by Jan Richman
I, along with a dozen other docile tourists, follow.
The chamber is a windowless room painted in bruise-purple blacklight paint, spangled with hundreds of wobbly silver stars. It’s basically an extremely poor man’s planetarium. Whoever was responsible for mural-izing the universe didn’t bother to sand down the remarkably uneven plaster walls, so when the lights snap off and the wondrous depths of the five-sided universe glow silver and spectral, the crack of light flowing in from under the double doors reveals numerous spooky ruts and gullies, giving the entire cosmos an acne-scarred complexion. Plus, as my gaze wanders around the room, I notice the mural’s lack of adherence to astronomy as we know it. Stars are clustered together in unrecognizable cliques and blobs, and none of the planets I do manage to spot have moons or rings or gauzy haloes. The Milky Way—the only familiar cosmological flagpost—was done with gray paint and a roller, more of a milky stripe than a way, really, careening down the rocky terrain of the ceiling like an arduous bike path.
A kid in a fedora and suspenders steps out into a spotlight to tell us that it’s 1820 and he’s confused about the true church. The costumery budget for Mormons: Our Journey appears to be sorely lacking; the fedora is a couple of sizes too big and the suspenders are too short. Unfortunately, the disparate sizing only serves to exacerbate the teenager’s teenagerness—his head is comically childlike, bobbing balloonishly on his spindly neck, while his torso is burgeoning. It is all but impossible not to stare at his crotch, as the whole area has been unwittingly hoisted front and center like a shipmate’s small but tightly packed duffel bag. The script is awkward and long-winded, emphasizing the young man’s quivering ineptitude in the face of religious revivalism, peppered with phrases like “God’s treasures” and “corrupt living” (according to the Lonely Planet Guide I’d brought with me, Smith’s chief source of income as a youth was hiring himself out to local farmers to help them find buried treasure by the use of “seer stones”). Finally, he decides to pray to the Lord God, asking guidance in the matter of what church to join.
The Lord, sans fanny pack, answers his call faster than most 911 operators, bringing along his bitch, Christ. When the two make their entrance, the fluorescents are cranked back on abruptly via the wall switch by the door, and I have a flashbulb-popping vision of my own. Let there be light, indeed. The stark and sudden illumination of the pockmarked heavens leads us into an interrogation scene, in which Smith is cross-examined rigorously and with much lively eyebrow action. Dad and Junior tag-team Joe pretty harshly, upstaging each other with community theater euphony and a penchant for sweeping, Biblical gestures. Eventually, they are satisfied with his alibi (“I always suspected I was a prophet, but no one ever confirmed it!”) and forgive him for being such a lousy servant.
“You, Joseph Smith, are an augur and a seer! You alone will bring forth the true church!” they shout in unison while jamming onto the youth’s wincing face a pair of granny glasses God had apparently stashed in one of the many folds of his voluminous robe. “Your eyes will read my words,” stage-whispers God, with a catch in his voice, “and translate my truth.”
Just then two kids scurry to the edge of the stage holding what appear to be styrofoam tombstones. They throw them onto the stage and then, looking sheepish, kick at the prophetic tablets until they creep nearer to the silvery lines of reflective tape placed on the floor.
“Ah,” says Smith, after a brief time-out to yank and prod at his suspended groin area, “What’s this?” He walks over to one of the white “stone” slabs and picks it up with one hand as though it’s a box of Cheeri-os. He even tosses it back and forth between his hands nervously for a moment. Examining the spidery black nonsense Sharpied onto the sides of the tablet, the boy adjusts his John Lennon specs and declares, “Hmmm, strange-looking words ... ‘The Book of Mormon’ ... well, I’d better get to work!”
Across the stage God and Jesus give each other a satisfied “our work here is done” high five, and someone hits the wall switch, plunging us back into faithless semi-darkness.
