by Rick Moody
My question about her early videos has always been not are you taking advantage of the men? but: how are you able to be vulnerable to all those people?
Notwithstanding the fact that I am a mediocre photo assistant because I can never anticipate what Laurel is really going to want at a shoot, and can never duplicate exactly what she wants by depressing the shutter, even when she tries to explain it to me, I like going along on the shoots. She is on occasion expedient and admirably results-oriented on photo shoots, and because I am a person with various complexities myself, and I truly would chew my own arm off rather than be told what to do, by anyone ever, it is not always useful for me to be her assistant. But: I loved her DNA project, which breaks down ideas of race and family until they are no longer operative in the normally simplistic ways that we talk about them in our cultural discussions. Laurel’s “family” as described by the DNA portraits transcended class, generation, race, political belief, region, and every other boundary you could erect in which to wall off your “family” from those other people out there at the edge of your property. She photographed gun-toting Republicans in the South, and Democratic African American union guys not too many states away. She shot Mennonites in Oregon. She shot Jews in Queens. The American family, in Laurel’s project, could be anywhere, at any time, and the responsibility to love them and treat them with respect, therefore, extended outward into the unexplored expanses beyond home, until home was in every direction.
In New Smyrna, first we had a DNA relative visit us on the Atlantic Center for the Arts campus, a guy from elsewhere in Florida, and he gave us a whole spiel about particle physics, and the new accelerators coming online. He was clearly a little curious and inquisitive about what he’d gotten himself into, especially as Laurel liked to shoot the DNA portraits at night, and she would never really talk to the subject until she’d gotten the photograph out of the way—so that the image really corresponded to her very first impression of him or her. The physicist, for that was his job description, didn’t know what to expect, but neither did we. We never knew what to expect. With the Christmas tree farmers in Oregon, for example, we were asked to stay for dinner, and in the midst of this feast, their youngest child pointed out that our host, his dad, had himself shot the venison we had been served, on the porch, one morning, still wearing his pajamas.
Later on, when this work was displayed quite a bit, it was hard to fathom what the subjects might have thought of what they had participated in. We shot another family in Florida, a little later, a truly lovely and exceedingly warm family, where there was a boy with some learning difficulties, who definitely knew a ton about the theme parks in Orlando, had all the facts at his command, and this boy had a grandmother in a motorized wheelchair, and we shot him and his mom and uncle, and then we shot the grandmother, and the poignancy of those images is overpowering and hard to describe.
Laurel’s single-minded drive toward the truth of an appearance, her refusal to idealize or to shape the subjects, was like unto her personality in other ways. I had learned long ago that there was never any profit in trying rhetorically to appeal to Laurel for peace when there were interpersonal problems happening between us and others. Laurel was going to speak the truth, for the sheer idealism of doing so. The photographs were the commission of this philosophical style in an aestheticized container. I admired them immensely. They were lyrical, beautiful, frequently otherworldly with their narrow alien columnar light (as if the subjects were about to be levitated up into paradise), they were sometimes funny, but they always told a truth about people, about individuals, about family.
In a way, the impulse feels novelistic to me, because novels, to me, are where those really complex thoughts about the truth of humanity get stored to best effect. The field of characterization in Laurel’s photographs is like the field of characterization in the best novels—rich, complex, new. I loved watching this work get made, even when I didn’t do a good job as the photo assistant.
In Orlando, Laurel was also to photograph a woman for the project who was more nervous than almost any other subject of Laurel’s DNA portraits. She kept calling and waffling about whether or not she was going to show. The subjects were often encouraged to come up with the locations for the images, the only requirement for which was that the location should be dark. Laurel’s only light source was an old handheld flashlight that I had given her some years before. Laurel used that flashlight throughout the project and would never tolerate a replacement. On this night in Orlando, we were driving through some parts of town that stood in distinct contrast to the theme park monoliths outlying, and all the stylized Harry Potter worldliness of Orlando. This town square downtown, among the people. Laurel and I wandered around beforehand, looking for any setting that was dark enough for a shot, but there was light pollution no matter where we turned. The subject continued to call and say she was a block away, and then more than a block away, increasingly nervous.
And if you thought about it there was really no reason why we did not sound like we were going to bludgeon her or dismember her and bury the body parts in various swamps outside of the greater Orlando area. Eventually, however, she turned up, the woman who was to be photographed, and she was an incredible addition to the project in every way, human, self-conscious, exceedingly shy, not like the America of fashion inserts or living below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, but of the America that has no power, that lives in exile from power. It was easy to see, while I watched the photograph happen, and the halting conversation got traded back and forth between photographer and subject, that she, the subject, was not going to get entirely comfortable, was marked by a great discomfort. Laurel asked her what prompted her to agree to be part of the project, and she said: I just wanted to be part of something.
