Aaron Freeman

Originally published in The Fix, July 24th, 2014

He was forced to make a choice. Either stay put as one half of a successful and beloved alternative rock duo and continue to blast himself with cocaine, benzos, and vodka just so he could be numb and function. Or he could sober the fuck up and leave Ween, a band he had been in since puberty. Years of active addiction and isolation had turned Aaron Freeman, aka Gene Ween, into another boy who would never grow old; he was going to die first.

Freeman chose to leave. “End it man...your money or your life,” he sings on FREEMAN, his first solo album of all original material, released on Partisan Records this week.

The decision to leave Ween, as Freeman said in a recent interview, was spurred by a progression that mirrored “the typical rock thing.” Meaning you start with the silly drugs, and then … well, you know. In the early days of the band “there was always drugs and alcohol but it graduated from my early 20s to a lot of weed and some psychedelics,” he said. “I think all those were fine but then it really started into the alcohol. As Ween was getting bigger and bigger there were less responsibilities for anything and you’re sort of a Peter Pan. You’re not accountable for anything except getting on stage.”

It fell apart in 2011 at a notorious show in Vancouver when a barely coherent Freeman was blacked out onstage in front of a huge crowd. At the end of the show his disgusted bandmates left him onstage alone.

“That was my career bottom,” he said. “I had been on a really dark bender and Vancouver was a huge show. The last thing I remember was I was onstage and the band had walked off [during a version of "Reggaejunkiejew"] and I was on my back screaming ‘Jew’ or something like that.”

The meltdown was part of a sad end of a creative, prolific, and wickedly irreverent band that had captivated everyone from Beavis & Butthead to, more recently, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon’s house band. Music fans who appreciate silliness and prodigious chops flock to Ween’s albums and shows like ants on a caramel.

Despite the love, by 2011 Ween hadn’t written any new material in years and the shows had become stale for Freeman. “We did 11 records that were amazing,” Freeman said. “But the only part of Ween that was left was these touring shows. We were playing the same songs night after night. It had turned into a showcase thing. For me, Ween had been over since the last record we did [La Cucaracha, in 2007]. It wasn’t okay for me. I started having a real crisis. Like, I know Ween is over, and all I’m doing now are these shows so I can make money … it was spiraling and spiraling and I was fucked up all the time.”

Dropping the Gene Ween moniker, Freeman recorded an album of Rod McKuen covers under his own name. He was doing whatever he could to escape the “Ween fold” and the music was good, but he was wrecked.

“It was really mellow music, it was sweet and pretty, but it’s the most drugged out record I’ve ever put out. That was a benzo record,” he laughed. “I love benzos. All benzos. I was in this beautiful studio recording in front of a five thousand dollar mic doing all this music and then I’d go back to my hotel room and eat jerk chicken and drink a bottle of vodka and throw up all over myself.”

He likens it to Martin Sheen’s warrior overdoing it at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. “That’s a heavy scene.” Freeman was out of control and he knew it. Sort of. Was he Aaron or was he Gene, the stoner rock icon? “I was having an identity crisis and I didn’t know who I was,” he said. “Everybody called me ‘Gene Ween’ and ‘dude’ and I was this Ween guy and I was always fucked up, and I could always find whatever I wanted.”

After a few more West Coast shows and a continued rampage back home he went into rehab for the third time - but not before playing two more high-paying Ween shows in Denver. “Every cent I made went into the rehab I was going to,” he said. “Insurance didn’t cover my third rehab.”

Freeman got on a plane and headed straight to Cottonwood in Arizona, where the withdrawal process began.

“I felt like Gollum for a while,” he said. “I couldn’t even look into the light. I was on a lot of benzos, which was really difficult to come off of.”

He surrendered to the disease at Cottonwood. “There was a pinnacle moment there,” he said. “When you get there they give you a three page booklet and it just wants you to describe what the fuck happened. What are you here for? What do you want? I remember for the first time in my life I was so desperate I just answered every question as honestly as I could. For someone like me that was a tough thing. I was like, ‘I’ll give you everything, I don’t care anymore, I’m not gonna try to hide anything.’”

From Cottonwood, Freeman went to Clean Adventures, a men’s halfway house that combined outdoor activities with counseling and work therapy.

“You stay in these houses with a bunch of other guys and you’re expected to go find a job during the day and be back at a certain time,” said the singer. “If you didn’t obey every single rule you got thrown out.”

He officially left Ween in May 2012. “There was no way I was going back into that world,” he said. In another major change, he moved away from his hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania. “[New Hope] was one of those persons, places, and things,” he said. “I had to get out of there. No matter how many times I would get sober or recover I had too much history there. Everybody in that town had seen me at one point or another just blasted.”

Freeman moved to Woodstock, New York, where he lives with his wife Leah, their son, and his daughter from a previous marriage. For Freeman, Woodstock is a peaceful place to raise a family and stay out of trouble. “It’s not really a party town, which is important,” he said.

Great, but what was he going to do with himself? Was he going to wear a blue smock and punch a time clock? “After I left Ween I was a fucking mess,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was resigned to the fact that I could work at Wal-Mart if I had to in order to stay sober. But [Freeman’s manager and collaborator Dave Godowsky] said from the beginning, ‘you’re gonna make a record.’”

Freeman said he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t, and he was petulant about it. But songs started to come together. “FREEMAN is where I was at last July, which was on my back porch, sober for a year and a half, sitting there with my acoustic guitar and suddenly writing songs again while I looked at chipmunks.” He maintains that he was unable to write as his disease progressed and the block remained through his earliest recovery.

The first few months were a nightmare and Freeman came face to face with one of the reasons why he used: a profound depression. “I was literally seeing black sludge coming off of things,” he recalled. “I wasn’t hallucinating but my brain was so fucked I would just go in my room and sit there and suffer and feel the dark knot in my stomach. That was always the point where I would go out and get completely trashed to alleviate it.” Eventually, Freeman learned to sit with the misery and let it pass, noting that the teachings of the Tibetan Bhuddist nun Pema Chodron helped him. He had to reach in, not out. “[Chodron’s] whole thing is to experience it, feel it, let it make you go insane, and then let it go.”

As for the 12 step school of recovery, Freeman says he believes in the power of group conscience, one of the program’s traditions, and always feels better after a meeting. However, he also “believes in the school of treating addiction with medication, absolutely. If abstaining means that you don’t sleep for a year what kind of chance will you have to keep going?”

Sleep or no sleep, joy or misery, eventually the creativity came back, and he attributes it more to biology than to spirituality. “I really believe my synapses got fried,” he said. “My pathways got fried. But I could tell in a year and a half something grew back. Some sort of stem connected to itself again. Boom, I was there.” The result was a new collection of tuneful, twisted pop songs that describe Freeman’s liberation. It could’ve stayed on the porch but Godowsky took a trip to North Carolina and brought recordings of the songs with him. “I trusted him to get musicians for the record,” Freeman said.

Godowsky returned with a drummer, bassist, and a second guitar player, and they recorded the album in nine days.

“They nailed it in a ridiculously short amount of time,” Freeman said, adding that the album had to be banged out quickly because money was tight.

“When I left Ween my income went down to like five percent of what I was making before,” he said. “We scrimped and scraped. We didn’t have any time to add any overdubs, that’s why the album sounds very bare bones, which I love.”

Songs like the celebratory “El Shaddai” narrate Freeman’s interest in Kabbalah, and although he says he’s not a Kabbalist, he read the Old Testament and the Torah when he was in rehab.The song was based on James A. Michener’s The Source, he said. “Covert Discretion,” which leads off the album, starts as a sweetly chilling acoustic ballad about the disease; at one point in the narrative he’s gratefully sharing drugs with fans in a bathroom when things suddenly turn ugly. “Get the fuck out my face,” he croons.

