“I’m not all panicky. And if I am, it’s not about grass.”
“You seem pretty damned jumpy. I almost detect a line of sweat on your brow. Or is it your personal glow?” He smiled, his teeth as white as a laser polish delivered. “Let’s take a walk. Come on.”
“It’s raining.” I looked at my feet. “And I don’t have the right shoes.”
He held up his left foot, shod in a gray suede number probably costing three hundred dollars. “I don’t even own the right shoes. We’ll stick to the concrete.”
“Oh, all right.”
What I wanted to do was go back home and roll a joint. I was panicky. These altercations with Bill were starting to wear on me and any excitement about the possibility of a show had turned to tension and dread. I was completely dependent on Bill for this project. Dependent on a man: something I’d vowed never to be and yet increasingly was. What were the chances I could find another mortician who’d provide me with bodies should Bill pull out? Black bodies. Young, black bodies dressed for a night on the town. The chances were zero. Zip. I was screwed if I couldn’t keep him on Team Violet. And no new ideas were coming down the pike. I was like car-happy Detroit: an entity with but one idea.
Plus I hated the thought of a breakup; I’d been with Bill two years. Familiarity had become attractive. Maybe I was getting old, soft. Coming home at night to a friendly face seemed like a good idea. Had I ever come home to a friendly face before? Bunny’d always been at work. Was an urge for domesticity seeping into my soul? Would a kitten be my next passion? Buck up, I told myself. It’ll never happen. Who would stick with me forever after?
“I want to walk through the conservatory while we’re here,” Diogenes was saying. “I’d like to see what plants they’re exhibiting. Need a few new ideas for the teensy garden on the side of my house. The shade is killing the miniature lilac…”
“The conservatory? Isn’t that like a greenhouse? Is that where we’re headed?”
I stopped in my tracks—and they were tracks. Despite the concrete, my feet were leaving a trail of mud. “Christ, Di, I don’t have time for trip through a greenhouse. I got film to process…”
“It’ll wait.” He grabbed my hand and tugged. “We’re practically there. Come on.” He looked at me sadly. “Have you ever had your own garden, kiddo? No, I guess not, living in apartments like you do. My poor little Vi. I’m gonna buy you a houseplant.”
“Had one once and it didn’t make it through the night.”
Di smiled, and I admired his teeth again.
“Jeez, those teeth are white. You gotta be careful, Di or they’ll make your skin look sallow.”
“It couldn’t have been your fault if it died overnight. It was probably a bum plant with no root system to sustain it. You should’ve taken it back. Bet you bought it at Home Depot.”
“It was before the days of Home Depot. Kresge’s I think. I lived in a row house for a while when I was a kid. But no garden. Bunny never had time to plant flowers. Barely had grass.”
I wondered if I could identify more than five or six kinds of flowers. It was embarrassing. The only ones I knew were used at weddings. “Go over and stand by the—roses?” I’d suggest to the bridesmaids.
The bride’s mother usually set me straight. “Carnations, dear.”
“Kind of sad for a woman named after a flower,” Diogenes noted as we arrived at the conservatory, the best-maintained building on the island.
Funny no bride had ever asked to be photographed in here. Probably not enough room for pictures anyway with all the flowers. Too many flowers shouted funeral. Or had before the charitable donations in lieu of flowers trend took over. And the lighting was iffy in the greenhouse.
“My father’s idea,” I explained, “naming both of us for flowers. His last expression of interest in the coming birth.”
Di slapped his forehead. “Right, a father. I always imagine you coming barreling out of Bunny fully formed and fuming. Cal Hart, right?”
“Hal.”
I couldn’t believe I’d mentioned my father. Maybe it was the proximity to flowers making me go soft. We walked through the main door where an African-American woman wearing a bright pink slicker and hat sat solemnly at a Formica table. A trickle of water from the leaking glass panel above dripped on her head, but she seemed unconcerned.
“Can I ask you two to put your names and zips down here,” the woman said, smiling up at us and pushing a clipboard forward.
