Over time, people’s responses begin to fall into recognizable patterns. The incredulous ask, “What? Like a diary? No, I don’t write in a diary.” Two male peers rebuffed my questioning with snorts of disdain. (They later added that they were occasionally prone to “jotting down ideas” in “some sort of book,” but this practice struck them as something different from I was asking.) The devoted tell me, “I try to write something everyday.” But the most common response is that of the covert—those who answer me with an equivocal yes, qualifying it with “only occasionally, and I always hate whatever it is I’ve written.” Like hearing your own voice on a recording device, reading previous journal entries instills a sudden flush of self-awareness. Red-cheeked from embarrassment, we reject the notion that that strained and breathy voice was ever ours, preferring instead the baritone version that plays in our own heads.

My first recorded journal entry is from 1998, when I was in third grade. It’s the only entry in the entire book, right there on the front page, transcribed after a muddy school field trip to Muir Woods. It begins:

When it rains the mushrooms magically appear! OR SO PEOPLE THINK. Banana slugs have eyes on their tentacles and tongues covered in teeth. They can smell a mushroom from THIRTY FEET AWAY!

I wince when I read this. I have never stopped wincing when reading something my younger self wrote, if only because it reminds me of what my younger self was like: an overly serious somebody, with severe bangs and a bowl cut that resembled Darth Vader’s helmet. What is a journal entry meant to do but bring you face to face with the person you loosely recognize as yourself?

Journal writing, like everything else, is made flat by extremity. We read the diaries of masters to reconfirm their undeniable talent. “See?” we say in admiration. “Every bit of them was brilliant.” We cradle them close, grateful to know that the human mind is capable of spinning and whirring like mad even when no one’s looking.

For this very reason, I love the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf. She meditates on the amorphous narrative of a diary, voicing her own insecurities but with an unparalleled degree of articulation and insight:

What sort of a diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection has sorted itself and refined itself.

All of us journal writers hurl the random bits of our daily existence into notebooks in hopes that from their lined pages will rise the story of our lives. It’s just that the Virginia Woolfs of the world have an easier time of making this happen, if only because their blips and blurbs are studded with the markers of genius. Their exceptionality is made brighter to me by the dull nature of my own entries. Though some of my entries are deeply felt and poignant, a lot of them read like a list I made for a high school crush when I was sixteen years old. “Pros: handsome, funny, likes the movie Clueless. Cons: he’s an asshole.”

I have no memory of what possessed nine-year-old me to write so fervently about the underlings of the forest floor, just as I have no memory of what it was like to not know how to tie a shoe or write out the particular loops and circles of my own name. I am young still, in my early twenties, but I have a hard time accessing what it felt like to be fifteen years old and bruised by something invisible. Our younger selves are different selves, and though we welcome the distance from life’s earlier undignified moments—the slippings and swoonings and sadness of being small—what strikes me as more tragic is feeling so apart from that fledgling version of yourself that you can’t even remember what it was like to walk under the canopy of trees and stare fixedly at something darkened with dirt.

Anyone who writes in a journal will recognize that his or her entries all conform to some false sense of continuity. To write in a journal is to construct a painstaking narrative linking authorial versions of ourselves so apart from one another that they feel disconnected. It is only when we go back and revisit those versions of ourselves that we realize they had anything in common in the first place.

In her diary, Virginia Woolf addresses her future self as if she were a distant reader, someone who has stumbled upon a forgotten book and cannot help but read it. She writes:

If Virginia Woolf at the age of fifty, when she sits down to build her memories out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her and remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them…. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough for tonight….

This passage resonates with me because I believe journal writing is largely anticipatory. To write in a journal is to consciously or unconsciously acknowledge the corrosive capabilities of time. Journal writing is an act of mummification: one embalms the present in expectation of a future hunger for remembrance. I build my memories out of these books. I write not because I think my life is interesting, but because I have a deep abiding love for imperfect systems of archive. On my splintering bedside table, I have a stack of five journals, all but one of them crammed full of entries dating from more than a decade ago. I did not write in these journals every day, and oftentimes their uses underwent strange permutations. They contain lists of baby names I thought were pretty, and fastidious logs of everything I consumed in one day, and incoherent, rambling descriptions of nightmares from when I briefly tried to take up lucid dreaming as a “fun” alternative to hobbies. More than anything else, I am thankful to my journals for reminding me of the remarkable. Few things remain private anymore—our propensity to share has exploded to the point of excess—and I’m guilty of this indulgence just as much as anyone else. So I’m grateful to go back and discover these rare instances of true secrecy. It feels like a kind of freedom. After all, I am an assemblage of an anecdotal hodgepodge in every way, wince-worthy moments included.