“Black Bush,” meanwhile, is a pastoral tune in the spirit of Donovan. That is, if Donovan inhaled Scotchgard. Very Ween-like.

Freeman said he will perform Ween songs on the upcoming tour, both the ones he’s always had the most fun doing live as well as songs that have never been performed live before.

With ex-bandmate Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween, he says he currently has “no relationship, outside mutual business approvals.” This seems bittersweet, considering the duo had been working together since 8th grade.

Freeman, who will have three years clean in December, chooses to focus on what he gets in return for his departure. “One of the benefits of recovery is you get your kids back,” he said. “The best part of the last couple of years is every night we give each other a hug and a kiss and say goodnight. When I was at my worst all I wanted was to say goodnight to my kids. That’s the shit. I have a group of friends [in Woodstock] who just know me as Aaron and they’ve never seen me fucked up.” He laughs. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

The Man For Women Only: B. John Michaels Will Be Your Sex Object

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What ifs are the purview of the charlatan

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Lacuna

1.

He named his rifle Persephone after Susanna’s favorite fruit of myth. Later, the blood and teeth he saw on the field stubble reminded him of the seeds of that fruit.

He didn’t name his knife anything because the knife was an extension of him. The knife was kept sheathed at his hip or at the small of his back. When he wore it on his chest with the handle pointing down and to the left the other men looked at him but didn’t say anything. When he wore the knife this way he was telling the heavens that he was bored to tears and needed to return to the place of silent breathing and the enemy not six feet away unknowing he was there to take what was most precious.

The knife was numbingly sharp and could cut transparent layers of wood and grass and anything else. He loved Persephone but he loved himself more. Covered in dead leaves and lying like a boxed corpse or striding from the wood as an apparition he could gather anything: lives if he cared to, but most precious of all was information. He could travel on information, and some of the most powerful men in the army were starting to notice.

Early September the heavens rewarded him. He was given orders that would take him away from the cavalry and send him out alone, on foot. Any other kind of man, he thought, would have been frightened or at the very least insulted by these orders, which isolated him from all the others and probably guaranteed Susanna’s widowhood. This was the sort of mission that would bury another kind of man.

James Pike thought these were orders of the most fragrant variety.

He squeezed his eyes shut and saw Susanna’s shoulder and neck. The smell of June sun on a snarl of hot leaves. Boys kicking dirt on him because he was fifteen and not five feet tall. What was he fighting for. To spill the reeking pearly guts of every butternut within his reach.

He named his rifle Persephone for the girl who comes up from the sky blue mouth of death every March.


2.

The man sat on the porch, legs crossed tight at the knee, arms folded tight against the chest. His eyes were closed and the corners of his thin mouth were turned down in a deep frown; Pike wasn’t sure if he was asleep, resting, or simply displeased.

It was a warm late October day but the man looked cold. Pike thought the man was Sherman but he couldn’t be sure. He had never seen a likeness of the general and he imagined Sherman as the type of leader who would be constantly surrounded by aides and always in motion. This man simply looked tired and old. His dark hair was thinning and seemed to have been cut by a dull knife. His chin and cheeks were stubbly. His blue coat was open at the throat, obscuring any stars or sign of rank that could prove to Pike that this was the Uncle Billy of legend. He was too far away and the man didn’t move.

Pike didn’t know what to do. He was exhausted to the point where he had to carefully balance upright in his boots and wobble in all directions at once so he wouldn’t collapse flat on his face. The past ten days he had spent in a canoe on the Tennessee, getting shot at by guerillas. Everything, including his cartridges, had gotten soaked at the bottom of the canoe. His stomach had stopped growling days ago. He wanted something to eat and he wanted praise. Something told him that General W.T. Sherman was not the man to give him such things.

Pike stroked his matted beard, shifted his weight slightly, and cleared his throat. “General Crook sends his compliments, sir,” he said. His voice was a croak and he couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken.

The man on the porch shifted his weight slightly, uncrossed his legs, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. When he dropped his hand to his knee his dark eyes were open and fixed angrily on Pike.

“I did not hear your approach, sir,” the man said. He stood up, slowly slapped the dust off his trousers, and glared at Pike. “I cannot place your accent, sir, or your mixed dress. Are you here to help me or run me through?”

Pike dropped his gaze to his filthy coat, which did indeed look gray from the dust and dirt. His wide belt was cinched tight against his hunger; tied now, not buckled. The knife sheath, smeared with blood, was strapped to his breast. He took a deep breath.

“Are you Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, sir, commander of the fifteenth army corps?”

The man walked down the porch steps and stood close to Pike. “I am not, sir. Tell me, how did you get past my picket lines?”

“Can you direct me to General Sherman, sir?” Pike thought the man’s face looked ancient; it had been scrubbed clean like a high-ranking officer’s face, but the creases were filled with dirt. He knew that some men called Sherman a lunatic. He also knew that in the month Sherman had lost his young son to typhoid. Maybe he had gone mad.

“Where are you from, son?”

“I was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, sir. But I moved ar --”

“The birthplace of General Grant,” the man said. “I was born in Lancaster.”

“Sir, are you General Sherman?”

“I am, but as of one hour ago, I am no longer in command of the Fifteenth Corps. Let you be the first soldier to congratulate me in person on my promotion to Commander of the Army of the Tennessee. The theater of war has become a safer place and the enemy will surrender by Christmas, by God.”

Pike pretended he didn’t understand the sarcasm. “Corporal James Pike, Fourth Ohio Cavalry, sir.” He saluted quickly, didn’t wait for a return salute, and reached into his bag for the two messages. He handed them to Sherman, who stared at him for a moment and then took the torn pieces of paper out of his hand.

Pike watched Sherman read the messages and waited to be dismissed. Or offered a place to sit and rest. Something to eat. When he realized the general was forthcoming with none of the above, he waited and studied the man’s face as he read. Pike knew what the messages said.

One was a telegraph from Grant which had been sent through by Crook. It was an order to drop all work on the railroad, cross the Tennessee River quickly, and head east toward Bridgeport. The other letter was in part a character reference from General Blair, who had written that Pike was a man deserving of the most complex and delicate missions.

“In conclusion: If you are reading this letter, General Sherman, you may regard the man standing before you as a truly gifted scout and ranger,” Sherman read aloud.
Pike bowed. Sherman cleared his throat.

“Your footfalls didn’t wake me and you avoided being detected by my picket lines. You paddled a canoe down the Tennessee River over Muscle Shoals with no ammunition and received not so much as a scratch on your person. Or at least no scratch that I can see. You’re a singular character, Pike. What can I do for you?”

“Give me something to eat, sir,” Pike said. “And then I will tell you what you can do for me.”


3.

He had been offered a horse and a change of clothes. He accepted the former and declined the latter. Two nights into the march toward Elkton, Pike was summoned to Sherman’s tent.

Pike had the gift of silent movement and obviously he knew it. Although he didn’t know why he was so blessed. Most of his young life was spent shouting above the clamor of the newspaper pressroom while his father occupied the quiet corner office upstairs. He didn’t stay in the business long enough to become deaf.

He watched Sherman write at his desk. Pike was not five feet away from the general and yet the older man did not know he was there. Pike wasn’t surprised; a few months ago he lay under a broken bridge while what seemed to be Stuart’s entire cavalry made valuable plans inches from his nose.

Now Pike breathed low and deep, mouth closed, feeling his lungs expand effortlessly. His heartbeat slowed to a whale’s pace. By watching the movements of Sherman’s hand, Pike could decipher what he was writing: The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land.

