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).

Raza

The future you shall know when it has come; before then, forget it. – Aeschylus

Kelsie and her smeary gray eyes, oily grape lipstick, skin tinged its usual shade of green, staggered backward, fingertips bright with blood.
This was the game they would play: Kelsie took a long sip of air through her nose and mouth and, leaned forward, eyes closed. At the same time, Javon blew out a long whistling breath. Their faces moved together, Kelsie’s lips pursed, Javon’s soft. Their lips touched. Javon sealed his lips around Kelsie’s mouth.
Several long giddy moments. Kelsie exhaled, slow and dreamy, into Javon’s mouth, as he inhaled. Sitting on the edge of his bed, or her bed at her mom’s, they would go back and forth like that, sharing air. They called it space breathing.
When Kelsie pulled away, somehow her lipstick would always make a greasy purple ring around his mouth. Sometimes it was smeared on his cheek. Javon wasn’t sure if he hated that, being imprinted, or if he secretly liked it. Space breathing was the wintertime game, before Christmas break, but the other game was springtime, was now. “I stabbed her because,” Javon told himself. He knew this only made sense to him, and maybe to Kelsie. It didn’t make sense to the sheriff’s department, or to community corrections, or to the Youth Offender Program, but none of that seemed to matter now, in light of other things that were happening. “In light of larger world events,” Javon thought, echoing the words used by his tutor at the YOP.
Like most of her friends and some of her teachers knew and guessed, Kelsie didn’t exactly have a personal permanent address at the moment. She saw it as a problem only when she was at a friend’s and her clothes bag and makeup were at her mom’s.
Today, after school, she was due at her mom’s, and Kelsie wanted to get her stuff out of there before her mom got home. If they met up at the apartment – a first floor one bedroom in a two-family that her mom had been living at for about six months, a world record for her – they were due for a fight.
Kelsie felt like something was pushing her between her shoulder blades, forcing her forward into whatever the next thing was, and she liked it. She couldn’t get in the side door but the basement window was open, so she squeezed down there, legs first, leaving her bag in the back yard. She wanted to be in the basement anyway, because that’s where the landlord’s stuff was. The coffee can on his old work table was filled with all kinds of saf-t-blades. She reached for one with a silver handle.
The first pass was always the best, a butterfly quiver. She already had a word in mind but it didn’t matter. The coffee can was painted a thick forest green and it had uncooked pasta elbows stuck all over it, also painted the same shit green. Kelsie made a similar thing for her father, when she was in second grade.
She drew the point of the triangular blade slow and sure across the soft whitish green skin on her inner arm between her wrist and elbow. Pulled the line through, making a curving J, her mouth already getting that metallic bloom. She and Javon putting their bloody arms together, space bleeding, haha, so they could be a part of each other. But not now, or not ever, could she ever cut with anyone there, even Javon.
The platinum foaming now, carbonating, ecstatic. An acrid smell of fear, the cat her mom hit and quickly wrapped in a towel and drove cursing to the vet as the animal lowed in Kelsie’s lap in the back seat, the hyacinth someone had planted outside, by the side door, the smell of wet early April, cold and shocked, what’s it called, that flower, she didn’t know the name of it, her thighs going weak, like she was kicked in the back of the knees, but nice, subtle, and she leaned against the workbench, the plywood edge jamming against her ribs, overcast, all parting way for a razor frond shower of sparkler sparks, incandescent, burning her forearms, as Kelsie pirouetted carefully and sat down cross-legged against the moist cellar wall. Her neck and armpits were soaked in sweat. She sat there for a while, and waited for everything to go back to being just regular.
Kelsie could see Javon’s eyes stray from her face. A tremor, a wobble, almost imperceptible; he was looking into her face, but for that breadth he was not. For a fraction of a second he was elsewhere. Javon was looking at someone else, someone behind her, or worse: He was looking at the space where someone soon will be.
The empty space will be filled by Raza. Raza, the cross country and track runner, who moved back to Pittsfield from Florida. She left Pittsfield as a 9th grader, pudgy and somehow immune to whatever taunt the rest of her schoolmates could hurl at her. Raza, who, at 14, was willing to run both the steeplechase, hurdles, and the two miler. Who was forgotten until she returned to Pittsfield in February, in the middle of Junior year.
Raza, with her swath of elbow-length tawny hair, tawny skin, and weird brown copper eyes. So beautiful and removed that no one could say anything. One day in between the March elimination tests, Kelsie secretly watched Raza in the hall, as she pulled things out of her locker, as she flexed her ankles, going up on tiptoe and settling her heels down.
I will never matter. I’m vanishing as you read this. Looking down at my palms now, a lurid, venous red, my shoulder blades banged against the wall so hard, the plaster cracked a little. I will never know the flower names, the two note bird call you always hear, who sings it, the constellations.