That very first entry I ever wrote ends with a more reflective paragraph:

Today I used my senses. I looked at the characteristics of a bird and saw his crown. He was black and blue. I found some dead leaves that looked like Stained Glass. I am looking forward to exploring the redwood forest.

When I discovered it buried behind my childhood bookcase a decade later, I felt as if I were going to cry. I worried I’d never be as earnest as I was then, but I loved it for its futurity. Sitting on the carpeted floor of a bedroom I no longer called my own, I strained to see a little bit of me in me. But this is the quiet, interior struggle of anyone who keeps a journal, and I have written enough for tonight.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell. 

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The playful, tortuous subtitle of Mooallem’s first book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America makes no secret of this human-centric focus. But as Mooallem narrates the inspiring, heartbreaking, and often just plain strange efforts of people who’ve devoted their lives to saving endangered species, the question of who exactly the “wild ones” are in the book becomes uncomfortably hard to answer.

Mooallem was kind enough to take a break from caring for his newborn second child to talk about Wild Ones at a cafe near his home in San Francisco.

***

The Rumpus: I had to remind myself several times as I was reading your book that it was nonfiction. Some of the things you describe are really bizarre. You’ve got Martha Stewart chasing polar bears around the Canadian tundra. You’ve got men dressing up like whooping cranes and flying in little planes with them. You even describe something called a “copulation hat.”

Jon Mooallem: In the ’70s, people started realizing that DDT was thinning out bird’s eggs. Peregrine falcons were one of the birds affected by this, so they created a captive breeding stock. But breeding animals can be a lot harder than you might think, and they found, through this weird process of trial and error, that they could wear this leather helmet. It looks kind of like a cross between a rugby helmet and maybe the helmets they wear in the Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. The male bird would land on the hat and be coaxed to ejaculate by the human handler into the hat so that they could inseminate other birds. Somehow, I find it weirdly symbolic of a lot of the work I’ve written about, both in its ingenuity and its total absurdity.

Rumpus: And yet it worked.

Mooallem: It did. There are peregrine falcons around now. We have them here in San Francisco, in large part due to the persistence of some very brave ornithologists wearing the copulation hat for more than a decade.

I think there are two levels of these sorts of interventions. You’ve got the very hands-on manipulations, like the copulation hat and like Operation Migration, where they’re reintroducing whooping cranes. Whooping cranes are the largest birds in North America. In the 1940s, they were down to the teens in terms of number of birds left, and so people started breeding them in captivity, which had its own copulation hat-esque obstacles, but then they realized, how are we going to get these birds back in the wild? They usually learn migration from their parents, but their parents were bred in the lab, too. So they hit upon this solution of training the birds to fly behind men flying ultralight airplanes. But the men have to do it in costume, so that the birds won’t get acclimated to people.

Then there’s this other kind of intervention, which is more of a psychic intervention, where the way we talk about these animals and feel about these animals can really play into their ecological situation. It’s more abstract, but that was the case with the Martha Stewart thing. I was in Churchill, Manitoba where there’s an NGO trying to spread the word about climate change, and they’re using polar bears as a symbol of the problem. And we wound up chasing Martha Stewart in these little buggy-like vehicles across the tundra so that they could make sure that she was interviewing the right scientists and putting across the right talking points on her show. The polar bears have PR handlers these days. And I’m sure that, for them, that kind of intervention is just as important as the copulation hat was for peregrine falcons.

Rumpus: You write that animals’ survival in this day and age depends “more on Barnum than Darwin.” What do you mean by that?

Mooallem: The level of compassion and persistence and passion that we dedicate to these species is going to do more for them than any ecological force. Our imaginations are an ecological force now. And to stir that up, you need salesmanship, whether it’s as extreme as the Martha Stewart example or something as simple as putting the panda on the logo of the World Wildlife Federation. There are certain creatures that we care about and certain ones that we simply don’t care about.

Rumpus: We don’t care about the Hawaiian blue-tailed skink, for example.

Mooallem: No. It’s gone. And I didn’t know that. Here I am writing a book on this subject, and I didn’t even know what it was until like two years into the process.

Rumpus: So there’s this kind of species-ism, where we put our energies into saving so-called “charismatic megafauna” like polar bears or pandas or bald eagles.

Mooallem: Yes. And I’m not necessarily criticizing that. I think it’s miraculous that we care about any of these animals. We don’t have to. And for most of human history, we didn’t. So I think it’s a little funny when you have these conservationists saying, “Pity the poor reptile or the poor insect that humanity can’t be bothered to care about.” I mean, isn’t it amazing that we care about all of the things that we do care about? But we don’t really acknowledge that our interest in an animal is vital to its survival. That’s literally the case scientifically and legally, in tons of different ways. Human interest is the key to survival now on earth.