The man’s hand paused above the paper. He took a deep breath and started writing again. I ask no sympathy. On, on I must go, to meet a soldier’s fate.

“Sir.”

Sherman carefully set aside his pen. “You did it again, Pike. Have you not announced yourself to my aide?” More humor than anger this time.

“I’m not certain where your aide is,” Pike replied. “Permission to enter.”

“Granted. Have a seat. And answer me this.”

“Yes sir.”

“Your accent.”

“Sir?”

Sherman adjusted the lantern so he could see Pike’s face. For a moment both men were silent. “Permission to speak candidly, sir,” said Pike after a moment. Sherman nodded slightly.

“As I like to say sir, I don’t speak like an Ohio man because I am only from Ohio on my mother and father’s side. I always wanted to be someone different. So I trained myself to speak different. So I could keep myself company. Give me two seconds with anyone sir, and I can speak in their manner. Perfectly.” Sherman’s diary entry moved him and he considered telling him about Susanna’s accent. Then he thought better of it.

“What is your favorite accent?” Sherman asked.

“It’s not really an accent sir, but I enjoy speaking in the style of Chaucer.”

“Ah,” Sherman said. “Can you imitate all of the southern accents?”

“Rebel accents? Easily, sir.”

“I have been thinking of a mission for you, Corporal. There are many variables, but one thing is almost certain – you will fail. You will be captured and jailed, at best. You will be hanged, most likely.”

Pike’s smile was wide and avid. Sherman looked at this smile, confused for a moment, and then continued. “There are many … how do I put it? There are many ‘what ifs’”

“What ifs are the purview of the charlatan,” Pike replied.

Sherman considered this for a moment and then dropped his head back and laughed. A dry, one note ha.

“Thank you for that, Pike,” Sherman said, looking at him again. “I note that the more dangerous the mission, the more desirous you are of earning it.”

“It’s true. I want to do something bold, sir. I want to be a hero. I want to be remembered.”

“Are there heroes in this war, Pike? Will we be remembered? As the men we were?”

4.

His orders were to burn the bridge crossing the Savannah River at Augusta in order to create confusion in Johnston’s army. Pike was to wait for news of Sherman’s mobilization toward Atlanta and then he would act.

Sherman had estimated that the odds were three to one that Pike would be caught. Pike thought his commander was being too generous. The odds were much worse and for that he was grateful.

Sherman wanted Pike to take a companion and disguise himself like a refugee from East Tennessee, work his way over the mountains into North Carolina, float down the river and burn the bridge.

He had refused to take a companion and so found himself alone on a raft in ragged butternut, lying on his back in the sodden summer heat, looking at the stars. Persephone was long gone and yet this was her time to be walking the Earth, was it not? Pike had time to wonder about the things he had lost in the past three years alone. Boots, horses, rifles. Teeth. Where were they now? What of Susanna and Frederick his hound. Would they know him. If he followed his orders properly he would be unrecognizable to the very end.

When the enemy called to him from the river bank he would sit up and holler back as someone else.

Getting off on Third Eye Blind

Originally published in New York Press in April 2000. Unexpurgated so I (and you) can relive its bitter joy. What would I say about 3eb today, 13 years later? "Always/Think we'll get more time"? by Jessica Willis There is a handsome man stumbling over a dirty snowbank on the edge of Tyler St. He has pale blue eyes and dirty cowlicked hair. The Just Been Fucked look, some would say. It’s a fair assessment, but a larger measure of his handsomeness is that he is sporting what I would call Lush Hair–a dark, pungent cock’s comb that says he sleeps where he lays and doesn’t care if he comes or prays, as the song goes. He, the former Johnny Bender of Bumlake High, the dark star in a long coat, should be naked and smoking in a motel room right now, his hangover assuaged with coos and quim, but now, this weekday, he’s on the tall side of 30 and the short side of his preferred midday blood alcohol content: a beautiful loser without a ride in a town where rides are hard currency. He might very well be a derelict, a bum in the old language. He looks almost homeless. There is a liquor store, inevitably named Cappy’s, or Crappy’s, across the street. That’s where he’s going. A lonesome day for this handsome man. He finally gets over the snowdrift and the traffic is slow enough for me to observe what he does next. He doesn’t do anything. I pass by; eventually he lurches between the cars and is gone. Handsome men don’t know what they are, and no one knows what to do about them, so they wincingly endure and use the cliches at hand, to pass time and try to make some sense: they "don’t fit in"; they "walk with the mighty"; they "lie like dogs" with the tired, pretty young women who are still willing. They are neither the tough guy nor the fey boy. They give head and they cry with equal amounts of gusto. They might be good-looking, but they don’t necessarily look good. They are not the male equivalent of a beautiful girl. They act as mortal as they can. They do not feel blessed. They feel deep. What’s that Devo line–half a goon and half a god? The handsome man walks on, looking for handsome things. Walk on baby, walk on…on and on, Stephan Jenkins begs a "hottie" in one of his songs. He’s singing about one of his damaged women, but I’d like to think he is singing about himself. Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind: the unapologetic frontman in a climate where frontmen are treated with derision and arid awe, a full-time handsome man. A man handsome enough to make me crumple in front of my stereo, lyrics sheet in hand, when Blue, Third Eye Blind’s second record, is played in the apartment for the first time. You want to absorb and memorize every inch of Jenkins’ lyrics. He effortlessly plunders what was the last secure realm of the crazy, moneyed female: conversational psychobabble. And not only that, he makes this hollow crisis management rock. Really hard. He even makes it fertile and interesting. During our recent conversation(on Valentine’s Day, naturally), Jenkins described "Wounded"–unarguably the best song on Blue–as a "sexy song about sexual assault." He’s not joking or being disingenuous; "Wounded" is four minutes of the gunkiest, most freewheeling arena nosebleed rock this side of Montrose, topped with a strenuous vocal catharsis that would make Bikini Kill’s Hanna go red: "The guy who put his hands on you/Has got nothing to do with me," he reassures a violated female over a misleading strummy intro. By the end of the track, he’s hooting up and down the scales like a girl uninterrupted: "rock on baby, rock on/you say you can’t grow." Much of the hugeness of Third Eye Blind’s sound on Blue (and on its self-titled first album, the sleeper of 1997 that gave the world that heinously tuneful doot doot doot single) is provided by the not-quite-handsome men who surround Jenkins: Brad Hargreaves’ tumultuous drumming, bassist Arion Salazar’s arrangements, the driving, alpha-male landscapes of lead guitarist Kevin Cadogan. But it’s Jenkins’ limelight, all the way. Perhaps this is why Cadogan left the band right after a gig at Sundance in January. According to an anonymous source at Elektra, Cadogan’s departure came after "a unanimous decision" within the band, since destructive "creative differences" had been evident during the recording of Blue. Cadogan has since been replaced by Tony Fredianelli, Third Eye Blind’s original guitarist, who left the lineup in 1996, before the band was signed. Of the return of his once and future guitarist, Jenkins says breezily, "We’re a closed society. We hire from within." If there’s pre-divorce tension between Cadogan and his bandmates on Blue, I can’t quite hear it. I wish I could, because a touch of genuine, unintentional sonic angst would have made this perfectly damn good record into a rough jewel. For reasons I can’t quite name, the notion of trying to rock Sundance gives me the heebie-jeebies. Then again, I am not a confident, handsome man who has caressed Charlize Theron’s hair. More things about Jenkins:sometimes he ends statements in question form? Like this? In that Newspeak that seems to have been borne straight out of the halls of Choate or Pencey Prep? For example: "The girl in "Wounded"–it’s very personal?" Any elaboration would "ferret her out, and that’s not okay"? My question to him had been,"Who was she?" Because there’s a she embossed all over Third Eye Blind’s narrative; an unnamed and gloriously screwed she who often finds herself waffling, thrusting and ODing under the long shadow of Jenkins, who has more than just a knack for slipping graphic, clumsy references to sex and death into what could be just another good ’n’ forgettable breakthrough hit. She is the wan, intelligent presence who makes Jenkins into a handsome, pained man. Without her, he would be museless, or, at worst, a good-looking 6-foot-2 jock with an acid tongue. He’s got her though, and she’s got him, and Jenkins is definitely the most cleansed when the ending is an unhappy one. "When I walk out of a tragedy, like Lear," he says, "I feel good. The demons were exorcised. I’m like, ‘Drinks for everybody!’" Occasionally, Jenkins serenades this she, and it’s bedroom bard-dom at its most ugly beautiful: "I lift your head while they change the hospital sheets/I would never lie to you," he blurts to his burnt-out babe in "The Background," an excellent power ballad from the first album that cops Jimmy Page’s mincing "Over the Hills and Far Away" intro. And occasionally he’s bragging about the skills all over the FM–Blue’s "1000 Julys" is flanged and phased-out gratuitous Apocalypse rockdom about making some girl come. "She goes down on me" was the cutest, clearest line in "Semi-Charmed Life" (doot doot doot), and this worried a lot of talk show folks when special guest Third Eye Blind refused to change the line into something more like "Let’s spend some time together." One of his favorite words might be "fucking," used adjectivally, flatly and casual, as in, "Some days I feel like a giant, like a demon, and some days I’m invisible and fucking flawed, and neither one is true." His literary heroes (he graduated UC Berkeley in ’88 with a lit major) are Kerouac, Sam Shepard, Wordsworth, Tennessee Williams and "their sons," Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. "Guy writers," he says with a chuckle. He refers to Shakespeare as a "guy." His Valentine’s Day plans included rehearsal and a radio interview thing. No date? "No date," he replied, like this is a foolish question. I wanted to ask, "No Charlize?" But I don’t know how to pronounce her name. He is happy to talk about the trustfund cutie on Prozac who inspired the shouty "Losing a Whole Year," the first track on the debut album, which begins with an alt-rock sledgehammer riff and the line, "I remember you and me used to spend/The whole goddamned day in bed," and disintegrates into a "routine deceit" by the end of the song. "She’d say she was trying to be down. I think she’s a painter now. She sounded like money," he adds, quoting his own lyric. "It was funny and fragile, her desire for grit." Next. We return to "Wounded." It has been my favorite song for what seems like forever, and Jenkins likes it too. A manifesto for the bloodied, damaged and unbowed, which becomes evident when he eagerly sings a stanza for me, a cappella, in a reedy, breathless voice. Anybody could go around singing this. In the Third Eye Blind merchandise catalog, included in the Blue CD case, there are "Wounded" baseball caps for sale. "Boom, I’m out there." He’s talking about visiting the "Wounded" girl, who apparently went to NYU. He seems to be warming to the idea of discussing the story. "I visit her one semester, and she’s dressed all sexy. Suede miniskirt. Big butt, big tits, big legs, long strides." Then the bad thing happened to her. "The next time I see her, she’s got her hair in a bun, loose clothes, and she’s protected and angry." But time happened, the bruises she feels will heal, to paraphrase the song, and eventually she shows skin again, and goes back to sexiness and her long strides. "That’s where I get the line ‘you walkin’ down shakin’ that ass again, and then you walk on baby, walk on,’" he says. I would say this is a happy ending. It is during this moment in the song that the music and the words hit a triumphant climax, spurred by Jenkins’ perfectly timed "Ow!" Chiming, sustained power chord to fade. Don’t tell me you can’t get your hands in the air. David Lee Plath. Sylvia Lee Roth. I can’t think of a more chic, more durable morph: the star who has a few trials by fire in his back pocket, the in-jokey nut who has the balls to thank Klonipin by brand name on his first record, crossed with a man who likes a big blast of anything with a summertime hottie walking on and on like a cherry on top of it all.