I lost another friend besides M.J. that winter, too. A close friend, Maggie Estep, a spoken word artist, a horse-racing enthusiast, a serial monogamist nonpareil, a nicotine gum addict and former heroin abuser, a yoga expert with a titanium hip, a prose writer given to slang, a performer at the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock who turned up on Beavis and Butthead once, a punk, an inveterate curser, a would-be real estate agent at the end of her life, a New Yorker who had decamped to Hudson, a traffic-stopping but unconventional beauty who was also beautiful in life experiences, a sober person who was once on the cover of High Times, an unrestrained laugher, a musician and singer who never really sang, a study in contrasts and paradoxes of every sort, someone who bulldozed through a lot of cherished encampments in the writing and art and music communities of my youth and made everyone think more carefully about what they made, and someone who literally everyone I knew downtown in the eighties loved in a way. Her vitality and her enthusiasm for life was the quintessence of having lived well, though she never had much money and was often chasing a book contract, and it made no sense, of all the people I knew in the eighties and early nineties, some of them self-destructive in the most baroque ways, that Maggie would be the person to die of a heart attack at just fifty years old. The only possible rationale for this was that she had already used up a lifetime of events in the short time she was on earth. Her death was a terrible shock for a lot of people, and I missed her badly, like many other people I knew.
While Laurel and I were at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, there was also a satellite launch at Cape Canaveral. And we all trooped out to the beach to watch. I have always found that going anywhere in a large crowd of artists or creative people most reminds me of when I was in the psychiatric hospital in 1987 and we were allowed out for a walk in Hollis, Queens, usually to go to buy a soda and candy at a bodega. I don’t know why we were allowed to buy candy, exactly, and I imagine that the neighbors must have gotten very tired of the dual-diagnosis fuck-ups wandering down the hill, past their houses, to the bodega. Anyway, trips with artists are not at all dissimilar. People struggle to get a conversation going, are frequently awkward, and it’s hard for the group to behave like a group. On the beach in New Smyrna, the
light started to fade, and the conversations became more atomized, as though the things driving the artists apart were far more profound than what bound them together.
But just when it appeared that the group might be terminal somehow, or that it was all about who could do the best job of impressing the slightly vague but very beautiful dope-smoking painter women, the satellite was launched. Somehow, perhaps from watching footage of the Challenger disaster, I expected these rockets to go straight up, and then to vanish into the crepuscular skies, but the rocket, instead, careened horizontally out over the ocean, toward the Bermuda Triangle, perhaps a bit like MH370 lurching free of its appointed course, and it felt intensely military, and ominous, or as though the military applications of the rocket should be obvious, as they clearly were since World War II; the rocket and its payload traveled out horizontally for quite some time before abruptly lifting up into whatever sweet spot of earthly orbit was required. There was something nearly spiritual and thrilling about the way the satellite pierced the twilight, the magic hour, there on the easygoing and faintly louche seaside of the Daytona Beach environs. The satellite launch showed us a little bit of the military-industrial complex, a part that could not be hidden from us, because the mere launching of the rocket and the satellite could not pass unobserved. It had to be observed. All those alien-bearing unidentified flying objects must be similar, I suspect, they must be the military-industrial complex doing best what it does, mixing expensive weapons for mass murder in with a media blackout. In the desert of New Mexico, this combination of forces always mixes in with the febrile imagination of the delusional, the unrepentant alcoholics, the rugged individualists.
We watched the satellite launch, and then went back to the arts center, a little more dazzled, and a little less impressed, by the project of advanced rocketry.
At the Atlantic Center for the Arts, you’re supposed to sign your name inside the closet of the faculty apartment (which, it bears mentioning, is a serene and wonderfully isolated little pad down at the end of the boardwalk), and it didn’t take long to see that the closet contained the signature of my friend no longer living, Maggie Estep.
March
Laurel’s mom was failing. It was a fact unignorable, and yet our difficulties, our sense of constant crisis and mounting difficulty, from longed-for child lost to miscarriage to the loss of Stella, from the haunting by M.J.’s troubles to the death of Maggie, the struggles piling on, of the kind that is so often at hand that you don’t really know which way to turn upon getting out of bed in the morning, often made it impossible to attend specifically to the problem of Laurel’s mom. She had been living alone for some years in downtown Ames, Iowa, where Laurel grew up, and she had almost everything she needed, excepting peace of mind. There was a really great food co-op in town, of which she had been a member since it first existed in the late seventies. And there was a church, a Unity Church, that she went to on Sundays, and where she tried with the utmost effort to keep the demons inside from commandeering too much real estate. The dignity of her attempts was easy to admire.
Things had never been quite right since the period in which she lived off the grid in Port Townsend, Washington, where her shack was in the woods and had no plumbing, a time she referred to as the best in her life. Reality had shifted to some parallax orientation for her, different from how we were understanding it. But there were also specific physical problems, which may or may not have been manifestations of the same paradigmatic change. Laurel had had to intervene to bring her mom back from Port Townsend to the Midwest for treatment. For a while this seemed to work, and the major project with Mary was to eliminate stress and keep her life as simple as possible. She had enough money to pay the rent, to get some groceries, and to send some money to Laurel’s two somewhat unconventional older half-siblings.