Rumpus: At one point in the book, you call the efforts of Operation Migration—the guys flying planes in whooping crane costumes—”sublime,” but you say you meant the word in a different way than the philosophers meant by the term.

Mooallem: Well, I didn’t actually know what the philosophers meant…but I checked it out on Wikipedia and I think that it was originally applied to natural landscapes like waterfalls and mountains, and being overwhelmed by the grandeur of the natural world. I had a similar feeling watching these airplanes fly in front of a flock of birds. I think a lot of people do. You feel a kind of wonder, an excitement. You can’t believe it’s happening, so I used the term “sublime” even though I was looking at something that is not natural at all, and is in fact meant to make up for the fact that we’ve destroyed what was natural.

Rumpus: Isn’t that wonder also about connecting with something so different than us, so other?

Mooallem: Yeah. I think there is a real craving for that kind of experience of otherness in the world right now, even if it’s just a hike on a nature trail. There’s a hunger to be in the presence of something that’s beyond you and beyond your grasp.

Rumpus: I think that craving might be called anxiety. We’re anxious to connect to the otherness of the natural world because we’re terrified that we’ve fucked it up beyond repair.

Mooallem: Without a doubt. I think that motivates a lot of the recovery efforts I was writing about. It’s not just the particular species at stake but that, if we let go of this one, where does that leave us? Each battle becomes a battle of principle that cannot be lost.

Rumpus: This anxiety seems to be especially pronounced here in America, and I think it’s no accident that you made sure to include the phrase “in America” in the subtitle of the book, even though a good chunk of it is actually set in Canada. Our identity as Americans is so connected to the bounty and grandeur of our wilderness, and I think people are really freaked out that we’ve spoiled it. I see that anxiety reflected in all the reality shows on TV these days about Alaska and survivalists. People are desperate to believe that we still have that wildness in us.

Mooallem: As soon as something is almost gone, people grasp onto it the hardest. [America] was the place where people came after all the Old World countries had already extinguished their wildlife. It was a fresh start, where wildlife was so abundant that colonists were writing ad copy back to Europe about how they could sweep fish out of the ocean with a broom. You could make an argument that that’s where the American dream starts. It wasn’t just this vague belief. It was actually a matter of math. There were X amount of animals and so much fewer people, you could get by just by showing up.

Rumpus: Speaking of colonial America and its relationship to nature, another point in the book where I had to remind myself that I was reading nonfiction was the story of Thomas Jefferson and the mammoth.

Mooallem: Mammoth fossils were being discovered around the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jefferson and some other Founding Fathers figured they must still be out there somewhere in the whole two-thirds of North America we hadn’t set foot in yet. In fact, when Lewis and Clark set out, they had instructions to keep their eyes peeled.

Rumpus: For mammoths.

Mooallem: Yes. The mammoth became kind of the first bald eagle, the first species people really identified with America because it was so big and powerful. It was everything that a new country wanted to see itself as. And it hit people hard when more and more evidence started emerging that mammoths were, in fact, extinct. They had to change the mammoth story and rewrite their feelings about it. The new story went that instead of America being so magnificent that it was filled with mammoths, it was actually an empty place just waiting for white settlers to take it over. God had wiped the mammoth out to clear the way for us. It’s another example of the narratives we build around creatures.

Rumpus: And the real irony is that, according to some theories at least, the mammoth was wiped out by people.

Mooallem: That’s right. People wiped the shit out of this place long before any European settlers came. There were all sorts of Pleistocene megafauna walking around, and then humans developed a new kind of stone point that enabled them to bring down bigger and bigger animals. So, basically, we’re living in this impoverished ecosystem that preceded the wasteful, reckless white man that is so easy to vilify. We were already down to the dregs before any of our grandparents or great-great-great grandparents got here.

Rumpus: So this cycle of people damaging the natural world and causing extinction goes back a long way.

Mooallem: That’s always the big question and a giant hole in a lot of the reasoning. If you’re going to say that things aren’t like they used to be, when exactly are you referring to?

Rumpus: It complicates the whole idea of “saving” one species or another.

Mooallem: Exactly. As does the other stuff we were talking about, this kind of perpetual intervention. Can we really say that we’re saving the whooping crane if we’re breeding it in a lab and then flying it around with planes? I mean, we’ve saved it from disappearing. But it’s not the same thing.