So Cool

Originally published in the New York Press, July 31st, 2001

by Jessica Willis
The summer of ’87, scored in 10 seconds of guitar tablature: a couple of deafening
power chords, arcing into an harmonic shimmy, and landsliding down again. A barely there pause and then, riding on a torchy hi-hat beat and a few more implosive chords, hair metal was spurred to its apex.

"In the still of the night I hear the wolf howl, honay!" Let the loitering outside
the L’il Peach looking for someone to buy us a case of Miller Genny games
begin, motherfuckers.

Whitesnake’s "Still of the Night" was well over six minutes long and pretentious
enough to whiff of Zeppelin, but lead vocalist David Coverdale was more mercenary
than any spreadsheet Page and Plant’s people could ever hope to scribble
up. After firing guitarist John Sykes, the tasty young god responsible for laying
down that unbelievably hollow and huge sound on the album, Coverdale snatched
up a poseur metal lineup that aimed to satisfy both the chinless geek boy and
the booby teen queen: bassist Rudy Sarzo from Quiet Riot, drummer Tommy Aldridge
from Thin Lizzy and guitarists Vivian Campbell (Dio) and the hideously pretty
Adrian Vandenberg, who looked like an Aryan with a Farrah ’do. It was all
cheekbones and gorgeous hair and instrumental breaks and it was the shit, man,
we ate it up like good blotter.

Not that anything else was going on that summer, except for the Crüe show at the Centrum,and Whitesnake was opening, it was gonna rule. But until then, it was too hot
to do anything, so we would stay inside and watch Whitesnake on MTV. Of course
it was the "Still of the Night" video, played in ceaseless rotation,
that completely numbed, titillated and belittled us. There was Tawny Kitaen,
the sixth Whitesnake, Coverdale’s bitch, video co-poseur, hollow and blowzy
and bored and beautiful like Sykes’ power chords; the girl none of us could
ever be or have, condemned to have auburn tendrils of her profuse hair stuck
in her lipgloss for eternity, always two steps away in her stiletto snakeskin
heels.

Coverdale made sure there was something for all of us to be wistful about that summer. I remember Fat Gino, sweating on his vinyl couch one listless afternoon, pulling absently at his pathetic thatch of straightened, coarse, dyed black hair, and staring at the spotlit, sunkissed image of Adrian Vandenberg on the screen. Fat Gino had tears in his eyes. Tears of longing and respect. "This is so cool,
man," he whispered. "This is so fuckin’ cool."

Border Crossing: The Juvenile Resource Center and Yearbook Photography

Jessica Willis
April 2012

Introduction
In the three years since the founding of the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC), the Pittsfield Public School district’s new alternative school, the yearbook photographers from the district’s two high schools have never visited the JRC to take pictures of the students. The objective of this intervention was to form a partnership with the high schools and have the yearbook staff visit the JRC and take pictures of the students.
At the same time, the researcher (who is a teacher at the JRC) sought to discover, through interviews and surveys with students, teachers, and administrators, what past and present barriers have prevented the JRC students from being included in their yearbooks. On a deeper level, the study sought to help students become connected to their school, classmates, and community through inclusion in their yearbook.
Interview data suggested that students who spend all or part of the day away from the campuses of their sending schools are unlikely to be represented (either through formal portraiture or informal photos) in their yearbook, and this absence may have negative repercussions for the student. Research suggests that yearbook and school photos provide a connection between the student, the school and community and “[w]ithout a school portrait, a modern childhood, at least as an aspiration, is in a sense incomplete” (Burke & Ribeiro de Castro, 2007, p. 215). At the same time, unflattering or insensitive school photography may also perpetuate stigma toward students with special needs and “[underscore] their status as less than desirable” (see Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011, p. 50).
The JRC is the campus for 52 high school students and 10 middle school students with moderate to severe behavioral issues from the Pittsfield Public School district. Students attend classes at the JRC for all or part of the school day; part-time students at the JRC return to their sending schools for other classes or go to work and/or volunteer commitments in the community.
The JRC is run by the Berkshire County Sheriff’s Department and the school district and is located in the county’s former House of Correction, a 140-year-old building that still retains much of its visual identity as a jail. The original bars are still on the windows, metal doors still close and lock with a heavy thud, and razor wire remains coiled atop the chain link fence surrounding the schoolyard.
There are fifteen 9th, 10th, and 11th graders currently enrolled in the researcher’s classroom at the JRC. Twelve of those students have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs); eight have a primary disability listed as Emotional; four have Multiple Disabilities.

