’s home is transformed into a last known address, one of the first places the police will look for them. Close relatives, friends, and neighbors become potential informants.

One strategy for coping with the risky nature of everyday life is to avoid dangerous places, people, and interactions entirely. Thus, a young man learns to run and hide when the police are coming. He doesn’t show up at the hospital when his child is born, nor does he seek medical help when he is badly beaten. He doesn’t seek formal employment. He doesn’t attend the funerals of his close friends or visit them in prison. He avoids calling the police when harmed or using the courts to settle disputes. A second strategy is to cultivate unpredictability—to remain secretive and to dip and dodge. Thus, to ensure that those close to him won’t inform on him, a young man comes and goes in irregular and unpredictable ways, remaining elusive and untrusting, sleeping in different beds, and deceiving those close to him about his whereabouts and plans. He steadfastly avoids using his own name. He also lays out a good deal of money to silence potential informants and to purchase fake documents, clean urine, and the like. If a man exhausts these possibilities and does encounter the police, he may flee, hide, or try to bargain for his freedom by informing on the people he knows.

The danger a wanted man comes to see in the mundane aspects of everyday life, and the strategies he uses to avoid or reduce these risks, have some larger implications for the way he sees the world, the way others view him, and consequently the course his life may take. At a minimum, his hesitancy to go to the authorities when harmed leads him to become the target of others who are looking for someone to prey upon. His fear of the hospital means that he doesn’t seek medical care when he’s badly beaten, turning instead to underground assistance of questionable repute.

More broadly, a man in this position comes to see that the activities, relations, and localities that others rely on to maintain a decent and respectable identity become for him a system that the authorities exploit to arrest and confine him. Such a man finds that as long as he is at risk of confinement, staying out of prison and maintaining family, work, and friend relationships become contradictory goals: engaging in one reduces his chance of achieving the other. Once a man fears that he will be taken by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family life, with all the paper trail that it entails, that allows the police to locate him. It is precisely his trust in his nearest and dearest that will land him in police custody. A man in legal jeopardy finds that his efforts to stay out of prison are aligned not with upstanding, respectable action but with being a shady and distrustful character.

* * *

Reprinted with permission from On the Run by Alice Goffman, © 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. Paperback edition published by Picador, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing. All rights reserved.

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)

After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.

You first got the idea for this movie while you were at 30 Rock, when someone wrote a line about Toofer having been in an a cappella group in college. You thought it was a complete joke. When you found out that nope, a cappella is real, you thought, someone has to make a movie about this! But what I find really interesting is that you started talking about the general idea of a movie about college a cappella without any specific story or plot in mind yet. I feel like some people would be hesitant to broach such an early-stage idea, even to friends. Is that always how you’ve operated?

Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision.

Can you describe the book a bit, and what the process of transforming it into a movie script was like?

In the book, Mickey follows several a cappella groups and takes you through the process of what they do in their year, in an a cappella season, and leading up to the ICCA [International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella] Finals. But there’s no real narrative, per se—there’s no character from the book that I pulled and put into the movie. Fat Amy, for example, is just someone I created.

But what was so great was he wrote about this all female group, Divisi, who made it to the ICCA finals. He explained that ladies are the underdogs because they don’t hit the lower registers, and don’t typically beat box. So Divisi went to the finals and did Usher’s “Yeah!” and they beat box and they rapped and they did this awesome choreography—and they didn’t end up winning, because a female judge didn’t like what they did and thought it was inappropriate, so she scored them low. But they were amazing. For a long time, the group in the movie was called Divisi, but we ended up changing it to the Bellas. Divisi is kind of an odd name to hear over and over again.

But basically, from the book, I was able to get some quirks of these groups and what it’s like to go from the beginning to the ICCA Finals. And I realized—and the producers did as well—that it’s an underdog story, and this all-female group is the underdog, and we wanted to show them break through the glass ceiling, if you will.

Are the actual recorded songs in the movie only women’s voices?

Oh yeah. Yeah. In the first movie I made sure to ask the music producers, “Are they really singing? Is that really them? And there are no instruments?” And they assured me that there weren’t. Which is not to say that they’re not produced—they are produced, and they can work magic; they can really make you sound like a drum.

Speaking of the music, I was delighted to learn that “Cups,” which is in the first movie and became this smash hit, was Anna Kendrick’s audition song.

God bless Anna Kendrick for doing that. [Laughter] In the script I’d written that her character, Beca, hadn’t prepared with the song that everybody else had and was going to sing something else, but I hadn’t specified what that would be. When we saw her do “Cups” at her audition, she was so charming, it was so great, and it was like, “That’s it. That’s what she’ll do.”

So, I feel like I’m coming out to the people who read this interview, but I was a huge a cappella fan in college.

You didn’t do it, but you were a fan?

Yes. And I think that’s even less cool, to be honest. A cappella was pretty cool in college, but the first year out, I quickly understood this was deeply uncool and I should not tell anybody. Why is a cappella so uncool?

I think because the groups take it so seriously, but when you pull back and think about it, they’re singing covers of songs. And take glee club, take a cappella, take the marching band and compare them to athletes, it leans on the side of uncool in general, in terms of our society’s version of what’s cool and what’s not.

If you’re on a sports team, you’ve got to be visibly athletic. There is a very specific type of person who is on a sports team. Whereas a cappella takes people from all different walks of life—you get all these guys and ladies and I think they just sort of find their family. So I think maybe on the bigger, broader level, maybe that’s why it seems uncool. And, you know, they could be snapping their fingers and doing choreography that might seem a little uncool, too.

Having said all that, though, when you see them perform, you get talent crushes on these people. It’s infectious. You look at the character of Jesse in the movie—if you compare him to a big old football player, he might lean towards the side of uncool, but when you see him perform, he is crushable. It’s the whole rock star thing. Every girl wants to be with him. He’s just awesome.

Do you think a cappella is getting cooler as a result of this movie? Or is Pitch Perfect giving people more confidence to proclaim their nerdiness?

I think it’s changing the definition of cool. One of the joys of the Green Bay Packers being in the movie [a few of them make a cameo appearance at a riff-off] is that it’s the jock that auditions for the musical. They basically are like, “Look at us, and we love it and it makes us happy.” I think happiness and joy are trumping any kind of, “Oh, you’re a nerd,” or “You’re uncool,” or wanting to throw somebody in a locker.

Was it hard to get the Green Bay Packers involved in the movie or was that an easy sell?

Oh, they tweeted to Elizabeth [Banks, the director and producer] how much they love the movie. They were basically like, “If you put us in the sequel, we will take it seriously, we will sing, we will rehearse, this is no joke.” They know all the choreography in the finale and, after a couple of drinks, they’ll totally do it for you.

Some of the storyline of the first film is built around the tendency of the Bellas’ leader, Aubrey, to projectile vomit when she gets overstressed…which was slightly disturbing. But I’ve heard you say in a few interviews that you know pursuing a project is going to be worthwhile if you feel really nauseous beforehand.

Yes.

What is that about? Why do you get so nauseous?

That’s a very good question. You’re like, “What’s your deal?” I think I understand the pressure right away, like the stress. I know how much work it will entail, I know that there will be a lot of debating. So I think I feel the immediate pressure, and that makes me nervous, and that nervousness gives me the worst kind of butterflies and maybe I haven’t eaten and I’m like, “Oh God, I feel sick.” I do think there is a little bit of Aubrey Posen in me, or there used to be way back when.

So I feel I have to raise some critiques of the movie’s treatment of weight and race. The plot kicks off with a wardrobe malfunction: Fat Amy’s vagina is exposed on stage in what becomes a scandal called “Muffgate.” In a review for Slate, Carl Wilson writes, “The gag depends on body-shaming the ‘Fat Amy’ character (the ebulliently game Rebel Wilson) even more than the original movie did, basically implying that vaginas are gross, fat girls are gross, and fat girls’ vaginas are really gross.” What are your thoughts?

I am so protective of Fat Amy and of that character. I didn’t create that character to ever have her feel shamed, ever. She is someone who is ridiculously confident and beautiful inside and out and loves herself and loves who she is in this world. I wanted there to be a wardrobe malfunction that caused them international disgrace so that they would start at the bottom of the barrel again. And so out of all the characters who could have a wardrobe malfunction, I thought, Fat Amy is the funniest character to do that because she is this larger than life, out there, confident character.

To me, when everybody in the movie is like, “Oh, no, she’s not wearing any underwear, cover your eyes,” it’s not about “the fat girl’s vagina”—and I’d never say “fat girl” like that, in such a negative way—or that her vagina is ugly. I compare it completely to Janet Jackson, who in society is viewed as a hot, sexy lady, but do you know how much shaming she got after the Superbowl? I think she even got death threats, and she showed just a boob, not even the nipple. And Justin Timberlake, in my opinion, got off a little bit scot-free there.

So I feel like when anyone says the “fat” part, they are putting that on there. Our intention was just to say that, as a woman, she is being shamed, regardless of what she looks like. I wouldn’t have even added that layer, and I was surprised that people did. I apologize if there is any heavyset lady out there who felt like that’s what I was doing, because that’s not at all the intention behind it.

There’s also a scene, though, in which Fat Amy paddles across the lake while serenading Bumper, and then they start making out on the lawn in front of the Treblemakers, who are all really grossed out by it and start turning away.

They’re not grossed out because of what Rebel [Wilson]—or Fat Amy—looks like, it’s that Rebel and Adam [DeVine, who plays Bumper] are going to go for funny no matter what, and they both have their tongues out. Rebel and Adam aren’t going to do a beautiful romantic comedy kiss. They’re comedians. They’re funny, they’re gonna go for the funny, and it is funny to watch. So when they start to roll around, to go after it, that’s why the rest of them don’t want to stick around. So again, I can understand why maybe that was the perception, but I think it’s our own stuff we bring in from how society treats heavyset ladies in general that maybe we project onto it. If I saw Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady making out like that, I’d leave too.

In an interview on Bullseye, Jesse Thorn asked you about the race jokes in the movie: there’s a Latina immigrant character whose gag is basically to counter any complaint the Bellas have with a dire bit of her own story. As you described it on that show, those race jokes are purely satirical, a way of putting into sharp relief the silliness of the Bellas’ complaints.

Yes.

But I did wonder, because people in my theater laughed so much—not that you know what’s in the audience’s head, but might this give some license to people to laugh at un-PC jokes that it’s unseemly to laugh at in real life?

Look, you want to have it be provocative. I think you want to start a conversation, right? I don’t want to say, “Why are you laughing at that? Are you racist and that’s why?” I don’t want to try to decide, as you were saying, what’s in the audience’s head.

But someone tweeted that they were glad that their children found it offensive, or were taken aback by the sexist or racist jokes. For me, when I hear that, I think, “Oh, this is good, because it’s starting a conversation.” The joke happens because there is a stereotype in the culture, or maybe you take something in reality that’s dramatic and terrible and you call it out or you poke fun at it. What’s good is that you can have a conversation with your children and be like, “That way of thinking is an inappropriate way of thinking. You’re right, it is wrong, it’s not nice. It is mean.” Or maybe you could talk about the state of how we treat minorities in this country. I don’t want to get too heavy with you on this because it’s a lighthearted movie, but I do think it’s an opportunity for that kind of conversation.

We’ve gotten some flak for the John Michael Higgins character, just how sexist he is. And maybe there’s one too many jokes, maybe the jokes need to be better, and that’s all fine and I’ll take that hit. But as a woman, I can write a misogynist character because even in 2015, we are dealing with people who believe women shouldn’t go to college. I mean, they are out there. So if someone gets offended by that, I’m like, “Okay, good, because you don’t believe in that, and you think that is a terrible way of thinking, and I do, too.” But I get to make fun of it because I deal with it on a daily basis.

You were one of seven children. What was it like in your house? Did you have sing-alongs with your siblings in the car?

I don’t remember sing-alongs in the car, although I’m certain we must have done it. I lived in a house of wonderful chaos. My parents were really great about having different rules per kid based on the kid, which I thought was kind of cool. They knew I needed rules and I liked it—I’m a real academic rules person—so they gave me a curfew, but my brother didn’t have one. That kind of thing.

One rule for all of us was that you couldn’t sing at the dinner table, because I think it drove my parents crazy. And so we would get up and go into the family room, which was connected to the kitchen, and we would sing in the family room. We were like, “We’re not singing at the dinner table!”

To leave the dinner table, you had to be excused, and there were two ways in which you got excused. One was if you ate enough. The second one was that you had to have given enough to the conversation at the table. So if you had a bad attitude and you were sitting there being all mopey, you weren’t excused. So what ended up happening is we’d have these really long dinners that we still have to this day. And at one point my grandfather lived with us, so it was seven kids, a grandfather and my mom and dad, five dogs, ten cats—I mean, it was just this wonderfully chaotic home. I had a friends and family screening of the movie in April and half my siblings came out just for the night to watch the movie with me. It was really fun to have them here.

So. Can you sing?

[Laughter] I’m awesome, I’m aca-awesome. No, I can. Back in the day, I used to do musicals and stuff like that, but I’m more of an improviser than a singer these days. But I can karaoke with the best of ’em.

Speaking of improv, since that’s your background—it’s so collaborative, and writing a film is so solitary. What are you more drawn to and how do you manage that balance?

I really don’t like being alone—in life in general, and also when I’m working. My husband is a comedy writer and I’ll often pull him in to bounce ideas off of, or sit with me and help me with a joke. And he is so funny, he’s so fantastic.

One thing I maybe do differently than other screenwriters is I show my work to the producers a lot. I’ll turn out pages and get their notes, which gives a sort of collaborative feel to the whole writing process.

You’ve written for both 30 Rock and New Girl. I’m a big fan of both shows, which have quite different tones, but I can’t put my finger on how exactly. How would you characterize that tonal difference?

On Bullseye, I mistakenly said that the 30 Rock tone was no tone. But that’s wrong of me. It’s really that as long as 30 Rock started in a place of being grounded, you could kind of go and do anything. We might have one episode that’s really grounded and about some character’s existential crisis, but the next episode, we make up a holiday called “Ludachristmas.” Or the first script I ever was a part of writing was called “Black Tie,” where Paul Ruebens plays this inbred prince.

Whereas New Girl starts every story with the emotional component. It’s not afraid to go to the emotional side and really can make you cry. I would say that, tonally, it’s more grounded than 30 Rock. And New Girl can feel a little bit like a movie sometimes.

In a Splitsider interview from 2010, you said you went into comedy rather than drama because you have a “cartoon-looking face.” Do you still think of yourself that way?

I still believe it. I look like a cartoon character! I have big eyes and big teeth and cheekbones and stuff and I just think that is really good when you’re on stage. And I can look really goofy really fast.

I noticed that your Twitter bio says, “Spokesperson for women with sizeable teeth,” which is such a good joke and really made me laugh. But I also was curious if anyone has ever actually commented on your teeth.

When I was first auditioning in Los Angeles, my agent at the time—he is not my agent anymore—sat me down to talk about my smile. He was basically like, “You’ve gotta pull those teeth back.” And I ended up doing Invisalign. My teeth were always straight, but they were a little bit out there, and so I did pull them back. I’m not ashamed of my smile at all, but I maybe feel a little bit sensitive about it because someone sat me down to talk to me about it. But I don’t know. I have my mother’s smile so I love it and I don’t want to be ashamed of it. That’s why I said I’m a spokesperson for it.

I love that your response to that agent’s comment is that, okay, you do Invasalign, but you’re also like, “Fuck you a little bit, I’m gonna put this in my bio.”

I think I just pulled a Fat Amy on that one.

* * *

Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Susie Cagle | Longreads | June 2015 | 21 minutes (5,160 words)

The sun was going down in East Porterville, California, diffusing gold through a thick and creamy fog, as Donna Johnson pulled into the parking lot in front of the Family Dollar.

Since the valley started running dry, this has become Johnson’s favorite store. The responsibilities were getting overwhelming for the 70-year-old: doctors visits and scans for a shoulder she injured while lifting too-heavy cases of water; a trip to the mechanic to fix the truck door busted by an overeager film crew; a stop at the bank to deposit another generous check that’s still not enough to cover the costs of everything she gives away; a million other small tasks and expenses. But at the Family Dollar she was singularly focused, in her element.

We loaded up more than we could carry—the plates, bottles of water, dish tubs and bars of soap—then turned down a two-lane road past the yellowing city golf course, past the cemetery, past the small muddy pond full of matted geese and ducks, where the water is so warm no fish can live. The sun sank a little further into the dirt.

Air grows thick in the Central Valley. It’s humid and the dust sticks together, a light film coating your skin, your clothes. Each breath a labor.

It was the rainy season, but you wouldn’t know it.

California has always been plagued. The floods and fires presented as disasters are in truth a natural lifecycle for a binge-and-purge ecosystem that was in no way formed with human life in mind. Centuries of settlers have attempted to tame this extreme landscape with increasingly ambitious feats of engineering: draining lakes until they were craters, moving rivers of water until all the fish died, drilling out the aquifers until the land sank.

This has in some ways made us very rich. California’s economy is the largest of all the U.S. states. When the plains turned to dust nearly 100 years ago, thousands migrated here, including my family, and helped to establish the Central Valley as the nation’s preeminent agricultural center. Today the region produces a full third of the produce we eat.

But now the land is purging. A spectacular drought has drawn the entire Southwest dry. Where water has long been a rival good yet inexplicably taken for granted, more than 90 percent of California is in a severe drought, with the situation in Porterville and much of the surrounding valley deemed exceptional. The state’s natural dryness has been exacerbated by a creeping global climate change and a cascade of questionable human decisions, and it has escalated with shocking speed.

Last September, Governor Jerry Brown declared the drought not just an emergency, but a disaster, releasing millions in funding for immediate aid but none for the long-term infrastructure necessary to maintain an extremely thirsty modern society.

The crisis is constant. California has always been plagued.

For the last year, the unincorporated and impoverished community of East Porterville has experienced some of the worst effects of this drought through a combination of exceptional factors that have coalesced to stamp out a self-sufficient subsistence that has characterized Central Valley life for many people over the last 150 years.

With no municipal water system, families rely on private wells and the groundwater those wells tap. So, too, do the farmers planting thirsty and thirstier non-native crops nearby— farmers who can drill ten times as deep as their residential neighbors for the water those plants need. Months go by without rain; the groundwater they suck up isn’t replaced. No one really knows how many of the shallow home wells have gone dry here: They thought it was 100 until they counted 500, 600, 800… that now pump only sand. In a community that prides itself on self-reliance, how do you live off the land when the land turns on you?

This is life after water. And no one knows how long it might last.

After water, there are a thousand new considerations: Is it better to cook with expensive, precious bottled water or eat fast food every night? Does this soap have animal fat in it that will stick to your skin and be harder to scrub off? Whose truck can you borrow to pick up the water you need from the fire station to bathe your babies? How dirty does it have to be for you not to drink it on a 110 degree day? How long can you live like this?

After water, what is the cost of this independence? What is the role of government and other institutions? Who bears the load of a community on the brink? How does a town stay a town?

Who brings the plates?

Donna Johnson grew up in Kansas before moving to Southern California, and then retiring in East Porterville, where many have come to rely on her over the last year. They call her “the Water Lady;” some even show up at her house unannounced, demanding the stuff. Johnson might be the most famous woman in East Porterville. She’s won awards from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Ford Foundation, been profiled in newspapers and magazines around the world.

Early last year, when her well began sending up more sand than water, Johnson went door to door, asking neighbors if their wells had gone dry, too. It took weeks. She compiled a list of affected homes— a list much, much longer than the county had anticipated. She advocated for East Porterville residents at city and county meetings. She began accepting and delivering donations, filling her carport with palettes of water, emptying it, filling it again.

Porterville takes little responsibility for this unincorporated rural sprawl, which is just fine by most of the people who live in it. In theory, East Porterville should be capable of sustained self-sufficiency: It’s positioned strategically at the edge of the Tulare Basin, a few miles downhill from the Sequoia National Forest and less than a mile from the painfully named Lake Success, with the Tule river running straight through it. In theory, its underground aquifers should be easily recharged. But some wells here have been running dry four summers in a row.

Porterville, by contrast, is not just surviving, but thriving, according to its former mayor. The town of fewer than 55,000 is situated about an hour’s drive north of Bakersfield, surrounded on three sides by the dairies, ranches, and fields of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains that feed America and several other nations. The biggest employers are the government, the hospital, the Walmart distribution center, the casino, and Foster Farms chicken. The local median income is about two-thirds the state average. It is consistently ranked as one of the top ten most polluted cities in the country. To say that Porterville is thriving would appear to be something of an overstatement of the current condition.

A Wild West town with deeply conservative politics, Porterville is not what most think of when they think of California. Porterville supported the Confederacy in the Civil War, and made a concerted effort to secede from Tulare county in later decades. More recently, it was the only city in the state to officially endorse a ban on same sex marriage.

Today Porterville is, at least, surviving, as it has for more than 100 years. And it is changing. Since 2000, the town has grown by more than a third, in large part by annexing select swaths of its neighboring unincorporated communities, in some cases completely surrounding remaining county holdouts. The politics are shifting with the population: More than half the city is now Latino. Its wealth and education levels are on the rise. Its municipal water system, sustained by deep public wells, is still functioning without incident.

But at the edge of the basin, in the shadow of the mountains, East Porterville is drying up. And no matter how much funding the state designates for disaster relief, no matter how many water tanks the county delivers to front yards, no matter how many people Donna Johnson counts, they can’t stop it.

Before Porterville, before the almonds and the gold, before people, this was all an ancient sea. For the better part of a million years, the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys that together make up the middle of California were home to a variety of prehistoric ocean life. When it all dried up, the basin was left lush, swampy, and remarkably fertile above an abundance of underground aquifers.

The loose-knit Yokut Indian tribes of the Central Valley lived here for hundreds of years, in communities scattered along the Tule river. The Spanish clung to California’s coasts, disinterested in the inland areas, where nearly 20,000 Yokut were undisturbed until James Marshall found a bit of shiny metal at a lumber mill more than 100 miles north. The ensuing Gold Rush drove tens of thousands of new residents to California, some of whom stopped on their way to the mines to instead settle Porterville and begin cultivating crops. In 1856, the new settlers waged war on the Yokut—by 1910, only about 600 were left. But new Porterville thrived: The railroad came, then the businesses and banks from San Francisco, then the mineral mines.

More migration begat more agriculture—tens of thousands of new Golden State settlers required a new local food system to sustain them and their new cities. The people needed crops, and the crops needed water, a resource those early pioneer farmers had taken for granted when they planted hundreds of square miles of thirsty fields under all that California sunshine. It took 60 years of droughts, floods, and federal wrangling before the Bureau of Reclamation devised a complex system of pump plants, canals, and aqueducts that would funnel stored water from the soggy Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta down into the farms and communities of the Central Valley. The massive, sprawling Central Valley Water Project took nearly 40 more years to build.

While California was reengineering its geology to better serve its new society, another part of the country was grappling with its own water woes—and coming up dry. The Homestead Act and transnational railroad had encouraged development and agriculture across the West. In the Great Plains, a few good wet years led new settlers to believe they could farm the land without worry. They ploughed deep, destroyed native grasses, and set the stage for sweeping environmental devastation.

In the early 1930s, a period of drought set upon the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. The land had not just dried up, but evolved into a swirling, destructive, and near-constant storm of dirt. The ensuing Dust Bowl sent more people escaping West than the Gold Rush had enticed with the promise of wealth.

Driven from her Texas farm as a child, my grandmother Bernadene Garrett arrived in Porterville with her parents, two sisters, and a brother who would die in the next war. The family established and cultivated a modest tomato farm. But in dry years, the dust still swirled.

At 14, Bernadene caught valley fever, caused by a fungus that lives in loamy soil across the southwest, coming alive and airborne in the dry heat of late summer. The spores root down into your lungs and can never truly be displaced. She dropped out of high school for two years, and suffered symptoms of the disease for the rest of her life.

In recent years, the fever has been making a comeback, flying up from the loose Valley dust, infecting thousands every year. There is still no cure and no preventative vaccine.

Whether it was the farm, the fever, or the unyielding conservative and religious politics of the place, I can’t know, but Bernadene wanted out. At 19, she eloped with my grandfather—at the time, a lawyer; later, a drunk—and didn’t look back.

Donna Johnson pulled into a long dirt driveway, and began unloading what she brought: the plates, the water, the plastic dish tubs and the bars of soap. The supplies were purchased with small donations or Johnson’s own funds. Door-to-door assistance has been the nature of the Water Lady’s operations for much of the last year. Sometimes there are other volunteers, assistants, but they usually last only a day or two. It’s just too hard.

Lately it’s gotten a little easier. The county started making monthly water deliveries, cases of Sparkletts for cooking and drinking. But the logistics are haphazard and confused: With multiple trailers and homes on one property, some people are often skipped.

Javin Hester, 23, emerged from his trailer with good news: They strung a long hose from a neighboring church’s deep well, and now had enough water shared amongst the four homes here for one person to take a shower at a time. Sometimes the water is the color of rust, or urine, but sometimes it’s not—it’s water, and it’s theirs.

The storms this season brought far more wind than rain, and the landscape is littered with crisp, fallen dead trees, trees that had survived for generations, through many lesser droughts. A tall pine snapped and took out the power here for two days recently; its remnants were chopped and piled near Karen Hendrickson’s front door.

Hendrickson, 48, moved here with her daughter from Los Angeles at the height of the dry summer, to take care of her ailing mother. It was a lot to get used to, even before the water ran out. When her mother died in November, she left Karen the house.