Furry is sitting alone on the front step of his hut, head in hands, when I walk by. He’s back in his orange coverall, bunny-earless. His hair has been pulled out of its slim Willie Nelson pigtail braids, and it spills in a crimpy gray curtain over his forearms. I can’t tell whether he’s asleep or just meditating, so I stop short a few feet away from him and whisper, “Furry?”
His head lifts off of his fingertips for an instant, alert to the sound of my voice, and he glances at me with a half-smile. Then his head falls back onto his arms of its own accord. He moans a little, acknowledging my presence in a friendly but exhausted way.
“Furry, I just came by to thank you. I wanted to say good-bye before I took off.”
I sit down beside him on the long cement step. It is hot. I am hot. I can smell Furry’s mousy sweat and his metallic antiperspirant mingling to form a new aroma that is more folksy than either scent alone. His back and shoulders shiver as though he is silently crying or laughing under his orange carapace of arms. I bend down, trying to get a peek at his face, but his triceps clutch in agitation. He is vibrating fast, practically giving off sparks.
I try to discern whether there is anyone inside the hut. I have to tune out the continuously piped-in Osmond music (the selection of the moment: “One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl!”), the sounds of teenage screaming on the nearby Tumbler, and Furry’s throaty rumbling. I stand up and squint through the door crack, but I don’t see Bob, Mike, or Ken. Unless they are in there, out of range, silently vibrating like Furry, or quietly crouching once again over some beaver-shot centerfold (or is it a bunny-shot?) spread out on the bungalow’s messy floor. Or perhaps the guys went off to participate in some blundering, Tarantino-esque high-stakes bunny-suit deal. They could probably get some realistic-looking cap guns cheap from Pioneer Village. I sit down again to ponder this until I realize with a start that Furry has swiveled his head to look at me with a curious stare, like a pet watching you take a shit or weep.
“Hey, Mister!” I almost shout. “You freaked me out! I was afraid you weren’t going to make it back to earth there for a minute.”
He narrows his eyes. “So you’re as scared as the rest of them,” he says.
This is worse than I thought. I touch his hair, which is really soft. He winces. “Come on,” I say. “Give me a break, Furry. This place is depressing the hell out of me.” I raise my arm in a sweeping gesture reminiscent of the fanny-packing Lord. “You know, all the ... the ...” I struggle to find the exact noun to represent the squalor, the mediocrity, the desperate addiction to distraction that I am searching for.
“The people?” he offers nonchalantly, like a man who has had more than his share of run-ins with shoddy homo sapiens.
I laugh. “Yeah ... sort of.”
I can feel my scalp sweating under my hair. Each pore sprouts a fountain of sweat, a ticklish little effluvium of moisture that bonds my several hair products together into a sticky, untouchable skein. I wipe the two parallel drips that are traveling down my forehead toward my eyes. After about thirty seconds of sitting silently I am convinced that I will leave a damp imprint on this cement when I get up to leave. The one memento of my visit, the detail that will be remembered and shared, will be the bulbous, Rorschach-inkblot stain of buttsweat that remains when I rise from this step.
“I don’t so much mean people themselves as much as the weird plan involved in our conception,” I start. I know it is ill-advised to try describing my despondent state of mind in philosophical terms to a man who is clearly part bunny, but I can’t help it. “I mean, why are we constantly compelled toward stimulation? What kind of callow dadaist creator would make a species that is capable of almost anything—solving puzzles, building shelter, falling in love, creating language and music and art—anything except just sitting in a room with our own thoughts and feelings and memories? Is there anything we can’t do, except not
hing? We can never do nothing. Because when we’re still, that’s when we start to remember that we have these awful ... burns. And the wounds start to ooze and chafe and look really grotesque, and we go, ‘Oh yeah, we have to hold something against these, some butter or vinegar or ice-water or salve, something to change the nature of the pain.’”
The sounds of screams and canned music and endless arguments come down around us like hot rain and dissolve into incomprehensible static.