Method of Intervention and Inquiry
The researcher interviewed three school staff members: one high school principal, one teacher/yearbook adviser, and one veteran special education teacher. Eight students were interviewed: five were from the researcher’s classroom and three were from the dropout prevention program for seniors. All students were interviewed in person at the JRC. The teacher/yearbook adviser was interviewed in person in her classroom; the principal and special education teacher responded to emailed surveys. The special education teacher and the teacher/yearbook adviser were from one sending school and the principal was from the other. All in-person interviews were audio taped and transcribed, and all participants were given pseudonyms to protect their identities. Students were chosen based on their availability and their willingness to be interviewed; every student invited to participate agreed to be interviewed.
The researcher chose to query staff members based on her prior relationship with them: Did she know them? Did she have a prior relationship with them? Did she like them?
During this part of the process the researcher recognized her bias about forming partnerships with her co-workers and realized that she may be missing out on fruitful collaboration experiences because she was hesitant to work with people whom she did not know well (see Canter et al, 2011).
Survey questions were as follows: “What, in your opinion, are the past and present barriers which have prevented the JRC’s inclusion in your high school’s yearbook?” and “Is there a way that the JRC’s programs could be more visible in a positive way in your school?” The last question, aimed at the yearbook advisers, sought to introduce the intervention objective: “Is it possible to schedule a time for you to visit and photograph students at the JRC?” In-person interview questions generated more conversationally but they were based on the survey questions.

Findings: “Off –Site, Out of Mind”
Interview data showed that the staff and most of the students agreed that the JRC should be included in the sending schools’ yearbooks, but staff and students identified different barriers to inclusion. The interviews also generated data about how the students felt they were viewed by others, how students and staff viewed the JRC, and how photography could help – or hurt – the facility’s identity as an alternative school and a former jail.
In addition to the barriers of separation from the sending schools’ campuses, social stigma, and lack of knowledge about the JRC by the school population at large, which were identified by the researcher’s students, three seniors in the dropout prevention program noted that the relatively transient nature of the JRC’s population made it difficult, or even undesirable, to be photographed for their sending schools’ yearbooks. Students enter and exit the programs at the JRC throughout the school year and this emerging theme of transience suggested that some JRC students may not wish to be remembered as being a part of the school. This transient theme was exclusive to the high school senior participants.
“This is my first year in the school [district] so I don’t have many memories,” said Violet, 18. Like the other two 18-year-old seniors interviewed for the study, she hadn’t gotten her senior portrait taken.
When asked if he was disappointed about not having his portrait or any other picture in his yearbook, Virgil shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s just a picture. In a stupid yearbook.” Earlier, he mentioned that he had just moved to Pittsfield from out of state. Despite their indifference to their presence in the yearbook, the seniors interviewed said they wouldn’t mind being associated with the JRC in candid photographs. “I would do it,” said Natalie.
The researcher had more time and access to the students in her own program, allowing for more in-depth interviews. The researcher’s students identified barriers that were different from those identified by the seniors. Carl, a 16-year-old 9th grader who was enrolled in the researcher’s full-time program, said that one barrier to inclusion in the yearbook was the JRC’s relative invisibility to the school population at large: “Most of the regular students haven’t even heard of programs like this,” he said.
At the start of the interview, Carl expressed his hesitation about being photographed for a product that didn’t matter much to him. “The yearbook is just a means … to reflect on what happened over the year and who your peers are,” he said. “It’s not a big thing to me but I’m … not much of a people person.” He suggested that the yearbook was for students who were “more attached to what the school does.”
Although Carl suggested that he wasn’t “attached” to his school, he became intrigued with the idea of having a photographer from both high schools visit and take pictures for the yearbook, noting that the JRC’s separateness (both physically and philosophically) had kept it out of the camera lens. Inclusion in the yearbook, Carl said, would be a way to “get our program out to the rest of the school,” and he “would actually find that interesting, seeing as how we’re a different program from what it normally would be. I haven’t heard of anybody actually taking pictures of a program like this.”
Carl also said that he had negative experiences with being photographed for school. During the interview, he pulled his school ID out of his pocket and showed his picture to the interviewer. “The photographer was telling me to do this special pose, like sit up straight,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t know why every single picture taken of me looks mean. He wanted me to sit up and look proper.” In the photograph, Carl is slumped over and scowling. When asked if the photo was a fair representation of him, he said, “half the time, yes.”
This exchange about Carl’s annoyance about being asked to do a “special pose” was reminiscent of the themes in “School Picture Day and Self-Concept” (Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011), where the authors’ son, normally a child with a “wide smile and twinkling eyes” was not encouraged to smile in his school photograph; instead, he started vacantly into the lens “with an expression that screams DISABILITY.” The authors also noted that these bad photographs become “permanent records of the student and class identities,” (2011, p. 50), thereby furthering the permanently negative views of students with disabilities. Studying his glum expression on his school ID, Carl said:
I’ve actually been referred to as like a ‘special ed person’ and that actually offended me. I’m not really special ed. I’m perfectly capable, it’s just harder for me in certain situations. Like with … a classroom full of people, I’m not too comfortable with that. The school system is just attempting to put labels on us. It’s just not fair.
Other students who took part in the study echoed Carl’s desire to be photographed if it would be a positive form of public relations for the JRC. “I wouldn’t care [about being photographed],” said Samantha, a 17-year-old junior and part-time JRC student. “I would just sit here and smile if someone were taking a picture of me.”
Samantha said she liked being a student at the JRC but she was uncomfortable with being in a former jail. “[The bars on the windows] don’t make me feel comfortable here,” she said. “It just reminds me we’re in a jail and we can’t get out.” Carl also mentioned that being “wanded” by sheriff’s deputies and having to pass through a metal detector hen he entered the building made him “feel like [he] was being treated like a criminal.”
Another student, 15-year-old Kevin, felt that yearbook photography wouldn’t help the JRC’s identity. “Pictures aren’t going to change anything,” he said. Then he added, “the bars on the windows ain’t cool. Don’t let them take pictures of the bars.” This last comment suggested that the building (and its students) were vulnerable to being photographed in an unflattering way if they (outsiders unfamiliar with the JRC) were insensitive to how the JRC students wanted to be seen.
In contrast to the students, the high school principal felt that the JRC’s primary barriers to inclusion in the yearbook were related to access, namely, a “lack of communication with the JRC regarding picture day and a lack of access to JRC students.” In addition, the principal reported that “if [JRC students] do not participate in extracurriculars at [the high school], it is highly unlikely they will be photographed.”
Anne, the teacher/yearbook adviser (who also acts as the main photographer), echoed the principal’s statement that a lack of access and non-participation in extracurricular activities contributed to the JRC’s absence from the yearbook. Anne has been the high school’s yearbook adviser for the past 22 years, and in that span of time, more and more off-campus programs have been created. As more and more school programs are located in different parts of the city, it has become a “challenge” to find all of the 210 seniors in the graduating class and managing the yearbook requires “a little bit of detective [work].”
Even the on-campus students who were enrolled in vocational study and didn’t have time to take part in extracurricular activities often were excluded from the yearbook, according to Anne. “They spend three periods a day in their shop,” she said. “They’re not even passing by at bell time. They’re not being seen.” The JRC’s invisibility to on-campus life, compounded by its geographical separation (the JRC and Anne’s school are 2.5 miles apart), made it even more unlikely that the JRC or its students would be included in the yearbook (1).
“I know [the JRC] exists but I don’t know a great deal about it,” she said.
When the researcher mentioned that her students “felt like they have been forgotten,” Anne was candid.
“And they have!” She exclaimed. “To be honest we kind of … yeah, that’s very true. It’s very clear like every single day, whether I can keep up with it or not, what events are going on here. You know and that keeps us busy.”
Anne also mentioned that a lack of time to go off-campus and photograph other programs was a barrier. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t go out to the other places where the students are. I don’t have the time, I’m a teacher,” she said. Anne did try to visit the JRC on one occasion to take photographs, but she had to cancel her visit because she could not get a substitute teacher.