Of Tulare County’s nearly half million residents, about 15 percent are living outside of municipal boundaries and large water infrastructure. This is not East Porterville’s burden to bear alone: Residential wells are going dry across the San Joaquin Valley. And in the spirit of the state’s wild, individualist founding, California provides no regulations or protections for private wells on private lands.

When Johnson delivered her list of dry homes to the county, there was no agency or aid program in place to organize and fund emergency infrastructure and supplies. This simply hadn’t happened before. There are assistance programs, grants, and low-interest loans available to drill new wells for low-income and elderly residents through state disaster funds and the Department of Agriculture. Otherwise, a new well could run upwards of $20,000.

This is the libertarian trade-off of rural residential life: Less government means less help, but also less restriction. There are no building codes to follow, and no rules about raising as many chickens, goats, and horses as you’d like.

Most in East Porterville have stayed, at least for now. But a place once defined by its self-sufficiency has become increasingly codependent. Were it not for government, nonprofits, and community assistance, this would all be dust.

Javin Hester’s grandfather Bill Wiggins inherited their property from a friend, and despite his advanced age, manages it to the best of his abilities—no one here has any complaints.

Talking about her landlord, Hendrickson’s voice cracked. She teared up. “He’s helped us so much. He’s done so much more than he should.”

But for every Bill Wiggins, there is a horror story about another house just a block over there, where the landlord threatened to evict the family if they asked for county assistance. For every Donna Johnson, there is someone hoarding all the Sparkletts gallons that were delivered for their entire apartment building, or refusing to help the young mother who knocks on their door, desperate for water, instead turning her in to Child Protective Services.

There is nothing on which we rely so completely for survival, and yet we have done precious little to prevent its waste, its sale, and its destruction. America’s water footprint is the biggest in the world, per capita. Where nearly 800 million people lack access to clean water around the globe, the U.S. uses it to green millions of acres of golf courses, flood millions of acres of non-native crops, and grow millions of acres of feed for millions of the cows we rely on for food.

California’s trouble with water is not strictly an issue of supply, but also one of priorities. Though little blood has been spilled, the nation’s water wars have arguably been some of the fiercest and most pivotal in shaping our modern communities, and in no place has that clash been as hot as in California. The state’s hierarchy of licensed water rights is perhaps the most convoluted in the world, a strictly regulated system of “finders keepers” that leaves already strained water resources exceptionally overbooked.

The drought has had a cascading effect across this complex supply chain. Much of California’s fresh water is naturally stored in the Sierra snowpack, which is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The loss of natural resources places more pressure on the engineering meant to shuttle water around the state—not to where it is most needed or best used, but where it has been most assuredly promised.

In early 2014, the Bureau of Reclamation reallocated that year’s limited supply of Central Valley Project water, sending precisely none to the San Joaquin Valley farms that are contracted for up to nearly 2 million acre-feet. In 2015, the Bureau issued the same allocation, calling the situation “dire.”

Receiving nothing from nature and nothing from the government, farmers dug deep. Some tore out especially thirsty non-native crops, leaving fields fallow. Others dug deeper, drilling hundreds of feet down into the valley’s precious, ancient aquifers, pumping them out far faster than nature can replace them. If they pump more than they need, that water can be sold back to water districts, which then turn around and sell it to other thirsty farmers. Since 2011, the number of well permits has more than doubled in Tulare County, which issues more than any other county in the Central Valley.

Here private land rights have always come with groundwater rights: Whoever has the resources to drill the deepest wins. California was the last state in the U.S. without laws regulating its groundwater resources until 2014, when Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, tasking local governments with tracking water use and enforcing limits. Even so, it is still the last state without regulations—California won’t release standards for what “groundwater management” means until 2016, and counties won’t begin implementing them until 2017.

So far, these are the only restrictions placed on the state’s agriculture business. When Governor Jerry Brown stood in the dry Sierra mountains to announce California’s first-ever mandatory water cutback, he targeted lawns, not crops. Farmers will be required to track and report more information about their water use to the state, but their fields won’t have to do without, though some irrigators have offered to cut back.

Tulare county has three sub basins—three underground pools that farmers are draining, quickly, to irrigate a wide variety of crops increasingly responsive not just to local and national tastes, but to international ones as well.

This is a multibillion-dollar industry, but it is not necessarily good business. For all that water, agriculture produces just about 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. But that 2 percent, while small, is vital: It shaped the state’s physicality and identity from its earliest pioneer origins and today feeds Americans from coast to coast. Its political lobby is immensely powerful, with deep ties across party lines.

The state constitution protects against “the waste or unreasonable use or unreasonable method of use of water.” This could be a tremendous tool for the state government to use in prioritizing residents over business, were it interested in doing so.

California’s agriculture business might be, at this point, too big to fail.

But this was not the water war anyone expected.

Central Valley activists have worked for years to rein in the environmental degradation wrought by massive agribusiness. Farmers pile fertilizers on their fields, tainting the groundwater with high levels of nitrates, concentrated over miles and miles of farmland. Rural residents living with well water are exposed to significant health risks: excessive nitrate consumption reduces the body’s ability to send oxygen to vital tissues, which is especially dangerous to babies.

These are all problems not of nature, but of corporate scale. When they drill down 500, 800, 1,000 feet to drain the sub-basin and load nitrate-heavy fertilizers on their fields, individual farms are acting in their own best corporate interest. Some of those irrigation wells have run dry, too. The small rural residential communities nestled in between those farms, the ones that once seemed so sustainable with their own water supplies and arable land, have been sacrificed to a parched supply chain that privileges water-logged coastal cities and a global food system.

But it’s a supply chain on which these communities also rely, as nearly 36 percent of East Porterville’s labor force works in local agriculture.

When the wells began to pump dry, the county tested the little water that remained, and found that just like so many other towns scattered across the valley, it too was contaminated with nitrates. This made residents eligible for aid under the state’s Cleanup and Abatement fund. It also put East Porterville’s future in a new kind of jeopardy: No amount of rain can fix this.

The last winter brought a strained optimism to East Porterville, but it brought little rain. The water that did fall—less than 2.5 inches—beaded off the slick, arid ground, flooding some low-lying neighborhoods before evaporating in the hot sun.

Where California thought it was engineering the land to meet society’s demands, it didn’t account much for nature’s. The state’s Mediterranean and semidesert ecosystems are prone to cyclical drought cycles, feast or famine, but creeping global climate change threatens to further exaggerate those already extreme conditions. East Porterville can pray for rain all year, but the period between 2011 and 2014 was the state’s hottest and driest on record.

If East Porterville’s plight highlights the ability of a community to unite in a disaster, it also exposes the difficulty of official infrastructure to do the same. Water trickles here now, not through wells or pipes but an ad-hoc system of community, nonprofit, local, regional, state, and federal government aid.

Nonprofits have delivered large water tanks to some families, and the county is working on a program to provide larger ones. The state Emergency Management Agency is drilling a new deep well for Porterville, so the city will have the capacity to set aside up to 2 million gallons of water for the East each month—enough for about one fifth of the town. But that water won’t be pumped for several months, and the city refuses to fill the county’s tanks in the meantime.

Every arrangement is strained; every solution, temporary. The situation is as fluid as the water no one has.

Last fall, the county and city set up a temporary free shower service at an East Porterville church where Rev. Roman Hernandez has been accepting and dispensing donations of water and bread rolling in from as far away as Missouri. Their own well went out more than six months ago.

It was already dark by the time we arrived at the house Angelica Galleos shares with her husband and two young daughters, the sky a chalky indigo. Their water tank sat squarely in the small front yard, just beyond the living room window. On this day it was empty.

Galleos and her family moved to East Porterville from Mexico in 2007. When their well stopped pumping, more than a year ago, she considered going back. Instead she worked with Donna Johnson, translating for the majority of local residents who speak only Spanish. On their first day together, they saw an old man living in conditions so dire, they didn’t know how to help. After sobbing together in the car, Galleos decided to stay.

Everyone agrees: Things are better than they have been. But the crisis of concerted drought isn’t the first day without water, but the persistent and plodding reality of it. This is the nightmare scenario that motivates doomsday preppers to load up secure underground bunkers with water tanks. A true crisis is so much more mundane for people like Angelica Galleos. It’s cold sponge baths when the public showers are too crowded in the morning; four hours at the only crowded laundromat, jockeying for the few big machines; every meal served on paper plates. It’s a kind of shame. It’s your child with the lice that you just can’t get rid of; the outhouse your husband built in the backyard that you don’t want anyone to see. It’s not a moment but a constant, wearing you down one day at a time like a small stone at the bottom of a river.

The city water line runs right down Galleos’s street, past her house and her empty water tank. When I asked if she might want to hook into the municipal water system, she and Johnson looked at each other and giggled.

Rural life in America is dying, and not slowly. In an ever more connected age, society is moving closer together. Today only 19 percent of the country’s population lives outside cities and suburbs. It’s the last vestige of an older, more libertarian time, when to live in the West meant to be autonomous, wild, and often uncomfortable. People did not move to California for its established social structures, but for what they could pull out of the ground with their own hands.

For the Central Valley’s Latino immigrant communities, rural freedom cuts both ways. While they are disconnected from municipal convenience, they’re also sheltered from government scrutiny, a condition more vital than running water for those who are undocumented.

Just like the farmers who pump out the precious aquifers, people in East Porterville want to be able to do what they please with their land. But unlike those farmers, East Porterville is small, and it is poor, and it is in no one’s best interest to save its old way of life. It does not have a powerful political lobby, or substantial private resources. Some of the renters have already started to pack up, and others are reconsidering city annexation.

Ideology is not the only thing keeping East Porterville plagued. Even when they want to join the city, it is not always so easy. Laying new infrastructure is expensive for both Porterville and property owners, and there are sometimes insurmountable political hurdles.

The city water line that feeds the showers at Rev. Roman Hernandez’s church runs right up to the edge of his property, not 100 feet from the front door.

And so East Porterville can no longer survive by grit alone. Over the next three decades, Porterville plans to slowly annex the East, bit by bit. Those who want to cling to rural life have dismally limited options: They will have to draw upon their own personal wealth and dig deeper, or embrace a different kind of community governance. Some Central Valley communities plagued by private well failure have teamed up to form community water boards and dig shared, community wells with the help of organizing nonprofits—a system that would still require public elections and private water bills.

If there were any time for the myth of California to crumble, now seems to be it. The West is still bound up and driven by an idea of itself as a place where the pioneer spirit won out, Manifest Destiny achieved, nature dominated, tamed. California has a deeply uncomfortable relationship with its own history. It is a place in a constant state of reinvention, a land of bright blazing future, tenuous present, and little to no past.

In downtown Porterville, an antique store boasts the best collection of local history, xeroxed chapbooks filled with brief anecdotes of prominent local families and industry. The city museum is a collection of donated trinkets: dozens of samples of different barbed wires; hand-woven baskets from Native American tribes that lived hundreds of miles away; a porcelain doll collection; newspaper clippings from World War II; old musical instruments. You could spend all day there and learn nearly nothing.

We were grossly irresponsible stewards of this land. It did not go dry at nature’s behest alone. We would do well not to forget.

I came to Porterville looking for my own history, too. This was where my family first found California, as dust-covered refugees of a terrible drought. But they didn’t choose this rural life of pioneer spirit and self-sufficiency. My family left Porterville long before the water began to run out, settling in milder parts of California, coastal towns that don’t worry for their share of antiquated water rights. They reinvented themselves, and never spoke of what came before.

After water, I have so many more questions: Did you think the water would last forever? Can you believe it’s happening again, and here? What would you have done? But everyone I could’ve asked is gone now. The addresses on their Census surveys are now empty fields, and whatever there once was of Garrett Tomatoes has been lost, too, to time.

On my last day in Porterville, I visited the graveyard where my great-grandmother is buried, the mother of my father’s father, a man I never met, who has excised any trace of himself and his life here from every online ancestry database. I looked for my name chipped away in a piece of stone. I was so conspicuous in this search that the groundskeepers seemed worried for me, asked if I needed help. They looked up Essie Cagle, and directed me a few aisles away, to an unmarked plot covered in a dry carpet of short yellow grass that was crispy to the touch.

We disregard the past at our own peril. We forget the great regional destruction of the Dust Bowl, a destruction that came about not simply at nature’s behest but in no small part by way of shortsighted farming practices. We forget Owens Lake, drained dry to feed a young and hungry Los Angeles, now the country’s greatest source of dust pollution. We forget what this place was like before we got here, and we forget the hundreds and thousands of miles of infrastructure we built to carry the water we needed to make it California, this California, the one with which we have been so passionate and so careless.

If there were any time for the myth of California to crumble, now must be it.

We could double down on the self-righteousness that delivered us here by reviving old plans to import water from Northern California, from Alaska, from Canada, despite the potential for further environmental harm. We could attempt other grand feats of engineering, desalination plants, water pipelines. We could rip out all those crops, two valleys worth of crops, billions of dollars worth of crops, and start over in another part of the country. We could pray for rain, or to be delivered from our own folly. Or we could reconsider our priorities.

But we certainly can’t dig any deeper.

* * *

Susie Cagle is a journalist and illustrator based in Oakland, California.

* * *

Editor: Mark Armstrong; Fact-checker: Brendan O’Connor

Werner Herzog | Of Walking in Ice | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 12 minutes (3,048 words)

Long out of print, then in print in only a difficult-to-find small press edition, Herzog’s brilliant, strange jewel of travel writing has been reissued this spring. It is excerpted here courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press in the U.S. and Vintage in the U.K.

* * *

At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself. What I wrote along the way was not intended for readers. Now, four years later, upon looking at the little notebook once again, I have been strangely touched, and the desire to show this text to others unknown to me outweighs the dread, the timidity to open the door so wide for unfamiliar eyes. Only a few private remarks have been omitted.

W.H. 
Delft, Holland, 24 May 1978

***

Saturday 23 November 1974

Right after five hundred meters or so I made my first stop, near the Pasinger Hospital, from where I wanted to turn west. With my compass I gauged the direction of Paris; now I know it. Achternbusch had jumped from the moving VW van without getting hurt, then right away he tried again and broke his leg; now he’s lying in Ward 5.

The River Lech, I said to him, that will be the problem, with so few bridges crossing it. Would the villagers row me across in a skiff? Herbert will tell my fortune, from cards as tiny as a thumbnail, in two rows of five, but he doesn’t know how to read them because he can’t find the paper with the interpretations. There is the Devil, with the Hangman in the second row, hanging upside down.

Sunshine, like a day in spring, that is the Surprise. How to get out of Munich? What is going on in people’s minds? Mobile homes? Smashed-up cars bought wholesale? The car wash? Meditating on myself makes one thing evident: the rest of the world is in rhyme.

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. She is not dying now because she isn’t dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes. She wouldn’t dare! She mustn’t. She won’t. When I’m in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.

In a rain-sodden field a man catches a woman. The grass is flat with mud.

The right calf might be a problem, possibly the left boot as well, up front on the instep. While walking, so many things pass through one’s head, the brain rages. A near-accident now a bit further ahead. Maps are my passion. Soccer games are starting, they are chalking the center line on plowed fields. Bavarian flags at the Aubing (Germering?) transit station. The train swirled up dry paper behind it, the swirling lasted a long time, then the train was gone. In my hand I could still feel the small hand of my little son, this strange little hand whose thumb can be bent so curiously against the joint. I gazed into the swirling paper and then wanted to rip my heart apart. It is nearing two o’clock.

Germering, tavern, children are having their first communion; a brass band, the waitress is carrying cakes and the regular customers are trying to swipe something from her. Roman roads, Celtic earthworks, the Imagination’s hard at work. Saturday afternoon, mothers with their children. What do children at play really look like? Not like this, as in movies. One should use binoculars.

All of this is very new, a new slice of life. A short while back I stood on a flyover, with part of the Augsburg motorway beneath me. From my car I sometimes see people standing on the motorway flyovers, gazing; now I am one of them. The second beer is heading down to my knees already. A boy stretches a cardboard barricade between two tables with some string, securing it at both ends with Sellotape. The regulars are shouting, “Detour!” “Who do you think you are?” the waitress says. Then the music starts playing very loudly again. The regulars would love to see the boy reach under the waitress’s skirt, but he doesn’t dare.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

Where I’m going to sleep doesn’t worry me. A man in shiny leather jeans is going east. “Katharina!” screams the waitress, holding a tray of pudding level with her thighs. She is screaming southward: that I pay attention to. “Valente!” one of the regulars screams back. His cronies are delighted. A man at a side table whom I took for a farmer suddenly turns out to be the innkeeper, with his green apron. I am getting drunk, slowly. A nearby table is irritating me more and more with its cups, plates, and cakes laid out but with absolutely no one sitting there. Why doesn’t anybody sit there? The coarse salt of the pretzels fills me with such glee I can’t express it. Now all of a sudden the whole place looks in one direction, without anything being there. After these last few miles on foot I am aware that I’m not in my right mind; such knowledge comes from my soles. He who has no burning tongue has burning soles. It occurs to me that in front of the tavern was a haggard man sitting in a wheelchair, yet he wasn’t paralyzed, he was a cretin, and some woman who has escaped my mind was pushing him. Lamps are hanging from a yoke for oxen. In the snow behind the San Bernardino I nearly collided with a stag—who would have expected a wild animal there, a huge wild animal? With mountain valleys, trout come to mind again. The troops, I would say, are advancing, the troops are tired, for the troops the day is done. The innkeeper in the green apron is almost blind, his face hovering inches from the menu. He cannot be a farmer, being almost blind. He is the innkeeper, yes. The lights go on inside, which means the daylight outside will soon be gone. A child in a parka, incredibly sad, is drinking coke, squeezed between two adults. Applause now for the band. The fare tonight shall be fowl, says the innkeeper in the Stillness.

Outside in the cold, the first cows; I am moved. There is asphalt around the dungheap, which is steaming, then two girls traveling on roller skates. A jet-black cat. Two Italians pushing a wheel together. This strong odor from the fields! Ravens flying east, the sun quite low behind them. Fields soggy and damp, forests, many people on foot. A shepherd dog steaming from the mouth. Alling, five kilometers. For the first time a fear of cars. Someone has burned illustrated papers in the field. Noises, as if church bells were ringing from spires. The fog sinks lower; a haze. I am stock-still, between the fields. Mopeds with young farmers are rattling past. Further to the right, toward the horizon, many cars because the soccer match is still in progress. I hear the ravens, but a denial is building up inside me. By all means, do not glance upward! Let them go! Don’t look at them, don’t lift your gaze from the paper! No, don’t! Let them go, those ravens! I won’t look up there now! A glove in the field, soaking wet, and cold water lying in the tractor tracks. The teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion. I think of unharvested turnips but, by God, there are no unharvested turnips around. A tractor approaches me, monstrous and threatening, hoping to maul me, to run me over, but I stand firm. Pieces of white polystyrene packaging to my side give me support. Across the plowed field I hear faraway conversations. There is a forest, black and motionless. The transparent moon is halfway to my left, that is, toward the south. Everywhere still, some single-engine aircraft take advantage of the evening, before the Goon comes. Ten steps further: the Goon will come when Hell freezes over. Where I am standing lies an uprooted, black and orange signpost; its direction, as determined from the arrow, is northeast. Near the forest, utterly inert figures with dogs. The region I’m traversing is infested with rabies. If I were sitting in the soundless plane right above me, I would be in Paris in one and a half hours. Who’s chopping wood? Is that the sound of a church clock? So, now, onward.

How much we’ve turned into the cars we sit in, you can tell by the faces. The troops rest with their left flank in the rotting leaves. Blackthorn presses down on me—as a word, I mean, the word blackthorn. There, instead, lies a bicycle rim entirely devoid of inner tube, with red hearts painted around it. At this bend I can also tell by the tracks that the cars have lost their way. A woodland inn wanders past, as big as a barrack. There is a dog—a monster—a calf. At once I know he will attack me, but luckily the door flies open and, silently, the calf passes through it. Gravel enters the picture, then gets under my soles; before this, one could see movements of the earth. Pubescent maidens in miniskirts are getting set to climb onto other teenagers’ mopeds. I let a family pass by me; the daughter is named Esther. A cornfield in winter, unharvested, ashen, bristling, and yet there is no wind. It is a field called Death. I found a white sheet of homemade paper on the ground, soaking wet, and I picked it up, craving to decipher something on the top side, which was turned toward the wet field. Yes, it would be written. Now that the sheet seems blank, there is no disappointment.

At the Doettelbauers’ everybody has locked up everything. A beer crate with empty bottles waits for delivery at the roadside. If only the shepherd dog (that is to say, the Wolf!) wasn’t so hot for my blood, I could do with the dog kennel for the night, since there’s straw in it. A bicycle comes and, with each full turn, the pedal strikes the chain guard. Guard rails next to me, and over me, electricity. Now it passes over my head crackling from the high voltage. This hill here invites No One to Nothing. Just below me, a village nestles in its lights. Far to the right, almost silent, there must be a busy highway. Conical light, not a sound.

How frightened I was when, before reaching Alling, I broke into a chapel to possibly sleep inside, and there was a woman with a St. Bernard dog, praying. Two cypresses in front let my fright pass through my feet into the bottomless pit. In Alling not a single tavern was open; I poked about the dark cemetery, then the soccer field, then a building under construction where window fronts are secured with plastic covers. Someone notices me. Outside Alling a matted spot—peat huts, it appears. I startle some blackbirds in a hedge, a large, terrified swarm that flies recklessly into the darkness ahead of me. Curiosity guides me to the right place, a weekend cottage, garden closed, a small bridge over the pond, barred. I do it the direct way I learned from Joschi. First a shutter broken off, then a shattered window, and here I am, inside. A bench along the corner walls, thick ornamental candles, still burning; no bed, but a soft carpet; two cushions and a bottle of undrunk beer. A red wax seal in a corner. A tablecloth with a modern design from the early fifties. On top of it a crossword puzzle, one-tenth solved with a great deal of effort, but the scribbling inside the margin reveals that every verbal resource had been tried. Solved are: Head covering? Hat. Sparkling wine? Champagne. Call box? Telephone. I solve the rest and leave it on the table as a souvenir. It’s a splendid place, well beyond harm’s way. Ah, yes. Oblong, round? it says here, vertical, four letters, ends with L in Telephone, horizontal: the solution hasn’t been found, but the first letter, the first square is circled several times with a ballpoint pen. A woman who was walking down the dark village road with a jug of milk has occupied my thoughts ever since. My feet are fine. Are there trout, perhaps, in the pond outside?

Sunday 24 November

Fog outside, so icy cold that I can’t describe it. On the pond swims a membrane of ice. The birds wake up, noises. On the landing my steps sound so hollow. I dried my face in the cottage with a towel that was hanging there; it reeked so bitterly of sweat that I’ll carry the stench around with me all day long. Preliminary problems with my boots, still so new that they pinch. I tried using some foam, and, with every movement wary like an animal, I think I possess the thoughts of animals as well. Inside, beside the door, hangs a chime, a set of three small goatbells with a tongue in the middle and a tassel for pulling. Two nut bars to eat; perhaps I’ll reach the Lech today. A host of crows accompanies me through the fog. A farmer is transporting manure on a Sunday. Cawing in the fog. The tractor tracks are deeply embedded. In the middle of a courtyard there was a flattened, gigantic mountain of wet, filthy sugar beets. Angerhof: I’ve lost my way. Sunday bells from several villages in the fog all at once, most likely the start of church services. Still the crows. Nine o’clock.

Mythical hills in the mist, built from sugar beets, lining the path through the field. A hoarse dog. I think of Sachrang, as I cut off a piece from the beet and eat it. It seems to me the syrup had a lot of foam on top; the taste brings back the memory. Holzhausen: the road emerges. By the first farm, something harvested, covered with a plastic tarp anchored with old tires. You pass a lot of discarded rubbish as you walk.

A brief rest near Schoengeising, along the River Amper; matted countryside, meadows at the edge of a forest, rimmed with rifle ranges. From one rifle range you can see Schoengeising; the fog clears, jays appear. In the house last night I peed into an old rubber boot. A hunter, with a second hunter nearby, asked me what I was looking for up there. I said I liked his dog better than I liked him.

A harness hangs in my corner and within it a red streetlight is mounted for lighting, a loudspeaker above. Zither music and yodeled “Hollereidi,” my beautiful Tyrol comes from on high.

A cold mist rises from the plowed, broken fields. Two Africans were walking in front of me making thoroughly African hand gestures, deeply engrossed in conversation. To the very end they didn’t notice I was behind them. The most desolate thing was the palisades of Hot Gun Western City, here in the middle of the forest, all dreary, cold, void. A railway that will never run again. The journey is getting long.

For miles across open fields I followed two teenage village beauties along a country road. They were walking a little slower than I, one of them in a miniskirt with a handbag, and after several miles I steadily drew close to them. They saw me from far away, turned around, quickened their pace, then stepped a bit slower again. Only when we were within reach of the village did they feel safe. When I overtook them I had the feeling they were disappointed. Then a farmhouse at the edge of town. From a distance I could see an old woman on all fours; she wanted to get up but couldn’t. I thought at first she was doing something like push-ups, but she was so rigid she couldn’t get up. On all fours she worked her way to the corner of the house, behind which were people who belonged to her. Hausen, near Geltendorf.

From a hillock I gaze across the countryside, which stretches like a grassy hollow. In my direction, Walteshausen; a short way to the right, a flock of sheep; I hear the shepherd but I can’t see him. The land is bleak and frozen. A man, ever so far away, crosses the fields. Phillipp wrote words in the sand in front of me: ocean, clouds, sun, then a word he invented. Never did he speak a single word to anyone. In Pestenacker, people seem unreal to me. And now the question, where to sleep?

