The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  Today’s student left is unfortunately complicit. Its adherents implement “scent-free spaces” prohibiting perfume, tobacco, and industrial odors in their organizing meetings, because it is apparently more important that the fraction of bourgeois professionals with allergies participates in their “anticapitalist” social movements than the majority of all people living below the poverty line. They call these maneuvers “accessibility policies.”

  Once, at an Occupy Wall Street assembly, standing six feet beyond the last concentric circle in the parking lot, I lit up a cigarette. In short order, I was asked to leave. I insisted on Occupying. Such are the grinding wars of public accommodation in the United States—a country whose people are so poorly entitled to any public space that simply occupying a park is a big deal. In other countries around the world, workers do that sort of thing all the time. Maybe the American resistance could go and do likewise—if, that is, its leaders would welcome workers to their meetings, cigarettes and all.

  Smokers of the World, Exhale!

  If the lifestyle lords of the ruling class want us to quit smoking, they can provide us with the resources required to spend a quarter of our waking hours drinking kale smoothies, doing yoga, and attending trauma therapy just like them. As long as they fail to meet such elementary demands of mutual social obligation, they deserve much worse than a little secondhand smoke. Meanwhile, we members of the smoking class might consider using bourgeois paranoia to our advantage. We might start organizing “smoke-ins” fifteen feet away from high-end daycares, exhaling in their general direction until all kitchen and cleaning staff are paid five times the minimum wage plus full health and dental coverage. Persons of the educated class may suggest this is “mean” or “violent,” of course, at which point we may direct them to the reputable oeuvres of Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin.

  If the government really cared about working-class smokers’ health, our political elites could easily fund our well-paid vacations, free therapy, and other support services by slashing corporate subsidies. Instead, they direct bourgeois unhappiness our way. Instead, they blame the poor for contaminating the world, while funding paramilitary offensives in defense of filthy transnational mining projects and neocolonial oil-and-resource wars—conflicts that will make the world much less safe for their children than a smoldering cigarette ever could. Indeed, even if government did offer smoking citizens the most tempting of Golden Handshakes, we might nonetheless exercise our prerogative to refuse their dirty money and blow smoke in their faces instead.

  In the meantime, my last words for the smokers are simply: Never let anyone make you feel ashamed. You should be able to smoke precisely as much as you want. This is not because mass-produced cigarettes or “Big Tobacco” are beautiful things. They are not. It is, rather, because we are beautiful and precious. Our lives are beautiful and precious. Our lives, despite what the bosses say, are actually for our own enjoyment, not to make others’ lives easier, cleaner, and lazier. As long as the value of professionals’ lives is not measured primarily in terms of their effects on others, but according to their pleasure, so shall our own lives and value be measured.

  Like them, we shall pursue our own desires for pleasure no matter how whimsical, and if our desire is to smoke, then offended professionals can just hold their breath for once—perhaps using this blessed interval of silence to meditate on their thieving class and its own grotesquely swollen “carbon footprint.” If state and capital are going to steal our precious energies and vast hours of our lives to line their pockets with profit, leaving us with poor sleep, insufficient rent money, and a diet of 7-Eleven specials as we provide the country’s most basic services, the very least we deserve is to enjoy our cigarettes in peace. So if anyone asks, it’s not that smoking should be permitted because cigarettes can be proved an absolute good, which they cannot, but simply because for the time being we happen to smoke them. We might call this giving professionals a taste of their own entitlement. Heaven forbid they choke on it.

  ALIA VOLZ

  Snakebit

  FROM The Threepenny Review

  The phobia, which hoards the past, can be the one place in a person’s life where meaning apparently never changes; but this depends upon one never knowing what the meaning is.

  —Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

  We meet a fat diamondback five minutes down the trail. He is stretched across the path, dozing in the shade of a juniper bush. I’m an adult, so I want to act like one, but I’m crying so hard I can’t inhale and snot is dribbling into my mouth. It takes me twenty minutes to inch past the viper, while his tongue whips the air. After that, I search out a long, heavy stick to thump on the ground and jostle the creosote scrub before passing. My husband, Kevin, and our two friends are sympathetic, but my pace is agonizingly slow, and they drift ahead. I hear them chattering, always around the next bend, while blood bangs through my head like a Taiko drum.