Discussion: The Border Crosser
In “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild” (2007) authors Burke and de Castro make the point that school photography is a “ubiquitous marker of schooling,” and its familiarity makes it “easily overlooked,” thereby hiding its importance (2007, p. 214).
The observations of Carl and Kevin indicated that the two youngsters understood the importance of their photographed presence in their school’s yearbook; Kevin in particular, with his plea to not let them take pictures of the bars, suggested an understanding of the risks involved: Risk to his identity, his classmates’ identity, his school building’s identity, and how he will be seen in perpetuity.
Carl’s comment that photographing him and his classmates would be “a ... way of getting it out there” suggests that the JRC students want recognized and connected to other schools and to the community. At the same time, the students feel conflicted about the JRC’s identity as a former jail. Despite this conflict – or perhaps because of it -- the students are willing to partner with the school and try to “get it out there.” School photography is emblematic of that connection between school, home, self, and the community:
It seems that the school photograph and in particular the embodiment of school in the annual portrait that finds its place in the home is neither public nor private but straddles the two domains acting as a border crosser encouraging emotional investment in the notion of school. Crucial here is the inexorable order, regularity and persistence of form and style generating assurance and belief and indeed hope in the effects of education on generations of children (Burke & de Castro, 2007, p. 216).

Conclusion
The JRC’s absence from the high school yearbooks is seen by the district staff as a fault of geographics, lack of access to students, and time constraints; the JRC students see it as the fault of continued stigmatization. Although these views are different, everyone interviewed for this project agreed that the JRC should be a presence in the yearbooks of the city’s two high schools.
Taking the next step – a visit from the yearbook staff for candid and group pictures – has yet to happen. This project, like many partnerships, has no clear end in sight. Anne’s busy schedule has prevented her from visiting the JRC and taking pictures, but she recently made this remark, via email, to the researcher: “Why don’t you take your own photographs and send them to me. Just about any [electronic] format will work. There’s still time.”
The suggestion that we (the JRC population) take responsibility for our own images is a new and welcome development in this study and will make it much easier for the JRC to become part of the yearbook – on the JRC students’ own terms. However, presence in the yearbook is only the beginning of the process of helping the students forge a positive connection to the JRC and their community.

References and Notes
Burke, C. & de Castro, H. (2007). The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of
Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild. History of Education, 36 (2), 213-226.
Canter, et al. (2011). School librarians: The forgotten partners. Teaching Exceptional
Children 43 (5), 14-20.
Pfeiffer, M.A., & Pfeiffer, K.T. (2011). School Picture Day and Self-Concept. Teaching
Exceptional Children 43 (3), 50-54.
All in-person interviews took place on February 29th, 2012 and March 6th, 2012.


(1) At this point in the conversation, I asked Anne if she thought that the increasing popularity of social media Web sites (like Facebook) has decreased the yearbook’s significance among modern high schoolers. Are students more apathetic about the yearbook now? “A little bit. I think so,” Anne replied. “And I think it’s because we have so much more access to images now. I mean if you were in a yearbook years ago … that’s what you got. It’s kind of an old fashioned thing in a way. I mean, kids want them, but as far as the excitement of it …” The possible connection between the increased use of social media and the decrease in the popularity of the yearbook warrants further study.

There was perfection in the severance of whatever we called union

This was the time where dew beaded on her forearm hairs and reminded her of cobwebs or silver mail. Waves of heat were visibly coming off her body, distorting the grass and trees. She thought of a start corral at a winter race; the bodies packed together made a similar blur of heat throbbing just above their heads. A thermopolis. Raza shivered. That was years ago, when just the sight of great clumps of runners could change the weather or at least her mood.
She spit her remaining saliva into the dirt to show it didn’t matter that she was under siege. They were down to eating rats but they threw the last of the meat over the castle walls to show their attackers that it didn’t matter. Thoughts were doing that pearls on the parquet thing again. She had run, and then walked, and then limped, and then crouched, coughing and sighing, only to stand up – head rush – to begin running again. There was severance in the perfection of whatever we called union with whatever we called God, she thought, then, no, that isn’t right, you’ve missed it again.
The perfection comes from the union and the separateness together, she thought, slowing to a shuffle. The perfection comes from being with God and then being cut off. In that order precisely. The not happy ending and being okay with it. That’s what made Tereza a saint, she figured: Oneness, or whatever, and then her failure, her loss, the dark space, the white arm without dew reaching into darkness and there was nothing there except her reaching.
The peace comes from the knowing that the bow no longer sings and the bell is stuffed with paper and feathers, too full to chime. She wished she could read and write in Latin or Greek, preferably both. She wished she was fast like RoboSnatch here, passing her on the left. R.S. was squeezed into a two piece black spandex thing, no hips, almost no breasts, built like a guy, running like a horse with a bit in her mouth, chin tucked down and eyes up.
Kelsie had fallen behind weeks ago. There was no doubt Raza ran without pity, even if other hopefuls like R.S. made her look somewhat gauche. The pity in fact leeched out of her all through the beginning of the run and she was left adamantine, sunburnt over her usual tawny sallowness. Kelsie however was greenish white and then she got that mottled color tourists got before they ignite in a second and third degree burn. And then eventually she had to stop.
Just leave me here, she told Raza. I can’t go any more. Just leave me in the shade.
There is no shade, she replied.
Kelsie put her palm up to shield the sun from her eyes and she looked at her friend.
My journey ends here, she said. Leave me here, I’m gonna watch the birds. I want them to be the last thing I see. I’ve dreamed of this moment my whole life.
Raza was startled. Kelsie had never spoken like that before and Raza honestly didn’t think she was capable of any … she didn’t know what. Self poetry, maybe. She felt guilty for thinking Kelsie, probably her final friend, was dumb.
The sun was getting lower and the mountain on the other side of the strait had turned pink. It was not a breathtaking view but it was something else. She didn’t give a shit about the view or any view but she wanted some clean water. Her father told her that dreams were held in the mouth and honey vinegar and hot water at the bedside and sipped first thing in the morning would wash the hidden dreams into your mind and you’d be able to speak them. She would drink that in her white bedroom in Miami. Miami. The word alone conjured another life, nights and days of doing her toenails inches away from the new white berber, aqua and lilac roofs, hair down to her ass, writing her name in steam, the sweet and alluring smell of dry ice, cigarette smoke, the feeling behind her knees after a snort of dope, music so loud it decayed and became something else. The black guys in matching cheap black sweatsuits and picked-out floaty hair standing by their cars on Old Ocean Drive at dawn, feet wide apart, hatches up, vibrating. They always seemed to be waiting or watching. She thought they liked having people watch them listen to music that had been blasted into something else.
Raza hadn’t seen her reflection in a long time and she didn’t care to.
Now I am further ahead/ than either of us dreamed/anyone would be. What Kelsie said half delirious lying on the grass reminded her of a poem by some lady about a doomed climbing team. “I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back … we are moving almost effortlessly in our love” And: “We will not live to settle for less”
Now here she was on a road with no name, passing and being passed by other – and she had no other word for the living except -- hopefuls. Or the road once had a name but it had been forgotten, blissfully forgotten.
She would live to settle for less. She was in the process of settling for less and less right now and it was bringing her to perfection.
In fact it was pink to begin with because of the fucking feldspar in the granite. Why why why. She couldn’t help her friend.