***

Originally published in German under the title Vom Gehein in Eis in 1978 by Carl Hanser Verlag. English translation copyright 1980 by Tanam Press. UK edition published by Vintage, 2014. US edition published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Jillian Lauren | Plume | May 2015 | 11 minutes (2,636 words)

Below is an excerpt from Jillian Lauren’s memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, as recommended by Longreads contributor Sari Botton. Read her interview with Lauren about memoir and family.

* * *

In a one-bedroom apartment in West Orange, New Jersey, late winter 1973, my mother, Helene, is home in the middle of the day, dancing to the Hair soundtrack while cleaning the house, when she gets a call from an old college friend named Jillian. Jillian married a fertility specialist after graduation and lives in Chicago now. My mother called her years before, seeking advice. Helene is on a list for a study in experimental fertility drugs, but the process seems to be dragging on forever. After nearly four years of trying to conceive, her diagnosis is unexplained infertility.

Jillian says, “Look, Helene, I don’t know if you’ve considered this yet. I don’t want to overstep my bounds, but we have some friends who just used this lawyer out here to adopt a healthy white baby and it was fast and relatively painless. I just saw them at temple and that baby is so cute and I thought of you. I got the lawyer’s name, in case you’re interested.”

My mother prepares a special dinner that night. She’s been doing that a lot lately to cheer my father up, since the stock market has been lousy and he’s been coming home dejected, dissatisfied, looking like a trapped animal. She doesn’t bring up the lawyer until after dessert. He is surprisingly amenable to the idea. Sure, what the hell. Let’s adopt a baby. We want a family, right? What’s the difference how you get one?

There are the interviews and the paperwork and the planning. My mother is good at this; she’s meticulous and organized and likes to color-code and label. It gives her something to take her mind off the wait.

Everything You Ever Wanted. Purchase the book.

My parents finally receive the call. Your daughter has been born. They board a flight to Chicago. The lawyer hands my mother the baby, sweet and perfect and pink, in the waiting room of the hospital. It’s a closed adoption, meaning that the records will be permanently sealed, my birth mother Sherri’s name expunged from any documents as if she never existed.

They fly home from Chicago and the stewardess offers my mother a bassinet but she declines. She doesn’t want to put the baby down. Ever. She never will put this little girl down.

I’m a pretty baby, with steady brown eyes that are melancholy from the get-go. When my mother walks through town with me, she’s instantly the most blessed and shining of things: a new mother. In 1973, the birth mother in an adoption agreement legally has six months to change her mind and reverse the adoption. Every single time the phone rings, my mother’s stomach drops and she has a sense of vertigo on her way to the phone, as if, on the other side of the kitchen wall with the tiny blue flower wallpaper, there is a precipice. If, by chance, it is the lawyer’s voice on the other end (there are little things he has to call her about now and then) her mouth becomes immediately parched and her hands tremble.

My mother keeps a suitcase packed and hidden away in the back of the closet. In it are a couple of changes of clothes for herself and for me, diapers and bottles and formula, travel toiletries, and five thousand dollars in cash. If the call ever comes informing her that she has to give me back, she’s taking me to Mexico. This nice, accommodating, middle-class woman would rather be a fugitive in exile than give me up.

It is a grand and powerful thing, the love my mother has for me. And yet. It has its limits.

* * *

Scott and I face my parents across the office of a highly recommended New York therapist, decorated with the requisite leather chairs, potted plants, erudite books, and tasteful paintings. My mother’s hand shakes as she lifts a glass of water from a Moroccan end table, inlaid with mother of pearl.

I’ve brought them here to tell them about my memoir. I’ve made a list of every single point in the book, both related to them and not, and my plan is to run through them in a safe and neutral space, with a mediator present. Two hours have gone by and I’m near the end of the list. It’s been abysmal.

“Why can’t you just get over this stuff?” they ask, again and again.

“I think it’s really sad that you can’t shut the door on the past,” says my father. “You dwell. You’re obsessed.”

“I’m not obsessed. I’m a writer.”

Which is not strictly true. I am also an obsessive dweller, of course. That’s why I’m a memoirist. My past is the vein of gold that I mine every day when I sit down to work. It’s just not true in the sense that he means it. It doesn’t indicate the emotional reality in my present life. It’s not like I sit around angry at my parents all day long. Just when they vote Republican.

“We give and give and give and all you have ever done is take. I don’t see any love from you. Any caring,” he says.

“Wait, wait,” says the therapist. “You’re misunderstanding. There is a lot of love for you in the book.”

I tell my father about a passage in the book in which I fondly recall going with him to buy cinnamon doughnuts in the early morning, during our yearly trips to the Jersey Shore. It was something we’d do just the two of us, when the rest of the world was still asleep.

“After everything,” says my father, deeply hurt, stammering, quietly now. “After everything, the doughnuts are what you remember?”

“The doughnuts,” I say, “weren’t doughnuts. The doughnuts were you and me.”

I’m asking the impossible—for a crushed and enraged man to understand a metaphor.

Months of negotiating and wheedling and cajoling and threatening and crying follow the therapy session. When none of that works, my parents disown me, emotionally holing themselves up in a storm cellar until this whole book thing passes them by.

“I cannot deal with this,” says my mother in a sort of hysterical wheeze, during our final conversation.

It’s nap time and I’m lying on my living room floor in a bra and a pair of sweat shorts that say Hanalei Bay across the butt, a relic from the Kauai honeymoon that seems a thousand years ago. Her phone call catches me in the middle of changing clothes.

“You have always been so ungrateful. I need time away from you. I do not want to hear from you anymore.”

Like Chava, the daughter of the Jewish patriarch, Tevye, in my father’s beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof, I committed a sin that caused my family to respond by killing me off, in spirit at least. By writing a book that portrayed the clan as less than perfect, suffering from the same dysfunctions, violence, addictions as our neighbors, I perpetrated an unforgivable betrayal, not just of my parents but also of the entire community. When my mother tells me that they have taken down my pictures, rewritten the will, want no further contact with me, I think of Tevye’s famous debates with himself, repeated over and over again throughout the course of Fiddler, like a mantra. On the other hand . . . On the other hand . . . ending, finally, tragically, with his rejection of Chava for marrying out of the tribe. NO. There is no other hand.

I hang up the phone and imagine my father, like Tevye, going back and forth between his love for me (Little bird, little Chaveleh . . .) and the deep hurt I have caused him, and siding, eventually, with the hurt.

Write a book about an unsavory past, about an imperfect family?

NO. There is no other hand.

I don’t argue. I don’t protest. I’m grateful to put the phone down. The silence that follows has a new sort of texture to it—this silence in which I no longer have parents. I’m sad and have a hollow sickness in my gut, yes, but I’m also relieved. An enormous burden immediately lifts when I realize that I will have a reprieve from hearing myself described as ungrateful no matter how many times I say thank you.

Just how grateful are we supposed to be to our parents exactly? Grateful enough to never pursue our own dreams? Grateful enough not to tell our own stories?

“He is so lucky!” is one of the most irritating things that people say to me about Tariku. I get it at least once a day.

This “lucky” is laden with multiple shades of meaning. It’s meant to be congratulatory to Scott and me. He is lucky because we’re so very benevolent, because we’re so very generous. Oh, and also because he’s not dying from malaria in a developing country. Lucky little guy. The implication always seems to be that he’s indebted to us, that he owes us some sort of obeisance. Gratitude isn’t as simple as it sounds.

When I was a kid, my father used to say to me (usually when I was tearfully begging for a pair of Jordache jeans or a Joan Jett cassette tape), “I cried when I had no shoes, until I saw the man who had no feet.”

“Why should I stop crying because of some poor footless schmuck? What kind of shitty way is that to think? I should cry harder.”

“Ach. Do-gooder.” This was meant as a sort of insult, as if having a bleeding heart made you a fool.

If I argued cleverly enough, sometimes I’d get the jeans. Not because he agreed with me, but because my dad liked a good debate.

When people tell us how lucky T is, we say, “We’re lucky.” It is both a memorized response and the absolute truth.

There was a time my parents felt truly lucky, too. Now, they have assured me of radio silence. It’s not an idle threat. They’ll stick to their guns. As I lie with the now-quiet phone next to me, my feeling is twofold. First, how sad it is that my parents and I never manage to meet emotionally. It’s not for lack of trying on either of our parts. I do love my parents. If they never talk to me another day in my life, still I would not trade them. But I also feel relieved to stop living in a story in which I am different, selfish, troubled, and, above all, ungrateful.

My arm and shoulder ache from carrying my toddler around. My head is full of too much hot and heavy static. I go stand blankly in front of the fridge, as if the answer is inside a frozen York Peppermint Pattie. I stick a piece of cheese in the mayo and shove it in my mouth, like my father in so many ways, including our fondness for stuffing our emotions by shoveling food down our gullets.

Grunting and rustling come from the baby monitor. I forgot about the monitor for a minute, while I was being flattened by this latest emotional steamroller. Usually I have the monitor volume turned way, way up, so that T’s breathing creates a rhythmic soundtrack for whatever else I’m doing. Panic washes over me. I stopped paying attention to it for a heartbeat. What if he stopped breathing—I wouldn’t even have heard. I know that this is not exactly the healthiest of behavior—my running fixation with every possible horrible thing that could go wrong with him—but I can’t help myself. Scott has suggested I see a therapist about this ghoulish brain chatter, but I haven’t done it yet. No time, I tell him. Maybe I am wary of letting it go. This is my equivalent of the suitcase my mother kept in the closet when I was an infant. The anxiety that is also a badge of honor in some ways. See—I have a love so profound it is driving me crazy. I run in to pick him up out of the crib and cling to him for dear life, like some deranged mother from a Philip Roth novel. He hangs on me like a little monkey for a heartbeat, before squirming, demanding to stand on his own two feet, ready to greet the remainder of the day at 120 mph, as he always does.

T and I go to the Long Beach aquarium that afternoon. It’s soothing for him. He likes to watch the octopus, the penguins, especially the sharks. I follow him as he runs from tank to tank, shafts of sunlight hitting the water and shattering into a wavy grid. I’m so attuned to the edges of his little form, so hawkeyed and intent on not losing sight of him, that my own edges are almost nonexistent.

I wonder if this is the fate of mothers: to dissolve ourselves into the needs of others. Is this why my own mother is so furious? Somewhere deep inside are we moms inevitably keeping tabs, expecting payback for our sacrifices?

When I’m out in public with T, I don’t just have to watch him to make sure he’s not escaping; I must also be within range of intercepting the surprise right hook he could throw at any moment, for the most invisible of offenses. I watch the other mothers with envy and a measure of self-pity. How come they get to sit there and drink an iced tea and chat with a friend while their kid happily plays in the fountain? There’s no iced tea for me, just constant vigilance.

Scott and I have been going for regular counseling and parenting classes at the echo Center and it has at least given us some language to talk about what’s going on with T. The problem is, it doesn’t seem to be changing anything. Much like the cocooning, many things about the philosophy are helpful, even essential, but it’s not a panacea. The echo Center is a good start, but it’s becoming clear that we have to look further and pursue more specialized help.

I have the same thought at least five times a day—I wonder if I should quit working. Would his behavior be less extreme if I quit any pretense of writing and threw myself, every minute of my every day, into being with T? Nearly every night, I talk to Scott about putting my writing on hold for a while. A year, two years. True, I have a book coming out, but that can be the last for a while. I can go back to writing someday.

“Why do you keep bringing this up?” he says. “It’s not just that you shouldn’t quit; you can’t quit. You are psychically incapable of stopping.”

He is probably right. I write and it draws a thick black line around all of these dissolving, hazy edges; it delineates me. Then the day with Tariku begins the process of eroding that line again. And so we continue.

I know what’s the best choice for me, but I am honestly not sure what’s the best choice for him. How is a mother ever supposed to know that?

In front of us, a mom yanks her whining little girl by the arm too hard. The girl drops to the ground screaming. With an embarrassed tuck of her hair, the woman leans down toward the girl, speaks in her ear, sets her on her feet again, and they continue on toward the turtle tank, both looking a little weary. Her palm lingers behind the girl’s blond curls with tenderness; I can feel the apology in her hand. It never ends, the stuff to be sorry for.

* * *

From the book Everything You Ever Wanted, published by Plume. Copyright © 2015 Jillian Lauren. Purchase the book.

Sari Botton | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,858 words)

In her first memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, Jillian Lauren held back pretty much nothing—about her eighteen months in the harem of the Prince Jefri Bolkiah, playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei; her substance abuse; her time as a sex worker.

She didn’t stop there. Lauren also revealed some of the less idyllic aspects of life in her adoptive family, such as her father’s violent nature—a choice for which she paid dearly when her parents stopped talking to her.

In her second memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, released in May, Lauren depicts the very scene where her parents cut her off, after a family therapy session in which she tells them she won’t be deterred from publishing Some Girls.

It’s just a small part of the new book—which is much more about her life after the harem: kicking her drug habit; meeting her husband; adopting her son, Tariku, from Ethiopia; figuring out how to square Tariku’s advanced intelligence with his lagging behavioral development; and finally, trying to adopt a second child.

But, in light of my never-ending quest for the best way to handle writing about those who’d rather not be written about, I was particularly intrigued by that part of the story.

I was also intrigued, and encouraged, when Lauren told me that she and her parents recently had something of a reconciliation. Her mother and father began speaking to her again in the past year. They attended one of her recent readings, near her hometown in New Jersey. And they say they love this book—even thought that tearful scene is included.

I got to talk with Lauren recently about the price for telling the ugly truth, and why she’d do it all over again. Here’s a part of our conversation, followed by an excerpt from that particular part of the touching, compelling Everything You Ever Wanted.

* * *

In the beginning of the book you’re back in your prior life. You’re using drugs, doing sex work. There’s that scene of you under the bed hiding in your dealer’s apartment, and you make a bargain. Tell me about the bargain that you made.

Well, the book deals with my more scandalous years, mostly in flashback. And that particular flashback was when I really realized that my life had gone so far off the rails, and was dangerous, and never where I thought I would be or wanted to be. So I made a bargain with God. It was probably the first time I had talked to God since my Bat Mitzvah. The bargain was that if I lived through this dangerous scenario, I would get off drugs and I would go to rehab, and that’s exactly what I did.

And it changed your life.

It absolutely changed my life. And when I got out of rehab I decided that I really just wanted a job, I just wanted to be a person, a worker among workers. You know, I wanted a life that was not so very exciting. And so I went to beauty school, and it was when I was in beauty school that I met my husband and my life got exciting again, whether or not I wanted it to.

You also write about the fallout from your first memoir, which is particularly interesting to me. It’s something I live with to some degree, and think about all the time. There are multiple places where you pay the price for writing your first memoir, about, among other things, being in the harem of the Prince Jeffrey, brother of the Sultan of Brunei. There’s a scene in the new book with your parents where you’re at a therapy session with them, and they tell you they no longer want to talk to you. That hit me in the gut. Where are you now with your parents? Are you still not in contact with them?

Well last time I spoke to you I wasn’t talking to them, but now I am. We’ve been talking to them for months now, and I just saw them for the first time at a reading I did in New Jersey, near where I grew up. My feeling about it is that there have been a lot of years, and a lot of water under the bridge since that first memoir came out, and they’re not the only ones getting older, we’re all getting older.

When was the first contact made?

I can’t remember, exactly. I texted my mother—I can’t remember whether it was for her birthday or Mother’s Day—and we started a tentative texting relationship. Then it led to talking on the phone. I’ve talked to my father and mother on the phone. We’re never going to see eye to eye about the first book, or about my childhood, or about a lot of things, but I think we’re definitely reaching toward having some sort of a relationship. You know, if there’s one thing that my early years with my son have taught me, it’s that healing is possible from many things that appear to be insurmountable.

I’m very encouraged by the fact that you’re in touch with them, and that they came to your reading.

I hope a lot of people will be encouraged by that. The story has not yet been written on this. But I felt bad when people used to ask about what happens when you write about family, and I didn’t have a good answer for them. Although, I’ve never regretted it for a second. I stand behind everything I said in that book, and I would say it again. I was sad about what happened, but I was willing to be sad about what happened. I believed in the work enough.

That’s the part of that chapter that really emboldened me, where you said you loved your parents, and were grateful to them, but didn’t believe that gratitude should keep you from writing the truth.

Right. How grateful are we supposed to be to our parents? Are we supposed to be grateful enough to not tell our own story? To not have our experience in the world? And you and I are writers and what we do is we express those experiences in an artistic way. Are we supposed to not do that out of gratitude, or respect, or fear, or love, or any of those things? Would that be a fair thing to request out of love, that we don’t tell our stories?

That’s such an interesting way to look at it. It makes sense to me. I need to try and hold onto that.

I was just at a fundraiser for The Moth last night, and every time I go to a Moth event it reinforces for me the importance of storytelling in our lives, and the importance of sharing the hard stuff, and the messy stuff. And the stuff that our families—if what they expect from us is to present this glossy façade to the world—aren’t going to approve of. Those stories have given me a sense of hope and connection and meaning in the world. And somebody else shared their stories before me, and so I am really honored to be a part of that tradition. It’s just not always without its casualties.

How was it to see your parents at your reading?

This book has been a real gift in that it has opened up some new, authentic roads of communication with my family. It was great having them there and I look forward to seeing what the future brings with our relationship.

How did they respond to the material you read?

They loved it! I read the part about meeting my son for the first time. Tariku was there for the reading, as well. My mom cried. Tariku ran up to me afterwards, hugged me and said, I’m not making this up, I swear, “You made me proud!” That kid! I nearly sobbed my mascara down my face.

There’s a chapter in which you relate the story of your parents cutting you off years ago, in response to your publishing your first memoir, Some Girls. Have they read that chapter? How have they responded to that, and the book, in general?

They really don’t like that book. It embarrassed and saddened them and they didn’t understand why I would air my dirty laundry in public. They’ve had some time to sit with it and now they’re more supportive of what I do as a memoirist. I think they see the value of telling your story now. It’s still a tender subject and I wouldn’t say that they exactly love the book now, but at least it’s an open dialogue.

Let’s talk about the other consequences of telling your story. One of them was that it interfered with your ability, at least from one organization, to adopt a second time.

Yeah. There are consequences for living in a public way. You know, if I had never told that story publicly, we’d probably have three kids by now, we really would. And that is a huge consequence in my life, in my son’s life, in my husband’s life. And what I have gotten out of that is the chance to make amends, the chance to change my behavior, the chance to make a mistake and apologize and start again. I maybe should be clear that I lied on the application, and those lies were apparent from what I had written. So right now we’re going to our second adoption, and we’re working with a new agency. When I walked into this agency, I put manuscripts of my new book and my old book on the desk, and I said to the woman in there, “I need you to read these, and I’ll go over every single thing that’s in them with you. If there’s anything in here that’s a deal breaker for you, then I need to know that now and not six months from now, because neither me nor my child are getting any younger, and we want another kid.” This new agency has been so supportive and so terrific, and they love the new book. They’ve actually had me come and do some trainings with them because of the things that I talk about in the book that are very common adoption-related behaviors and issues. They actually think that they’re a very valuable training tool for potential adoptive families. So it’s been terrific, and now I feel—and this is what I learned with my first book too—that the more honest I am, the more freedom and acceptance I have, not less. It’s just that sometimes it takes some unpleasantness to get to that.

Read an excerpt from Everything You Ever Wanted 

* * *

Nathan Rabin | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,900 words)

“Working in the media in 2015 is like being part of an epic game of Musical chairs. Every day the music starts and you race madly to hold onto your fragile place in the world.”

I published that in a Facebook post after being let go from my latest employer, comparing working in pop culture media in 2015 to participating in an insane daily game of musical chairs. You try your best to keep up, to maintain the heat, the buzz, and the pageviews to stay in a game that has a disconcerting obsession with putting aging writers out to pasture to make way for younger, cheaper, more malleable replacements.

Every time you see that one of your film critic colleagues has been let go or taking a buyout (see: Lisa Schwarzbaum, who was at Entertainment Weekly for 22 years before taking a buyout, or Claudia Puig who took a USA Today buyout after reviewing films there for 15 years), you breathe a nervous sigh of relief. For that day, at least, you are safe.

The music stopped for me on a recent Wednesday, and I was left standing. I was a 39-year-old man without a job, but with many other accouterments of adults: a wife, a mortgage, a baby, and a dog. Within a few days (and in a frenzy of panicked number crunching), my wife and I decided to pack up and move in with my in-laws in Atlanta while my wife hunted for a job, and I figured out life as a freelancer. Truthfully, we had been priced out of the city long before my termination. Between the gaspingly high costs of child care and the mortgage on our modest condo, we were coming to terms with the fact that we would have to leave Chicago. But there is a big difference between choosing to leave a place and being forced to do so by dint of financial necessity.

On the last day of my old job, I stumbled out the door, holding aloft that iconic emblem of termination: The Box. Though from the outside it might look wholly indistinct, we who have felt its symbolic weight know this is no ordinary box; this is a box that can make grown men cry. It is a box of sadness, a box of shame, a box of regret and a box of dreams never to be fulfilled. It is the box the fired are given (generally by an HR person with a very sad face) in which they are to place the detritus of their work life, because they are no longer welcome at their former employer.

The contents of my box of shame represented my attempts to transform a workplace I had entered into two years earlier—brimming with hope and idealism—into a place that felt like home. I surrounded myself with some of my favorite tackiest things, things that told me who I was: I had figures of Homer Simpson as King Kong from Burger King and framed pictures of Tha Dogg Pound and the leads of Elizabethtown as well as a clipboard from Patch Adams where I wrote my weekly schedule that somehow survived Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and, now, two jobs.

You see people with Boxes Of Shame on buses and trains sometimes. Sometimes the look on their face is one of noble forbearance, a clear-headed look of purpose that implicitly says, “This is but a mere bump in the road to be endured with stoic dignity.” Sometimes the look on a man with the Box of Shame betrays the sadness and brokenness and rejection the man is feeling. In this case the man and the box are in perfect synchronicity, each silently but powerfully telling an achingly sad tale of rejection and failure.

I am a man who regularly vomits from anxiety, a man who burst into tears upon first reading my infant son the childhood story, Corduroy, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was the latter kind of a man with a Box. As I humped the collection of work knick-knacks home on the Kimball bus post-termination, I imagine I bore the haunted look of a lost man, a formerly capable provider who—how quickly these things happen! By how little are we undone!—had been relinquished not just of his job, but of his professional identity as well. As is typical of the frigid Midwestern city in which I reside, nobody on the bus would look at me, let alone give up their seat. Everybody was too wrapped up in their own business to pay any attention to mine.

I grew up in a group home, the son of an absentee mother and chronically unemployed father, so I clung to security fiercely. Growing up, my greatest dream was owning my own home, something that was mine, where I could raise a family and be the man I always wanted to be.

So, when I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife, I used the money from the advance for my memoir about my terrible childhood, The Big Rewind, to buy a modest two-bedroom condo in Albany Park. It wasn’t much, but I loved it. After a lifetime of skulking about in subpar rentals, I finally knew the pride of ownership and community, of truly belonging to a place and being deeply invested in its future. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking things like, “Get the hell off of my lawn.”

Just as I filled my workspace with knick-knacks, I filled my home with symbols of previous achievements: blow-ups of my books and framed copies of glowing reviews from The New York Times and TIME and Rolling Stone. I kept them at eye level in an attempt to trick my bipolar brain into thinking that I genuinely was the man of substance and importance described in the articles and not the sad, broken, overwhelmed pretender I felt like most of the time.

Now this condo that I love so much will have to become a part of my past. There is so much collateral damage when someone loses their job. My wife and I adore our nanny and her three-year-old daughter, who seem to love our son just as much as we do and surprised us regularly with unusually beautiful pictures of our child at play, at rest.

Now, because I had been let go, I needed to let this wonderful woman go as well. It was a game of dominoes, with only two dominoes, really. One fell, and knocked over the other. “I just want to say how much we appreciate everything you’ve done for our son and just to see you guys together just warms my heart,” I said sobbing, as I incoherently ambled up to the subject at hand.

“And I would love nothing better than for you to be his nanny forever but,” the crying started again, “I just lost my job and I’m not going to be able to pay you, or to keep our condo, or stay in Chicago, so we’re going to have to let you go.”

Our nanny was far more understanding than I had any right to expect. It was the rare instance when the person doing the letting go is more upset than the person being let go. But beyond having to leave Chicago and the modest little condo of my dreams lies an ominous proposition: The Basement.

Now, I love my in-laws dearly, and they have a lovely home with a very nice basement. If, as a 39-year-old new father, you should find yourself in the untenable position of having to live in someone’s basement, my in-law’s basement is about as good as it gets. But I have lived the last 18 years of my professional life online, and, within our online culture, basements occupy a very specific and very negative emotional space. One might even argue they occupy a very specific and very negative emotional space right next to the screaming sadness of the Box of Shame.

In online culture, parental basements are the official homes, literally and figuratively, of trolls: nasty little people who devote their days to saying nasty things about people under the comforting cloak of anonymity. In the world of online culture, parental basements are tiny little Loservilles, pathetic havens for people who cannot deal with the crazy rhythms and random cruelty of our hectic online world.

One of the most ubiquitous insults on the internet is to accuse some poser acting like a big shot online of living in his parent’s basement. In movies and pop culture, an adult living in his parent’s basement is shorthand for the character being a loser, or, at the very least, an emotionally stunted man-child.

Now, after four books and 18 years at the top of the pop-culture-media food chain, I am preparing to pack up my family and move into my in-laws’ basement. I’m not even moving into my own parents’ basement: My dad lives in government housing and my mother abandoned me, so I didn’t even have the resources to move back in with my biological parents; I have to move in with my wife’s parents.