Furry looks at me seriously. “The only good thing for men is to be diverted from thinking of what they are,” he says slowly, as though he is carefully reciting from dim memory a phrase that has been drifting through his head since high school philosophy class. “Pascal,” he says. “Someone dropped a copy of the Penguin Portable Pensées under the loopscrew. I keep it next to my bed.”
I smile. “Awesome.”
“You saw, didn’t you?” he asks, nodding back toward the door of the hut.
Is he referring to the sight of him in his bunny suit? “Um, yeah,” I say, not sure, as I hear it coming out of my mouth, whether I should be lying.
“I figured,” he says. “That man was my furrier, Freddy. He’s making me a new suit for the convention, and this morning was my first fitting. I thought I could finish before you got off the Tumbler, but there was a complication with the whiskers.”
“What convention?” I ask. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“Totally off the record?” he says, and looks me in the eye.
“Totally off the record. Shit, between Mormon-town and your collection, I have more than enough to write about already.”
“Well, it’s called AnthroCon, and it’s a convention for furry fans. People who are interested in . uh, anthropomorphism.” He looks at me. “It’s not all rabbits,” he says, anticipating my question. “That happens to be my thing. I met Bob, Ken, and Mike a few years ago online, playing a game called Furtopia. They lived in Salt Lake, so we naturally, you know, gravitated.”
“So does everyone dress up at AnthroCon?”
“No, no, lots of people are there just to network. There are artists and writers, people who spend a lot of time online, and then there are ... the suits.”
“Do you wear the suit the whole time? Do you have to take the head off to eat?”
“Absolutely not! It’s considered very gauche to be seen without your suit head. I go back to my room in the hotel occasionally to eat or drink something, but I make sure I’m alone before I break character.”
“I have to tell you, Furry, I thought you looked very much at home in your costume. I mean, you seemed so comfortable. It really suits you.” He looks at me, and we both break out laughing at my unintentional pun. Even his laugh is rabbit-like, high-pitched and vibratory, his nose scrunched up and trembling.
I kiss Furry good-bye, right on the mouth this time. His lips are moist and they actually taste pink, like he’s been sucking on one of those little Valentine conversation hearts. Ask Me. Say When. Yes Dear. Be Mine. Maybe he’s not on anything, I decide, stronger than the euphoric sentences of Pascal’s Pensées and a bunch of carrots.
I rise from the stair and reach into my pocket for the rental car keys. After I have walked halfway to the exit gate, I remember to look back to see if I’ve left a giant sweat stain on the step where I was sitting. I can make out an elegant gray blob, but I can’t tell from here whether it’s really my buttprint or just Furry’s quivering hoop of shadow.
Eden’s Exit Sign
I stole something pretty much every day from the time I was four until I reached my early thirties. In conscious memory my kleptomanic tendencies began one day in nursery school when I swiped the tiny pinwheel blade that sat in the bottom of Cindy Carlton’s mother’s blender. On that day, after recess, we were scheduled to make peanut butter, a high-profile endeavor that had garnered enough hype to warrant several guest-star moms. When my mother showed up without a blender, Cindy Carlton’s mom had to “jet home”—an expression I understood to mean that it was no big deal at all and that absolutely no one should feel in any way guilty or shamed by the extemporaneous nature of her jaunt—to pick up her Waring stainless, even though my mother’s name was officially written in neat cursive next to “Bring Blender” on the classroom chore list. She had forgotten to bring ours, or never intended to bring it, or floated in a world so far back behind her eyes that blenders and lists and cursive were like storybook apparitions that required no material equivalents. Who knew what went on in her quiet cortex? She mumbled apologies, then sat demurely on a giant tub of Legos and crossed her legs, holding her purse in her lap, smiling sadly at a water stain on the opposite wall.