fragment, c. 2011

I chose the Housatonic because I am a river lover, and I’ve been a champion of the Housatonic ever since I splashed my kayak under a railroad trestle years ago in Great Barrington on a listless July afternoon and took her south, way south, to the Connecticut border. The trip was enchanting – I saw bank swallows, pale carp, heron, and a loping water road through Berkshire County previously unknown to me. At the same time, the trip was squalid; my guidebook warned that the muddy river bottom and much of the wildlife were still afflicted by PCBs, the carcinogenic compound that is the legacy of Pittsfield’s General Electric plant. In many places, the riverbanks were littered with trash – a reminder that our waterways are often neglected and used as dumping grounds for our refuse.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.

My Life in Furs: Hate Me If It Makes You Feel Good

I've been looking for this nasty nugget for a good long time. Here it is--my errant farewell to NYC.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000

by Jessica Willis

She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.

We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.

I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.

"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."

Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.

His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.

"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.

"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."

This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."

The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.

"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.

Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.

Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."

She thinks about this for a moment.

"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."

Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.

And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.

There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.

"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.

She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.

She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.

Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.

And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.

Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.

A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.

And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?

Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.

Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.

I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"

Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.

Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.

I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.

"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.

"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."

Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?

Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.

Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.

"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.

The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.

Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.

"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.

Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.

It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.

The steel-mirror of her smile

13 October 1904. And so we ride. In July we purchased the vehicle of passion – a Pope-Hartford touring car, and whenever I am not writing or gardening or on the terrace star- gazing I am bundled in the car, with dogs, Teddy, HJ, and dear Charles Cook as charioteer. Yesterday we toured Lee and Becket, and the voyage reminded me that one has to glimpse only a sliver of a scene to know it complete.
A vision I won’t soon forget– We turned off Main Street in Becket village & began to climb a high street; where I saw sheds built from rough boards clinging to the stark mountainside. An inhabitant of one such place stood motionless in a black doorway, her face gnarled like the granite flank on which she lived. My heart pounded at the scene–HJ beside me saw it too but I don’t believe he had the same reaction. We motored on; the shadows bruised and grew long. The burnished Lenox autumn around Laurel Lake suddenly was very far away.
Some time ago Rev. Lynch in Lenox told me about a woman who became seriously ill in such a shack on Bear Mountain. She was from one of the drunken mountain outlaw families who live
on the fringes of the Berkshire hilltowns. When he arrived to administer last rites, he found her already dead, flung on a bare mattress on the floor, her skirts bunched up to reveal one glistening leg, swollen with rot. She lay there like a dead dog in a ditch, her family in the shadows, half-drunk and inchoate with animal grief. The Rev said the sight of the living faces too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death. There was no coffin. Someone had dug a hole for her body, and they carried her out into the bitter cold on the mattress. These glimpses of squalid misery are but a fragment; I see the entirety with something other than my weary old eyes. Perhaps my possession of this other sight is what compels Teddy to call my writing a form of witchcraft. My dear old man doesn’t see me, and for that matter I no longer see him ...
Newborns screaming in a cold shack, slippery with blood, brown bread and a dull knife on a greasy table, smoke and fire spluttering in a cold hearth– they all flash between the trees, in the steep periphery, on every motor-flight. I cannot evade these images, they’re in my chest, crying to come out, needing to be told.

All Soul’s Day, 1904. The Mount. Will be closing up soon for the season and then on to warmer climes. Finishing the final edits to House of Mirth, revising the ending. Charming letter from Walter arrived today, asking if House’s interior decoration is being attended to...and praying that none of its chimneys smoke. Seated at my desk in the library now, I have to smile.
In the end, Lily was right. Freedom is a draught meant to be drained to its lees, and success is not a country with a pass-code known only by those who see no difference between money and poverty. Those who see no difference are fools. There is a difference.
In the end, Lily is no longer a case to be clinically studied by Selden; nor is she a butterfly writhing on the end of a pin, praying for suffocation between two dusty panes of glass. Her face, once mobile, is cold and impassive in death. I agonized over this final scene and slashed at it last week; this morning some sort of grace blew off the lake and into my chilly bedroom. It is late fall here but I gave Selden a spring morning and a smarting chill light to look one last time at her now expressionless face. Lily’s actual death and the close of the book were easier to write than her living death, earlier in the story. In the Baroque phase of Lily’s life, she poses, sensationally, as “Mrs. Lloyd,” the Sir Joshua Reynolds painting, as part of a tableau vivant amusement. I situated the scene at a party hosted by the freshly minted Wellington Brys. In her silken, almost sheer gown, it seemed as though she wore nothing underneath, and her onlookers – the petrol of the great machine – were at once uplifted and disgusted by her display. Humiliations to follow. Birth, marriage, death – the polite woman’s lot ... Lily transcends all three. Scribner’s will be serializing House of Mirth in its issues starting January. The novel will publish in October 05. May none of its chimneys smoke, indeed.

le 3 Mars 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris. T & I and the dogs and the servants are settled in to the new apt. I can breathe freely, a home in Paris at last; even Teddy thinks I’m in fine form again. And yet my hand shakes as I write this. Not certain what this feeling is. But I am not naive; I know its connected to something, or someone, very new. At Rosa’s salon last week I met an American journalist named Morton Fullerton; I believe he’s a Parisian correspondent for the Times. My mind is wandering at these inanities even as I write. His eyes are a mocking icy blue, framed by dark lashes and gleaming black hair. He is almost my height; compact, coiled. Physically at ease with himself, stunning to see in a male. Lithe, almost an effeminate air I find immensely attractive, what with the transparency and devotedness of most of my men friends...Henry, Walter, etc. I know M can be of help for me for French serialization of The House of Mirth; trying to reserve some time so we can speak privately about the matter. Want him to have tea with H & me. There’s something very mysterious about Fullerton, something hidden behind the magnetic emptiness of those eyes. Very knowledgeable about Franco-American relations, George Meredith (M is a fan and a friend, evidently), etc. Easy to talk to – when one can find him.

6 March 1907. 58 Rue de Varenne. Yes, there is something mysterious about dear Monsieur Fullerton. He doesn’t respond to my notes or request for help in placement of House of Mirth. Sally tells me he has family in eastern Massachusetts and some sort of business there this summer. I’ll send him a note asking if he would like to visit The Mount in the fall.

7 March 1907. M replied and said he most certainly will visit; Mon cher Henry however tells me he’ll make an excuse at the last minute and not come. I refuse to believe it and already look fwd to October in Lenox.