When I met my beautiful, glamorous South African wife I wanted to give her the world. Instead, we ended up on a crazy five-year roller coaster that somehow ended with us both being rudely ejected into her parent’s basement, with our newborn and crazy-ass Yorkie in tow. And now we are preparing to box up our belongings and put them in a U-Haul as we prepare for our new life in Atlanta with equal parts trepidation and excitement. We’ll be doing our damnedest to transform this basement into the home our son deserves. He’s an unusually sunny little man, so I hope that he’s still too young to associate boxes with anything negative. Surely, the darkness of these boxes can be redeemed by the incandescent light of our son’s oblivious but life-affirming smile and laugh.

Boxes and basements can be dark, grim places, but they don’t have to be. I’m trying to see Atlanta as a healthy and necessary fresh start. I’m excited about doing new kinds of writing for different kinds of people. I’m excited for my son to grow up surrounded by sunshine and love and grandparents who have embraced him as if he were their own child and derive no greater joy in life than in spoiling him.

The Box of Shame is a grim thing to carry, but once you bring it home and sift through the contents, it ceases to be a Box Of Shame. When you open a box, a lot of light can flood in. For the sake of my family, and for the sake of my future, I’m a whole lot better off contemplating all that light and all that potential rather than brooding over the infinite darkness inside of a box.

* * *

Nathan Rabin is the former head writer of The A.V Club and the author of four books, most recently You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,437 words)

I came here looking for something

I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Hey, I’m not tryin’ to be nobody

I just want a chance to be myself.

 ─Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, “Streets of Bakersfield”

***

On North Chester Avenue in Oildale, California, an 83-year-old honky-tonk named Trout’s stands down the block from a saloon with an aged western facade, and across the street from a liquor store that sells booze and Mexican candy.

Trout’s opened in 1931 to give hard-working locals a place to dance and drink and unwind to live music.  During the 1950s and ’60s, local country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard played Trout’s, in their own bands and others, and kept people dancing while helping popularize the raw, propulsive style known as the Bakersfield Sound.

Photo by Julia Wick

There used to be lively honky-tonks all over the San Joaquin Valley. Seven days a week, area musicians like Bill Woods, Tommy Collins and Fuzzy Owen developed this regional variety of country in bars with names like Lucky Spot, the Blackboard and the Clover Club. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression led thousands of hard-working families to California to pick cotton and fruit, and work the oil fields. When the Dust Bowl Okies that Steinbeck depicted in The Grapes of Wrath moved from tiny towns like Arvin and Weedpatch, many settled in Oildale in northeastern Bakersfield. Some built camps on the canal and Kern River south of Trout’s. Many settlers played fiddles and guitars and created what locals called, often disparagingly, “Okie music.” Maddox Brothers and Rose were one of California’s first popular western acts. The band members left Alabama for the San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s. They followed crops with the season, finally settled in Modesto, California, and their swinging, hillbilly boogie ─ a precursor to rockabilly and western swing ─ influenced many of Bakersfield’s country musicians.

Maddox Brothers and Rose. Photo by Kern County Library

Bakersfield was a small town. Many of the Sound’s principal architects knew each other and performed together in some way or another. They formed bands. They wrote and covered each others’ songs. They booked each other on TV and radio shows, hired each other as managers and as artists on their record labels. They served each other drinks while tending bar. And sometimes, like Haggard and Buck’s ex-wife Bonnie Owens, they even married. Their stripped-down, hard-driving style emerged partly as a reaction to the overproduced, glossy commercial country coming out of Nashville, with its orchestral layers and market ambitions. Lap steel guitars and Fender Telecaster twang helped set the music apart, as did guitar plucking, and a playful, contagious beat. If Johnny Cash’s classic stuff has the chugga-chugga rhythm of a train rolling down the tracks, the Bakersfield Sound feels like a pair of boots shuffling and spinning atop a beer hall dance floor. The Bakersfield Sound was so catchy that musicians outside country circles like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Gram Parsons dabbled in it. In 1965, The Beatles released a cover of Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally” as the B-side of their US single for “Yesterday.” In 1978, Mick Jagger sang “I was driving home early Sunday morning, through Bakersfield, listening to gospel music on the coloured radio station” on The Stones’ tongue-in-cheek “Far Away Eyes.” The Bakersfield Sound even influenced The Grateful Dead. “We’re kind of on the far fringe of it,” Jerry Garcia told Elvis Costello in 1991, “but we’re part of that California Bakersfield school of country-and-western rock ‘n’ roll─Buck Owens, Merle Haggard. We used to see those bands and think, ‘Gee, those guys are great.’ [Owens’ guitarist] Don Rich was one of my favorites, I learned a lot of stuff from him.” Many Valley musicians helped create the Sound. It was Haggard and Owens that popularized it. Now Bakersfield has a Merle Haggard Drive, a Buck Owens Boulevard, and the luxurious Buck Owens Crystal Palace, and the original Valley’s honky-tonks have closed. Trout’s is the last.

As Oildale native Gerald Haslam writes in his book Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California, “Country music as a distinct regional and working-class phenomenon may be dying, while a variation of pop music called ‘contemporary country’ becomes more popular nationwide. What has happened to the promise of country music in Bakersfield is the same that has happened to nearly all of California’s country music and to the nation’s, too. It has been diluted by the commercial homogenization of the nation; folks eat at McDonald’s instead of Bunky’s Drive-In, they sleep at Motel 6 instead of Bud’s Motel, they shop at Wal-Mart not Curnow’s Dry Goods─the former establishments not significantly different in Tulsa or Tampa or Taft.”

I grew up in Arizona listening to Bob Wills and Buck Owens. My dad is an Okie, and my family watched Hee Haw and sang The Texas Playboys on road trips. When I visited Bakersfield last fall, I went to Trout’s to touch the hem of country music’s garment.

Inside, a single long bar stretches door to door. Scattered tables face the dance floor, and acoustic guitars covered with visiting musicians’ signatures hang from the chipped ceiling. A large hole in one wall stands directly beside a mounted boar’s head and a neon Heineken sign that isn’t lit. Beside the entrance, a simple blue neon sign announces the business’ allegiance with the words, “The Bakersfield Sound.”

Photo by Julia Wick

Despite Trout’s reputation, the pickups and PT Cruiser in the parking lot would’ve looked at home outside a Whole Foods grocery store. A kid raced by on a skateboard, and on stage, a woman named Crystal sang a new Top 40 country song while about twenty people sat and watched.

Crystal smiled when she stepped off stage, exposing two large wings tattooed on her back. “O.K.,” said Amanda, the young karaoke hostess, “give it up for Crystal!” Regular customers and fellow singers applauded. Dressed in a bedazzled tank top and tight dark jeans, Amanda commanded the room with a friendly authority. She’d been doing karaoke here for six years.

A middle-aged woman named Cheryl got up and sang a near perfect rendition of Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).” People hooted and howled during her performance. Her dyed red hair was cut long in the back and feathered up front, though not quite a mullet. In loose pink cotton pants and a pastel flower top, she dressed like she’d just gotten off work at the hospital. She leaned forward and bent her knees, and when she reached a high note, her voice filled the room. The audience erupted in applause.

A tan man with a ponytail broke from the country theme and sang “Soul Man.” He raised his hand like a preacher as he belted out lyrics. After the last line, he screamed “Woohoo!” and leapt from the stage, landing cautiously with bent knees. For 10:15 on a Wednesday night, the place was lively.

Trout’s offers country line dance lessons Tuesday through Thursday. They used to have live music seven nights a week, and karaoke seven nights a week. Competition from other karaoke joints cut into their business, and live music no longer generated enough money to sustain it. Now they host karaoke on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and live bands Monday, Friday and Saturday, with each alternating on neighboring stages. If you stand outside the liquor store on Chester Avenue long enough, you’ll see a man in a large black cowboy hat and jeans walk into Trout’s. Silhouetted by the interior blue light, his body will look like a frame from a futuristic Western. That’s Indio.

“They call me Sidewalk Elvis,” Indio said. “I been doing Elvis for thirty years. I run this town. I’m a bad man.” He unwrapped a peppermint and tossed the cellophane at a red Folgers coffee tub beside Trout’s front door. The wrapper missed and landed on the sidewalk amid a mess of cigarette butts, many of which were his.

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Indio only sings Elvis. Elvis has nothing to do with Oildale or the Bakersfield Sound. However country the King’s roots were during the early years he recorded blues, rockabilly and Carl Perkins covers for Sun Records, his career is ultimately more pop than country. Like some regulars, Indio doesn’t come here to pay homage to Bakersfield’s roots. He comes to sing, which shows how far Trout’s and Bakersfield have moved from their origins in oil and Telecaster twang in order to stay solvent in the age of iTunes and pop supremacy.

A black cowboy hat keeps Indio’s eyes hidden and his oily black wig pressed flat against his ears. When he speaks, his voice remains flat, barely modulating even when he curses. With the shape of his face, his soft eyes, and the way his skin sags over sharp features, he could pass for actor Harry Dean Stanton, but not Elvis.

Indio was born in Kentucky, grew up in Chicago and moved to Oildale thirty years ago. He lives down the street. “I had a baby with a girl,” he said, “and I raised the girl, because her mother was a junkie, and I took her away from her. I got the papers from my lawyer. Then after that, I lost a grandson in a fire on Washington about two years ago. He wasn’t even two years old.” Washington is a nearby street in this historically rough neighborhood. “My daughter owned the house, and it burnt.” When asked if she was O.K., he said, “Yeeee─not really, because it really blowed her mind, and every now and then I gotta step in and try and pick her up. I been trying. Sooner or later I will be able to pick her up, but right now, you know. I gotta see who’s turn it is. Hold on.”

He went inside to check his place in the karaoke queue.

“Yeah,” he said when he came back out, “doing Elvis songs is my happiness.”

The peppermint turned over in his mouth as he spoke, clinking against his teeth. Inside Trout’s, a man sang a new country song that neither of us recognized.

Trout’s interior. Photo by Julia Wick

Indio turned and looked up the street. “Here’s my daughter.” A 26-year-old blonde approached on Chester Avenue, with a brunette friend in tow. When they arrived, Indio put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder. “This is my baby right here. Did you come down to sing?”

She rolled her eyes. “No.”

Indio said, “Did you come to hear me?”

She patted his shoulder and said, “No,” then extracted a box of cigarettes from his jacket. “That’s what we came down here for.” She laughed a nervous laugh. Her eyes were puffy and red, their color exaggerated and eerily luminescent.

At this, Indio’s monotone revealed a hint of desperation. “Come in and hear my song.”

His daughter threw her head back. “I don’t want to go in there,” she said, “because I don’t want to drink, and I know if I go into any bar, I’ll drink.” She spun around on the tips of her toes as she said this, as if trying to wrestle free of her options and his expectations. She was clearly under stress. Her friend echoed her sentiment: best not to go in.

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Indio’s daughter handed him his smokes as he went inside for matches. Elvis, she said laughing, “That’s like a never-ending story with him.” When he came back out, the two women were sitting on the bench beside the door, their legs crossed in opposite directions. “Dad, what song are you gonna sing, ‘Kentucky Rain’?”

He gave her the matches. “No, I’m doing the─It’s the piano one. Hold me close, hold me tight. It’s got the piano music in it.” The song is an early Elvis tune called “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Elvis’s seventh RCA single, it came out in 1956 and was his second No. 1 hit on the country music charts.

Indio pulled his hands out of his pocket. “One of you’s givin’ me a drag ’cause I’m next.” His daughter handed him her cigarette, and he took a long, deep pull before handing it back. “Wait till you hear me do this one.” he said. “It’s gonna blow your mind.” He stared up the street, fidgeting with something in his pocket. He smoked Time, a discount brand whose dark red box had the motto “Renovate Peaceful Mind.” It reminded me of Del Reeves’ country song “Be Quiet Mind.”

Indio coughed and pulled out another peppermint. Mints kept his throat moist between songs. He muttered, “I’m up,” and ducked inside. While he sang, the two women smoked and discussed where to hang out after Trout’s.

Trout’s is a tough area. In July, a few months before my visit, a man got stabbed inside the Longbranch Saloon on the next block; the man survived. At 8 p.m. the previous winter, police found a 23-year-old stabbed in the parking lot of the Dollar General a few blocks south on Chester; he died at the hospital. In March, a man on a stolen motorcycle fled from police. After he crashed, he started running down nearby Beardsley Avenue. When he pointed a handgun at two officers, they shot him dead. Beardsley is the center of Oildale’s criminal activity, a hotbed of drugs, gangs, prostitution and assorted violence, the sort of street where a shopping cart sits on the lane line on Google street view. Indio lives on Beardsley.

Trout’s interior. Photo by Julia Wick

The women decided to go to the house of a friend who would have cigarettes and would not be drinking. Inside the bar, two people danced to Indio’s song. On stage, he stood still, keeping his body turned toward the lyrics on the monitor, his left shoulder to the audience, and his hand in his pants pocket. He hit a few strained notes. He didn’t bust any moves. Mostly, he sang a sweet, soft version of a beautiful song. He sounded pretty good, engrossed but shy, and lacking the vocal force and stage presence of someone who’d been singing for thirty years.

“OK,” said Amanda, the karaoke hostess, “give it up for Indio!” Three people clapped.

“Thank you, thank you,” Indio said, and curled the bottom of his hair with his hand. When he came back outside, his daughter and her friend were walking north up Chester, fading into a moist hazy distance. Indio watched them for a few seconds then went back inside.

* * *

Chester Avenue, 1880’s. Photo by Kern County Library

The 400,000-person city of Bakersfield began in 1863, when gold rush settler Thomas Baker built a house along the Kern River, and travelers started calling it Baker’s Field. In mid-20th century country music circles, Bakersfield became known as Nashville West and Buckersfield, after Buck Owens. It had a reputation as a place of dust-covered cowboys, fist-fighting oil workers and hard-drinking hillbillies, an image that ran so counter to the Golden State’s standard image that both Californians and outsiders dismissed it as what Gerald Haslam calls a “bumpkin locale” with “bumpkin music.”

Whatever it might have been, modern Bakersfield is no longer redneck. It’s country and working class, educated and upscale, chain store and mom and pop. Even though it’s rough in spots, Bakersfield is also the kind of place where people routinely flash their headlights to let you know that they want to let you pull out of a store and onto the street, even in rush hour traffic, a place where a Grimmy Farms truck full of carrots rattles down Highway 99 while fit bicyclists in high tech gear cruise the cement path along the Kern River Parkway.

The song that people mark as the first in the Bakersfield style is “Louisiana Swing,” recorded by Bud Hobbs and his band the Trail Herders in 1954. Hobbs was born in Bakersfield. A young Buck Owens played lead guitar on the track, and a local named Bill Woods played piano. Right as Woods starts to solo, Hobbs pulls a move from the Bob Wills playbook and identifies him to listeners with a sweet, “Ah, Billy Woods from Bakersfield, yeah.”

Bill Woods. Photo by Kern County Library

After Owens and Woods recorded with Hobbs, Woods led his own band, called Bill Woods and His Orange Blossom Playboys. Woods gave Owens his first regular gig, playing his Telecaster for $12.50 a night. During their fourteen years as the Blackboard Cafe’s house band, the Orange Blossom Playboys employed a revolving cast of musicians and helped define California country. Musician and TV show host Billy Mize was a member, bringing the circle back to Buck, as so many things here do.

“When I first came to town in 1951,” Buck remembered on stage at a benefit for Mize, “things got kinda tough and I hocked my guitar. I got a chance to work for a few days, and I didn’t have a guitar. Billy heard about it, and he said, ‘I got a guitar over at the house he can borrow,’ and he’d never even met me.” 

Billy Mize. Photo by Kern County Library

Mize was a talented songwriter with musical chops to match his handsome features. He penned songs for Dean Martin. Jerry Lee Lewis covered his song “Who Will Buy the Wine.” Like Owens, the Dust Bowl drove his family from Kansas to the San Joaquin. In his early days, many local musicians played in Mize’s band, and later, he played in Merle’s. When he teamed up with Bill Woods and a funny, fast-talking player named “Cousin” Herb Henson in 1953, they started a TV variety show called “Cousin Herb’s Trading Post.” Broadcast from Bakersfield, the signal reached Los Angeles, where scores of people watched exclusive live performances from up-and-comers like Haggard and Owens, Jean Shepard and Bonnie Owens, and a fiddle player later convicted of murder, named Spade Cooley. Touring musicians like Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Merle Travis and Hank Williams played, too, and Mize’s voice and warm personality earned him loads of other TV work, including a regular slot on Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch show, and later, three TV Personality of the Year awards from the Academy of Country Music. Mize’s grandson made a movie about his life and struggle to recover from a stroke, called Billy Mize and The Bakersfield Sound. All of which is to say: Owens and Haggard are the big names, but it took a whole city’s worth of farm-hands and Okies to create some of the world’s liveliest music.

If Owens is the musician who made California country famous, Haggard is the local boy who made Oildale proud. 

Merle Haggard. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Buck was born in Texas, spent time working in Phoenix, Arizona, after his family’s car broke down there en route to California, then settled in Bakersfield. Merle Haggard was born in Oildale in 1937 and raised near the Kern River Oil Field. Like many Golden State Okies, the Haggard family migrated to the Valley from Dust Bowl Oklahoma in search of work and some measure of the good life. Merle’s father James did carpentry for the Santa Fe Railroad, and Merle, fittingly, was born in a boxcar that James refurbished into a house. James had played music back in Oklahoma. After James died, Merle used to stand outside the nearby Beardsley Ballroom and listen to touring musicians like Bob Wills. Big names played Beardsley Ballroom during the 1940s and 50s, including Hank Williams, T. Texas Tyler and the Maddox Brothers and Rose. Inevitably, the young Haggard picked up an instrument.

One of Merle’s closest friends, Bob Teague, remembered his formative years: “I was just walkin’ down the street one day, and I heard somebody pickin’ at a guitar.” He peered over a fence in an alley and saw Merle. “Hey,” Haggard said, “you know how to play one of these things?” “We were pretty tight after that,” said Teague.

Merle and Teague ditched school. They hitchhiked to Texas in their teens, stacked bales of hay on a Modesto ranch and started playing music. They jammed on their porch. They played at people’s homes. They played their first show at a rough beer hall called the Fun Center on Crows Landing Road; they got paid $5 and beer. Merle was fourteen.

Bakersfield, 1952. Photo by Kern County Library

Haggard loved Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Jimmie Rodgers and Lefty Frizzell. When he and Teague went to Frizzell’s performance in Bakersfield, Teague tracked the Texan down backstage and told him, “Hey Lefty, this guy can sing nearly as good as you can. You need to hear him sing.” Merle played a couple songs on Lefty’s guitar. The musician was so wowed that, after intermission, he sent the sixteen year old up on stage, where Merle played Jimmie Rodgers tunes, backed by Frizzell’s band. The audience loved it. “They screamed for the local kid,” Haggard remembered. “Everything was right, and I was hooked.” But he hadn’t focused on music yet. 

Oildale in the 1940’s. The Post Office and Market are now Trout’s. Photo by Kern County Library

Like many Valley kids, Haggard picked fruit for money and hopped trains at the tracks by his house. Unlike his friends, he got into trouble with the law at a young age: burglary, breaking and entering, drinking, fighting, stealing cars, passing fake checks, even a rumored armed robbery. His outlaw image and charming personality made him an Oildale legend, adored and respected by both girls and boys. Instead of finishing high school, Haggard passed in and out of reform schools, violated parole and escaped various penal institutions, and in 1958, ended up in San Quentin maximum security prison. When he got out and returned to Bakersfield in 1960, Haggard said, “I finally wised up, and I got out of it.” He started focusing on music.

In 1960, country music was still called western music, and it was hot. Owens’ songs “Under Your Spell Again and “Above and Beyond” climbed high on the charts. He performed “Above and Beyond” on national TV that year. The next year, Billboard named Owens “Most Promising Country and Western Singer of 1960.” He scored fifteen No. 1 hits on the country charts between 1963 and 1967 and made Bakersfield seem destined to replace Nashville as the seat of America’s country music industry. After Haggard got serious about music, he grew into one of country music’s most celebrated and talented songwriters, writing or co-writing hundreds of songs, a string of hits and country standards that got him inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and whose titles even non-country fans recognize: “Okie from Muskogee,” “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” “Mama Tried,” “Branded Man” and “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.” Although he didn’t write his first No. 1 hit “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” this signature tune showed him that, in his words, his criminal past wasn’t something to hide, “it was one of the most interesting things about me.” But in 1960, Haggard was playing clubs around town for pocket change. Trout’s was one.

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Besides the décor, there are still a few signs of the bar’s pedigree. An established songwriter and guitarist named Red Simpson, one of Merle and Buck’s contemporaries, plays here every Monday night. He’s eighty. He wrote some hit songs for Buck, including “Sam’s Place” and “Gonna Have Love.” He wrote Haggard’s 1972 song “Bill Woods from Bakersfield.” He’s had a few hits of his own. Simpson’s known for his truck-themed songs. Once he struck gold with “Roll Truck Roll” in 1966, he kept writing about semis and the open road. His best known are “I’m a Truck,” “Highway Patrol,” and “Country Western Truck Drivin’ Singer.” He’s one of the last of the original Bakersfield country musicians still playing. He lives nearby. People give him rides to work.

After Cheryl’s group moved to a table on the dance floor, I noticed something move to my left on the bar. I blew on it and it landed inches away in a pool of blue light. It was a cockroach. When I blew it again, it landed on an old silver cooler behind the bar and scurried away.

Indio spent his time at Trout’s pacing in and out of the building. He’d step onto the street to survey the scene. He’d have a cigarette, suck a peppermint. When pedestrians walked by, he greeted them with a friendly “What’s up, man?” Sometimes they said hi. Sometimes they ignored him. His wasn’t a question. It was acknowledgment. He liked people, and the neighborhood had trained him to stay on guard. He ordered coffee, not beer. “Doctor said I’d die in ninety days if I drank alcohol,” he said, “so I don’t. I overdid it. Not no more.”

For self-defense, he sometimes carried an ice pick, and he always carried two knifes. “You never know.” He tilted his head toward the bar. “Ah,” he said, “I’m up next, man,” and he walked right on stage. He sang “Kentucky Rain.” He stood mostly still, his left shoulder facing the audience again.

Photo by Julia Wick

Cheryl got up and sang Merle’s “Okie from Muskogee” with a fervor deserving the song. It was an easy way to win over this crowd.

Indio said he’d sing me “The Chapel” next, but first he needed cigarettes. “I know my daughter will want some,” he said. I drove him to 7-Eleven.

As he climbed back into my car with a fresh box of Time, he said, “You’re gonna like ‘The Chapel,’ too.” I hated to disappoint him, but I was too tired to stick around. I’d flown from Oregon to Sacramento that morning, and drove the 270 miles straight from the Sacramento airport to Trout’s, running errands and making phone calls along the way. I needed to find a place to sleep. 

I parked by curb outside Trout’s and explained my situation: the exhaustion, the long day, needing to wake up early tomorrow morning. He turned to me, a solemn look on his tan face. “Oh, I wanted you to hear that song.” The pitch of his voice raised plaintively, bringing out his Kentucky twang. His eyes locked on mine from under that hat. “OK,” he said, grabbing the door handle. “I’m gonna do it anyways.”

If he felt any disappointment about my leaving, he showed no sign of it, or even any sign that he’d enjoyed hanging out with me. When he swung open the car door, he greeted a pedestrian with the exact words with which he’d first greeted me: “Hey, what’s up, man?” He sighed while standing, and by the time both feet hit the pavement, he was pulling out a cigarette and onto the next thing. His song was coming soon. He didn’t want to miss his turn.

***

See Also:

1. Aaron Gilbreath’s Introduction to the Bakersfield Sound Playlist:

2. A Merle Haggard Reading List from musician and critic David Gates

***

Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper’s, The New York Times, Paris Review, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Vice, and The Morning News. Future Tense Publishing published his chapbook “A Secondary Landscape,” and Curbside Splendor will publish his essay collection, “It’s Really Something You Should Have Examined,” in 2016.

Fact-checked by Brendan O’Connor
Edited by Julia Wick

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)

The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”

***

Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.

What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.

Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.

The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox.

Some of these defects have been long since remedied in the many iterations of the device that have appeared since its 2007 debut. Telephony works well, and who uses the phone anymore anyway? Data speed and reliability have been updated both on wireless network infrastructures and in the smartphone itself. But other issues persist. For those who cut their computing teeth on desktops and laptops—the things that we used to mean when we used the word computer—manipulating mobile software still feels awkward and laborious. Those many taps of the original Mail app haven’t been altered or remedied so much as they have become standardized. Now, we use all software in the convoluted manner mobile operating systems demand, from email to word processing to video editing.

But to issue complaints about usability misses the point of the iPhone, even all those years ago, and certainly today. The iPhone was never a device one should have expected to “just work,” to quote Apple’s familiar advertising lingo. It is a device one has to accommodate. It taught us how to tolerate Apple making us tolerate it. It put us in our place before Apple. This was the purpose of the iPhone, and this is its primary legacy.

Then, as now, the iPhone demands to be touched just right, in precisely the right spot on menu, list, or keyboard, and with precisely the right gesture. Likewise, it demands not to be touched just after, when being pocketed or moved or simply turned to place at one’s ear. Doing otherwise erroneously launches, or quits, or selects, or deletes, or slides, or invokes Siri the supposedly intelligent personal assistant, or performs some other action, desired or not, slickly coupled to a touch or gestural control.