Rumpus: The best example of this dilemma comes in the second part of the book, where you focus on the Lange’s metalmark butterfly. This is a very fragile creature that only lays its eggs on a specific plant growing on sand dunes near Antioch, California. But the sand dunes are almost all gone. There’s a drywall factory there. And yet, the federal government has spent millions trying to keep this particular butterfly from going extinct.

Mooallem: There is a strong case to make for keeping that butterfly where it is, but it’s not scientific. I could not find a scientific justification for it. It just doesn’t matter. And even if it did matter, the context in which it did matter is completely gone. This butterfly is not like the panda bear or the California condor. But the people involved with it are very passionate and it’s the policy of the U.S. government to save it. It has all the same protections as a whale or grizzly bear.

Rumpus: That brings me to the word “wild.” As the book goes on, the definition of that word starts to get slipperier and slipperier. The creatures we want so badly to keep wild, like polar bears or whooping cranes or certain butterflies, need such finely-tuned environmental conditions that, without constant human intervention, they would perish.

Mooallem: We’re in a very paradoxical place. If wildness is the thing we’re passionate about keeping in the world, it’s up to us to preserve it. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. But then again, that’s where we’re at. It’s not going to change.

These animals are not necessarily hard to save. They’re just hard to save in a way that conforms with our romantic ideas about their wildness. You could take the plant that the Lange’s metalmark butterfly lays its eggs on and grow it in pots in my backyard, and then bring the butterflies and I’m pretty sure they’d be just fine. You could do that anywhere. You could do it in Central Park, in Golden Gate Park, in Asia. As long as that plant is there, the butterflies will be there. But they’re not going to live at Antioch Dunes, which is the one place they lived before humans showed up. But why isn’t that option on the table? Is saving the butterfly in that way better than doing all the backbreaking work we’re doing now?

The fact is that a lot of the people working on these recoveries are career conservationists. And a lot of time, it takes an outsider to say, “Hey, what are we really doing here?” I felt like I was engaging a lot of these people in conversations they had been dying to have for a long time, but they  just haven’t had the opportunity to. They’re just not prompted to think this way within the bureaucracies of their work.

Rumpus: A lot of the older conservationists you profile have become disillusioned. They started off young and idealistic. But as their careers have gone on, they’ve lost a fair amount of hope and drive.

Mooallem: I tracked down some battle-scarred conservationists and for the most part, they weren’t cheery. A lot of them failed to do what they set out to do. And even the ones that had success, it was often indirect. So I don’t blame them for feeling that way, but I’m glad I could write about them in a different context and show what role they did play.

And I will say that even though some of them told me they had given up, they really hadn’t given up. That kind of moral energy doesn’t go away just because you get beaten to shit trying to exert it on the world, and that’s an amazing thing. It makes me proud to be a human being. I would talk to all these sour old men and women, and I would leave feeling exhilarated to see how this process plays out every generation. People start out full of energy, they meet obstacles, but then someone else comes and they pick up the baton and keep going.

Rumpus: Is that the “weirdly reassuring” part of the story you refer to in the title?

Mooallem: Yeah. It goes back to this idea of the sublime. For the people who have worked on Operation Migration or the guy who spent fifty years at Antioch Dunes with the Lange’s metalmark, these things can be completely dispiriting. But then you zoom out and you see the that there is this fight that we’re all in together. I find that incredibly reassuring. Humankind can’t control the entire world and solve all of its problems, but we’re engaged in this big ecological bar fight where we’re trying to do this stuff.

Rumpus: Isn’t the bar fight really within ourselves, though? Isn’t it really a fight over what kind of animals we are? I just read today that carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than they’ve been in at least 800,000 years.

Mooallem: Stuff is fucked up. I’m not trying to be rosy about it. I can’t explain why but being around these people, despite their imperfections and disagreements, who are engaged in questions of how humanity should exist in the world, is completely life-affirming.

I don’t have the most optimistic outlook on the future. Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I had just brought a kid into the world and it got me thinking about these things in a different way. That doesn’t mean I think things are going to turn out great. I can still be pessimistic but at least I can feel better about being pessimistic sometimes. That strikes me as the secret to a lot of things in life, being able to sit with your fear.

I hope I’m not mistaken for a kind of Pollyanna, but I think there’s a big space between feeling like the world is coming to an end and feeling like we don’t have to worry at all. And I think I’m getting better at occupying that space.

Rumpus: Getting back to the American relationship to wilderness. We exterminated thirty-million buffalo—or bison, to be more precise. It struck me that the guy who led the effort to save them is a perfect embodiment of our conflicted relationship with nature and animals.

