by Anna Journey
The last time I saw Carrick perform we’d been broken up for a couple of months. We’d continued to live together in Houston, where we’d moved three years earlier so I could earn my PhD in creative writing and literature. We slept in separate bedrooms but met up nightly for dinner as we finished the final months of our respective graduate degrees. I think we knew that one—or both—of us might not finish up if we suddenly abandoned our routines. Over the past few years I’d watched Carrick morph from an exuberant jazz musician in VCU’s robust, experimental department into a stricken MA student in bass performance and pedagogy at the University of Houston’s small, conservative program. Carrick’s instructors sneered at improvisatory techniques and pushed him to play mainly classical music, a period in which he felt constrained, alienated, less himself. But wasn’t this the city of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Barrie Lee Hall? Where the hell had I dragged Carrick? The conflict now seems an echo of that clash from fifteen years earlier, when his mother tried to mold him into a concert violinist and he rebelled, only this time he’d made the opposite decision: he’d quit his bands, moved with me to Texas, and, in service to his master’s degree, he’d left blues, jazz, and bluegrass behind.
As a playful yet pointed fuck-you to the program, Carrick planned to bow the closing classical composition (I’ve forgotten which one) during his thesis performance while wearing a full-length white rabbit suit, channeling Mozart as a lunatic Easter bunny. I wanted to stay for the spectacle, but I needed to slip from my aisle seat early to meet the delivery guy who was scheduled to bring several aluminum troughs of pulled pork, brioche buns, and coleslaw for the after-party. As I lugged the hot tins of barbecue past the auditorium’s closed double doors I couldn’t make out any muffled bass notes, but I could hear the audience suddenly roar and clap.
After the reception we walked back to the car through the dark parking lot. Carrick rolled his upright on its tiny endpin wheel over the asphalt while I carried the white bunny suit slung over one shoulder like a hide. Excited from the rush of performing, he grabbed my hand and swung it back and forth through the air as if we were kids charging across a playground. “Let’s give things another shot,” he said, turning to me. I looked away and shook my head. “I can’t,” I answered, letting go of his hand.
A couple of weeks before we left Texas, Carrick and I had divided up our possessions and taped shut our cardboard boxes: each one labeled with either my name or his and our different destinations. We then flew to our separate hometowns to visit our families for Thanksgiving. During this time Carrick learned from a mutual friend about the affair I’d had two months earlier that had catalyzed my motivation for the breakup. The friend had e-mailed me an ugly, judgmental diatribe. I instinctively knew from the gratuitous details—dates, locations, hotels—that he’d blind-copied Carrick. He called me immediately. Like the gleeful “Wheeee!” he’d once squalled from the station wagon as it spun over black ice, he opened that final phone call by announcing, theatrically, “Happy Thanksgiving!” I let out a surprised laugh before I sighed. I realized I’d just heard the last joke Carrick would ever tell me. The rest of that conversation remains a stunned, adrenal haze. Did I make excuses? Stutter apologies? I think I asked if he would call me again and he said he didn’t know, his voice fraught and exhausted. “I don’t want to hear this!” he finally cried, interrupting me, and abruptly hung up.
He soon moved back to Virginia and I took a teaching job in California. He took all of the instruments and I packed the ceramic pots. I noticed Carrick had left behind our stemless wineglasses and wondered if it was because their rims carried the faint coral prints of my lower lip. I slipped an acquaintance our three-foot avocado—the one I’d grown from a toothpicked seed and defended from fruit flies with an invisible troop of mail-ordered nematodes. Since that cold, late November, each time I encounter an upright bass, one body conjures the other—an obvious metonymy. For the first couple of years after the breakup I felt downright implicated in the presence of a string bass. At shows, while the other musicians took turns soloing on piano or mandolin or sax, I’d be gazing the other way, locked in a private spat with the apparition of my missing bassist. Each note seemed to thump out a jazzier version of Poe’s pulsing “Tell-Tale Heart.” You’re an asshole, a slapped G would sing at me. You cheated and you lied, went the melody. Even if a bass player was clean-shaven and tall and looked nothing at all like Carrick, I’d see my former boyfriend in the way the other musician braced his thumb against the fingerboard or tipped the instrument against his left hip. But the reaction I know would amuse Carrick the most for its screwball panache is this one: whenever I’d see TV cowboys swagger across the screen in old Westerns, their dusty gun holsters reminded me of the quiver-style leather bow holder Carrick would tie to his own thigh at bluegrass shows so he could reach down and slide the stick from the pouch without losing time.
