The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  It’s true, of course: the addict will probably never get another intervention like this—which is to say, on reality TV—but this is precisely the difference between the addict and his audience. For the regular viewer, the once-in-a-lifetime intervention happens every Monday night at nine. The unrepeatable is repeated. Every week is a relapse, the viewer thrown back into addiction after last week’s vow to stay clean. Epiphany is succeeded by another intoxication. A grown woman throws up on her mother’s couch once more. A needle jams into the same junked vein. Disturbance is promised, recorded, dissolved—then resurrected, so it can be healed again.

  Indigenous to the Hood

  Start the Gang Tour at a Silverlake building called the Dream Center, where grown adults cluster around the bus like kids on a field trip. Pay sixty-five dollars and take a complimentary bottled water. Notice the church group from Missouri, twenty-strong and blond, and eye their grocery bag full of snacks: Teddy Grahams, Pringles, Cheetos. Notice the surprising number of Australians. They pace restlessly. One of them is named Tiny, but he isn’t. He appears to be here with his son, a teenager in baggy shorts and braces.

  Alfred is the tour’s founder and guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. Like: “We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys.” Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. Alfred has hired three other guys to help lead the tour—ex-gang members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. Your sixty-five dollars will fund this work.

  Your friend the screenwriter arrives bearing a half-drunk chai that disappointed him. He compliments your tactful yellow dress, neither Crips blue nor Bloods red, and you remember elementary school field trips downtown. You and your fellow Westsiders were given careful instructions about gang hues. Your subconscious still follows them. The Missouri group leader is a buzz-cut guy whom Alfred affectionately calls Pastor. “Where’s Pastor?” he says, when he’s talking about something Pastor might be interested in.

  On board the bus, the jokes continue—“In the event of an emergency, you’ll find bulletproof vests under your seats”—but the scenery changes. Silverlake bungalows give way to the warehouses of downtown and the signage of a hybrid city—papuserías and pho shops, Spanglish enticements: Thrift Store y Café. 1-800-72-DADDY promises dads it can get them custody or at least visitation rights.

  Each guide stands at the front of the bus to tell his story. One guy, let’s call him Capricorn, points out the projects where his first girlfriend still lives. “Still won’t take my calls,” he says. Another guy lays down statistics: every felony, every sentence, every prison, how much coke he got busted for each time. One guy describes a brutal turf war on the first day of junior high, when the kids from three different elementary schools—each one loyal to a different gang—were all jammed together for the first time. They started clapping at each other until the police came. You think clapping is a kind of hand signal. You learn it’s not. You learn boys get their first guns when they’re eleven or twelve.

  You hear notes of something like nostalgia when these guys talk about their former lives—the weapons and arrests, the monstrous tallies of their cash flows. Pride comes before the fall and also after it. But the nostalgia is tangled up with a deep and genuine lamenting of the terms of this territory—how harshly it circumscribes the path, how inevitably it punishes alternatives. Things are different now, though. These men got out of prison and wanted another way. When Alfred says, “I’m a spiritual man,” you see him looking around to see if Pastor’s listening. His reform is operative on all fronts. He’ll tell you about his struggle for a bigger vocabulary: “I learned ‘gentrification’ in solitary”; “I practice pronouncing ‘recidivism’ in the shower.” He calls Capricorn’s life story “an indigenous tale from the hood.”

  Scholar Graham Huggan defines “exoticism” as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement.” You’re in the hood but you aren’t—it rolls by your windows, a perfect panorama of itself. We don’t do drive-bys. You just drive by.

  You pass the old LA County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It’s got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new LA County jail—called the Twin Towers—isn’t beautiful at all; it’s a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh. Alfred gets on the mic to talk about his time in there: ten guys in a cell designed for six, extra men moved to closets and kitchens whenever inspection teams rolled through. He talks about the rats. He calls them Freeway Freddies. It was an ecosystem in there, and out here too: you see an entire neighborhood selling bail bonds. You see Abba Bail Bonds and Jimmie Dright Jr. Bail Bonds and Big Dog a.k.a. I’m still tough Bail Bonds, and Aladdin a.k.a. I need my fucking third wish Bail Bonds. Bail bond shops remind you that every guy serving time has a mother and every mother probably has a story of that time she went to the bail bond strip mall and had no idea which bail bond shop to choose.

  From downtown, you head to South Central and finally to Watts. The towers are eerie and wondrous, like something a witch made, pointing ragged into a blue sky. Capricorn tells you he’s climbed them. Most kids in Watts have climbed them. A lot of guys get them tattooed on their backs or biceps—the distinctive profile of their bony cones. One of the Missouri girls asks, “What’re they made of?” and Capricorn says, “What does it look like they’re made of?”

  You like this kind of tour, where there is such a thing as a stupid question, though this—to you—doesn’t seem like one. What are they made of? Capricorn finally mutters, “Shells and shit.” He’s right, you find out later. They’re made of shells, steel, mortar, glass, and pottery. An immigrant named Simon Rodia made Italian folk art the template for generations of gang tats.