28 October 1907. The Mount. Whatever sadness was upon me, mocking me...I have succeeded in waving away its black wings. M was here last Monday and Tuesday–already a week ago. It was a brief visit, and I am just beginning to feel its reverberations now.
On Tuesday I took M and Eliot on a motor-flight, and despite the chill and the early snow I was warm inside, looking at M’s glossy head in the front seat, next to Cook. We stopped so Cook could put chains on the wheels; M and I sat in the wet leaves (did I get cold? I can’t remember). I noticed a wych-hazel in bloom nearby. To me, the shrub is the sign of the late-bloomer... an old woman’s blossom. At 45 years of age (although the same probably could be said of me at 18), I am a late-bloomer. We dropped M off in Westfield so he could get on to his family in Brockton; E and I continued on; I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the trip. The air was dazzlingly clear; I drank it down gratefully...a white note on my tongue.
I received a thank-you note from M today, and folded inside the paper was a sprig of wych-hazel. I read the kind letter in my boudoir and held the tough little brown and yellow sprig in my fingers, and tears of emotion welled up in my eyes and pressed against my chest. Forty-five years of lonely interior life and only now am I feeling this ache which must be love, I can deduce as much for I am falling; this is the plunge I have, until this moment, only read about.
Without M here now I only wish to return to Paris.

Le 22 mai 1908. 58 Rue de Varenne. After the events of this spring, it seems errant and incorrect, somehow, to be leaving for Lenox tomorrow. After Teddy, in misery, left Paris for a spa in Arkansas in March, I have taken many liberties with M. Or as many as possible what with my schedule. Have been snatching time to meet with him whenever I can. Lately he has been teasing me about my lack of experience in matters of love; his taunts are almost not playful and they make my cheeks burn with shame. It is true–I am inexperienced. Lately my lack has been v. much in the foreground. I am not pretty enough, not young enough, not many things enough for M. I have been too sad, for too long, & something in my nature – some lack, I suppose– has left me starving for what other women seem at least once in their life to know.
And yet those bitter feelings are washed away by other afternoons. The other day we sat in le jardin de Lux and took in the warmth; in my feverish ear he whispered that I was his love, his darling, and I stared at the other lovers walking carefully side by side and I wondered if they knew what I knew...that my bottomless appetite for this man has drained the world of its blood. I can’t bear the thought of a summer and fall in Lenox. I will miss the constant bleus...our word for the little notes that fly between us several times a day. Meet me at the Louvre, le Bois du Boulogne, les Tuileries. Jusqu’a le moment prochain...I love it, you know I do...with these fragments of scribbled phrase on my breakfast tray an entire scene unfolds in my mind as I hurtle toward our next meeting.

1 October 1908. Lenox. Nothing. No letters, no bleus, nothing. Curt replies through the spring and early summer have dwindled and no longer arrive. I wrote M today asking for my letters back, for what can remain? He has forgotten me, or has forgotten what was between us. I cannot know what is worse. Anything on earth wd be better ... than to sit here and wonder: What was I to him, then?
I am reminded of George Meredith’s Modern Love, a favourite of M’s...written in 1862, after Meredith’s marriage crumbled under his wife’s infidelity. Written the year I was born. I find myself returning to the verses again and again: Yea filthiness of body is most vile,/but faithlessness of heart I do hold worse./The former, it were not so great a curse/To read on the steel-mirror of her smile.
Also I am reminded of the poem’s original subtitle —This is not meat for little people or for fools. Aah, I am still too young and tender, somewhere, to be hurt this way And too old to play these girlish games that end in heartache. The silence and too-obvious faithlessness of his heart is crushing me. It’s still suffocatingly hot here and I cannot bear to be in my once beloved Lenox paradise a moment longer.

5 June 1909, Charing Cross Hotel, London. Sensing last night was a coda or terminus of sorts. I thought as much even as I was crying into M’s open mouth, as we lay in the sooty bed, bathed in lurid red light, palm to palm, breast to breast. He left some time ago and sent roses just now. Outside the window the train thrumming within and without as we made love, and the rhythm jolted me into a meter I must try to master—

14 July 1911, The Mount. Yesterday’s horrors tell me I have no choice but to sell the house. Teddy initially agreed, but is now vehemently opposed. He returned from a fishing trip yesterday and immediately became abusive, much to H’s horror. After tearing through the gallery, and up the stairs to my boudoir (I could hear him clattering below) he told me that I must save myself and leave him. But he still won’t agree to sell this boat anchor of a house and then begs me not to turn my back on him. Oh, if I were free—free—free! Isn’t it awful to have a chain snaffled around one’s neck all the time, without knowing it? And again, a miserable heat wave. H left today, mortified by the scene.

26 Sept 1911, Rue de Varenne. When I landed a few days ago I received a cable that Teddy had sold The Mount. All this, after I made him promise to do no such thing until I cabled him from Paris and could consult with him. I wish I could be more pleased about the publication of Ethan Frome, but I have received news from the doctors in French Lick, Indiana that Teddy does have some sort of psychosis.
Feeling terrible vertigo and shock. Have much in common with Mr. Frome and his crushed hopes. Little else makes sense to me. Without The Mount for us to share there is truly nothing for me and the dear old man. I no longer recognize the gallant, supportive, and gentle soul I married 26 yrs ago. I timidly write the word I have been avoiding with heart and pen: divorce.

27 July 1914, Poitiers. It’s nonsense. It cannot be. Yet there it is, tonight, on a heavy lidded evening, one of many in summertime France. A reality is drifting into my hotel window: passerby are singing La Marseillaise, and rousing us from a pleasant doze. Walter and I both craned our necks out of our windows and gazed into the square, as people raced below, taking up the rousing refrain. It can’t be war.

3 August 1914, Rue de Varenne. After reading my last entry, I can only reply: It most certainly is. Germany declared war on Belgium yesterday, and today, on France. One can only hope that this conflict ends within a few weeks.

20 October 1914, Rue de Varenne. After a foolishly-timed late summer sojourn in England – where I tried to convince myself that my destiny is this dear domestic paradise – the quaint Anglo countryside I returned to Paris in late September and found a new mistress to run my sewing shop on the rue de l’Univ. Hopefully the shop can help unmarried ladies or war widows...friends are offering plenty of financial and moral support. American friends included, of course...but why is my native country not offering its military aid? These American pacifists in Washington and beyond don’t know the monstrous results of their decision not to act!

17 Feb 1915. Vauquois. Writing this from the relative safety of the Mercedes. Cook has taken us to Vauquois, and I can hear and see the battle Even Walter thinks our travels have been thrilling. What a motor-flight After months of brutality in the Argonne, France seems to be fighting back against the hideous Boche and finally gaining ground. In the distance, on the butte, I can see men in silhouette, running and falling, running and falling. It looks like a story I should write one day, but it is not. War has somehow extinguished all narrative. War is “like” nothing. Blood is not a crimson seal, dying with dirt in your mouth, while what used to be the sky erupts and liquefies overhead (a wounded soldier the other day used these words to describe the Front to me), is not “like” being buried alive. It is not “like” hell.
Cannon fire thrums until we scarcely notice it. Smeared faces with blood on their teeth walk on. And, to that end, a refrain we hear again and again: Sauvez, sauvez la France. I will not abandon you again.

FIN

“The steel-mirror of her smile” is a work of fiction. However, some of the passages have been taken directly from Edith Wharton's novels, letters, and actual diary entries. Those brief phrases are bolded in this text. Sources for this work are Hermione Lee’s 2007 biography of Edith Wharton (Vintage Books), Modern Love and Other Poems by George Meredith (Kessinger Publishing, 2008), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905) and Summer (1993, Bantam Books).