  The whole park is rattlesnake color, and it’s breeding season. We camp among the mating snakes for three nights. We hear no rattles, receive no death threats. Exhaustion renders my terror quiet and viscous. “Snake,” I breathe, as we ease past yet another languid viper looped beside the trail. They’re draped everywhere, as in my dreams.

  The last one we cross is pasted to the frontage road. It must have bitten an oncoming tire; its mouth is spread open like a flower, the tiny yellow points of its teeth splayed. The pink flesh of its throat is turning to leather in the desert sun.

  “Joshua Tree is such a powerful place,” Dad says in our next So how the heck have you been? conversation. “Big energy there. I’m jealous you got to go.”

  Now that I’m grown, Dad and I are long-distance phone friends. We talk several times a year, our conversations clotted with jokes. We’re both more comfortable this way, knowing we can hang up and return to our separate lives. I tell him about camping during breeding season.

  “Oh, you must have loved that,” he chuckles. “You used to cry if you had to walk past a rope on the ground.”

  “Remember the time you got bit?” I ask.

  He hesitates. I picture his face squinting into the empty spaces eaten into his memory by the double whammy of epilepsy and psychedelic drugs. “Not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  “How could you forget? You showed me the fang marks when I was little and it scared me to death. I never got over it.”

  “You must be thinking of someone else . . .”

  I don’t believe him. We argue about it—politely, since we’ve both come to value our friendly distance. Then I call Mom, so she’ll take my side. Dad forgets everything and she remembers everything. That’s how it works.

  “Not that I know of, honey,” she says. “Your father did some dumb shit, but I think he steered clear of rattlesnakes.”

  Dad sits on the edge of his bed. I’m curled on the rug at his feet, an Alice in Wonderland pop-up book open on my lap. I am six years old and I do not understand why his eyes look so strange, his ice-blue irises walled behind dilated pupils. He has just returned from a week alone in the woods, what he calls a vision quest.

  He’s come home snakebit.

  Dad rolls up the left leg of his lavender bell bottoms to show me the weeping punctures. His calf is swollen, the skin waxy and yellow like pork rind. Blue rings moondog the fang marks and raised gray veins jitter to his ankle.

  I’m sweating in my footie pajamas, the canary-yellow ones that are so small they force my toes to curl. I’ve been told countless times that rattlesnakes are deadly, so I don’t understand why he’s still alive. He could die in front of me. The hot flannel constricts around my body and I tear at the metal snap at my throat.

  How could this, possibly the most vivid memory of my childhood, inspiration for decades of ophidiophobic behavior, be false? This moment feels solid in my history, a flagstone lodged between our trip to Disneyland and the death of my first cat.

  If I invented this memory, I don’t know
why or when. The question gets under my skin. I write essays about my father, scour childhood memories, and peek between my fingers at YouTube videos of snakes, scaring myself so badly one night that I run to find Kevin.

  “You’ll give yourself nightmares,” he chides.

  “I already have them.”

  Snakes take up inordinate space in my memory bank. I recall fifty-two specific encounters with wild snakes, a card deck of terror. Each image is crystalline. The snake’s pattern. The sunlight gleaming on its skin. Whether its body was looped or unfurled or some disorienting combination of both. Whether it darted, oozed, or froze.

  Equally sharp are times when I thought I saw a snake and it turned out to be something else—a lizard, a half-buried root—because my mind thought Snake! and triggered phobic hyperawareness. My highlight reel even includes photography from nature books and some truly awful YouTube clips. The viper whose decapitated head bites its own dying body. The snake that eats a spider, which then consumes it from the inside out. The infant who sleeps peacefully on a platform surrounded by hooded cobras.

  I want to anchor my fear to a moment in time, but I can’t find a sturdy one.