Kelsie looked at her arm. She could feel the stitches tugging under her sweater. She slapped at the stitches when they started to itch, but only in private. Raza meant “race” in Spanish. Kelsie looked it up. It also could mean “the people.” She had given Javon the knife, the stubby, half dull paring knife, and he looked at it, looked at her, and said, “with this? I’ll kill you if I do it with this.”
Raza had a scooter, which everyone thought was weird and stupid until they found out that all the stars and beautiful unknowns in South Florida had one too. Kelsie was still trying to learn how to sit up straight and not disturb the stitches when Raza asked her if she needed a ride home.
Kelsie was sitting on the steps outside the main door after school. “Do I look like I need a ride?”
The scooter spluttered and farted a puff of exhaust. Raza waited and didn’t answer, and Kelsie knew that yes, she looked like she needed a ride somewhere. In fact she looked like something that had been left outside and rained on repeatedly, because she was.
The lake was partially thawed out, and they stood by the shore, looking at the fog. When Kelsie said it smelled like shit, like long dead fish, Raza said she should have seen what Miami smelled like just before they left.
“How come you don’t speak Spanish?” Kelsie asked her after a while.
“No one spoke it in my house,” Raza said. “Do you speak Irish? Or Welsh?”
“There are no Irish or Welsh languages,” Kelsie said. “How did you know what my family was?”
Raza looked at her for a moment but didn’t say anything. Then she picked up a flat stone, and with a swift movement, bounced it across the surface of the water.
“Running is the future,” Raza said. This was later, the next day. “Soon, if we want something, we’re gonna have to run for it. Run to it.”
Kelsie was sitting on the bleachers, on one of the sagging lower slats, smoking a wet, half-broken menthol. Raza was standing on the track, shielding her eyes from the weak May sun. Kelsie tried to sit in a way that wouldn’t let the stitches – staples actually – pooch out over the edge of her tight jeans. She thought maybe she should take up running so she could look like Raza, whose hips and waist were in a straight, hard line.
When the scooter was running, which wasn’t very often, Raza would wait for Kelsie by the main doors after school, and they would ride to the lake. If they had to walk, they would meet by the back path. Kelsie’s mom lived on King Street, in Browntown, and Raza would walk her there before she continued on to her dad’s place on Daniels Avenue. The walk was long enough for Raza to tell Kelsie a story.
Raza moved back to Pittsfield because of “pollution contamination,” as she called it. One very early morning last December the Home Guard came to their street and said they had eight hours to clear out. Raza said her family knew this was coming, the Guard had been coming from the southwest, going street to street, in every neighborhood, and ordering people to push north because of the cloud. In fact Kelsie had heard about the cloud. She remembered reading it on her screen, almost by accident.
“People not in Miami thought it was a pain in the ass ball of smog but it’s way worse than that,” Raza said. “I woke up one morning and our whole front lawn was like three deep in dead white birds. Egrets. The whole street was covered. My dad was going to start throwing them in a trash bag but our neighbor came out of the house screaming not to touch them, because they caused cancer.”
Those who had a car that worked and could still drive and could somehow get the car to I-75 or I-95, that’s what they did. Those who didn’t, or couldn’t, Raza said, just started walking. Or bicycling. Their bodies and bikes were weighed down with whatever they could balance. Trash bags stuffed to the limit and lashed to their owners’ backs. Cans of food. Photo albums. That last one was the worst to see, Raza said. Fucking ancient photo albums weighed a ton. Her grandparents had a stack of them, passed down through the generations. Both the grandparents and the photo albums were gone now. Raza also said she saw an old woman, sugary white, riding on the back of another woman. They had a saddle, with stirrups and everything. The woman-horse looked like she was strong at one point in her life, but had moved beyond strong, and could walk forever. Her back half bent and racked beyond pain. Pods of runners, bodies cannibalized from hunger and fatigue, running in identical cadence. Someone on a bike dragging what appeared to be a black towel on a rope, and before she could jerk her glance away she saw what it really was. Raza said she only had to glimpse something to know it complete.
Raza said she rode her scooter next to her dad’s car. Lines for petrol were long and the trip, which normally took her dad 22 hours, ended up taking almost three weeks.
“You watch. Wherever we have to go next, I know most of it will be on foot. Because we won’t be able to get any petrol. I’ll walk to fucking Baffin Bay if I have to,” Raza said.
Raza’s return to Pittsfield seemed to trigger a city-wide worry about the cloud, which had now become The Cloud. At first, only the adults and the rich kids seemed to care; they were the ones who held up signs in Park Square, with slogans like “it’s coming” or “hold your breath.” Things got more tense when other people showed up with signs that said “Keep going your not sleeping on our couch.”