What do I do with all of my lost time? With the relationship that took up most of my twenties the way one of Carrick’s basses filled a whole corner of our kitchen? We were together for seven years and we haven’t spoken once since the awful phone call. Now it seems to me that my twenties were as disproportionate and hulking and lovely as Carrick’s upright bass, when he’d fit his endpin wheel into the bottom of the instrument so he could roll the whole thing down the sidewalk. The wheeled bass looked like a sumo wrestler wavering on a unicycle or one of Remedios Varo’s surrealist paintings of people with wheels instead of legs. Who knew some relationships are like this—a string bass rolling, elephantine on a single wheel, until a person lets go of the shoulders, releases the neck, lets the body drop?
One of our favorite winter walks in Richmond was the three-mile loop from our house on South Cherry through the branching streets of the Fan district (which unfolds on a map in the shape of an antique silk fan) to Video Fan on Strawberry. After choosing a movie we’d swing by Strawberry Street Market to pick up dinner, where Carrick had a shtick going with the funny gay clerk who served fried chicken and vinegar-soaked greens at the deli counter. They’d developed a good-natured butch/femme routine in which they each played to their own stereotype: Carrick’s burly mountain redneck to the clerk’s effeminate preening queen. Carrick would demand to know the clerk’s secret collards recipe, shaking his fist like a cartoon villain, and the clerk would sniff, toss his head as he reached for the greens with his metal tongs, and coyly refuse to give up the ingredients. At first the shtick embarrassed me, but I soon learned I could either stand there looking foolish or laugh.
I don’t believe in ghosts, though I’m easily spooked. I don’t know if the orthodontist’s office in the old Victorian was haunted. I do know that the upright bass kept implicating me with its fraught embodiment of Carrick and the way it continued to play my former relationship’s most painful notes. I’m not sure when I began to hear welcoming melodies rather than caustic ones vibrate from an upright’s f-holes, or when I started to recognize in the instrument not an enemy but the shape of an old friend. Now when I hear the walking bass line twang during “Dark Hollow” I recall that winding hike Carrick and I took up to Blackwater Falls: the cool shadows scattered from the oak canopy, the toffee-colored tannic water crashing over rock. The bluegrass standard “Little Maggie” brings back the dancing kids flat-footing to a wild tenor banjo solo at the Purple Fiddle and the rich taste of that sandwich on rye I’d order before gigs: grilled provolone, cheddar, cream cheese, and tomato with balsamic. I imagine I won’t ever encounter a band’s cover of “Who Flung Poo” at a random show, though sometimes I hear that repeating “Wheeee!” trill from a sudden incongruity—something bizarre or weird a student says that seems unintentionally funny. And sometimes I think of Carrick’s final farewell, which used to jolt my gut with a smoldering guilt but now comforts me: that handwritten note he’d tucked into a box I’d packed after our Thanksgiving phone call. It doesn’t matter what you did or how big you fucked up, he wrote. Everyone deserves kindness. Life is worth living. You have work
to do.