Diogenes quickly grabbed the pen and added his name to the list. I scribbled an illegible name and a fictitious zip below his—always sure I was being tracked. Funny it was the drug dealer who was unconcerned.
Di’d already passed through the door and slipped into a cacti display.
“I bet the plants occasionally swallow a visitor and they need the information for identification,” I joked, half-believing it as I looked around.
“Never mind the jokes. Sit down right there and breathe it all in,” he said, pointing to a bench.
“Smells exactly like it did outside. Whole island’s crazy with the green stuff. I can hardly breathe.”
It was quiet except for the sound of dripping water. I looked down at my shoes and slid the bottoms across the floor, trying to remove the mud. It made a rude noise and a man on the other side of a large tree peeked around and shot me a disapproving look.
“True,” Di responded, taking in his surroundings with a Zen sort of pose. “In winter, it’s more startling than now.”
“Startling?” I looked around. Plants, rocks, water, and little else. What you’d expect to see in a greenhouse. Or whatever he’d called it. A conservatory. I’d thought a conservatory was a place you learned to play a piano.
“So what’s going on with you, Vi?”
“Nothing.”
He sat down and squeezed my hand.
“Okay, okay.” I pulled my hand away. “Well, I’m still working on that project I told you about.”
“The dead bodies?”
I nodded and found myself telling him more about the project despite my pledge to keep it secret. If I failed at this…
“This is starting to remind me of your shopping cart debacle,” he said with a shudder. “That one got a little dangerous, didn’t it?”
I nodded, having known he’d bring it up.
When I first returned to Detroit after a year in Chicago and two or so in New York, I came up with the idea of photographing shopping carts of the homeless. More than one of the shopping cart owners had come after me too, thinking I was trying to steal their stuff or expose them to—to what—ridicule? Most of the homeless people believed their cart was like a house, identifiable to the onlooker. Distinctive. Personal.
After I finished developing the first half-dozen photographs, I realized the carts were completely indistinguishable from each other—in a photograph, at least. Each photo showed a cart piled high with clothing, blankets, spare dishes, the stuff of dumpsters; you quickly lost any sense of individual items, individual people. It looked like I was making a sort of cruel, crude, and artless comment. Once again, the social commentary I fled from. And what it taught me—which I should’ve known—was the means to their survival rested inside those carts. Or, on another level, their home. So the only message was political—not artistic.
I fooled around with the idea of creating my own shopping carts for a while, tried it once or twice, but even those carts—more creatively assembled than the real thing—looked dull on film. And the lack of authenticity bugged me. Although many photographers stage their work, this seemed particularly tasteless. Pose the rich if you’re going to orchestrate it.
Any attempt to persuade the cart owners to stand next to their carts was completely out of the question. I’d begun to have nightmares about being surrounded by faceless people with shopping carts. It was like a scene out of a zombie movie. So the whole idea was a bust, and I never sold a single picture. I didn’t try very hard, not liking any enough to take along to
an art fair or a Christmas bazaar. Actually I was afraid those photos would turn people off to my work altogether. I swore I wouldn’t go near a project that used people in that way again. Were dead people any less vulnerable, less open to being used, than homeless ones?
The spare closet was going to need to be a lot bigger if success didn’t come soon. It was more than a little depressing to see the sea of envelopes waving to me when I opened that door.
The most distinctive thing about the carts had been the streets they sat on, often the most dilapidated blocks of Detroit. Even then, in the early 2000s, the streets in Detroit were apocalyptic. Now—well, what’s the next stage? Post-apocalyptic implies bodies, disease, fire. I guess we’d arrived.
But that’s when I first got the idea of photographing the demise of apartment houses. Apartment houses from the twenties and thirties were architecturally interesting—or what was left of them. There was a period when middle-class people were sometimes apartment dwellers. Even in Detroit, traditionally a city of home owners. Maybe it was the Depression that made home ownership iffy. And the idea of all those abandoned apartment houses—little ones mostly with four to eight flats, places once desirable—was poignant.