  Capricorn tells you he chose his name before he knew his zodiac sign. It happened to work out. He gets a call from a guy named Puppet but doesn’t take it. He says, “I can’t deal with that right now.” He tells you he still believes his phone is tapped—by whom, he doesn’t say—so he changes phones nearly every week, gives the old ones to his nieces and nephews. Your screenwriter friend says, “So now your nieces’ and nephews’ phones are tapped?” Capricorn doesn’t laugh. Your friend tells him you grew up here, in Santa Monica, and you feel ashamed because you know Santa Monica isn’t here at all.

  The here of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. Here is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” writes Susan Sontag, “is a quintessential modern experience.” Part of what feels strange about this tour is that you’re assuming the posture of a tourist—How many people have died here? How do the boys come of age?—but you are only eighteen miles from where you grew up.

  Alfred says more people have died in LA gang conflicts than the Troubles in Ireland. You’d never thought of it like that, which is his point: no one thinks of it like that. These blocks look so ordinary. South Central Avenue itself is just a gritty bracelet of strip malls and auto body shops; Watts is parched lawns that once burned. The here of Watts was on fire in 1965. Black boys who hadn’t gotten into the Boy Scouts were sick of it. They made their own clubs. Thirty-five thousand people rose up. People got sick of it again in 1992, when Rodney King was beaten and thousands of people, the children of the Watts riots, said enough. Reginald Denny with a brick to the head said enough.

  You try to remember what you thought about Rodney King when you were young, but you can’t. Is that possible? You can’t. You were nine years old. You can remember, faintly, that some part of you got stubborn about the police—but they only would’ve hit him if he did something wrong. You still wanted to belie
ve in uniforms and a system of order that had always served you well. You remember OJ Simpson better than King. OJ Simpson’s wife was killed in Brentwood, where you went to school.

  Rodney King was swarmed and then he was beaten. He suffered fifty-six baton blows. Two officers broke his face with their feet. Where were you back then? You were a kid. You were on the coast. Other kids had to be kids farther east, where people got angry at the corner of Florence and Normandie and stayed angry at the corner of Florence and Normandie, stayed angry at Koon and Powell and the paleness of Ventura County, and for days the fires wouldn’t stop.

  Your refrigerated bus crosses the concrete spine of the LA River, icon and encapsulation of the city’s wasteland shame. The gray banks are covered with patches of lighter gray where paint has been layered over graffiti. Alfred points out a long stretch of painted riverbank—three stories high, and three-quarters of a mile long—where the world’s biggest tag used to be. It read MTA: Metro Transit Assassins. It was visible from Google Space. Now the grayness is like a sprawling tombstone—another scar in a battle between two different structures of authority, two civic institutions trying to claim the same space.

  Alfred delivers a lesson on graffiti taxonomy: the difference between tag and flare and roller, between a masterpiece and a throw-up. A masterpiece has more than three colors. A throw-up usually means bubble letters but sounds more like some boy vomited the colors from his mouth. On a downtown wall, you see a painted face vomiting rainbows. Across the street, you see what looks like a polar bear illuminated by sunset. “Look at that throw-up,” you tell your screenwriter friend. “Masterpiece,” he corrects, pointing out five colors. You realize that three-story MTA would’ve been a masterpiece too. You learn that every graffiti act in the state of California is a felony. You learn that painted hot-chick skulls are called Sugar Skulls. You learn that three dots tattooed under the eye means la vida loca, as in: I plan to keep living the. You think those dots look like tears suspended against gravity. You don’t know whether they signal commitment or renunciation or something in between. Tiny’s teenage son asks Alfred, eager: “Were you much of a tagger?” He asks Capricorn if his family still lives in Watts, and—if so—if we’ll get to see them on the tour.

  The outing ends under a sultry Sugar Skull. You all pose for “gang shots” in front of a huge mural that says Big Los Angeles in bright blue bubble letters. Or maybe you don’t pose, because you feel uncomfortable. But the Aussie guys are psyched for it, flashing their hand signs and sporting tough-guy pouts. One girl from Missouri gets some backseat posing advice from her friends—“Look tough!”—but fucks it up because she can’t stop grinning. Pastor poses with the bus driver, who’s taken off his shirt to show an inked-up chest that has one rose for every year spent in prison. There’s not much bare skin left.

  This photo shoot feels like an odd capstone. You’ve come to understand gang violence as symptomatic of an abiding civil conflict whose proportions we can only begin to fathom; now you watch church kids fumble their fingers toward Eastside, toward Killaz. Maybe Pastor will change his Facebook profile to a shot of himself and Capricorn gripping palm-to-palm. “Photographs objectify,” Sontag writes, “they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed.” Now Pastor owns a small corner of the hood—or perhaps, more to the point, he owns a moment of his own experience. He can pack up his own heightened awareness like a souvenir. His opened eyes are take-home talismans. You want the tour to give you back another version of yourself, you and everyone: a more enlightened human.

  You imagine the sermon in Branson the next Sunday, Capricorn and Alfred like ghosts of glorious reform behind the pulpit. Maybe Pastor will say, These men turned a 180 you wouldn’t believe. Maybe his congregation will break the silence with their clapping.