MODIFYING THE BADGER
Transforming a badger into a raccoon demands a Dremel tool and at least two types of saws. For my second class at Prey Taxidermy—the studio in downtown Los Angeles run by the taxidermist and former Disney employee Allis Markham—I’d signed up for the Sunday workshop called Mammal Shoulder Mounts. Because my creature’s hide belonged to an older male raccoon—a boar—I needed to modify a cast polyurethane badger form to fit the skin, since a standard raccoon form would be too small for my imposing specimen. The goal of the course was to “focus on the intricacies of mammal faces” and involved the arrangement of skinned and tanned hides over commercial taxidermy forms to create busts known as “shoulder mounts.” I’d chosen a raccoon instead of a coyote since the grizzled canines reminded me of underfed German shepherds. I admired a previously mounted raccoon hanging on the wall near the studio’s sink for its subversive whimsy: it was as if someone considered the scrappy mammal a noble trophy, a hunter’s graceful whitetail stag. Instead, the animal, peering down from a wooden wall plaque through its black bandit’s mask, challenged viewers to contemplate the artfulness of California roadkill or the charm of garbage can invaders exterminated by Salt Lake City’s Animal Services.
Tim Bovard, the head taxidermist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was guest teaching the mammal course at Allis’s studio. He asked the eight students to draw numbers from a bowl so we could take turns picking our hides. (Upon registration online, we’d been asked to check a box marked “Coyote” or “Raccoon” to reserve our preferred species.) Similarly to my first taxidermy course at Prey, a weekend workshop called Birds 101, in which only one of ten students was male, the participants in Mammal Shoulder Mounts were all women: an amateur boxer in her twenties who specialized in anthropomorphic mice, a middle-aged hippie with a brass peace sign belt buckle, a mother and daughter duo from Montana, a blue-haired thirty-something, a wisecracking Southerner, a quiet San Francisco barista, and a woman with tattooed arms and what appeared to be collagen-injected lips and huge silicone boobs at which I kept accidentally staring (she’d gotten the only available bobcat). Tim passed a bowl around the room, and I drew a folded slip of paper marked with the number one, which meant I got first dibs on the raccoon hides. The pelts resembled a stash of hand puppets from someone’s nightmare: eyeless raccoons and coyotes with scabrous lids, slack mouths, and lips like the jagged hems of gnawed-on leather gloves. Because Tim had mentioned that the person who chose the large boar raccoon would need to modify a badger form to fit the skin, I immediately seized the hole-filled hide, its yellowed fur streaked with white. I liked the idea of my animal being a shapeshifter.
A few months ago, my former poetry mentor Lee visited my husband David and me in Venice, California. We’d invited him to give a reading at our university in celebration of his new book. After Lee finished his last poem and the audience clapped, students began raising their hands. One woman asked Lee’s advice for people who have difficultly writing about themselves. “That’s a rare problem!” Lee joked from the podium, removing his teal-rimmed reading glasses and then pushing them back up his nose. “There is no one self,” he continued, now serious. “We’re always inventing ourselves in poems, so to write about the self is to write about multiple selves. The self is malleable.”
For years Lee dissuaded me from writing autobiographically. He encouraged me to model my work after that of his favorite contemporary poet, Norman Dubie, a writer who often assumes the voices of historical figures or invented characters in the form of the dramatic monologue. Dubie might speak through the mask of an escaped slave, a young woman in a leper colony, or an insomniac racecar driver. The reason Lee asks young poets to write persona poems, he explained to the attendees, is that “stepping into other people’s skins allows them to realize that when they write about themselves it’s actually a created personality.” “Your own self,” he added, “is one of many selves. We’re not always the same person.”
The adjective personal, from the Latin personalis (“of a person”), has a number of meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, these include: “belonging to a particular person rather than to anyone else”; “of or concerning one’s private life, relationships, and emotions rather than one’s public or professional career”; “relating to a person’s body”; and “existing as a self-aware entity, not as an abstraction or an impersonal force.”