The iPhone resists usability, a term reserved for apparatuses humans make their servants. An iPhone is not a computer. It is a living creature, one filled with caprice and vagary like a brilliant artist, like a beautiful woman, like a difficult executive. Whether it is usable is not the point. To use the iPhone is to submit to it. Not to its interfaces, but to the ambiguity of its interpretation of them. To understand it as an Other, an alien being boasting ineffable promise and allure. Touch here? Stroke there? Stop here? Do it again? The impressive fragility of the device only reinforces this sense—to do it wrong by dropping or misgesturing might lead to unknown consequences. Unlike other portable devices—a Walkman or a traditional mobile phone— the iPhone embraces fragility rather than ruggedness. It demands to be treated with kid gloves. Even before you’ve first touched it, you can already hear yourself apologizing for your own blunders in its presence, as if you are there to serve it rather than it you. The iPhone is a device that can send you far out of your way, and yet you feel good about it. It is a device that can endear you to it by resisting your demands rather than surrendering to them.

Rather than thinking of the iPhone as a smartphone, like a Treo or a BlackBerry or, eventually, the Android devices that would mimic it, one would do better to think of the iPhone as a pet. It is the toy dog of mobile devices, a creature one holds gently and pets carefully, never sure whether it might nuzzle or bite. Like a Chihuahua, it rides along with you, in arm or in purse or in pocket, peering out to assert both your status as its owner and its mastery over you as empress. And like a toy dog, it reserves the right never to do the same thing a second time, even given the same triggers. Its foibles and eccentricities demand far greater effort than its more stoic smartphone cousins, but in so doing, it challenges you to make sense of it.

iPhone Original/3G/4/5. Photo by Yutaka Tsutano

The BlackBerry’s simplicity and effectiveness yielded a constant barrage of new things to do. And eventually, so would the smartphone—social media feeds and status updates replaced work with play-as-work, with hyperemployment, a term I’ll explain soon enough. But that first iPhone resisted utility old and new. It acclimated us to the new quirks of touchscreen life, of attempting to accomplish complex tasks that would have been easy on a normal computer but laborious on a tiny screen that ran one program at a time. Today we’ve acclimated, accepting these inefficiencies as givens. But such an eventuality was never guaranteed, and iPhone had to train us to tolerate them. Like the infirm must endure physical therapy to reform damaged limbs and tissues, so the smartphone user needed to be trained to accept and overcome the intrinsic incapacities of the handheld computer.

This was harder than it sounds in retrospect. That first iPhone receded into itself at times, offering its owner no choice but to pet it in vain, or to pack it away it until it regained composure, or to reboot it in the hopes that what once worked might do so again. It was a beast of its vicissitudes. And it still is, albeit in different ways. To own an iPhone is to embrace such fickleness rather than to lament it in the hope for succor via software update. And even when one does come, it only introduces new quirks to replace the old ones: the slowdowns of an operating system upgrade launched to execute planned obsolescence, say, or via new sensors, panels, controls, and interfaces that render a once modernist simplicity baroque.

The brilliance of the iPhone is not how intuitive or powerful or useful it is—for really it is none of these things. Rather, the brilliance of the iPhone is in its ability to transcend the world of gadgetry and enter another one: the world of companionship. But unlike the Chihuahua or the bichon or even the kitten, the iPhone has no gender bias. It need not signal overwrought Hollywood glam, high-maintenance upper- class leisure, or sensitive loner solitude. iPhone owners can feel assured in their masculinity or femininity equally as they stroke and snuggle their pet devices, fearing no reprisal for fopishness or dorkship.

The Aibo and Pleo, those semirealistic robotic pets of the pre-iPhone era that attempted to simulate the form and movement of a furry biological pet, failed precisely because they did nothing else other than pretend to be real pets. The iPhone got it right: a pet is not an animal at all. A pet is a creature that responds meaningfully to touch and voice and closeness, but only sometimes. At other times, it retreats inextricably into its own mind, gears spinning in whatever alien way they must for other creatures. A pet is a sentient alien that cultures an attachment that might remain—that probably remains—unrequited. A pet is a bottomless pit for affect and devotion, yet one whose own feelings can never be truly known.

The iPhone offers an excuse to dampen the smartphone’s obsession with labor, productivity, progress, and efficiency with the touching, demented weirdness that comes with companionship. Despite its ability to text, to tweet, to Facebook, to Instagram, perhaps the real social promise of iPhone lies elsewhere: as a part of a more ordinary, more natural ecology of real social interaction. The messy sort that resists formalization in software form. The kind that makes unreasonable demands and yet sometimes surprises.

And of course, the kind that overheats and flips into mania. Mania, it turns out, is what iPhone wants most. To turn us all into the digital equivalent of the toy dog–toting socialite obsessive or the crazy cat lady, doting and tapping, swiping and cooing at glass rectangles with abandon.

***

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously argued that by the time a century had passed, developed societies would be able to replace work with leisure thanks to widespread wealth and surplus. “We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today,” he wrote, “only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines.” Eighty years hence, it’s hard to find a moment in the day not filled with a duty or task or routine. If anything, it would seem that work has overtaken leisure almost entirely. We work increasingly hard for increasingly little, only to come home to catch up on the work we can’t manage to work on at work.

Take email. A friend recently posed a question on Facebook: “Remember when email was fun?” It’s hard to think back that far. On Prodigy, maybe, or with UNIX mail or Elm or Pine via telnet. Email was silly then, a trifle. A leisure activity out of Keynes’s macroeconomic tomorrowland. It was full of excess, a thing done because it could be rather than because it had to be. The worst part of email was forwarded jokes, and even those seem charming in retrospect. Even junk mail is endearing when it’s novel.

Now, email is a pot constantly boiling over. Like King Sisyphus pushing his boulder, we read, respond, delete, delete, delete, only to find that even more messages have arrived while we were pruning. A whole time management industry has erupted around email, urging us to check only once or twice a day, to avoid checking email first thing in the morning, and so forth. Even if such techniques work, the idea that managing the communication for a job now requires its own self-help literature reeks of a foul new anguish.

Email and online services have provided a way for employees to outsource work to one another. Whether you’re planning a meeting with an online poll, requesting an expense report submission to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, asking that a colleague contribute to a shared Google Doc, or just forwarding on a notice that “might be of interest,” jobs that previously would have been handled by specialized roles have now been distributed to everyone in an organization.

No matter what job you have, you probably have countless other jobs as well. Marketing and public communications were once centralized; now every division needs a social media presence, and maybe even a website to develop and manage. Thanks to Oracle and SAP, everyone is a part-time accountant and procurement specialist. Thanks to Oracle and Google Analytics, everyone is a part-time analyst.

Photo by Leo Chen

And email has become the circulatory system along which internal outsourcing flows. Sending an email is easy and cheap, and emails create obligation on the part of a recipient without any prior agreement. In some cases, that obligation is bureaucratic, meant to drive productivity and reduce costs. “Self-service” software automation systems like these are nothing new—SAP’s ERP software has been around since the 1970s. But since the 2000s, such systems can notify and enforce compliance via email requests and nags. In other cases, email acts as a giant human shield, a white-collar Strategic Defense Initiative. The worker who emails enjoys both assignment and excuse all at once. “Didn’t you get my email?”

The despair of email has long left the workplace. Not just by infecting our evenings and weekends via Outlook web access and BlackBerry and iPhone, although it has certainly done that. Now we also run the email gauntlet with everyone. The ballet school’s schedule updates (always received too late, but “didn’t you get the email?”); the Scout troop announcements; the daily deals website notices; the PR distribution list you somehow got on after attending that conference; the insurance notification, informing you that your new coverage cards are available for self-service printing (you went paperless, yes?); and the email password reset notice that finally trickles in twelve hours later, because you forgot your insurance website password since a year ago. And so on.

But the deluge doesn’t stop with email, and hyperemployment extends even to the unemployed, thanks to our tacit agreement to work for so many Silicon Valley technology companies.

Increasingly, online life in general overwhelms. The endless, constant flow of email, notifications, direct messages, favorites, invitations. After that daybreak email triage, so many other icons on your phone boast badges silently enumerating their demands. Facebook notifications. Twitter @ messages, direct messages. Tumblr followers, Instagram favorites, Vine comments. Elsewhere too: comments on your blog, on your YouTube channel. The Facebook page you manage for your neighborhood association or your animal rescue charity. New messages in the forums you frequent. Your Kickstarter campaign updates. Your Etsy shop. Your eBay watch list. And then, of course, more email. Always more email.

Email is the plumbing of hyperemployment. Not only do automated systems notify and direct us via email but we direct and regulate one another through email. But even beyond its function as infrastructure, email also has a disciplinary function. The content of email almost doesn’t matter. Its primary function is to reproduce itself in enough volume to create anxiety and confusion. The constant flow of new email produces an endless supply of potential work. Even figuring out whether there is really any “actionable” effort in the endless stream of emails requires viewing, sorting, parsing, even before one can begin conducting the effort needed to act and respond.

We have become accustomed to using the term precarity to describe the condition whereby employment itself is unstable or insecure. But even within the increasingly precarious jobs, the work itself has become precarious too. Email is a mascot for this sensation. At every moment of the workday—and on into the evening and the night, thanks to smartphones—we face the possibility that some request or demand, reasonable or not, might be awaiting us.

Often, we cast these new obligations either as compulsions (the addictive, possibly dangerous draw of online life) or as necessities (the importance of digital contact and an “online brand” in the information economy). But what if we’re mistaken, and both tendencies are really just symptoms of hyperemployment? We are now competing with ourselves for our own attention.

While often true, this phenomenon is not fundamentally new to online life. We get network television for free in exchange for the attention we devote to ads that interrupt our shows. We receive “discounts” on grocery store staples in exchange for allowing Kroger or Safeway to aggregate and sell our shopping data. Meanwhile, the companies we do pay directly as customers often treat us with disregard at best, abuse at worst (just think about your cable provider or your bank). Of course, we shouldn’t just accept online commercial exploitation just because exploitation in general has been around for ages. Rather, we should acknowledge that exploitation only partly explains today’s anxiety with online services.

Hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true) but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies. And even calling them “unpaid” is slightly unfair, because we do get something back from these services, even if they often take more than they give. Rather than just being exploited or duped, we’ve been hyperemployed. We do tiny bits of work for Google, for Tumblr, for Twitter, all day and every day.

Today, everyone’s a hustler. But now we’re not even just hustling for ourselves or our bosses but for so many other, unseen bosses. For accounts payable and for marketing; for the Girl Scouts and the Youth Choir; for Facebook and for Google; for our friends via their Kickstarters and their Etsy shops; for Twitter, whose initial public offering converted years of tiny, aggregated work acts into seventy-eight dollars of fungible value per user.

Even if there is more than a modicum of exploitation at work in the hyperemployment economy, the despair and overwhelm of online life don’t derive from that exploitation—not directly anyway. Rather, it’s a type of exhaustion cut of the same sort that afflicts the underemployed as well, like the single mother working two part-time service jobs with no benefits or the PhD working three contingent teaching gigs at three different regional colleges to scrape together a still insufficient income. The economic impact of hyperemployment is obviously different from that of underemployment, but some of the same emotional toll imbues both: a sense of inundation, of being trounced by demands whose completion yields only their continuance, and a feeling of resignation that no other scenario is likely or even possible. The only difference between the despair of hyperemployment and that of underemployment is that the latter at least acknowledges itself as a substandard condition, whereas the former celebrates the hyperemployed’s purported freedom to “share” and “connect,” to do business more easily and effectively by doing jobs once left for others’ competence and compensation, from the convenience of your car or toilet.

Staring down the barrel of Keynes’s 2030 target for the arrival of universal leisure, economists have often considered why the economist seems to have been so wrong. The inflation of relative needs is one explanation—the arms race for better and more stuff and status. The ever-increasing wealth gap, on the rise since the anti-Keynes, supply-side 1980s, is another. But what if Keynes was right, too, in a way. Even if productivity has increased mostly to the benefit of the wealthy, hasn’t everyone gained enormous leisure, but by replacing recreation with work rather than work with recreation? This new work doesn’t even require employment; the destitute and unemployed hyperemployed are just as common as the affluent and retired hyperemployed. Perversely, it is only then, at the labor equivalent of the techno-anarchist’s singularity, that the malaise of hyperemployment can cease. Then all time will become work time, and we will not have any memory of leisure to distract us.

***

At the start of 2015, fewer than eight short years since the first launch of the iPhone, Apple was worth more than seven hundred billion dollars—more than the gross national product of Switzerland. Despite its origins as a computer company, this is a fortune built from smartphones more than laptops. Before 2007, smartphones were a curiosity, mostly an affectation of would-be executives carting BlackBerries and Treos in unfashionable belt holsters. Not even a decade ago, they were wild and feral. Today, smartphones are fully domesticated. Tigers made kittens, which we now pet ceaselessly. More than two-thirds of Americans own them, and they have become the primary form of computing.

But along with that domestication comes the inescapability of docility. Have you not accepted your smartphone’s reign over you rather than lamenting it? Stroking our glass screens, Chihuahua-like, is just what we do now, even if it also feels sinful. The hope and promise of new computer technology have given way to the malaise of living with it.

Shifts in technology are also shifts in culture and custom. And these shifts have become more frequent and more rapid over time. Before 2007, one of the most substantial technological shifts in daily life was probably the World Wide Web, which was already commercialized by the mid-1990s and mainstream by 2000. Before that? The personal computer, perhaps, which took from about 1977 until 1993 or so to become a staple of both home and business life. First we computerized work, then we computerized home and social life, then we condensed and transferred that life to our pockets. With the Apple Watch, now the company wants to condense it even further and have you wear it on your wrist.

Some have accused Apple of failing to explain the purpose of its new wearable. The wristwatch connoisseur Benjamin Clymer calls it a “market leader in a category nobody asked for.” Apple veteran Ben Thompson rejoins Cook for failing to explain “why the Apple Watch existed, or what need it is supposed to fill.” Felix Salmon agrees, observing that Apple “has always been the company which makes products for real people, rather than gadgets for geeks,” before lamenting that the Apple Watch falls into the latter category.

“Apple hasn’t solved the basic smartwatch dilemma,” Salmon writes. But the dilemma he’s worried about proves to be a banal detail: “Smart watches use up far more energy than dumb watches.” He later admits that Apple might solve the battery and heft problems in a couple generations, but “I’m not holding my breath.” Salmon reacts to the Apple Watch’s design and engineering failings rather than lamenting the more mundane afflictions of being subjected to wrist-sized emails in addition to desktop- and pocket-sized ones. We’re rearranging icons on the Titanic.

After the Apple keynote, the Onion joked about the real product Apple had unveiled—a “brief, fleeting moment of excitement.” But like so much satire these days, it’s not really a joke. As Dan Frommer recently suggested, the Apple keynote is no less a product than are its phones and tablets. Apple is in the business of introducing big things as much as it is in the business of designing, manufacturing, distributing, and supporting them. In part, it has to be: Apple’s massive valuation, revenues, and past successes have only increased the street’s expectations for the company. In a world of so-called disruptive innovation, a company like Apple is expected to manufacture market-defining hit after hit.

Indeed, business is another context we often use to avoid engaging with our technological weariness. We talk about how Apple’s CEO Tim Cook must steer the tech giant into new waters—such as wearables—to ensure a fresh supply of desire, customers, and revenue. But the exigency of big business has an impact on our ordinary lives. It’s easy to cite the negative effects of a business environment focused on quarterly profits above all else, including maintaining job stability and paying into the federal or municipal tax base. In the case of Apple, something else is going on, too. In addition to being an economic burden, the urgency of technological innovation has become so habitual that we have become resigned to it. Wearables might not be perfect yet, we conclude, but they will happen. They already have.

I’m less interested in accepting wearables given the right technological conditions as I am prospectively exhausted at the idea of dealing with that future’s existence. Just think about it. All those people staring at their watches in the parking structure, in the elevator. Tapping and stroking them, nearly spilling their coffee as they swivel their hands to spin the watch’s tiny crown control.

The variegated buzzes of so many variable “haptic engine” vibrations, sending notices of emails arriving from a boss or a spammer or obscene images received from a Facebook friend. The terrible battery life Salmon worries about, and the necessity of purchasing a new, expensive wristwatch every couple years, along with an equally costly smartphone with which to mate it.

The emergence of a new, laborious media creation and consumption ecosystem built for glancing. The rise of the “glancicle,” which will replace the listicle. The PR emails and the b2b advertisements and the business consulting conference promotions all asking,“Is your brand glance-aware?”

These are mundane future grievances, but they are also likely ones. Unlike those of its competitor Google, with its eyeglass wearables and delivery drones and autonomous cars, Apple’s products are reasonable and expected—prosaic even, despite their refined design. Google’s future is truly science fictional, whereas Apple’s is mostly foreseeable. You can imagine wearing Apple Watch, in no small part because you remember thinking that you could imagine carrying Apple’s iPhone—and then you did, and now you always do.

Photo by LWYang

Technology moves fast, but its speed now slows us down. A torpor has descended, the weariness of having lived this change before—or one similar enough, anyway—and all too recently. The future isn’t even here yet, and it’s already exhausted us in advance.

It’s a far cry from “future shock,” Alvin Toffler’s 1970 term for the postindustrial sensation that too much change happens in too short a time. Where once the loss of familiar institutions and practices produced a shock, now it produces something more tepid and routine. The planned obsolescence that coaxes us to replace our iPhone 5 with an iPhone 6 is no longer disquieting but just expected. I have to have one has become Of course I’ll get one. The idea that we might willingly reinvent social practice around wristwatch computers less than a decade after reforming it for smart- phones is no longer surprising but predictable. We’ve heard this story before; we know how it ends.

Future shock is over. Apple Watch reveals that we suffer a new affliction: future ennui. The excitement of a novel technology (or anything, really) has been replaced—or at least dampened—by the anguish of knowing its future burden. This listlessness might yet prove even worse than blind boosterism or cynical naysaying. Where the trauma of future shock could at least light a fire under its sufferers, future ennui exudes the viscous languor of indifferent acceptance. It doesn’t really matter that the Apple Watch doesn’t seem necessary, no more than the iPhone once didn’t too. Increasingly, change is not revolutionary, to use a word Apple has made banal, but presaged.

Our lassitude will probably be great for the companies like Apple that have worn us down with the constancy of their pestering. The poet Charles Baudelaire called ennui the worst sin, the one that could “swallow the world in a yawn.” As Apple Watch leads the suppuration of a new era of wearables, who has energy left to object? Who has the leisure for revolution, as we keep up with our social media timelines and emails and home thermostats and heart monitors?

When one is enervated by future ennui, there’s no vigor left even to ask if this future is one we even want. And even if we ask, lethargy will likely curtail our answers. No matter, though: soon enough, only a wrist’s glance worth of ideas will matter anyway. And at that point, even this short book’s worth of reflections on technology will be too much to bear, incompatible with our newfound obsession with wrist-sizing ideas. I’m sure I’ll adapt, like you will. Living with Apple means marching ever forward, through its aluminum- and glass-lined streets and into the warm, selfsame glow of the future.

***

Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. His books include How to Do Things with Videogames (Minnesota, 2011) and Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minnesota, 2012).

Alexander Chee | Apology Magazine | Winter 2014 | 19 minutes (4,822 words)

This essay by novelist Alexander Chee first appeared in Apology magazine’s third issue (Winter 2014). Apology is a semiannual print journal of art, interviews and literature, created by ex-Vice editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson. The fourth issue is available for preorder. Our thanks to Alexander Chee and Apology for allowing us to reprint this essay here.

* * *

How could you, my friends would ask, when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and stab him in the neck? Poison his food?

You would be a hero, one friend said.

I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for how could I, well, like many people, I needed the money.

And besides, he didn’t really matter. I loved her.

***

Before I worked as a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley, I knew them the way most people did—from Page 6 of the New York Post and its editorial page; from Vogue, the New York Times, and the back pages of Interview. When I first moved to New York, in 1991, Pat Buckley was the preeminent socialite if you were looking in from the outside—and I was.

Like many ambitious young New Yorkers, I had ridiculous fantasies that involved how one day I would run into her in the rooms I saw only in those pictures. Reading the Times on the train on my way to work, I imagined walking into the dimly lit salons where the rich and powerful met and determined the fate of the culture, if not the world.

When I say I really didn’t think of him, I mean I didn’t read what was referred to by her friends at their parties as “his magazine,” the National Review, though I sometimes read part or all of his column in the Post.  I tried to read him when I did because I thought of him as the opposition and I wanted to know what the opposition said and thought, or I thought I did, but too often it was too awful, too enraging, to finish. I knew civilized people were supposed to read the ideas of people who disagreed with them and at least think about them. In this way I was not so civilized.

When I met him finally, he was not as vigorous as she was, perhaps from drink or cigars or both, though she certainly drank and smoked as well. He was shorter and more rumpled, as if one day he had gotten tired and then never quite rested enough. She was tall, tan, and animated, with a wild shock of carefully highlighted hair. She wore a painterly face of makeup that at times resembled the portrait of her that hung in their home. She had the habit of filling the room, and then you might notice him somewhere in it, holding court in a quieter way. It was easy to imagine the woman she’d once been, handsome though not manly, a natural leader. And for those of us who worked there in their house, it was her we watched, always. For it would be her we answered to if anything went wrong.

***

In 1997, I began working as a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley. I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: 5′ 10″, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old, clean-cut. I took the job because I looked good in a tuxedo and couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel. It was the easiest solution to my money problems when I returned to New York after getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I’d already been doing it for two years when I was called to work for the Buckleys. Cater-waitering paid $25 an hour plus tips and involved working everything from the enormous galas in the Winter Garden to People magazine lunches to openings at the Guggenheim. The tuxedo and the starched white shirt—and the fact that each assignment was at a different, often exclusive, place—all made me feel a little like James Bond. Sometimes my fellow waiters and I called it the Gay Peace Corps for how we could come into places, clean them up, make them fabulous, throw a party, and leave. And I liked that when I went home, I didn’t think about the work at all.

As a writer’s education, also, being a cater-waiter allowed me access to the interiors of people’s lives in a way that was different from every other relationship I might have had. When you’re a waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you see them in unguarded moments, and that, I liked. There was the Christmas buffet dinner where the host and hostess served their visiting family from a group of wines given to them by friends that they considered unworthy of being cellared. Or the Christmas party where the host took a friend into the coatroom to beat him in private (so badly he had to leave) to punish him for being a jerk to us, the waiters, and then handed out his friend’s cigars to us afterward and said, “My friend said to say he was sorry.” There was the party on the Upper East Side where we changed in a spare apartment we jokingly called “Daddy’s Rumpus Room,” as the walls were padded with gray flannel and the windows all frosted so that no one could take a photo from outside of whatever it was our host did in there.

And then there was the Upper East Side party for some wealthy closeted gays and lesbians who, to hide their sexuality and protect their fortunes, had married off so they resembled straight couples. They looked on with a placid mix of despair and happiness at their sons and daughters, many of them openly gay and lesbian, who were there with their same-sex lovers.

The best thing I’d done for myself as a waiter was to have the cheap polyester tux we all had to wear tailored shortly after starting. I soon caught the eye of a private-client captain, who eventually brought me to the Buckleys. He was a funny, boyish older gay man whose expression could change from a warm smile to an icy stare in less than a heartbeat. He had an English face and complexion, with a last name that didn’t match. I interviewed with him and left certain I’d failed. If he liked you, he never let on right away.

He worked for some of the wealthiest clients in New York City. I recall helping Martha Stewart pick out a favorite petit-four in the home of the Grubmans while Vera Wang and Tommy Hilfiger looked on. I learned, as I washed up afterward, that the plates had cost $3,000 a setting. I became used to climbing, at high speed, the back stairs at prominent homes all up and down Fifth and Park Avenues, and washing plates and glasses that cost more than my yearly rent.

The moment I describe next was not at the beginning any different from any of those other jobs, but I remember it because of a word: maisonette. It began with a phone message on my answering machine: “Come to ____ Park Avenue. It’s a maisonette. Don’t go to the front, but come around the side. But don’t ring the bell. I’ll be in front and take you in the service entrance. Tuxedo, plain shirt, bow tie. I want a fresh shirt—no stains on the cuffs or collars. And be sure to shine your shoes, as she’ll know.”

And then a pause. “When I say she’ll know, I’m talking Pat Buckley. You’re working at the Buckleys. Look your best.”

***

I knew William F. Buckley in the same way that every gay man of my generation knew him: as an enemy. On March 18, 1986,  the New York Times published an op-ed column by him that advocated for the tattooing of people with AIDS on their buttocks and wrists. He initially proposed something more visible, but then rejected it as an invasion of privacy.

There was a part of my history that made me an unusual figure in the Buckleys’ home. I was a former member of the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS activist organization. I had driven to Maine to lie down in the street along with thousands of other protesters in front of President George H. W. Bush’s house in Kennebunkport in 1991, for a die-in protesting his inaction on AIDS. I still had PTSD upon seeing policemen after being attacked by them in riots in San Francisco on International AIDS Day in 1990. I had been a committed member of the group’s media committee, appearing on television sometimes, determined to make a difference in the fight against a disease I was sure was going to devastate the world. This was an era when it was still shocking to hear that 10,000 Americans had contracted AIDS. But in just the six years between the die-in at Bush’s house and the day when I walked up to the Buckleys’ entrance, I’d watched the number of infected grow exponentially, each year, past all imagining.

So when I tell you that I thought of William F. Buckley as the opposition, I mean specifically, as regards to how he had given a powerful public voice to the belief that the illness revoked your basic humanity and placed you beyond help. The tattoo he suggested was to make sure you knew it. Whatever you might think of my friends who joked of my killing him, you may better understand the sentiment as a reaction to experiencing from him a denial that they were even people.