But then, all at once, things started to decline seriously. The particular eruption of hardship, as it was relayed to us by her friends on the scene, was that she started leaving things outside in front of her apartment. In the hallway. Some of these things were of real monetary or emotional value. There was no talking to Mary about why she was doing this exactly, because Mary was either incredibly loving and kind, or else she was clearly anxious about something that she wasn’t going to tell you about in any rigorous way, because she didn’t trust people not to misunderstand. There was often a person or persons who she believed was oppressing her, usually a man, and it was easy to read these oppressions as metaphorical transformations of difficulties that Mary may have had when younger, when a child in Texas.
A friend of Mary’s from Ames, whom I’ll call Jeanine, came to take Mary in, part of the time, and tried to help her with the anxiety and the more complicated battles she was waging. At first this seemed like a good thing, but then it quickly began to seem as though it might be less perfect than we would have wished.
Mary then had some kind of sudden, overpowering aphasia, in which she lost a great many words and had to resort to elegiac but impractical work-arounds like: the deep plate that you put food in (bowl), and the like. Sometimes these work-arounds were poetry, and sometimes it was just hard to figure out what she meant. Many doctors weighed in on the difficulties she was facing, and at first it seemed obvious she’d had a stroke, but not everyone agreed, and there was also always, in the background, the discussion of the car accident she’d had earlier in her middle age, and of the coma that followed, but after a few days of casting about for a diagnosis, a social worker friend of the family suggested that Mary might have an infection, which sometimes, in older people, manifested in cognitive impairment. Mary was then prescribed a large dose of antibiotics for a few weeks, and this did, in fact, help a bit with her aphasia. Words started to come back some.
When the independent living facility where Laurel had placed her got wind of Mary’s aphasia and middle-of-the-night wanderings, she was ejected, even though she was paying for the right to live there, and though she was no trouble, and never had been. It was the kind of injustice that really causes one to doubt the system and its ability to care for the elderly and indigent. Thus began a desperate sequence of addresses for Mary in which her physical situation always grew worse, never better, including hip trouble, maybe knee trouble, and then, ultimately, a brain tumor. An inoperable brain tumor, as it turned out, but maybe a benign one that would, at least, have the virtue of being slow-acting.
A battery of tests followed Mary’s infection, which was perhaps gram-negative, or E. coli in a site not specified, and these were not conclusive. She got an EEG at one point, and the MD, when she read it, said that Mary had significant dementia, and that within a couple of years she was going to be seriously impaired. This turned out to be the one piece of reliable and honest medical advice that Mary got in this span.
Mary’s ability to struggle through the difficulties, and her absolute failure to complain, no matter how bad things got, was nearly overwhelmingly poignant. The fact that Mary had not always been present while Laurel was growing up didn’t seem to affect how Laurel felt about her mom. On the contrary. Laurel was incredibly fierce about trying to protect her mom, and you did not, no one did, want to get in the way when Laurel was pursuing some reasonable fix on behalf of her mother. Laurel and her brothers had to plead and yell and threaten legal action in a great variety of settings over the years, and they did it without hesitation. The cost for Laurel of all this pleading and hectoring was not clear until much later. She would never allow any of these midlevel social workers and medical dysfunctionaries see her as weak or irresolute. The vibrations of despair and woe about her mom came only when no one was around but me. She was grief-stricken, and often overcome about what to do. Mary kept moving around from one short-term address to another, and at each there would be a moment when Mary’s prognosis was self-evident and she would be too much for the facility taking her in. For a while during her episode of aphasia, she was shipped to a nursing home in Ames, and when Laurel visited her there, she found her in tremendou
sly undignified circumstances with no nurse anywhere around. You would not have wanted to be among the nursing staff that day, when Laurel got to them. But this story doesn’t find its relevance in the amount of yelling you can do at nursing home staff, but in the way calamity engenders deeper feeling. And the way it ultimately draws people together. There’s a powerlessness that I felt about Mary, as the mere husband of Laurel, but I could love Mary and Laurel both, and the great intensity of their bond made this easy to do. It was perhaps an aspect of the matrimonial long accomplishment that I most needed to develop: listening and helping, and otherwise not needing to do much in particular. Even at her sickest, Mary still managed to be a loving and generous person, and so she was a model for just how to be with her in her hour of need.
In March, I had been asked to teach for a week at the University of Alabama, where I had once also been a finalist for a teaching job in 1994. I had passionately disliked Tuscaloosa the first time I’d been there. I didn’t then and don’t now care very much about football, I think football is a brain injury delivery system, and in 1994, during my campus visit, the University of Alabama had a grand parade for the members of the Crimson Tide football team, which was a parade of American things I don’t understand or admire. Somehow, when I didn’t get the job, I felt like the Crimson Tide was responsible, that I was not their man. Going back to the school twenty years later was meant to exorcise some of the feelings from that earlier time, when I had been in my early thirties and was generally willing to undertake employment in any rural portion of the nation, even if no such employment materialized.