Or so I’d thought. Funny how I seemed to move in circles leading nowhere. Or how I stumbled onto signifiers of a society gone bust and tried to make it art without making an overt political or sociological statement. Good ideas turned to smoke in my hands. Di was probably talking about the problem of exploiting people again, the possibility of getting myself into a dangerous situation, being open to lawsuits or physical harm.
“I’ve got waivers from all of them. Their families, I mean. Bill’s attorney drew up an airtight contract. Actually the families seem to get a degree of consolation from the pictures. Or sort of.”
“And what if a lover or a neighbor or a friend—a person you didn’t ask to sign a form, someone else—sees the photo and objects?”
“Well, a photographer runs that risk, doesn’t she?” I hadn’t thought of that. The idea an objection could come from another quarter: an old lover, a friend, the guy down the street.
“Look, you’d be surprised by how much people like the pictures,” I repeated. “The families, that is. They’ve all asked for copies.” Di shivered noticeably. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about it. They’re respectful. Not nasty-looking, like you seem to think. Come up and see them.”
“You scare me, girl. What you’re willing to do. The places you go. Roaming around here at six in the morning? Having run-ins with cops?” He stood up and stretched. “I’m breathing better already. A little chlorophyll can do wonders.”
I sighed, rising too. “So what’s new with you anyway? Still seeing Alberto?”
He shook his head. “We’ve been seeing each other for years, Six.” The nickname “Six” dated from our days at the Center for Creative Studies. VI was, of course, the Roman numeral for six. On occasion, I called him Five-Oh-One for Di although that sounded like those eighties jeans. Pretty Star Trekian and the names were definitely part of our nineties days, but we’d been geeks. Geeks who thought we were cool, of course. Cool art, cool music, books, clothes. It was the two of us against the world…for a while. But after a point, it became dysfunctional. Only the Millennials, the generation that came after X, might remain children forever.
“Why do you insist on thinking of me as promiscuous? You’re the one who drifts from relationship to relationship. So does any of this do anything for you?” He motioned to the plants as we prepared to leave. “Does it change your outlook, soothe your soul?”
“I guess not a lot. Urban girl with feet of concrete.”
“Any number of photographers take pictures of flowers.”
“Unless you’re O’Keeffe, it’s damned hard to make something interesting out of a flower. Hard to make it more than pretty. The two-dimensionalness of it on paper, I think. And O’Keeffe, if that’s who you mean, painted them. It gave her a lot more freedom; there’s a more tactile feel to paint. She invented those flowers.” I paused. “I never dug what’s his name, for instance. Ansel Adams. Calendar art. Static.”
He held the door open and I passed through. It was raining harder now and we both ran for our cars. Ahead, Diogenes seemed to run a bit above the ground. He should’ve been a dancer, but his cooking was pretty fine too. I slipped and nearly fell; he turned around to grin at me as I suddenly shrieked.
“You almost sounded like a girl for a minute, Violet.”
The water streamed from either side of his rain hat, but he still looked impeccable. Whereas I was smeared with mud, moss, dirt from top to bottom.
“Probably from being around you too much.” I threw him what I hoped looked like a playful smile. “Hey, why don’t you come up and see them, Di?” He looked at me quizzically. “The photographs, I mean.”
“Another day, chica. Gotta get back to work.” He climbed into his two-toned Mini Cooper. “Be careful, will you?”
“Of what?” I said, trying to get my keyless lock to work. Humidity seemed to confound it.
“It’s Detroit, remember.”
I went home and rolled a joint—more out of habit than need. I wondered if the greenhouse had done the trick. Maybe I should buy a plant. Maybe take pictures of plants. There’d been a grotesque feel to the greenhouse: the plants growing so thickly you couldn’t see past them. Sucking all the light from the sky, casting huge shadows, men hiding behind gargantuan leaves, women in pink rubber asking for your zip code without saying why.