  When I was a child, we lived in a former boardinghouse, a long-ago stagecoach stop on the Eel River in Northern California, an hour’s drive from the nearest small town. The boardinghouse stood on wild land with majestic boulders, acres of mossy oak and dusty manzanita, and a cool green river, gentle in summertime. Peacocks nested on our shaded porch and we had a box freezer for making fruit slushies.

  Behind the house was an empty chicken coop. My parents bought a dozen chicks from the feed store in town and brought them home in a cardboard box, together with a metal feeder and incubation lights. Peeping yellow puffballs with sharp little beaks. I gave them silly names like Fluffy and Muffy and Sunshine, though they were impossible to tell apart. I remember their smell—not fetid like grown chickens, but fresh and sweet. Miniature talons squeezing my fingers. Unearthly softness against my cheek.

  One night, a snake crept into the coop and massacred the tiny chicks. It left one survivor flailing in bloody dirt. Half the chick’s leg had been ripped away and its screams were tinny and tireless. Dad drowned it to end its suffering.

  Traumatic indeed.

  Only it wasn’t a snake, Mom told me recently, but a fox.

  A fox makes much more sense. A fox could cause frenzy in a chicken coop. A snake . . . well, couldn’t. After two or three little chicks, a snake would look like a sock stuffed with tennis balls. It would be too sluggish and protuberant to slither back through the wire. Slaughtering eleven chicks would require a whole den of snakes. I have to remind myself of this. Because for me, it has always been a large brown snake pouring itself through the chicken wire and lurking in the straw until the first innocent blundered near.

  I should have a fear of foxes: vulpophobia.

  But I’m not afraid of foxes. I’m not afraid of spiders. I’m not afraid of rats. I’m not afraid of bats. I’m not afraid of needles. I’m not afraid of earthquakes. I’m not afraid of worms. I’m not afraid of germs. I’m not afraid of funerals. I’m not afraid of meteors. I’m not afraid of dogs. I’m not afraid of God. I’m not afraid of Satan. I’m not afraid of turbans. I’m not afraid to fly. I’m not afraid to die.

  I’m not afraid to be bitten. I’m not afraid of the venom.

  It’s something else.

  They are shape-shifters. Snakes materialize out of nothing—ordinary rocks, twigs, and leaves—reminding us that perception is untrustworthy. You can never tell just how long a snake is, where its body begins and ends. They may fold themselves three times, six times, a dozen times. They move like water and shine like grease, but their skin is dry as dust.

  Snakes are deception, surprise, mutability. They violate the predictable. Snakes are agents of chaos.

  My friend at the barn where I ride horses says she’s afraid of snakes. She hates them, she says. Yet Diane tromps out into the grassy pasture like it’s no big deal. She watches where she puts her feet, while talking of other things and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. Spring has been coming earlier as the drought deepens. I saw my first snake of the year in January.

  A wispy, harmless garter snake has darted from underneath a feed bucket and is now creeping around the barn, making my skin vibrate with dread. Where will I confront the snake next? In the feed room? In a stall? Diane finds it near the manure pile and grabs a pitchfork.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  “I’m just going to carry it to the bushes.”

  “Please don’t,” I croak. “Please.”

  How can I tell her that the image of that strange, nimble body writhing between the tines will cycle on repeat through my brain for weeks? Even if I look away, I will know that it happened. The only thing worse than a snake on the ground is a snake off the ground: flying snakes and falling snakes and climbing snakes and swimming snakes.

  Diane laughs, her expression bemused. I see that she is going to do it anyway, so I rush into the barn and wait it out in the dark, hands clamped to my face.

  “Whoa, you’re a fast little guy,” I hear her say to the snake.

  Breathe.

  I am ridiculous, I know that. Among my worst fears is that my horse will unwittingly step on a small snake on the trail and I’ll be forced to pick a bloody segment of its body out of her hoof. If I have to pee at the barn, I open the Port-O-Let’s plastic door in minute increments, worried that a snake has squeezed through a crack to bask in the rank heat.

  When Diane says she’s afraid of snakes, she means that she is afraid of dangerous snakes, biting snakes, aggressive snakes. Delicate garter snakes don’t qualify.