It was known that The Cloud was a slow bomb, a creep, and instead of an incendiary (Kelsie’s new favorite word) event, it was a pulmonary event. An event, they said, that began with a dry, nagging cough and ended with a gasping, retching heave that shot arterial blood, alveoli, and tarry matter into your mouth. There was a name for this cough, Raza said: la tos marron. The brown cough.
Raza knew the skull stage was the last holdout place where things would live, the last place they existed before dying forever. She tried to remember South Florida before the cloud. All that was left was the time leading up to her family’s departure. What was the smell of Hollywood Lakes? She kept sliding back to her grandmother and her stories about grapefruits and their stinging ruby meat, and the pretty stink that blew off the sewerage treatment plant on the days when the wind blew from the northeast, which was rare at the end. But those were grandmother’s memories, not Raza’s. Not that it always mattered. Better the borrowed ones than the thing she kept fighting back: Xiane doubled over in exhaustion, pain, and disgust, quickly wiping away the contents of her cough on her magenta kidskin glove.
Raza stood outside the bathroom stall and waited for Xiane to finish cleaning herself up. She made a point not to touch anything in the girls’ room. Within six days of Xiane showing symptoms that severe, 38 more kids at South Broward High started with la tos. The cloud was the lead story on almost every major news feed throttle and the heads made it sound like it was a visiting dignitary, this one more malevolent and unpredictable than any named storm. By the second week, two-thirds of the 5,550 kids at South Broward had stopped coming to school. Xiane was bedridden, her device got shut off, and the parents of both girls agreed it was best if no one visited Xiane.
The last day she went to school, she wore the regulation mask they were handing out at the old Publix. Mr. Jiminez, standing bent and weird at the screen in front of the almost empty class. There were only two other kids, and they also wore masks. After a few minutes into his mumbled lecture, Raza realized the man had aged decades in like one week. Then she noticed the tears streaming down his cheeks and diverting gracefully around the thick rubber gasket sealed around his mouth. He just stood there shaking, light biro in his hand, trying to suppress a cough, or sobs, or both. He kept saying, in English, something that sounded like “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She took that as a sign to stop going.
Then the massive bird die-off, the sound below of men’s shouts in the apartment downstairs and on the street below; that afternoon was the first time Raza could say she was in a living nightmare; her cat had gone missing and she was ashamed that she couldn’t remember the last time she saw him, when she held him last; after the Home Guard left their apartment Raza was on her white throw rug by her bed, looking to see if he was up in the boxspring where he used to hide when he was really scared. Raza straightened out her legs and lay on her stomach. What was this? “The frantic niggling patience of a man in a burning house trying to gather up a broken string of beads.” Faulkner, one of her favorites. That line was for this moment, a fistful of water, which kept her alive, which kept sliding away.
She put her wet forehead on the back of her hand and began to cry for real, luxurious tears, half appalled and frightened.. She couldn’t remember why she was on the floor, what she was looking for. Please don’t take my mind. She was sixteen. Her father called from down the hall. Raza, let’s go.
That was months ago. But here was that time again, in Pittsfield. June. Raza was on her scooter, sitting in a petrol line on Wahconah Street. She guessed the line looked like something out of another generation’s memory of lack, of rations, of barely contained panic and hostility. A toy vision of the end.
Raza stayed straddled on the scooter and walked it toward the pumps using her toes, which was kind of difficult because she was wearing flip flops. It took an hour to get to the pump and put a gallon and a half into the tank. A guy in a trashed Vauxhall filled with what appeared to be scrapings off a hoarder’s floor poked his head out the passenger window and asked if he could go where she was going. His eyes were boiled red and when he rolled down his window she could smell a gust of state line smokes and baked vinyl. It was doubly sad.
She found Kelsie lying on her bed. “Don’t do that,” Raza said, in her usual flat voice, putting a percussive tap on the last t, which annoyed Kelsie to no end. “Did you pack anything?”
Kelsie didn’t answer. “Well, we can’t bring it anyway,” Raza said. “I figure we’ll get way up in Vermont with the petrol we have, but after that, we’ll probably have to walk. Come on, my dad wants to get on the road.”
Kelsie stayed on her back, chin to chest, arms limp at her sides. Her screen was balanced on her stomach and she was watching something Raza couldn’t see. “How are we going to do this,” Kelsie asked.
Raza considered just leaving her there, so she could cough herself to death. “Where is your mom?”
“I don’t know. Not here. I don’t think she’s been here for a long time.”
Raza had a feeling she knew where she was but she didn’t say. Instead, she wrapped her ponytail around her fist and flapped her hair in hope of a breeze. “Come on. We’re gonna drive, then we’re gonna run, and walk, and run. It’ll be fun. And look – ” Raza lifted her shirt and spun around, wiggling her ass. Kelsie burst out laughing.