  You’d clap for that sermon, actually. These men were raised into violence—raised by it, like a parent—and now they live another way. Is it possible to say—in the most full-hearted and deeply earnest sense, uncluttered by disclaimers—that this tour is impossible to look away from and important to remember?

  You feel uncomfortable. Your discomfort is the point. Friction rises from an asymmetry this tour makes plain: the material of your diverting morning is the material of other people’s lives, and their deaths. The unease of the tour is not the discomfort of being problematically present—South Central mediated by air-conditioning vents—so much as the discomfort of an abiding absence—a pattern of always being elsewhere, far away, our of ear- and eye- and gun-shot, humming beach to bistro along the Pacific Coast Highway.

  What good is this tour except that it offers an afterward? You’re just a tourist inside someone else’s suffering until you can’t get it out of your head; until you take it home with you—across a freeway, or a country, or an ocean. No bail to post: everything lingers. Puppet lingers. Those clapping seventh graders linger. Your own embarrassment lingers. Maybe moral outrage is just the culmination of an insoluble lingering. So prepare yourself to live in it for a while. Hydrate for the ride. The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.

  THE IMMORTAL HORIZON

  On the western edge of Frozen Head State Park, just before dawn, a man in a rust-brown trench coat blows a giant conch shell. Runners stir in their tents. They fill their water pouches. They tape their blisters. They eat thousand-calorie breakfasts: Pop-Tarts and candy bars and geriatric energy drinks. Some of them pray. Others ready their fanny packs. The man in the trench coat sits in an ergonomic lawn chair beside a famous yellow gate, holding a single cigarette. He calls the two-minute warning.

  The runners gather in front of him, stretching. They are about to travel a hundred miles through the wilderness—if they are strong and lucky enough to make it that far, which they probably aren’t. They wait anxiously. We, the watchers, wait anxiously. Pale light bleeds faintly across the sky. Next to me, a skinny girl holds a skinny dog. She has come all the way from Iowa to watch her father disappear into this gray dawn.

  All eyes are on the man in the trench coat. At precisely 7:12, he rises from his lawn chair and lights his cigarette. Once the tip glows red, the race known as the Barkley Marathons has begun.

  The first race was a prison break. On June 11, 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who shot Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and fled across the briar-bearded hills of northern Tennessee. Fifty-one-and-a-half hours later he was found. He’d gone about two kilometers. Some might hear this and wonder how he managed to squander his escape. One man heard this and thought: I need to see that terrain!

  Twenty years later, that man, the man in the trench coat—Gary Cantrell by birth, self-dubbed Lazarus Lake—has turned this terrain into the stage for a legendary ritual: the Barkley Marathons, held yearly (traditionally on either Lazarus Friday or April Fool’s Day) outside Wartburg, Tennessee. Lake (known as Laz) calls it “The Race That Eats Its Young.” The runners’ bibs say something different each year: Suffering without a point; Not all pain is gain. Only eight men have ever finished. The event is considered extreme even by those who specialize in extremity.

  What makes it so bad? No trail, for one. A cumulative elevation gain that’s nearly twice the height of Everest. Native flora called saw briars that can turn a man’s legs to raw meat in meters. The tough hills have names like Rat Jaw, Little Hell, Big Hell, Testicle Spectacle—this last so-called because it inspires most runners to make the sign of the cross (crotch to eyeglasses, then shoulder to shoulder)—not to mention Stallion Mountain, Bird Mountain, Coffin Springs, Zipline, and an uphill stretch, new this year, known simply as “The Bad Thing.”

  The race consists of five loops on a course that’s been officially listed at twenty miles but is probably more like twenty-six. The moral o
f this slanted truth is that standard metrics are irrelevant. The moral of a lot of Barkley’s slanted truths is that standard metrics are irrelevant. The laws of physics and human tolerance have been replaced by Laz’s personal whims. Even if the race were really “only” a hundred miles, these would still be “Barkley miles.” Guys who could typically finish a hundred miles in twenty hours might not finish a single loop here. If you finish three, you’ve completed what’s known as the Fun Run. If you happen not to finish—and, let’s face it, you probably won’t—Laz will play bugle Taps to commemorate your quitting. The whole camp, shifting and dirty and tired, will listen, except for those who are asleep or too weak to notice, who won’t.

  It’s no easy feat to get here. There are no published entry requirements or procedures. It helps to know someone. Admissions are decided by Laz’s personal discretion, and his application isn’t exactly standard, with questions like “What is your favorite parasite?” and a required essay with the subject: “Why I Should Be Allowed to Run the Barkley.” Only thirty-five entrants are admitted. This year, one of them is my brother.

  Julian is a “virgin,” one of fifteen newbies who will do their damnedest to finish a loop. He has managed to escape the designation of “human sacrifice,” officially applied to the virgin each year (usually the least experienced ultrarunner) whom Laz has deemed most likely to fail in a spectacular fashion—to get lost for so long, perhaps, that he manages to beat Dan Baglione’s course record for slowest pace: at the age of seventy-five, in 2006, he managed two miles in thirty-two hours. Something to do with an unscrewed flashlight cap, an unexpected creek.