On the day I arrived at the service entrance to his Park Avenue maisonette with a waiter’s tuxedo on my shoulder, I knew that we bitterly disagreed on the question of what it means to be human. I had never imagined meeting William F. Buckley at all, and so when my first day in the Buckley house began, the reality of what I was about to do to set in. I remember walking to Park Avenue from the subway and looking up at the enormous stone and brick tower in disbelief. I wondered briefly whether they ran background checks on the waiters, whether they knew of my past, whether someone like me could really work there. I drew a breath and put all of that out of my head.

And then the door opened and I was let in.

***

A maisonette, if you didn’t know, and I didn’t, is a house hidden inside the walls of an apartment building. The owners share services with the rest of the building but have their own door. In the entrance to the Buckleys’ maisonette, at that time, sat a small harpsichord of the most beautiful gold and brown wood. I was told that Christopher, their son, could play it very well. A portrait of him from when he was young hung on the wall on the right, near the entrance, and in it he looked supernaturally beautiful, like the child of elves. Next to the harpsichord was a tree made of metal and what looked to be cut glass or semiprecious stones for leaves, set in a bed of rougher stones in a low vase. There were trees like this all through the downstairs, chest-high, and the effect was like entering a forest grove under a spell, where the beautiful child from the painting might appear and play a song. The forest was also populated with expensive rugs, cigar ashtrays, lamps, and chairs covered in chintz. The house gave the appearance of having been decorated once in a particular style and then never updated again. Between the dark reds on the walls and the glittering stone trees, it felt warm and cold at the same time.

I was being auditioned, the captain told me. If I succeeded at this, one of his most difficult assignments, I would be a regular. “Mrs. B will watch you like a hawk,” he said, “in general, but especially for this first one. So you have to be on your very best behavior if you want to be asked back.” As the door closed behind us, he said, “That’s what we call them: Mr. and Mrs. B.”

I was introduced then to a kind older gentleman who, in my memory, ran their household. I don’t recall his precise title or his name, but if it had been a palace, I think he would have been the chamberlain. He impressed me instantly as one of the sweetest and most elegant men I had ever met, with a full head of white hair and a wry look in his eyes that stayed whether he was regarding a martini or a waiter. He was busy with showing the cooks around the kitchen. The waiters were brought upstairs to change in a small room that sat at the end of a hallway near the entrance to the back stairs, which led from the second floor to the kitchen. It contained a single bed made up with a torn coverlet, and a treadmill covered in wire hangers and books. Dusty sports trophies lined dusty bookshelves.

“Whose room is this?” I asked the captain.

“Mr. B’s,” he said.

I stared, waiting for him to laugh.

He said, “Oh, honey. Sure. She’s the one with all the money, after all. Canadian timber fortune, I think. Her friends call her Timberrr because of that and because she’s tall and when she’s drunk she falls over, because she won’t wear her shoes.” I thought of Madge Wildwood in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I laughed, he laughed, and then his face came over serious and flat and we both stopped laughing at the same time.

“Don’t you dare write about any of this,” he said. “Or I’ll have to hunt you down and kill you. With my bare hands. Because I love them dearly.”

***

The parties the Buckleys had in New York were typically attended by a strange mixture of her friends and his, which is to say, I remember holding out a tray of scallops wrapped in bacon toward the socialite Nan Kempner and the deeply conservative writer Taki Theodoracopulos, both of whom looked down at it as if it had insects on it, and then I moved on toward the magazine people, who swarmed the trays quickly, eating everything. It was her very rich society crowd mingling with the young writers Buckley was fostering, and they had very little to say to each other, typically drifting to different sides of the room, and yet never hostile.

Despite the way the writers condescended to me, I knew I made more money than they did. But it wouldn’t matter. I was holding the tray they were eating from. The food was always from another era: the terrines, for example, which I never saw anywhere else I worked. The scallops wrapped in bacon. Gravlax salmon on Melba toasts. They did not go in for the new trends in cooking—there was never going to be a piece of charred tuna, pink on the inside, on those trays. The only pink was in the roast-beef appetizers. There would never be coconut-crusted shrimp. And dessert was often, perhaps even always, rum raisin ice cream, a favorite of theirs. I found that endearing.

On my first night there, when I was not supposed to make a mistake, I did. I remember very clearly being in the dining room and making my way through the thickets of chairs around the tables. Someone was speaking to the room for some reason as the courses were changing—we were doing a service where we came in with one plate and left with another, switching it out very quickly, in rows of waiters. I cleared from the wrong side and served from the wrong side, and while the guest didn’t seem to notice, I was helpless except to look and see Mrs. B glaring at me as if I’d personally done it to hurt her feelings. Her dark, thickly lined eyes barely held in her fury.

I went to the captain immediately. He swore and glowered at me. “Chee…” he said, trailing off. And then he said, “It’s okay. I mean, you’re in for it now. But there’s only one thing for you to do.”

That one thing, it turned out, occurred at the very next party, and it was a part of my probation. Instead of passing food or drinks, I looked after her. Mrs. B typically sat talking to someone animatedly, her cigarettes, lighter, lipstick, glasses, and cocktail beside her on a small table. She drank Kir Royales, but with a light blush, not too dark. She would take off her shoes, setting them to the side. And when she leaped up to speak with someone she recognized on the other side of the room, she left everything behind.

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Your job at that moment—should you have screwed up as I had screwed up—was to go immediately to the back and emerge with a fresh Kir Royale prepared exactly as she liked it. You never brought her the one she’d just abandoned. You then grabbed her lipstick, glasses, cigarettes, and lighter in your other hand, bent down to retrieve her shoes, and went over to where, by now, she was in conversation again. You did not interrupt, but waited until she looked at you, and then you said, “Mrs. B, you left these,” and she would exclaim, take them from you, and sure enough, if the color of the Kir was right and you were appropriately chastised in your manner, and you did all of this exactly right each time she moved, you survived.

As I handed her shoes over that first time, I blushed a little, like someone in love.

***

I’d not read Mr. B’s famous column on the AIDS tattoo before I worked for him. After I began working for him, I still did not read it. I felt it was somehow safer not to, because once that friend had asked me whether I’d ever imagined stabbing Buckley in the neck, it then flashed through my mind once I was inside the house. I remember serving him and watching his neck as I sat the plate down. The single thing I forbade myself to think of became, of course, impossible to ignore. I felt a little like the character in Chekhov’s Story of an Unknown Man, who pretends to be a serf in order to work inside the home of the son of a politician he opposes. It’s an act of political espionage that uncovers nothing, and soon the narrator despairs of what he’s done. He eventually runs away with the neglected mistress of his employer.

This is not what I did.

For as much as William F. might have done to undermine the situation of people with AIDS, Pat seemed to do in their favor. In 1987 alone, for example, a year after the famous column, she was involved in raising $1.9 million for the AIDS-care program at St. Vincent’s, a hospital at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York. Today, it might be easy to underestimate the value of that gesture. But at the time, no one wanted anything to do with people with AIDS. Pat was one of New York’s greatest fund raisers for charity, and however many lives her husband may have put at risk, it seems to me she saved many more. If it was ever glamorous to raise money for people with AIDS, it was partly because she helped to make it so. And while the finances of their family are known only to them, it seems to me that Mr. Buckley would never condone the types of donations Mrs. Buckley likely gave. If there is a question as to whose money it was, perhaps the proof is there. She could, it seems to me, have afforded to go against him.

And so if it seems strange to you that one of America’s most famous homophobes was married to a woman who was a hero to many gay men, if it seems strange to you that the household where she lived with him was sometimes full of gay men serving food and drink to her guests despite his published beliefs, well, it was strange. It was also complicated. And yet the times were such that we, her waiters, experienced the millions of dollars she raised for those who were abandoned to their fates as a kind of protection and affection both. It was not for us, per se, but it could easily have been us next. For gay men in the 90s, that thought was never far from mind. And so I think we could joke about killing him. But never, not even a little, about doing even the slightest thing to hurt her.

***

I remember being in the back of the Buckleys’ limo, headed to their home in Connecticut for a party there. Their driver, our captain observed to me, kept a gun under the seat. A Cabriolet convertible pulled even with the limo and honked three times quickly to get our attention. It was Nan Kempner, waving wildly, girlish. She was still the beautiful icon, her hair held back in a scarf tied at her neck, the top of the Cabriolet down. This was just several years before her death.

“She thinks we’re them,” one of the waiters said.

I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure she knew we were the waiters. Why wouldn’t she know Mr. and Mrs. B were already there? She was a good sport, is the thing. It made no sense, of course, but it was easy to believe she was happy to see the men who carried around the food she so routinely ignored.

The Connecticut party invitation was a sign you’d arrived—both for the guests and for the waiters. To be asked to work there meant they trusted you the most. What I remember chiefly about the party is the roses, everywhere, carefully maintained. I first pictured Mrs. B tending them, before my imagination conceded to who she was and replaced the image with that of a gardener. I had a rose garden myself in Brooklyn, and well-tended roses have always impressed me. The country place was a large if somewhat unassuming house in Stamford, a city quickly becoming notorious for gang activity across the tracks from these seaside places. As Nan Kempner had sped away earlier, I wondered if she knew to worry about being carjacked in her convertible. Perhaps she had a gun under her seat too.

We changed clothes this time in an upstairs room with a view of the grounds and the pool before hustling down and attending to the needs of the hundred or so guests swarming the lawns. The party passed in its usual hustle, and was entirely unremarkable until the evening, as we went upstairs and changed to go. From the window, I saw Mr. Buckley head to the pool with a dark-haired young man we could see only from the back. I raised an eyebrow, and one of the waiters said to me, “It’s a tradition. He always invites a male staffer to a skinny dip at the end of the night when there are parties up here.”

“Really,” I said.

We heard the splashes. My coworker smiled. “Really. That’s how they used to swim at Yale, after all,” he said. Before I could absorb this, Mrs. Buckley appeared in the doorway.

She was, as I’ve said, very tall, and she loomed there like a ghost. We all froze. We were in various stages of undress. I had my pants on, but my shirt and jacket were hung up, and I wore just a V-neck T-shirt. She had never once come to where we changed before. Her eyes were half-lidded as she looked down at me—I was very near the door. Nearest of all the waiters, who stared as she gave me a long, long look and walked slowly ahead until she was right in front of me. “Thank you,” she said, very quietly, looking at me. “Thank you so, so much.” And as she said this, she set her long fingers down into the hair on my chest.

“Thank you,” I said. It was clear to me she couldn’t see me very well. She didn’t have her glasses on, and she was drunk.

I can only think I was very good with a Kir Royale. I wondered if perhaps Mrs. B had decided it was time for her to go make an invitation to a male staffer of her own. Why was she there that night, for what reason, when she had never come to us like that before? Was that night somehow unbearable, when all the others had been bearable? Whatever the reason was for her arrival in the room, all of us were shocked to see her.

There was a terrible loneliness and sadness in her expression, and then it was gone, and she seemed to come back to herself. “Thank you, thank you all,” she said, and turned and left the attic.

We finished dressing, and started back to New York in the car before the swimmers returned.

***

In the days after, when I thought of this evening, I could barely believe it. And then months went by, and years, and I could still barely believe it. I knew that, yes, if I ever wrote of it, my captain would throttle me—at the least. But more important, I’d lose my job. And for what? Waiters and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You only reveal a secret if you are never going back again, and at the time, I knew I had reached one of those accommodations one finds in New York—I had carved out a little place I could make a living, in a city where finding and keeping work has always been an extreme sport. I was also supporting my younger sister as she made her way through college with this money. I couldn’t afford, in other words, to risk it—to become famous as a waiter who spoke of all this and then be blacklisted by New York publishing in the process. They were monstres sacrés, and I was not. Everything in my life would change, and nothing in theirs—I wouldn’t be a hero, just an example, the briefest object lesson. And so it soon became a story that I told, instead, and to which people listened in disbelief, and at the end we laughed, as if it were only funny.

All these years later, the moment itself has come to represent some sort of peak, the climax of my life as a cater-waiter. It’s as if I never did it again after that night, though of course I know I did. I’m sure I was back at the Buckleys’ at least once more, for example, in New York. But in the way of these things, there was no good-bye—I didn’t know in advance the moment I would leave, and there was no presumption of intimacy such that I would have written a note saying, “Thank you for the time in your service.” I left the business, having finished and sold the novel I’d been working on. I transitioned to living off a mix of grants, advances, and teaching writing. I remember arriving at a party in Chelsea after the publication of that novel and finding my captain holding a tray. He smiled at me, we spoke, he congratulated me. Unspoken between us was that I still should never write of this.

And now Patricia Buckley is dead, William F. Buckley is dead, and the Buckley maisonette has been sold by the beautiful son. Even St. Vincent’s Hospital is gone. The building is being slowly converted into a nest of luxury condos.

When I knew I would not return—could not return—I finally did read the famous column. And when just exactly what he’d written was there in front of me—the actual wish for tattoos for people with AIDS—I had numerous reactions. I was surprised to see there was not just one tattoo he wanted for them, but two, one on the forearm and one on the buttocks. I wondered if he knew, before he died, that this column would be mentioned in his obituary along with the names of his wife and son and his place of birth—that it would, in fact, tattoo him. And I couldn’t help but imagine him in that pool in Connecticut with the young male staffer, swimming underwater, the walls glowing with light, their naked bodies incandescent, just like at Yale, and—maybe—wishing there was some mark on the boy he could easily see.

***

Nina MacLaughlin | Hammer Head, W.W. Norton | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head—the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a drag-and-click job at a newspaper and into a carpentry apprenticeship. In this section MacLaughlin strikes out on her own to craft bookshelves for her father and meditates on the relationship between writing and carpentry, and learning to build with wood instead of words.

***

The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.

I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.

“Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.

“We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

We parted ways with a hug and Christmas wishes, knowing it might be some months before we paired up again. I didn’t fear the slowing. I knew next season would come.

Around this time, my father and his girlfriend bought a house together in the woods by a tidal river in southeastern Massachusetts. My father finally collected his belongings out of the storage bay they’d been occupying for six years. To visit his new home was to see the familiar items from our growing up freed from dark boxes in a storage cell. Many boxes stacked in the basement remained to be unpacked, most of them labeled BOOKS.

During one of the first visits there, we sat near the fireplace, my brothers, father, and I, and our respective romantic partners. Outside the window, the bird feeder was a flurry of action. Tubby morning doves, bright darting cardinals, feathers a duller red than their full-force summer color, a nuthatch, some chickadees, a woodpecker. They fluttered and fed, some pecking at the feeder that sat atop a pole, some on the ground picking at seeds, some at the small cage of white suet that hung from a branch, cow fat white like snow. My father identified each bird. When one swooped in to scope the scene from the branches nearby, he would forecast which feeder the little bird would go to—pole, ground, or suet. He was right every time. He talked about how you could feel the presence of a hawk nearby—the birds would still, then scatter.

After watching the birds, we turned our attention back inside, toward the fire. Darkness settled, the window out to the feeder reflected the lamps, the stone fireplace, our faces. We chatted and laughed. Finally everyone started toward bed. My father stood, looked at me, and raised his hands toward either side of the fireplace.

“Bookcases,” he said toward the enormous blank spaces on the wall. I could picture it immediately.

“Great idea,” I said.

“I’d like for you to build them.”

I frowned. The relaxed feeling brought on by an evening of fireside laughs shifted to a storm of doubt. For me to build them? By myself? I could not say out loud that I wasn’t sure I could, that after these years with Mary, I doubted my ability to build cases on my own. I did not want to admit that the thought of it scared me. So I lied. I told him I wasn’t sure what my schedule was with Mary these days. “I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

I went to bed that night and thought about the cases. My reaction when he’d asked was immediate and surprising. Could I? I knew how to do this, didn’t I? I went through the steps in my head, the ones I’d learned from Mary and done with her many times. I pieced the cases together mentally, starting with the bases on which they’d sit, moving on to the frames, the shelves, the trim. I’d have them match the height of the window trim, I thought, keep that line consistent around the room. An outlet on one wall would mean notching a hole in the back. These were all things I’d done before, had seen Mary do.

“Keep me posted on the shelves,” my dad said as we left.

“I’d like to start unpacking those books.”

Back in Cambridge, I kept thinking about the cases. I made them more real in my head, more possible. The floors probably aren’t level, I figured, and reminded myself how to correct for that. I’ll have to alter the trim around the window. In my mind, I knew what to do.

But when my father called to see if I was up for the project, again I hesitated. The project had been taking shape in my thoughts, but, tools in hand, would I be able to translate what I knew to the wood? Without Mary at the helm, would I come to discover that I’d learned nothing? A terrible thought, it brought a clenching sort of discomfort, the confrontation that I’d been living a lie. I could dress the part, but did it mean I could do the work?

The feeling was familiar. When I began my job at the newspaper, when I first started filing stories, I’d wake up before work in anguish. How am I going to do this? What if I don’t finish on time? What if I can’t figure out how to say what I want to say? It was a specific, potent fear of failure, of being struck with the inability to express what I knew, or to do so in a way that revealed me for the faker I was.

The carpentry questions echoed the journalism ones. How am I going to do this? What if they don’t work? What if I can’t figure out how to make them stand? What if I can’t translate what I know to the wood? Doubt crowded my thoughts and delayed any possible start. To begin was to open the possibility of fucking it up.

The novelist Gabriel García Márquez once told the Paris Review that “ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. . . . Both are very hard work. . . . With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

It’s true that writing and carpentry both require patience and practice, and both revolve around the effort of making something right and good. Both involve getting it wrong over and over, and being able to stay with it until it is right. In both, the best way of understanding something is often by taking it apart. In both, small individual pieces combine and connect to make something larger, total, whole. In both, we start with nothing and end with something.

But what appealed to me so much about carpentry work is how far it is from words. The zone of my brain that gets activated building bookshelves is a different one than the one that puts together sentences. And what a relief it can be, not having to worry about the right word, not having to think, over and over, is this the best way to say this? The questions carpentry raises are the same, ultimately—will this work? Will this function as it should, be true and strong? But the answers come from different rooms in my head, and it is good to exit the word room in favor of a less-used realm that deals with space, numbers, tools, and materials. Much of what carpentry requires does not come naturally to me. Angles, numbers, basic logic. But with carpentry you have a tape measure, a saw, a pencil, a piece of wood. Concrete, understandable, real in the world, each of these things made for a specific purpose.

García Márquez admits a few sentences later that he’d never done any carpentry himself. If he had, he’d know that a piece of wood is not the same as words. A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between the wall and the floor, that’s real, too. There’s a sense of completion with carpentry that doesn’t exist with writing. Words are ghosty and mutable. A measurement, a cut, sawdust in my lungs, and the piece of wood slides in to fit tight with a few taps of the hammer. It’s the opposite of abstract. Measure, measure, mark. Cut. Nail in.

The process of building a writing office in his Connecticut backyard reminded Michael Pollan “just how much of reality slips through the net of our words.” Language becomes less useful when you’re building a bookcase. A certain head-emptying, in the finest moments, takes place. That meditative goal, rising above the words and emotional swamps, being fully awake to the tools and the wood, involves the evacuation of language. What a relief it can be, for words not to matter. The shelf is real, and right now, as I sand it smooth, it’s all there is. To write is to muck around in the space inside your skull. It is to build something, yes—worlds and people, moods and truths—but it is closer to a conjuring. You cannot put your wineglass down on a paragraph, even if that paragraph is perfect.

Much of what Mary taught me did not involve words. The classic writing dictum applies in carpentry, too: show, don’t tell. It’s hard to explain how to install crown molding. It’s best learned by watching it done, and doing it. Over and over. Her verbal lessons—start rare with meat; finesse; go slow; be smarter than the tools—are all enacted in the way she does her work, the way she moves and uses her tools to solve each problem. You could read books and books on how to build a wall or tile a floor, hear someone speak for hours on the best ways to make a bureau or a bookcase. They could use all the right words, weave the tightest net, but until you grip the hammer in your palm, until you feel two pieces of wood pressed flush against each other before they are fastened, until you stand back from what you’ve made and then walk up to it and kick it or place something on it, you will not know how it’s done. All the language in the world won’t make a bookshelf exist. It takes watching, and doing, and screwing it up, and doing it again and again until it is done.

***

I spent hours sketching and adding and subtracting in planning out the bookcases my father wanted. I called Mary to see if she could loan me a few of her tools.

“You’re heading out on your own,” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Good for you.”

“I haven’t said yes yet.”

“Say yes! You know what you’re doing. Remember that it’s going to take longer than you think.”

“I was guessing four days?”

“I’m guessing more like eight.”

“Shit.”

“Remember when you could barely use a drill?”

Photo by Nina MacLaughlin

That night I dreamed about bookcases. Up on a ladder in the sand, I was building a bookcase on a beach. The shelves faced the sea and the tide was rising, waves washing in to lower shelves, soaking the books that were already filling them, making the pages swell, drawing some off the shelves and back into the ocean. I was building the bookcases higher and higher so they’d rise above the biggest waves. When I turned, I saw seagulls dive-bombing the books that had been swept away and floated on the sea. My ladder kept slipping in the sand. Dread:

how will I hammer through water?

In the morning, I called my dad and told him I was available for the project.

It was the third day into the first real cold snap of the season, and the dry tight cold made everything seem brittle, bones and branches. The highway on the drive down, with the wood loaded into the car, seemed bleached by the cold. The sky was pale.

I arrived late in the afternoon, pulled down the dirt driveway with spindly trees closing in on either side, tall and narrow-trunked, fuzzed with pale green lichen. The house had the feel of a cabin—woodstoves and wool blankets, a high-peaked roof. The air down there had the sweet mulchy stink of wood and dead leaves, a whisper of the sea. Coming from the city, I noticed the quiet. A chatter of birds, rustle of branches and dried dead leaves. There was no city hum, no low rumble and buzz of traffic, movement, streetlights, no static of a neighbor’s television. Here, at night, the darkness and silence collected around the house like a quilt.

I unloaded the wood on the thin rim of back porch that faced three feet of grass and a wall of mossy forest and the river somewhere beyond. I looked at the stack of boards, the bundles of trim, and it seemed impossible that these would come together to make something real and useful. The light was fading and I stared at the wood, imagined the way each board and stick of trim would be cut, how they’d be fastened. Great steamy puffs of breath rose around my face with every exhale.

In what little light remained of the day, I drilled the holes in the case sides where pegs would slot in to hold up the shelves. I held the drill and stared at the wood some more. I took a deep breath, knowing that this first hole was the first chance to make a mistake. To look is to keep it perfect in your mind. To take the tool to the wood is to open yourself up to error. You know how to do this, I told myself. I placed the drill and squeezed the trigger and the bit burrowed down into the wood. The noise against the quiet of the marsh almost seemed a violence. I drilled hole after hole. Ducks made noise on the river. I’d finished the holes on two boards, half done, when it started to snow. The porch lamps bathed the wood in light. And if I held my breath over the planks of wood, I could hear the sound of snow falling, a papery whisper.

My hands ached from cold by the time I finished with the peg holes. I stacked the boards up, set the sawhorses aside, and put the drill back into its case. I shivered a bit inside. I’d be staying here until the shelves were done. Besides plotting out the shelves over and over in my mind, my thoughts kept returning to my father’s inevitable criticisms. He is a perfectionist, and quick to call out fault. I imagined him hovering over the work, in his khaki pants and leather shoes and layered shirts, clicking his tongue. You’re doing it like that? I anticipated having to remind him that he’d hired me.

I stomped around the living room to shake off the cold and he came in and told me to sit down. The gravity of his tone caused the rise of walls, the ones that shoot up to protect against coming bad news, to guard against the things you don’t want to hear. I sat and looked at my lap, pretended to focus on thawing my fingers.

“You are the boss,” he said. “And you have the right to kick me in the shins if I start being an asshole.”

I laughed. This was not what I’d expected.

He said it made him happy to have me be the one building these things, putting my stamp on this new house in this new phase. He talked about pride. He talked about how much it meant to him. How to explain the discomfort provoked by this moment of sincerity? This was not how we communicated in our family. We made jokes and talked books, and affection was understood as opposed to expressed. As he spoke, I tried telepathy: Stop, please, even this is too much. I glanced at him. Oh no please are those tears in his eyes? I felt shy and eager to rush away. So I scoffed and dismissed it with a shrug. “We’ll see how they turn out,” I said from behind the walls. But from there, I felt the significance of these shelves, too, of contributing to this new home and phase by making a home for his books. He loved to quote the Anthony Powell title: “Books do furnish a room.”

We had soup for dinner that night, thick soup he’d made with sausage and red pepper and white beans. We ate it sitting side by side at the kitchen island. It was exactly the sort of food I wanted after standing in the cold. He warmed the bowls with hot water before serving up the soup.

He saw me flipping through a stack of seed catalogues left on the counter, something I remembered from childhood, looking at all the colorful pictures of pansies and melons and zucchinis, and all of them and more appearing in our backyard in summer. “We’re going to clear some trees on the south side of the house and make a garden,” he said.

As we ate, he talked of decoys. He talked of having a workshop again. He’d been unpacking his tools. The workbench in the basement had a scatter of clamps and bullet levels, paint- brushes, half-carved shore birds, pale and paintless, pieces of driftwood, files, chisels, and rasps, all those wooden-handled tools I still didn’t know the names of, all of them freed from boxes finally and ready to be used again. I bet it felt good for him to have his hands on these tools, to feel the wooden bodies of the birds, to feel the potential, to start to carve again.