In C. D. Wright’s poem “Personals,” the author creates, through juxtaposition, an assemblage of luminous details that compose a self—multivalent and fragmentary. Wright also slyly subverts the conventions of the genre of the personal ad—its generalizations and idealizations—with her assortment of singular desires, charming idiosyncrasies, strange memories, and intimate confessions. Instead of claiming to like movies or long walks on the beach, Wright’s candid, deadpan speaker announces, as if in the context of a newspaper’s oddest personals column:
Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth
are small and even. I don’t get headaches.
Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench
where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.
If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,
I’d meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could
have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.
Do not lie or lean on me. I’m still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn’t better suited.
I’ve seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish
like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.
Which reminds me of a little-known fact:
if we were going the speed of light, this dome
would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.
Isn’t the road crooked and steep.
In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I’m not one
among millions who saw Monroe’s face
in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.
If I could afford it I’d live in hotels. I won awards
in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.
Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him
Eve. Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.
Through accumulation and refraction, Wright’s slivers of personal history in “Personals” expand into a larger social matrix, a collection of artifacts linked to the speaker of the poem, but also to the history and cultural heritage of the United Kingdom and the United States: the tragic figures of Admiral Benbow of the Royal Navy and Marilyn Monroe, the shapeshifting craters of the moon’s face, ominous echoes of an anthropomorphic road sign (“Danger, shoulder soft”), and Bill Withers’s lyrics, warped and eerie (“Do not lie or lean on me”). Wright’s last line directly addresses the anonymous reader of the personal ad (as well as the reader of the poem) through a witty evasion: “Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.” In “Personals,” Wright implies that what makes up a self, body, private life, or personal force is that unique mixture of pathos and humor, revelation and concealment, banality and wonder. She transforms the impersonal character of a simple “lonely hearts” ad into the complex and intimate helix of a deeply layered self.
Madison Rubin, Tim’s apprentice at the Natural History Museum, a woman who grew up in LA’s Brewery Art Colony, told me that she’d modified several taxidermy forms to suit the skins of incongruous creatures. She’d made a llama and an alpaca, each out of a deer form, by elongating the ruminants’ necks. And she’d radically reduced the scale of a fawn form to make a white-eyed baby goat for a Satanic altar.
Before his thirty-year museum career, Tim had worked for a time as a commercial taxidermist, creating trophy mounts for hunters. He warned us that the worst thing a person could do to fishermen’s catch was to mount and return the fish at exactly the same size—he regularly enlarged specimens to buoy the hunt
ers’ pride. But even with enlargement, it’s better to have a slightly smaller form to work with, Tim noted, since looser skin is easier to move around than a tightly fitting hide.
The tanned hides of my classmates’ coyotes smelled like wet dogs and dill pickles. I was surprised that my raccoon skin didn’t give off much of a scent—just the slightest musk of truffle oil or dusty attic. The jumble of polyurethane taxidermy forms the color of old elephant tusks sat on top of the industrial fridge. They had a waxy patina and looked like a herd of phantom animals of indeterminate species, partial-bodied and born without ears or eyes. The angular coyote forms resembled the blond ghosts of greyhounds, and the chubby raccoons recalled small albino seals. In order to turn my fat badger form into that of a slightly slimmer boar raccoon, I needed to slice off the sides of its broad, wedge-shaped skull with a circular saw, shorten the snout with a handsaw, narrow the jowls with a metal file, carve out new eye sockets and define the lip line with a Dremel tool, and sand down the rough edges to give the remade face “flow.”
In order to sculpt realistic expressions while taxidermying our mammals—alertness, curiosity, sleepiness, fear—we needed to scratch the smooth surfaces of the animal forms with a wire brush before gluing down our skins. This way, Tim said, the sticky, purple hide paste (which looked like buttercream icing dyed mauve and smelled like vanilla) would bind more securely to the polyurethane. And a firm bond better enables the skin to “hold the detail” as the taxidermist shapes it around simulated muscles—the bulge of a cheek or upward jut of a chin—making the face expressive, supple, and seemingly alive.