My mind slowly returned to the carts of the homeless. You didn’t see the towering carts as much anymore in Detroit. Had times gotten so bad the homeless had nothing left to push around? Were both the people and their carts in the Detroit River, the way New Yorkers claimed their homeless had been tossed in the East River. Maybe Bill would know.
Detroit Free Press: Albert Flowers, age 38, died last night after a struggle with Southwestern Mall guard Pedro Juarez. The fatal scuffle took place after the security guard accused Flowers’ stepdaughter of stealing makeup from a Target department store in the mall. Flowers died from suffocation, which occurred when Juarez held him in a headlock while the stepdaughter was being restrained by another guard. Local officials are considering whether manslaughter charges should be filed. The Flowers family is considering filing a lawsuit against the guard.
(July 2011)
“I don’t give a shit whether his wife signed the form, Violet. I’m reluctant to get mixed up with these people. They’ve already shown themselves to be a litigious bunch.” Bill sighed heavily. “Guy’s not in his grave and they’re talking about filing lawsuits. The Free Press hinted the video’s going to back up the store’s claim she was stealing cosmetics.”
It was Bill on the phone about an hour after he called to tell me he’d be picking up the body, and I could come down later to photograph him.
“Little idiot had a boatload of cheap beauty products in her bag. You gonna steal cosmetics, go to a tonier store. I use far better products than that on a corpse.”
Having once been a teenager who stole more cheap beauty products than I liked to remember, I held my tongue. Girls like her, or the one I was once, would never make it past the front door of a store that carried high-end stuff. But there was one fact kids didn’t understand. Low-end stores were more skilled in ferreting out theft and much more likely to prosecute. Tony stores didn’t want the publicity.
“If it were up to you, William, I wouldn’t have any photos except the one of the rugby player. That’s ’cause you needed me to take it.”
“I can feel you sticking out your tongue, girl. Life doesn’t always work out. I keep tellin’ you that.”
“Let me take a few pictures. I’ll be in and out in a flash. You can’t be second-guessing what’s going to happen years down the road. And what would my stuff have to do with a lawsuit anyway? My photos wouldn’t be used as evidence. The police photographer’s work goes to court. So too, the coroner’
s records. By the time, I come on the scene, the body’s been corrupted. Wouldn’t make either side’s case in any lawsuit. The body’s tainted by you too, as a matter of fact. You corrupt bodies pretty good.”
This long harangue won me a half-hearted laugh, and after a lot more cajoling, and quite frankly begging, Bill agreed, and I broke my record for getting to his place.
The deceased was dressed in a marine uniform. “So he no sooner came home from Iraq and this happened?”
“No, no, the uniform’s at least fifteen years old. Served in the Gulf War,” Bill said, sitting on the sofa and flipping through one of his burgundy books. When he looked up and saw my blank look, he sighed. “Desert Storm? Daddy Bush’s war. To keep Saddam out of Kuwait. Any of this history ringing a bell?”
“Right,” I said, taking the first shot. “I forgot. I was like a kid. So were you.”
Bill shook his head in despair. “You have no idea what’s going on, sugar, do you? Ever heard of Kuwait? How about the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Or ‘the war on terrorism’?” He threw this out and rubbed his eyes. “How about Nine/Eleven?”
I wasn’t listening anymore; I was thinking the uniform would make a nice change from the hoopla of peacock-blue shirts and velvet jackets. “Bill, has anyone ever sent a body back to you from the Middle East? A soldier, I mean.”
“Not yet.” He continued to page through his binder. “And I hope the day doesn’t come.” He looked up. “The military takes care of its own mostly.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d let me know about the death of a soldier or not. It was the possibility of bodies I’d never laid eyes on—ones where Bill knew the family too well, or didn’t want to tackle the contract issue—that gnawed at me. Deaths seeming inappropriate, unseemly, inconvenient to photograph to Bill. This hadn’t occurred to me before now. Was he holding out?
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