“Stay here,” he said, after we finished our soup. He went down to the basement and I heard rustling from below. “It’s amazing the stuff I’m coming across,” he said on his way back up the stairs. He returned to the kitchen with a cardboard tube under his arm and removed a scroll of crinkly delicate tracing paper, dry and faded a tea-stained yellow. He unrolled it to show a pencil drawing of a great blue heron with its S-shaped neck and stalky legs, a beautiful line drawing life-size at nearly four feet high. I’d thought he’d long forgotten his promise to make me a heron out of wood. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” my dad said. I told him it was extremely cool. “Now I just need to translate the drawing into wood. Imagine it in three dimensions.”

 ***

It didn’t warm up any overnight. In the morning, I made the boxes, the outer shell of the cases, and fastened on the backs. I cut the shelves, six for each case, and cut the pieces of trim to line the shelves and the cases, too. Measure, mark, cut—again and again. I attached the pieces of trim to the shelves, made the strips of poplar one-by-two flush with the top of each shelf to hide the unfinished edge of the plywood behind it.

My father went about his day, drinking big mugs of tea and working at the computer on a marketing strategy for a Boston nonprofit. And he watched his birds at the feeder outside. “There’s a woodpecker,” he’d call from the other room, “another downy,” and I’d lean to look out the window and see its red head and black-and-white-flecked wings. Its cheerful tap of beak against wood drummed out through the forest.

I moved on to sanding, priming, painting, which seemed to last for days. My boyfriend Jonah joined me for the last stages of the project, and it was good to have the help and company, to break the tedium and speed the sanding, priming, painting process. I had nerves for the eventual installation, when errors would reveal themselves. I had sent Mary a few panicked texts. What happens when —? Do we do it this way or —? And she wrote back straightaway with simple answers.

The floors bowed, rising and falling like low-tide waves.

They required time with shims and the level in order to right the bases on which the cases would sit, raising and lowering them until the bubble in the level slipped between its lines.

The levels with tubes almost full of yellow or chemical green liquid and an air bubble that slips back and forth inside are known as spirit levels. The alcohol in the tubes gives the spirit level its name. The laying of the level is one of the final tests of a carpenter’s work—the bubble settles itself in the middle. Perfect, yes: clamp, screw, check again; still level? Good, done. Press it against a doorframe, up and down, and the bubble finds center if all is as it should be.

I sometimes wish a tool existed that could measure the plumbness of our spirits, a tool that would help us decide what’s right for our own lives. How helpful to have an instrument that signaled, with the silent fluid shift of a bubble, that we should shift our spirit a little to the left—just a skosh— and all would be balanced and right. It’s not like that in life, of course. If your spirit is level one minute, there’s no guarantee it will be level the next. We shift, or don’t, make adjustments, change, with the intention and the hope—and sometimes nothing so intentional—that the bubble will find center.

Mary had a six-foot level, but we mostly used the two-footer and the bullet level, a little guy, six inches long. The levels have three tubes, one in the center and one at each end. The center tube reads for level on the horizontal: a floor, a shelf. The ones at either end measure for plumb on vertical readings, a doorframe, a wall. Two tiny lines mark each tube, and the bubble inside is exactly the size of the distance between those two marks.

It’s a silent tool. To see that bubble land between the lines is to feel relief and satisfaction. It’s a tool that’s also brought about temporary lapses in sanity. In adjusting cabinets on the floor, for example, a thin shim in the front corner gets the side- to-side reading right, but throws off the front-to-back. More shims, more adjustments, space fragments up and down. I lose the way. It’s a similar feeling of being so close to a piece of writing that suddenly you can’t see it, the plot goes, the whole thing vanishes, there but unseeable. The same happens sometimes with leveling. The bubble shifts and settles but refuses to tell you what you want it to tell you. A shim in and out, another, and nothing’s where it should be and each move gets you further away from where you want to be. I’ve had to step away, to approach another task, empty my head, then come back to leveling, removing all my little stacks of shims and starting fresh, to try again from scratch.

Once the bases were level, it was time to put the boxes up against the wall to see if the fit was right. I feared this moment. I feared the miscalculations that would be revealed. The first one, to the right of the fireplace, fit just right. It was the simpler one, the one that didn’t edge up against a window. I was pleased with the distance between the light switch and the side of the case, and pleased that it fit as it should against the stones of the fireplace, too. I pressed the other one into place. The outlet hole I’d made with the jigsaw slipped over the outlet right on center. The left side was flush against the piece of window trim I’d had to remove and rip to make the case fit. Oh, the seam was perfect! I marveled. This is always the moment—before it’s all finished, before the last piece has gone in and you’re tidying and on your way out—when you can really see it, when it feels the best.

My father took a break from his work and came into theliving room as I stood back and looked at the cases, hands on my hips. His smile was big and genuine. “Hey, all right,” he said. He gave me a high five. He could see it, too.

Photo by Nina MacLaughlin

Later that afternoon, as I tidied up the tools and stowed the paint cans for the day, buzzing with relief that the cases fit, that I’d done it right and well, my father came into the room, dark news written on his face. He’d just gotten an e-mail from my younger brother, who’d written that his girlfriend’s father was dying, and it was happening fast. In the years my brother and she had been together, she’d become a good friend. Her big laugh upped the level of joy in any room she was in. I hadn’t met her father, but knew he was a journalist, as she was. My dad shared the news, and we got quiet. In the pause, the silence felt like a bowl for what was being felt. Sadness, of course, the collision of facts and disbelief, an ache at the thought of a friend facing a changed world with someone gone, but also an appreciation of my luck, too, the recognition that here we still were right now, my father and I.

He made his way back to his office, and I finished packing the tools, and pulled on a coat to head out for a walk. I passed by my dad, his back to me at his desk as he looked out the window at his birds. Now and then, the bullshit gets stripped away, and the accumulated anger and hurt and confusion give way for a glimpse at a different truth. And what I saw was that he was trying his best like all of us, eager and excited to share his enthusiasms about birds and fish and books, keeping the feeders stocked with sunflower seeds, fumbling like all of us to bring himself and his distracted love into focus. I was overwhelmed by a moment of crushing affection. Our friend’s father would be dead soon. My dad had looked so happy when he saw the cases in their place.

“Bye, Dad,” I yelled as I opened the door to head out for the walk, and my voice almost cracked.

***

Jessica Gross | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,479 words)

In 1980, 29-year-old Christopher Kimball enrolled in a cooking class and was so frustrated by his instructors’ inability to answer his questions that he started his own cooking magazine. Cook’s Magazine, since reborn as Cook’s Illustrated, presents a small number of recipes refined through extraordinarily rigorous testing by the cooks in Kimball’s 2,500-square-foot kitchen lab. The bimonthly magazine—which features only black-and-white illustrations—eschews a focus on “lifestyle” in favor of treating cooking as a discipline and a craft. Over the years, Cook’s Illustrated has garnered a large and loyal readership—and spawned an empire, including a second magazine, Cook’s Country; many cookbooks; and two television shows. “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most popular cooking show on public television, is currently in its 15^th season. We spoke by phone about what it takes to write a crystal-clear recipe, the Cook’s Illustrated business model, and Kimball’s not-quite success getting his own kids in the kitchen.

* * *

I want to get into the nitty-gritty of writing recipes that are really easy for people to follow. In thinking about our conversation, I remembered that in middle school, I had to do a project called “Write It Do It.” You were given a structure and had to write out, step by step, how to put it together. Your partner got these instructions and then had to try to construct a replica, which you’d then compare with the original.

That’s great—I should do that with my test cooks.

Well, we did horribly—my partner and I came in second to last or something—which drove home how difficult it is to describe in words how to physically construct something specific. So, when you’re writing a recipe, how do you make crystal clear what the cook is supposed to be doing?

Yeah, that’s the essence of it—and it’s made even more difficult because every home cook’s kitchen is different. The cookware is different, the stovetop is different, the oven is different and they almost never use the right ingredients, or they substitute ingredients and leave ingredients out. So the variables beyond your control are substantial. In your case, if you have a set of Legos on a desk, you know exactly what the components are. In our case, they don’t have all the Legos. They substituted some other puzzle game for half the Legos and they aren’t going to actually build a whole building; they’ll leave out parts of it. And they won’t read your directions entirely. They’ll read parts of it but not fully. So it’s more like, “Write It, Kinda Do It.”

What that means is that all the specifics of what you do in your test kitchen aren’t necessarily replicable. For example, cooking times are useless. If you’re using an electric stovetop versus gas, or an All-Clad saucepan versus some crummy piece of Revere Ware, the times will be totally different. That’s why we give broad estimates, like four to eight minutes, or twenty to thirty minutes, and on top of that we always give visual clues: changes in color, changes in aroma, changes in texture. You have to give people redundant clues at every point about how to know when to go on to the next step. That’s probably one of the most important things you need to sort out.

The next thing you have to do is figure out which things will destroy the recipe. So if someone used all-purpose flour instead of cake flour, or natural process cocoa versus Dutch process, or a sirloin roast instead of a top round roast or vice versa—if one of those things is really going to make the recipe not work, you need to say that explicitly: “Only make this recipe with sirloin steak tips, and by the way, most sirloin steak tips are really not the right cut at the supermarket, and here’s what it’s supposed to look like.” So we go through a process of trying to blow up the recipe to figure out the most lethal mistake you can make.

And I think the last thing is—to get more to your point—just the clarity of writing, which means trying not to use too many adjectives: less is more. Be very clear and not overly descriptive. Include just as much information as you need.

Despite what you just said, do you have a favorite food adjective?

I don’t like any food adjectives that are superlative. I hate them all. Once in a while I find myself using “delicious” or something and I just get mad at myself. “Basil-flecked” just makes me want to kill somebody. I think the only adjectives that are useful are if you’re going to say a sugar syrup has to turn a particular color, you might define what that color is very clearly. But I don’t like adjectives that do not carry information, that carry only sensibility. I don’t find that useful. We’re not there to sell the recipe, we’re there to describe how to make it, and that’s a very different thing.

You mentioned that many people like to make substitutions when they’re cooking. What do you attribute that to?

I think it’s because people have so few creative outlets in life. If you go back a hundred years, when people lived in more isolated communities, they’d would sit around in Appalachia, say, and sing—or if they couldn’t sing, they’d pick up an instrument. People were freer to do a wide variety of things. People weren’t so vertically positioned. Now, if you’re not a musician, you can’t play music. So I think cooking is the last frontier where people think they can demonstrate some level of creativity, substituting ingredients, leaving ingredients out, changing the recipe, all of those things are put under the banner of being creative. And yet most of the time when you do that it doesn’t work out very well. And if you think about it, if you go back a hundred years, there was no great value put on creativity in the kitchen. You would make the recipe that your mother made or your uncle made, and you would make it the same way, and there was a great love of and comfort in repeating the recipe.

In this new America that’s so focused on the individual, people seem to think the individual has to create their own version of a recipe. And I think that’s just nonsense. If you have to adapt a recipe because you can’t get an ingredient, or once you get very good at a recipe you want to change it a little, fine, but we seem to be embarrassed to make a recipe the way someone else told us to make it because that doesn’t fit into our view of ourselves.

Take classical musicians: they’re perfectly happy to play Beethoven’s 5th the way it’s written. They’re not out there trying to improvise Beethoven. But if you get to rock and roll, which is more modern, everyone wants to stand up and do a jam band and play their own stuff. That’s the difference. The classical music is like the classical recipe—you play what’s on the sheet music, you cook what’s in the cookbook—and now everyone wants to be Jerry Garcia.

That’s incredibly interesting to me, that there are so few creative outlets because people are expected to only do the pursuits that they’re really good at now. But it seems to me a separate thing that it’s considered embarrassing to follow a recipe to the letter. What is that about?

Well, it’s as though cooking is a form of—and I hate this term—self-actualization, right? That’s what it is. If you are the creator and if you’ve just following somebody else’s recipe, you feel like you’re not really expressing yourself sufficiently, I guess.

Why has cooking come to take on this role as opposed to any other art?

Because what other way do people do art? Very few people play music, very few people do art, sculpture, painting. Very few people write poetry; people don’t keep journals like they used to.

You go back not too long ago, but after dinner—even in the south end of Boston, where I lived for years, the old houses had places for small pianos, uprights. There was a music room. And after dinner, people would play music. Someone in the family could sing, and someone else could play piano. You would perform. And there were kitchen dances in Vermont. People would bring a fiddle and something and play. There were lots of opportunities for the arts, crude though they may have been. But how can you do something creative today, really? The kitchen is the last place you can be really creative in the house, I think. Maybe gardening a little bit, but mostly cooking.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me the philosophy you’ve advanced through Cook’s Illustrated and “America’s Test Kitchen” works against this creativity bent: there is a right, even perfect, way to make each dish. Doesn’t that, in a way, stifle the creative urge even further? What outlet are people supposed to use then?

It depends if you think cooking is an art or a craft. I think of cooking as akin to woodworking. There is a right way to use certain woodworking tools. You have to understand the grain of the wood, the tools, and joinery if you’re going to be in construction or make shoes or whatever it is.

Baking bread is a craft, it’s not an art. There are rules and things to know. Yeast behaves certain ways under certain conditions. You can’t make it up. They’re facts. So I would say cooking is a craft and so you have to learn the craft. It’s not a question of doing what you want to do. When you cook meat to different internal temperatures, the meat fibers contract along the diameter and the length and squeeze out liquid, and you end up with drier, tougher meat. You can’t get around that. You can mitigate it, but you can’t get around it. So to be a good cook, there’s a body of information that you need to have. At some point, with enough experience, you can start connecting the dots and yes, many chefs are very creative. But that’s their job, and they spend twelve hours a day doing it, seven days a week, for years. I am not against people playing around with recipes, but they should get to the point where they really understand the recipe first.

Going back to non-cooking creative outlets: do you practice other arts in your own time?

Oh, yeah, everybody who does something for a living wants to do something else. I know a lot of musicians who want to be cooks, and I want to be a musician, so occasionally I put together my own jam band. I play lead guitar and practice that a fair amount; I’m a Deadhead from way back. And I love photography and do that, too. But with photography and music, as with cooking, there’s a lot to know. You’re not going to get good at music if you ignore music theory and what scales are, what chords are. All the great rock and roll musicians practice their scales. It’s the same thing.

Speaking of photography, can you take me back to the inception of Cook’s Illustrated and how you decided that illustrations rather than photographs would accompany the recipes?

Well, the original Cook’s started in 1980, and we did have photographs then. It’s a long story, but I restarted the magazine in 1993 and I reconfigured it. I decided that I didn’t want to be all things to all people, and that I was interested in cooking more than food and eating. That is, I wasn’t interested in the lifestyle around it. We wanted to focus on the kitchen and on developing recipes, and we thought that in many cases an illustration could actually convey information more clearly than a photograph.

The second thing was that color photography, which we do not use in Cook’s except on the inside back cover, is detrimental to the expression of information. I always felt that it was not a magazine—it feels more like a monograph or something. Black and white tells you right at the beginning this is a serious magazine about cooking, not a lifestyle magazine. We’re not trying to sell you on something; we are there to explain something.

I’d like to talk about the publishing model of the magazine, which has no advertising and relies only on subscription costs. At this point, when there seems to be a rising catastrophe in the publishing world, your model seems especially prescient. But at the time that you decided not to have advertisers, this wasn’t happening yet. So can you walk me through that decision, and how you came to feel so strongly that editorial and marketing should be entirely separate?

Well, there are two parts to the decision. The first part is, when I planned the second relaunch of Cook’s, I was sick and tired of doing a magazine that really wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wasn’t interested in anything other than the kitchen. So I decided, look, I’m not getting any younger. I just want to do the magazine I want to do, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but at least I tried. So I was starting with what I would want to read, and created a publication that was very focused on a certain approach.

Issue No. 42 of ‘Cook’s Illustrated’

Secondly, we’re a little bit like Consumer Reports. We do a lot of reviews, and there is no way I can have KitchenAid advertising in the magazine if I’m telling people to buy or not to buy KitchenAid. If you look at the other food magazines that do testings, they sort of talk about the features you should look at, but they don’t ever actually go out and say, “Look, we tested ten brands, and these three brands are a complete waste of money.” They can’t say that because they’d never get the advertiser back.

And the last thing is, someone said to me many years ago that it’s not how many recipes, it’s which recipes. And I believe that. It’s not a question of volume. We publish twelve or thirteen recipes every two months in Cook’s. I didn’t want a two hundred-page magazine with advertising, I wanted a thirty-two-page magazine that’s very focused. We’ll spend twelve or fifteen thousand dollars on creating a recipe. We’ll invest a lot of time and effort, and the advertising just blows the thing up. We’re Tiffany’s. We’re not 45th Street. We’ve done a lot of work to present just the recipes you want in just the way you want them, and the advertising is not consummate with that.

For all these magazines now flailing, trying to maintain their advertiser relationships, do you think this subscription-focused business model is a workable one? Or is it only useful for a very utilitarian type of publication like Cook’s?

First of all, print advertising obviously went into the toilet because of digital advertising. Digital advertising can be tracked for efficacy, whereas you can’t really track the success of a page of advertising in a magazine. But I do think that with certain kinds of advertising, like in fashion and bridal magazines, there is a case to be made that the experience of seeing a print ad is much more powerful than a half-second ad on a website. So I think we’ll get some balance—people will start to value magazine advertising again, especially in certain categories, as a really important part of what they do. But it will never be the way it was.

In terms of whether this advertising-free model works, I think it only works if you have editorial content that people can’t get somewhere else. The stuff in weekly news magazines or paparazzi magazines, you don’t need to get in a magazine. But in our case, given our test kitchen investment, our proposition isn’t just recipes, it’s a very particular set of recipes which are unique given the time and effort we put into them. Not everybody would agree, but our fans would say that they can’t get this somewhere else. If you make a cake and it comes out perfectly, and you have always had trouble with cakes, then you’re a believer, you know? With a political piece, say, that’s a harder case to make.

A New York Times Magazine profile of you from a few years ago reported that, in your test kitchen, “By far the most commonly occurring aha moments involve baking soda and gelatin.” Why are baking soda and gelatin so potent?

Baking soda has a lot of chemical properties, being alkaline, that go beyond its use in cakes and cookies. It’s a very powerful ingredient that can be used lots of different ways. And gelatin, it’s the same thing. Without cooking a particularly fatty piece of meat, you can thicken up a sauce, a gravy, with a little gelatin and get the same result. Umami ingredients—like tomato paste, or certain kinds of mushrooms like dry porcinis, or anchovies—will add a meaty flavor without meat. There are a bunch of tricks that you develop over time. But I think gelatin and baking soda certainly are in the top four or five.

Mushroom Bolognese; a recipe from “The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook”

What else is in the top four or five?

Certainly brining or salting. You can take a top round, which is a horrible cut of meat—it’s tough, it doesn’t have much fat, it kind of has a weird, livery taste—and salt it and let it sit for an hour or two at room temperature or overnight. Then, you slow roast it, and that’ll vastly improve the texture and the flavor. Slow roasting is very, very helpful for lots of cuts of meat. It develops flavor and things break down nicely, and cooks evenly.

I was told once that if you cook with olive oil on high heat, it breaks down into free radicals, which are really bad for you, and yet that’s exactly what’s advised in many recipes. Thoughts on this quandary?

The day I start worrying about olive oil breaking down into free radicals I think I’m just gonna hang it up. [Laughs] There are a lot of other things to worry about in your food supply than free radicals from olive oil. Italians have been cooking with olive oil for a long time, and I don’t think they’ve been dying off in unusually large numbers, so I’m not going worry about that.

What I would say is that if you heat an expensive olive oil, you’re going to lose a lot of volatiles, which is where the flavor is, so you’re going to waste your money. So the only thing I wouldn’t do is use a thirty-five dollar bottle of Columela and heat it up, because you’re not even going to be able to taste it.

It seems to me the dominant message of your recipes is that taste is the most important thing. But you don’t totally discount health either. Can you talk a little bit about that balance?

Well, this is pretty much a scam, if you think about it. What’s happened is we’ve reduced cooking or food to numbers—calories, grams of fat, cholesterol. It’s been used primarily as a method of selling people stuff, whether it’s anti-cholesterol drugs or low-fat foods in the supermarket. The exception would be looking at the ingredient label of an item in the supermarket, which is helpful. But at home, what do you need numbers for? If you want healthy, you know what to make. It’s not hard. You know perfectly well exactly what to make if you want to be healthy. If you make a chocolate mousse you know what’s in it because you just cooked it. Is it going to have calories? Yeah, it’s going have calories, but don’t be an idiot, don’t eat a whole bowl of it, don’t eat it every day. I think the adults who need supervision and nutrients and calorie counting and everything else, when it’s the food they’re cooking at home—unless you have a serious health issue of some kind, you don’t need me to tell you to have salad or don’t eat too much red meat or eat grains or vegetables. I think that whole calorie-counting, cholesterol-counting phenomenon is mostly a marketing gimmick.

The thing that’s missing so much of the time is the pleasure. Cooking should be a pleasure most of the time, and eating should be a pleasure, too. Why would you want to talk about eating in the context of whether it’s healthy for you or not? Julia Child didn’t sit around counting calories. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t worry about your health, but it’s not hard to figure it out. Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” is pretty much a twelve-word summary of what to eat. That’s all you need.

Plus, the more you’re enjoying what you’re eating, the less compelled you are to just shove it down your throat.

That’s a good point and it’s very true. One reason the rich don’t get fat is because they’re eating very expensive, well prepared food at very expensive restaurants. You don’t need a large volume of well prepared food to be satisfied, because really well prepared food is very satisfying in small quantities. But badly prepared food, like fast food, just isn’t that satisfying, so you eat more of it. So the better the food is prepared, the less you need, because you feel satisfied after a few bites, not twenty.

Do you cook at home?

Yes, a lot.

What do you eat?

I’ve actually fallen in love with Yotam Ottolenghi’s stuff—Plenty, Plenty More, Jerusalem. I met him a couple years ago, and he is a really smart guy. He has really changed how I cook. The Middle East and the Mediterranean has a completely different approach to cooking than Europe. Northern Europe is about melding ingredients through heat to create complexity in a sort of uniform way, like a French sauce. The Mediterranean and the Middle East is about keeping your ingredients distinct and contrasting. So you would have sweet and salty and sour together. You might have persimmon seeds and you might have some crunchy celery and you might have lentils and some very strong cheese and caramelized onions. You have very strong ingredients that, even when the dish is finished, maintain their character. You’re not melding things together, which means by and large the recipes are a little simpler to put together and they’re more ingredient-based. Northern Europe only had thirteen spices. I think Turkey had eighty-eight. The flavors are bigger, which it gives you more variety, more tools to play with. The palette is bigger. And now that you can get the ingredients, which you couldn’t get twenty years ago, it just opens up the possibilities. So that’s where I’ve been doing a lot more of my cooking lately.

When you’re working on “America’s Test Kitchen,” are you ever not in the mood for the particular food you have to eat on the show at that time?

No. I really enjoy the food on the show, and you can tell. I mean, if I’m on my ninth tasting and I have to do fish sauce or lots of pasta or brownies—the sweet things actually are the worst—the combination of those things does get a little overwhelming. But usually we do six recipes a day and that’s fine. I don’t eat lunch and I don’t eat dinner those days, I just eat that food. So that’s fine, and I’m always looking forward to it.

How did you go about teaching your own kids to cook when they were growing up?

Well, you’re assuming I did that effectively. I mean, I was cooking all the time, and we would get them involved. There were things they wanted to cook—chocolate, marshmallows, dough of any kind—and we’d get them to help out. My second oldest daughter, Ashley, bakes pies for a living, sells them at farmer’s markets in Vermont. She is really a good cook. I would say my oldest daughter doesn’t cook much, my son doesn’t cook at all and my youngest daughter has some interest. So I wouldn’t say I was overly successful in that, but at least they grew up in a house where there was a lot of cooking going on.

I remember years ago, I made an old fashioned chocolate cake for one of my kids’ birthday parties. There were about ten kids there, and two or three didn’t know what it was. They had never had a homemade cake, ever. And they didn’t like it, because it wasn’t a box cake or Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake. They took a taste and put their fork down.

So where do you think the culture of cooking will evolve from here?

Well, food has obviously become entertainment at a very high level, and my guess is that the next generation is actually going to start cooking a lot more. And that’s what I’m particularly interested in. “Hell’s Kitchen” is great, because some percentage of the people who watch that show end up wanting to cook.

And if even a very small fraction do, that’s more people than would otherwise.

Yes. Two or three percent would be just fine.

* * *

Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Maud Newton | Longreads | June 2015 | 24 minutes (5,889 words)

BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging.

Herter is a historian and philosopher of science and genetics, and a driving intellectual and creative force behind, as the New Yorker writer Jill Lepore puts it, “the only show on television where you’ll hear the line,‘Enjoy your oophorectomy!’” Throughout production for each of the three seasons, Herter has been integral to both the science and the story. She’s responsible for the references to Sacred Geometry and Buckminster Fuller, and she also, according to her longtime friend Graeme Manson, who with John Fawcett is one of Orphan Black’s creators and showrunners, “reads all the drafts and watches all the episodes and then it runs through her incredible brain.” She offers insights intended to refine and deepen the themes and the narrative, showing how science interacts with society, and discouraging simplistic dualities — pointing out, for example, “that religion and science are constantly intermingled throughout history.” We may have a “richer understanding of the science of heredity” than the eugenicists of the early 20th century did, but the idea of reengineering ourselves, of creating  “perfect” people, is still very much with us.

Herter is so embedded in the fabric and ideas of the show that colleagues call her “Real Cosima,” to distinguish her from Cosima Niehaus, the clone character she inspired. Like the show’s characters, like so many of us in this culture that seeks to decode our genes in an effort to predict and guide our futures, Herter is interested in the meeting of science, genetics, and chance.