  Fear and phobia are different planets, separated by vast, airless space.

  Snakebite is easy to avoid. Don’t step on a snake, don’t taunt a snake, don’t threaten a snake, and it won’t bite you. I often fail to notice pretty butterflies and birds because my eyes are glued to the ground. A twig lying in my path will knock my lungs into my shoes. My chances of mindlessly stepping on a snake are practically nil.

  Moreover, none of the snakes native to California could kill me with one bite. A perverse part of me hopes I’ll get bitten so I can prove to myself that the worst-case scenario isn’t that bad.

  But venom—which is to say, real danger—has nothing to do with this. When a startled snake whips into action, the ground itself appears to move. Solid becomes liquid. Inanimate becomes animate. Nothing is what you think it is. Nothing is safe.

  I keep returning to the false memory of my father’s snakebite.

  A grand mal epileptic with a penchant for going off his meds, he was profoundly unreliable and prone to sudden dramatic changes. He took LSD and peyote. He changed his name and then changed it back. When I was nine, he suffered a psychotic break, shaved all the hair off of his body and face, and plucked his eyelashes out.

  Because my dad’s instability disturbed me, I believed him snakebit. As if all things not what they seemed must be touched by snakes.

  In dreams, I walk gauntlets of coiled snakes. Snakes tangle in my hair. They bite my hands or my feet. They wriggle into my open mouth. I find snakes in my bed, in the ocean, in the car, in the sky. They invade good dreams and bad. Sometimes they are beautiful.

  At least one snake lurks in every dream I remember.

  Which is to say that if I have a dream without a snake, it’s forgettable, unimportant.

  Isn’t this persistent terror also a hope, also a call? By obsessing, I keep them close and present, inflating the importance of these humble, belly-walking creatures beyond reason. Again I think of my father, how parenthood temporarily transforms a half-broken person into a sort of god whose thoughtless gestures define his child’s world. It’s unfair to be a parent, unfair to be a child.

  And what did any snake ever do to me? Nothing. I’m the stalker.

  Kevin takes me to an upscale hotel restaurant offering a prix fixe menu of wild game
. It isn’t an anniversary or a birthday, but we dress up and celebrate, just because. Live jazz piano lilts through a room of low light and adult conversation. We sip a fine pinot noir bought on a road trip through Oregon before we married.

  Our black-tie server arrives with the appetizer. Crispy rattlesnake pot stickers with persimmon chutney. I stare at the golden-brown pockets of dough and meat. Just like chicken, I think, my heart quickening. Like chicken, like chicken. Acrid saliva swamps my tongue. The fork feels so light, if I let it go, it will float up to the ceiling.

  Kevin plucks his pot sticker barehanded, smears it through the chutney, and pops it into his mouth. “Mmm,” he says. “You’ll love it.”

  Being terrified of an appetizer is embarrassing.

  The standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. Eating this snake—digesting it, absorbing it—could be a step in the right direction. Using the side of my fork, I slice the pot sticker open, releasing a ghost of steam, and lift the morsel to my lips.

  It’s hot and bland on my tongue. I taste nothing, not even the chutney. But when I blink, I see the meat regenerating into a diamondback that will live enveloped in my intestines, eating what I eat, dreaming what I dream.

  Ducking, I spit the half-chewed bite into my cloth napkin, fold it tightly, and tuck it under my stockinged thigh. I push the plate toward my husband.

  He shrugs and pops my pot sticker into his mouth. “Your loss,” he says.

  Kevin and I are at Diamond Caverns in Cave City, Kentucky, approaching the visitor center to purchase tickets for a cave tour. A jet-black snake four feet long whips across the footpath in front of me and slips into the center’s decorative garden. I spin, making guttural noises, and speed-walk in the other direction. My husband grabs my shoulder, hoping to comfort me, but I cringe away from his hand. I feel turned inside out, as if my organs suddenly pulsed on the outside. I hyperventilate in the parking lot, until Kevin promises the snake is gone.