Photo: Sophia, by Jessica Willis 2010

The Taking of Raza

Passages from the following were read at Cirque de Thé, an event on 9/10/10 in Northampton, Massachusetts celebrating the release of the Fall 2010 issue of Meat For Tea, a Pioneer Valley-based literary journal. A version of my short (but ever-lengthening) story "Raza" appears in the Fall issue of the journal.


Raza is a retelling of the story, or stories, my student Javon told me over the course of the last school year.

Javon became my student after he had stabbed his girlfriend in the stomach at a party, and a restraining order was subsequently placed on him. It wasn’t clear if it was after the stabbing or after the restraining order, that he was officially barred from regular classes at school. The only other information I had about Javon, besides his criminal record, was his IQ. The number they gave me put Javon’s intelligence somewhere between that of a chia pet and that of John Stuart Mill.

I’d rather know a student’s pulse rate, but that’s just me.

Javon and I met every morning in a small room on the top floor of the old deconsecrated jail. I call it deconsecrated because eleven years ago it had been closed down and left to die, and a new, modern-looking facility had been opened about three miles away, near the Berkshire Mall. To an outsider, it had none of the charm of the old redbrick jail. The new jail, as it was known, was a sprawling cinder block and concertina wire job, and perhaps its proximity to the Berkshire Mall and the nearby concrete farm made it look like a hostile one story stepchild of both. The old jail was re-opened with the acronym Youth Offender Program about eight years ago.

There used to be hangings at the old jail, during the Civil War era. I took pride in telling Javon this, in hopes that I would be able to control him through, well, the threat of execution, the threat of the old noose.

Javon didn’t really act out much, though, but he was fond of licking everything in sight – lead paint peeling off the wall near where he sat, the potted soil and the apical bud of the half dead mint plant I brought in as a science experiment that would, like the old jail, die a slow death of its own – I mean the experiment, not the plant, because the plant is still alive as I tell you this. Javon named the mint plant Javon, and when I look at it out there, by my very nice front door which does NOT contribute to any of my middle class guilt, I think, “hello Javon.”

Right. So Javon licked everything in sight–I won’t describe his tongue here but it was flame like and very pink against his skin which was the color of you know what if you must know. I countered that very alive flicking pink tongue with stories about the old jail, the building we were in at the very moment. A building which still smelled like mop water under the other tutors’ honeysuckle perfume and dried cakes of watercolor paint in the art room where a sign said you were NOT allowed to build a bong or draw gang signs or fashion anything hate related. In fact the only thing you were allowed to paint was Escher type of shit, stairways that went nowhere, or green lump hills that told of nowhere.

After a couple of weeks worth of these two hour tutoring sessions, forty minutes each of reading, geometry, and earth science, we were comfortable enough together to openly talk about things other than angles, photosynthesis, and Paul Revere’s ride by Longfellow – which Javon said was stupid to read because if anyone knocked on anyone’s door in the middle of the night today, you know what they’d get.

Around this time somehow the subject of Black Sabbath came up. I probably brought it up, and it was definitely me who said I wanted to form a Black Sabbath cover band, but have it be klezmer, and the band would be called Shabbat. Eventually the band name would disintegrate into Shazbat. Javon didn’t know what either of those Yiddish words meant, and I felt again the embarrassing divide between the new human being, and the one who gets shazbat and whatever flotsam of references that matter not to the new human being.

Of course I never started that band, because the best I can do for any band is sing, and Black Shazbat would be an instrumental act.