Cosima Herter and Orphan Black co-creator Graeme Manson

* * *

Orphan Black, which just wrapped its third season, drops the viewer in the middle of a world—roughly contemporaneous with ours—where biotech and patents are urgent flesh-and-blood questions. With its multiple clone protagonists, the series is a narrative hothouse environment for examining the nature of individuality and the relative strength of genes and environment in shaping who we become, and also the possible contingencies of our new biotech world. “Women are often, throughout history, reduced to their biology, and marginalized because of that biology,” Herter has said. How might these tendencies manifest, the show asks, if a group of women were literally engineered as an experiment? So far the answer has been alarming, smart, and funny; it’s knowing and stealthily feeling. Without being heavy-handed, Orphan Black is wise about the mysterious nature of human life itself.

In the show’s very first episode, the conwoman and former orphan of the title, Sarah Manning, watches a woman who looks exactly like her, except expensively, impeccably coiffed, walk off a subway platform in front of an oncoming train. Then Sarah does the thing her life up to now has taught her is the kind of thing she would do: she scoops up the woman’s bag and flees the station. She takes over the woman’s life, planning to impersonate her just long enough to drain her bank account.

Soon, though, Sarah learns that she’s a clone, with potentially innumerable identical sisters, who turn out to be very different from each other. Cosima Niehaus (“Clone Cosima” to Herter’s Real Cosima) is a scientist studying experimental evolutionary developmental biology. Alison Hendrix is a high-strung suburban perfectionist mom. Beth, the woman who killed herself, was a cop. And Helena is the product of a fundamentalist clone-hating cult that doesn’t seem to have given her a surname. Meeting these women, Sarah’s sense of possibility begins to expand. Maybe she’s not destined to be someone who steals things and leaves.

All of these characters and more are brought to life by the show’s mind-bogglingly versatile star Tatiana Maslany. The longer the show goes on, the more individuated the characters become, and the easier it is to forget that they are, in reality, all one person. Maslany told Lili Loofbourow of the New York Times Magazine while filming the third season of the show that she barely slept during production of the earlier seasons. “I’d have to do shifts during the day where I’d be Cosima for the first half and then Helena — or whatever, Cosima and then Sarah,” she said. “So my body was physically shifting in my sleep, and I could feel it.”

Maslany has attributed her emotional mastery of all these people, of their conflicts and desires, to Cosima Herter’s insights. “She briefed me on the insane science behind cloning and it just gave me such a key into that world. It’s emotional, it’s about humans, it’s about life.”

Tatiana Maslany, as Cosima Niehaus

* * *

When I met Herter in the lobby of my Minneapolis hotel, each of us was surprised to find the other diminutive and approachable. She didn’t particularly remind me of any of the characters on the show, not right away, but like her clone counterpart she radiated warmth, generosity, and intelligence, and also reserve. She wasn’t accustomed to being someone people want to profile. In fact, she’d only recently started watching TV. (She didn’t really grow up with it, and never developed the habit until she needed to for the show.) How she came to be involved in Orphan Black—to be indispensable from the very beginning—was, like her mastery of the history and philosophy of genetics itself, a matter of talent and intellect meeting chance.

Herter’s parents married in San Francisco, migrated east and into Canada, through Ontario, where she was born, and then kept going north, into the Northern Territories, where she grew up. Her parents were “draft-dodging hippies,” she says, “pretty committed alcoholics” who eventually divorced. Her life at home was unpredictable. Siblings — she had many, through both parents, some of whom she barely knew — were in and out. Her mom was more likely to use homeopathic remedies or crystal therapy or to consult an astrological chart than to call a doctor.

In her twenties Herter worked for a mining exploration operation, “jumping out of planes and building camps and running around in the central Arctic.” Partly because of her stepfather, a member of the Dogrib tribe, she knew about the land and the elements, and this knowledge proved useful to outsiders. Though the pay was excellent, increasingly she had qualms about the work — “I just couldn’t morally reconcile with it” — and she’d already decided she didn’t want to keep doing it, and then her brother disappeared on a camping trip on Great Slave Lake, in a terrible storm. They found his nine-year-old stepson three days later, “wandering around literally in a circle keeping himself warm.” Her brother himself was never found. Of her siblings, he’s the one she was close to, the only one she lived with her whole life, “or at least his whole life,” as a child. Everything changed with his death; she didn’t want to be “so far away from the rest of humanity.”

Moving to Vancouver, she took an administrative job with good benefits, but quickly became bored with the 9-to-5 life. She was drawn to philosophy and started downloading syllabi off the internet, working her way through the readings for classes. Eventually, frustrated by her inability to master this material on her own to her satisfaction, she decided to go back to school. Her education didn’t take a direction, though, until she went to a professor’s office to understand why she’d done well on a paper she’d been nervous about, a paper about a political philosopher “I didn’t really enjoy reading and I wasn’t sure that I understood.” After they’d discussed the paper, the professor, Dr. John Beatty, looked at her and said, “What about you? What are you interested in? Forget about the class; who are you?” She found herself fighting tears as she told him about the reading she’d been doing on her own.

“‘The first time I read Darwin and The Origin of Species,’” she said, “‘it changed my life.’” She’d been reading books from the syllabus of a philosopher who “was trying to understand Darwin in a feminist sense,” how Darwin’s ideas have played through philosophies and politics. Then she started reading Darwin himself, she told Beatty, “‘and I loved it. I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t just science theory. This guy was writing philosophy, writing the history of life, and I am really moved by it. That’s actually what I really want to do.’” She mentioned her interest in Henri Bergson, a French philosopher with “‘his own ideas about chance and contingency and the nature of creativity, in the sense of things that emerge, that seem to have no cause, by chance. Things you cannot foresee. The unpredictability of everything: history, life… I actually don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t think I belong in the philosophy department, but intellectually, I don’t know where else to go.’

“So I went off on this ramble then got really kind of emotional and then embarrassed. And as I was just about finished with this whole thing I blurted out, for the first time I looked at his office, at his bookshelves, and it was all Darwin, Darwin, Darwin, Darwin. The whole History of Correspondence, the whole this, that, 15 different copies of Origin and Descent of Man and everything. And it was at that moment, only at that moment as I was about to leave, that I realized — I mean, he’s one of the most foremost Darwin scholars in the world. And then I left his office and I literally just burst into tears. I don’t even know why. It was just such a chance thing.”

As she finished telling this story, over lunch at the hotel restaurant, I had goosebumps on my arms, and Herter’s eyes were full and glistening. For a very awkward second, I thought we both might start bawling.“I don’t usually cry when I’m sad, but when something is beautiful I do,” she said, explaining how much Darwin still means to her now, how much respect she has for his bravery in publishing ideas that were so dangerous and revolutionary in his day. By this time, Herter did remind me of Clone Cosima, and sometimes of Sarah, too. Now, months later, it’s hard for me to watch the show and not see a little of Herter in Maslany’s acting.

As it happens, John Beatty’s work is also concerned with chance, and he offered to read Bergson with Herter in independent study. He became her mentor and then her best friend, encouraging her through the Master’s program in Vancouver and toward a doctorate. Until last June she was pursuing a PhD at the University of Minnesota in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She saw her work on Orphan Black and her work in the program as complementary, but that wasn’t the vibe from the department as a whole. Weary of the pushback and the student loan debt, she left school. Now she’s devoting herself to Orphan Black and to her own writing.

#cloneclub @OrphanBlack all dressed up for post finale partay with @RealCosima #PhysicsHerHair http://t.co/anTWTObkMy

—
Graeme Manson (@GraemeManson1) June 21, 2015

* * *

In an AMA with Reddit last year, Graeme Manson called Herter the show’s “secret weapon.” That particular day he was praising her for keeping “our feminist themes so pertinent to the science that we’re exploring,” but he’s lauded her just as lavishly and far more broadly elsewhere. He’s said she was the first person he talked with when he began to conceive Orphan Black, “to wrap my head around the themes of cloning and what is cloning.”

Herter explained that she was living in his apartment — back in Vancouver — at the time. Her own place had been badly water-and-smoke damaged in a fire, but she’d stayed despite warnings from city inspectors because her cat had gone missing and because she was a student waiting tables, too broke to move anywhere else, with a Master’s thesis due. Some days later, after the cat had turned up, Manson happened upon her smoking in the backyard behind the ruined building (all the floors above her ground-level flat were burnt-out shells) and insisted she move into his place. In lieu of rent, he said, she could give it a fresh coat of paint, work she’d sometimes done for money. As promised, he was mostly out of town that summer, but when he was around he began to talk with her about Orphan Black over drinks on his front porch. They were amazed and excited to discover how much their interests were converging.

Later, when he started working on scripts for the first season, Manson asked Herter to devote a few days to teaching a class in Cloning 101 for the show’s writers. She began by offering “15 different definitions of what a clone is,” in the context of, for example, bees and ants and “Dolly the sheep.” She covered evolutionary biology, Darwin, and eugenics. She touched on identical twins, which, as she’s written elsewhere, “are essentially clones,” except that they “split from the same fertilized egg” and then “develop together in the womb.” Just as identical twins aren’t really identical, genetically engineered clones wouldn’t be “exact replicas of each other—physically or psychologically.”

She also parsed the ambiguities of the “gene” concept itself: “‘It’s an idea that we’ve created in order to understand a phenomenon. Most of the time we talk about a gene, we’re talking about a place on the DNA. But we also talk about genes as if they’re a program. It’s a set of instructions, right? So, if you think about it, those are two very, very different things. Whole sets of different kinds of questions emerge when you think about it as a program or you think about it as a thing, as a solid entity or as a set of instructions. They have completely different kinds of metaphysics involved.’”

In the abstract these concepts can sound dry, but placed in the context of Orphan Black’s clones and their lives, they’re anything but. The show is quasi-predictive in the sense that it builds on undeveloped or experimental areas of genetics, and in meetings Herter presents possible ways forward. “Here seem to be the most strategic and fruitful lines of research that people are following that aren’t crazy.” She’s less interested in the answers than in the questions themselves and encourages the writers to think that way too: “‘You won’t have to fictionalize things if you ask these kinds of questions. You’ll be fictionalizing if you try to answer them.’”

As she throws out ideas and concepts, the writers come back with questions or observations. “Imagine being in a graduate seminar of six to eight people with the most keen, interesting, interested, eager ears, eyes, heart, mind open, full of questions,” she said. This part of her job involves “sitting in a room with people like that all day.”

It’s a diverse group, one that soaks in her knowledge and her philosophical probings and filters them into the storyline not to shock — though Orphan Black does shock — but always muddying simplistic understandings of identity and sexuality in ways that feel true and alive. The third season of the show featured an army of male clones (Castor to the female clones’ Leda) and genomic plot twists galore. The lead-up to the season finale involved a hunt for “the Castor original,” the male clones’ original donor, that upends viewers’ expectations in every direction and has Herter’s fingerprints all over it. “The epigenetic implications themselves are just mind-blowing!” Clone Cosima says, in the final minutes of the finale.

Beyond her work with the writers, Herter spends time on set, working with the actors, all of whom she likes. She spoke fondly but protectively of Tatiana Maslany and Jordan Gavaris (“humble Canucky people”) and Ari Millen (“also a lovely man, very soft-spoken”). “Sometimes I want to talk about these people, but I feel like if I talk about them, because they’re famous, I’m actually divulging something personal,” she said, explaining that she sees them “in their vulnerabilities and their fears. They’re struggling with trying to understand a concept. I have to go in and go ‘Okay, tell me how you understand this. What does that mean to you?’”

And sometimes she’s needed urgently for story. Just before our second meeting, a crucial prop fell through at the last minute — suddenly a fee, way over budget, had been tacked on — and everyone was rushing to try to figure out how to adapt the story on a couple hours’ notice. Herter read scientific journals on the fly, fielded suggestions, and gave the best workaround advice she could.

Often, though, her job involves being at home in front of the computer. She reads science journals, and science, patent, and industry blogs, especially biotech industry blogs. “A really interesting way to look at what kind of science is being done is looking at where the money is moving.” For example, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen recently invested in creating an institute to look at the the human cell. “So I look at these kinds of announcements of venture capitalism and biotechnology, and then what kinds of things they’re funding: okay, such-and-such institute does this kind of research, but they also do this kind of research, and they also have their kind of octopus tentacles in these industries.”

* * *

Although Herter was consistently open with me about her life and generous with her time, her insights, and her stories, she said she doesn’t ordinarily talk about herself. I can believe it. Throughout our time together, she kept shifting the conversation to the book I’m writing about ancestry, suggesting things I should read, archives I might want to visit, conferences I could attend. Gratefully, and a little guiltily — this was not the purpose of our meeting! — I scrawled down everything she said and then gently returned her to the subject of herself.

Before she agreed to meet with me, she asked some questions over the phone about my interest in her work and in the show, and I mentioned that I originally started watching Orphan Black because of my book project. It’s a wide-ranging thing, about my own family and genealogy, in part, but more broadly a layperson’s exploration of the science and superstition of inheritance, about our efforts to understand the extent to which who we are depends on genes, or environment, or some epigenetic blend of the two, and the extent to which we ourselves determine who we become. These questions are personal — and emotional — for most of us, and as I told Herter I’ve pondered them a lot over the years because I came into being through a kind of failed eugenics project. My parents married not for love but because they thought they would have smart children together. This was my father’s idea, and over the six months they dated he persuaded my mother of its merits. In the end, as an adult, I was a terrible disappointment to him, and he blamed my mother’s genes.

Confiding these things to Herter didn’t seem likely to make any lists of journalistic best-practices tips, especially once I started writing and realized they had became inextricable from this profile of her. My own background and the particular contours of my interest in her work were a subtext of our conversations, and at times even a subject that explicitly ran through them. During our time together, I sometimes felt as though Herter were interviewing me as much as the other way around, and I had the sense she’d interact with anyone else in this same companionable way. She’s interested not just in how philosophers like Darwin think about the kinds of questions Orphan Black raises, but in the perspectives of the actors she works with, the students she’s taught, the layperson writer such as me, and, really, everyone.

As she often does in interviews, Herter repeatedly emphasized that she’s not a scientist. “I don’t have the authority of that kind of knowledge.” She’s drawn to exploring contingency in science, how “things have congealed and become what they are,” to “understanding evolution and the concept of chance that plays into it that seems so controversial.” Our universal scientific principles arose because of the questions people asked: “History matters. You have to put these ideas in their historical context, just like you have to put your own ideas in your own historical context.” And “science is political. Science has always been political,” she said, citing Richard  Lewontin, a Marxist evolutionary biologist who’s “very interesting in terms of what we can actually use genetics for and he’s also an anti-determinist. People want things to be determined. They really want X to cause Y. They really want that. I am a complete anti-determinist.” At the same time, “I don’t think we are entirely socially constructed. I think that to some degree we are, by language, by culture, by gender expectations and religion. We are. But there is also – I think there is a genetic component to everything in biology.” We just don’t understand what those components are.

Herter respects science; in some sense she is devoting her life to science. But the “‘yay, science!’ bandwagon” unnerves her. “It doesn’t question the underlying assumptions about the kinds of authority that we endow science with.”

:) http://t.co/Tb4RIATb8a

—
Cosima Herter (@RealCosima) February 14, 2015

* * *

Although she’s an atheist, Herter is especially critical of the science-religion duality that’s emerged in Western culture. “That they are somehow two different magisterial domains that can’t cross each other is just so fundamentally untrue.” Many early scientific practices emerged from religion, and even now “many, many scientists also have deep-seated beliefs, right? Some things they are driven to look for and to contemplate and investigate come out of these kinds of questions, like ‘what does it mean to be you?” She understands the issues, “especially as somebody who is not religious, who is very much an atheist. At the end of the day I will put my faith in science more than I will put my faith in god, but I will also recognize that it doesn’t have all the answers.”

Religion has, as its critics say, wrought intolerance and violence, but “we are equally and often as oppressed and exploited and done violence to by science. We forget that anything that we give explicit and uncontrollable authority to has a power to be oppressive and violent and is often used for these purposes. Science is not neutral and we endow it with authority by calling something that is science neutral because then you give it a power to be whatever anybody wants it to be. You’ve invested it with its own supernatural status.”

I agreed. “The thing that fascinates me as a complete layperson about science,” I said, “is that the moment a scientific concept turns out to be untrue, it is no longer science. So science has a built-in way of sidestepping accountability for mistakes made in its name.”

She noted the tension between science as “a set of methodologies that we practice” and science as an epistemological framework. “Epistemology is knowledge. It’s the philosophy of knowledge: how do we know what we know? How do we know that’s knowledge? When you study epistemology, you’re studying what actually constitutes knowledge, and how you justify whether it’s knowledge and not belief. And when you endow science with an epistemological authority, you’re giving it the authority of knowledge with the assumption that it’s legitimate — i.e., it’s not about belief.”

At the same time as she’s disturbed by the cult of science, though, she’s also exasperated and troubled by cartoonish depictions of scientists. “As either heroic geniuses or conspirators in an evil plan?” I asked. “Or clinically almost Asperger’s-objective, have no personality, removed from everything. Yeah,” she said. “It’s not just about depictions of scientists— it’s about tropes, the lowest common denominator tropes. If you just think about your own self, you’re pretty multifaceted and you’re pretty complicated and it’s not always easy to determine what your own motivations are for things. It’s like saying all priests are pedophiles, right? That’s just an outrageous thing to say, completely irrational. And it’s offensive to people who are scientists.” She mentioned James Watson. “He was all of these things [people say], racist, misogynistic, classist, selfish, but [the] four or five million dollars that he just made from his Nobel sale, his Nobel award, he wants to set up scholarships for this, he wants to endow this institute with that. Do you know what I mean? People are complicated.”

Orphan Black is very good at depicting these kinds of complication. Aldous Leekie, at one point a bigwig in the show’s shadowy Dyad Institute, is in some ways what his name suggests: a character straight out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In other ways, as Herter says, he is — or at least sees himself as — a kind of humanitarian.

She runs through other scientist characters on the show: Duncan, father of one of the clones and creator of them all, and Clone Cosima, and her sometime love interest, Delphine. “These are all scientists, and not one of them are motivated by the same things, right? And yet they’re all sort of motivated by similar concerns because they live in the same world. I loved the Johanssen character – his religion is steered through the science at MIT. Because again, religion and science are not separate. There are very, very, very religious people who are also brilliant scientists.”

Writing last month about a recent episode, Herter says having Clone Cosima, “ostensibly the most hard-boiled empiricist of all the Leda clones,” undergo (spoiler alert) “what may be a near-death experience” was a way of allowing the character to “step back from her belief that hard science is the only method of revealing the mysteries of life and existence” and of encouraging all of us to consider “whether there is more to our existence than mere biochemical configurations.”

Cosima and Delphine

* * *

After we parted ways, I ended up feeling as though I couldn’t profile Herter properly unless I read and mastered all of her recommendations — an impossible task. I flew home and came down with a two-week flu, and in my feverish state I binged on books from the reading list she’d given me. Of all those I read then or since, the one that fascinated and horrified me most was the acclaimed geneticist George Church’s Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, co-written with Ed Regis. Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, a professor of Health Sciences and Technology at both Harvard and MIT, and a founder of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. His Personal Genome Project makes the sequenced genomes of Esther Dyson, Steven Pinker, and many other people publicly available online and Church aims to attract a total of 100,000 participants, “a veritable MixMaster blend of humanity.” He has done as much as any other single person to shape synthetic biology as it exists now and as it could exist in the future.

To give you a sense of where he’s coming from: Regenesis begins with a prologue titled, “From Bioplastics to H. sapiens 2.0.” The book is visionary, formidable, terrifying, and sometimes, to put it kindly, facile; in it, Church advocates total diversity, even diversity not capable of existing on our planet right now. Regenesis makes Orphan Black and everything it’s reckoning with seem more than feasible — it makes the concerns of the show seem like matters of great urgency.

The problem with eugenics as it was practiced in the early 20th century, Church contends, is not that we tried to reengineer human beings but that we tried to limit that reengineering to one particular prototype — “an optimal genetic specimen” — thus reducing diversity and humans’ long-term chances for survival. In place of that model, he advocates “maximal genomic diversity,” a “crusade for increased diversity,” he calls it, “a single-minded quest” that prompts us to ask “how fast and how diverse can evolution be made to go?”

Church views the genome as a program. While acknowledging, in passing, toward the end of the book, that “we have a long way to go before a genome sequenced is a genome understood,” in his work he proceeds as though certain parts of the genome are disposable. His aspirations extend far beyond garden-variety human cloning, which would do little to further his goal of increasing diversity. He wants to create a “genuinely synthetic” living cell “from the ground up.” Synthetic genomics will be superior to what evolution has given us, he argues, because it “will be under our own conscious deliberation and control instead of being directed by the blind and opportunistic processes of natural selection.”

He devotes a great deal of space to arguing for the creation of “mirror humans” — people made of molecules that are the mirror image of ours — who would be “immune to viruses and other pathogens.” They would also be “unable to digest foods by means of normal enzymes,” but no biggie: we would simply “need to develop, cultivate, and mass-produce a whole range of mirror foodstuffs.”

Church implies that it may actually be the obligation of Homo sapiens to revive species that became extinct because of us, among them the wooly mammoth, which he is actively working to recreate in his Harvard laboratory, and the Neanderthal man. “If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees true value in human diversity,” he writes, “then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp — or by an extremely adventurous female human.”

From Season Three of Orphan Black

* * *

As Herter said in our interviews, synthetic biology is already proceeding on many fronts. I was vaguely aware of some of these developments, but Church describes them in mesmerizing fullness in the pages of Regenesis. To list just a few of his examples: We’ve engineered E. coli to produce diesel fuel. We’ve revived an extinct species (the ibex), though the baby “lived for only a few minutes before dying of a lung condition.” And we have altered the genomes of mice, mixing in human DNA, for tailored research into treatments for cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, neurobiological disorders, and much more. After reading Regenesis, out of curiosity I tried to look up all variations of these mice, all the uses to which they are being put, and I couldn’t find a comprehensive list — in part because it’s possible, if you’re a researcher, to have the mice tailor-humanized just for you. Whatever discussion exists in the scientific community about how the mice themselves might be affected by, for example, having human brain cells, seems to focus only on the ways we’ve succeeded in making the mice more like us.

I’ve never felt more like I was living in a dystopian novel than when I researched the price of humanized mice and tweeted about it and ads began to follow me around the Internet, cropping up amid solicitations for dresses and hand towels. The mice are often cheaper in bulk, if you’re in the market.

Increasingly the tools to attempt cloning or synthetic biology are so widely available that Orphan Black’s scary do-it-yourself cloning operation/religious cult, the Proletheans, begins to seem like a potential reality. “Garage biology,” was once a “jocular term of abuse,” Church says, but now resources abound. One website offers an “‘open, free synthetic biology kit’” and at the book’s publication in 2012 there were “local DIYbio communities all over the globe.”

Early in Regenesis, when it serves the arguments he’s making, Church approvingly invokes the argument that science fiction “‘has a way of pointing to the future.’” Later in the book, though, he calls Karel Capek’s seminal “R.U.R.,” in which biological machines “take over the world and wipe out the human race,” “a tiresome and overworked scenario if there ever was one.” Can it be overworked if it’s a real possibility? Even Church acknowledges that there “are no fail-safe fail-safes in biological lab work.” In all our efforts to engineer and guarantee our own futures, we are opening biology — our own and other beings’ — up to chance in ways it never has been before.

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The science of biology is, in the broad sweep of human history, still very new. As Herter points out, it emerged as a discipline only in the 1800s, the same century that gave us the word “scientist.” Our understanding of biological “inheritance” is an even more recent development.  In A Cultural History of Heredity, the scholars Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörn Rheinberger note that “until well into the nineteenth century, a medical tradition dating back to antiquity” held that the “constitution and character of individuals” depended on six “non-natural things” — “nutrition, environment, rest, exercise, bodily excretions, and psychological states” — and seven natural things — “spirits, elements, humors, and organs,” and “functions, capacities, and temperament.” Ideas about heredity were fragmented in different disciplines. Then came Charles Darwin, with his groundbreaking theory of evolution, and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, who invented eugenics, the idea of improving humans through strategic breeding. And it wasn’t too long before Gregor Mendel, with his pea plants and charts of dominant and recessive traits, was established as the father of modern genetics, and everything came to seem much more clear-cut. Even now all the money flowing into biotech, and the appearance of books like Regenesis and John Harris’s Enhancing Evolution: An Ethical Case for Making Better People, shows that our eugenical impulses are alive and well.

Genetic research is invaluable — it’s advanced our treatment of disease by leaps and bounds — but sequencing the genome was supposed to tell us everything our DNA controls, everything it dictates, and it hasn’t done that. It hasn’t even come close. While the emerging science of epigenetics, of the ways our genes change over the course of our lives and especially of the question whether and when we can pass those changes to our offspring, is inchoate and hotly disputed, we would be foolish not to acknowledge that our view of hereditary genetics is, at best, through a glass darkly. Not to mention, in the context of all the genomic tinkering we’re doing, arguably obsolete.

As Herter says, Orphan Black is “proposing certain things in terms of dystopia that are not untrue.” In every direction the show raises questions that we can’t answer — that we may never be able to answer — but that we are long overdue in pondering. Not only through the mind, through the rubric of this enterprise we call science, but through the heart.

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Maud Newton is writing a book about the science and superstition of ancestry. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Granta, Bookforum, and many other publications. She won the Narrative Prize for fiction in 2009.

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Editor: Mark Armstrong; Fact-checker: Brendan O’Connor