I was raiding the crafts table a few minutes later when I spotted the Carlton Waring, tucked away in a baby blue Monkey Ward’s bag. Its shiny axis and complicated razor-petaled open mouth made something inside my young head spin like a propeller. It was like I had stepped into the swirl of a tornado, knowing full well I was going to get bruised and battered but unable to resist the intense peace-fulness in the center of the whorl. That was the day I fell in love with furtive opportunism. I glanced around quickly to make sure I wasn’t being watched, unscrewed the little rocket-shaped button that held the blade in place at the bottom of the blender, slicing my fingertip in the process, and stashed the spiny claw in the pocket of my Pendleton jacket. When it came time to make the peanut butter, I kept my finger in my mouth and said nothing as mayhem ensued. It was a mystery that went unsolved (until a month later when my father found the blade in my sandbox with an aluminum pie tin and a rusted flour sifter), and we spent the rest of the morning sitting cross-legged on our carpet-sample squares eating handfuls of salted peanuts and slices of Wonder bread spread thick with margarine.
The flair for theft never became an involuntary habit—not like blowing hard on the surface of my morning coffee to stir it without dirtying a spoon, or singing the name-game song under my breath whenever I see someone wearing a name tag. In fact, after a while I had to remind myself to steal something each day, even if it was just a flower from the park, a pen from the bank, a french fry from an unbussed table at a restaurant. It didn’t matter what I took, but it had to be one thing, every day. And each time, I had the same intoxicating thought: Everything is not in its place!
It was hard to stop. I’d get the urge and I just wouldn’t feel right until it was satisfied. Until I’d palmed that lipstick or that peppermint pattie, my fingers would itch. I’d walk around with my hands fluttering as though I were playing air-keyboard. I couldn’t relax until I’d stolen my daily swag. At that moment, I would hear a click in my head that corroborated my world view: This is all an elaborate illusion; this panorama is begging to be fucked with. But until I heard that click, I was vulnerable to all sorts of demons. I felt terribly exposed to what other people thought of me. Did they see how powerless I was, how utterly average? Until I found my own little folksy ritual, I crept through life feeling like an extra on a soundstage. Theft was the superpower that enabled me to slough off my colorless persona, the potency that made me custom-built. Security cameras were my kryptonite. Once I finally stopped altogether, a few years ago, I vowed never to steal again. But I miss it sometimes—the exhilaration of the click, Eve’s jaw-drop when she saw Eden’s exit sign.
At first, my mother’s oblivion was the catalyst for my thieving; the opportunities were just too easy to pass up. She could be looking directly at my hand in her purse, and she’d emit one of her abstract, other-worldly sighs. Her eyes were light blue lakes that faded mysteriously into sky. And there was daily satisfaction in proving myself right: my mother really was a ghost who roamed the earth, unseeing, unfeeling, untouchable. Maybe she had just gotten so used to ignoring my father’s outbursts that now any erratic behavior struck her as unremarkable.
Ironically, though my mother’s preoccupation taught me the joys of stealing, it was the challenge of deceiving my father that kept
me from passing through the typical juvenile shoplifting “phase” that so many kids experience, and instead made me vow to keep practicing and training until I could confidently fool the master. Not that the Condor stole things, per se, but he had eyes everywhere on his head. He clearly understood there was danger at every turn and no end of Machiavellian urges to be disabled. Unlike my mom’s, his looks contained worlds of knowledge about my plans and schemes, intricate detailed blueprints of my unwholesome intentions. Even during one of his tic storms, he would keep his eyes on me until the fit subsided, as though he knew that I was the kind of opportunist likely to strike while he was otherwise occupied. It was almost impossible to get anything past my dad, but I managed to come up with a couple of workable methods to smuggle my shoplifted treasures into the house: I’d hide the offending item in the clothes dryer in the garage when I came in from my “bike ride” until I had scoped out my parents’ positions in the house. Or, I’d sneak in the back gate onto the patio, and throw the thing onto a pile of dirty clothes in my bedroom through a window I’d previously left open. If for any reason the window had been shut in my absence, I’d dig a fast hole in the dirt at the far edge of the garden just over the lip of the canyon, and bury my prey temporarily, marking the grave with a piece of rose quartz or a broken sand dollar.