The good news was that Javon had an old clarinet from middle school band, and he said it was partially fucked up but still worked, and could make sounds. At my urging, he brought the clarinet to the old jail, the old jail, which we now referred to as the YOP, or Youth Offender Program. There was, and is, something offensive about the acronym YOP.

So Javon finally remembered to bring the clarinet to the YOP. True enough, it was fucked up. It looked like some of the silver parts had been stripped off. The clarinet made some blatting fart geese sounds, and it sounded so good, other tutors came in to the hallway to hear what we were doing in our too small room with the peeling lead paint and licked surfaces. We got through a few bars of “The Wizard,” and left it at that. I admit I also tried to play Javon’s clarinet, even after he put his pink flamelike tongue against the dried out saliva soaked reed.

These kinds of fun exercises in pedagogy and tutor tutee trust eventually lead us to the stories Javon told me. These stories were about Kelsie, the girlfriend he stabbed, and Raza, the scary Spanish girl with the waterfall hair (his words, not mine) and the weird knowing. Also his words. Raza moved to the West Side of Pittsfield from South Florida, Javon said, and with her, she brought news about something called “The Cloud.”

He described The Cloud as a ball of really bad pollution that messed up (his words) Florida and was roiling (my words) up to Massachusetts, fucking up (his words) everything in its wake. I was like, Ok, Javon. Enough. Back to Longfellow, back to pi. Javon told me about Raza’s story concerning one of the symptoms of Cloud infection. Something called the “tos marron,” or brown cough.

I wrote that “The cloud was a slow bomb, a creep, and instead of incendiary – Kelsie’s new favorite word – it was pulmonary. A pulmonary event, they said, that began with a dry, nagging cough and evolved into a gasping, retching heave that squirted a palateful of arterial blood, alveoli, and tarry matter into your mouth. Javon also said Raza and her family left Florida when they woke up one morning and their front lawn, and the whole street, was three deep covered in dead or almost dead white birds. Egrets, I guessed.

Javon said Raza was a runner, and she said the future belonged to runners, because in the future we will have to go everywhere like everyone did for thousands of years before cars and bikes. This interested me, because I am a runner too, and I share Raza’s belief.

It occurred to me, later on, that Javon was lying to me about the existences of Raza, The Cloud, and Kelsie. It was hard for me to believe that Kelsie was essentially spineless and she needed to get cut.

It occurred to me that I could write a book called “Lies my students told me,” but on second and third thought that title and subject aren’t nearly as interesting, or as voluminous, or as destructive, as the already extant “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

Ergo, I consigned “Lies my students told me” to my imaginary pile of other books that never were, and never will be, like “White women of no distinction,” or “Little Elvis,” about an imaginary meeting between Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac in 1960s Lowell; or the heavily umlautted “City of Sin,” about the amazingly so bad it was good Motley Crue /Y&T outdoor concert at the Lynn Manning Bowl in August 1985, where my spiderweb makeup melted, my thighs chafed, the guy I sat with was on acid but out of jail, and I was paranoid because we chewed and screwed on the Pike and my roommate told me “the hamburger police was gonna get us.” She added to my paranoia by describing a cop car speeding after us, with its hamburger bubble spinning, yodeling, and flashing blue and red.

There was also the as of yet untitled book about the Summer of 1990 endured in Northampton, Massachusetts. That book actually doesn’t belong in the imaginary pile, because I started it, well, ripped it off verbatim from my diary entries, and sold it to a now defunct women’s magazine in the UK. But it got all screwed up because they had to Anglify it for their audience. You know, “greasy one dollar bills” became “wadded five pound notes,” “the cottage in the Berkshires” became a “house in Berkshire.”

It was just wrong. I was, however, paid in pound sterling, which seemed more interesting 13 years ago than it does now.

It occurred to me that the relationship shared between me and Javon was more about me, more about what I needed to learn. I felt like I had subjected Javon to a lot of crap he didn’t need, like Black Sabbath, middle class Judaica, my own discomfort, my own failure. Then again, he subjected me to Raza, to the Cloud, to la tos marron, to licking everything, to Javon the still growing mint plant, and to his own busted up but admittedly entertaining take on klezmer.

It occurred to me that storytellers are always trying to sell someone out, and that’s what Javon was doing to Raza and Kelsie. And possibly to me.

Then I figured that neither Javon, nor I, could make this stuff up. Hence, Raza, the emissary of the coming race, and Javon, her watcher, her dramaturgist, her stalker to be.