Mooallem: William Temple Hornaday. I want to write a whole book about him. He was a taxidermist at the Smithsonian, a young guy, maybe thirty-two. And he finds out there’s only three hundred or so buffalo left, and he says, “I’ve got to do something about this—I have to go to Montana and kill a bunch of them!” He decides to stuff these things so that his children and grandchildren can know them after they’re gone. But a few years down the line he realizes that, hey, maybe we can save these things instead of just preserving them.

His story is such a great microcosm of a lot of what we’re struggling with in trying to expand the bounds of our compassion and what we think is possible. It was a moment where people were inventing environmentalism. He was a fascinating figure. He was also a total racist and a really disgusting figure in a lot of ways.

Rumpus: He called the buffalo stupid, didn’t he?

Mooallem: Yes. He blamed their extinction on their stupidity, which you would never hear an environmentalist say now. It dates him to his time. There wasn’t this gushy sympathy for animals. He was one of America’s first wildlife conservationists but he hated wolves. He wrote an entire section of a book that was a fake trial where he was a prosecutor and he sentenced wolves to death because they ate chickens and livestock.

Rumpus: And yet, some modern-day conservationists have seemed shockingly callous, too. You write about a particularly grisly incident where someone filmed polar bear cubs starving to death.

Mooallem: It was a horrible video. And this person put it online because he thought it had a chance to be iconic and stir up emotions. But nobody would watch it, and some people got really angry at [the videographer]. They said, why are you just standing there with a camera? Why didn’t you feed these bears? And that’s a debate that been going on a lot more lately.

There’s a whole slew of logistical questions involved [in feeding polar bears], but I think the more interesting argument is the emotional or the philosophical one. Do we want a world in which polar bears survive because we’re tossing them road kill? That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we’ve been doing similar things with other species for decades.

Rumpus: The bears themselves have become purely symbolic. They’re being used by these well-meaning activists to make a larger point about climate change.

Mooallem: They’re mascots.

Rumpus: You tell the stories of several local people in Churchill, Manitoba. Even though many of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t care about the issue, they seem to have more of a connection with the bears than the environmentalists who are supposedly campaigning to save them.

Mooallem: A lot of these guys spend months at a time out on the ice living in ice shelters and hunting and trapping, and it’s hard for them to conceive of a big, menacing polar bear as a victim, which is the story that the environmentalists are telling.

The videographer thought the video would get people outraged and motivated to help polar bears. The locals saw a video of someone not helping polar bears. They saw a video by someone who should have put down his camera and thrown the bears some meat. With all the arguments and compelling ideas about polar bears that everyone gets bombarded with, it’s easy to forget that they’re actual animals living in time and space.

Rumpus: That tension between the townspeople and the environmentalists shows how complex these issues are. It’s so easy to caricature attitudes about nature and animals. You’re either Ted Nugent or some kind of tree-sitting hippie. But it’s just not that simple, is it?

Mooallem: No. My editor said that this is not a book that ties everything up in a neat ribbon. It actually unties what we think are neat ribbons and then asks us to deal with the big mess on the floor. Not the greatest sales pitch, perhaps. I don’t think Oprah is going to go for that.

Rumpus: Or Martha Stewart.

Mooallem: Or Martha Stewart. But I think our job right now as people is to deal with the complexity, and to see through the catchphrases or [simplistic] ideas like “wilderness good, people bad” or “polar bears good, hunters bad.” We’re not going to get solutions to any of these problems thinking of them in clichéd terms.

Rumpus: I don’t want to ask you something trite like, “where do you think things will go from here,” but where do you think things will go from here?

Mooallem: Maybe in ten years somebody will write a book like this with more answers. But right now, I feel like we’re at a point where we just need to pull back the curtain and say this is where wild animals are now and this is where conservation is.

I remember right after I started working on this book, my daughter was two years old, and she was sitting in her highchair having a fit. There was a bowl of food in front of her and she threw it on the floor. It smashed, food spilled everywhere, and she suddenly shut up. I don’t know what she was thinking but it seemed pretty clear to me that she was astonished at the kind of wreckage she had created, the power she had exerted. She was just staring at this thing she had broken. I think that’s where we’re at.

WILD ONES book trailer from Jon Mooallem on Vimeo.

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I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that it’s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. But if I’d listened before, I’d never noticed. I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and I’d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.

Blonde on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. Although I know I’m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-Didn’t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.

But my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.” Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. He didn’t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they can’t understand, doesn’t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them.

The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. Everyone was getting stoned — Dylan, Dylan’s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasn’t everybody. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having.

In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why it’s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. I had never done any of these things. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted in. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.

I liked the complexity of the songs. I liked that I didn’t get it. I liked that it didn’t seem to want me to get it. I liked that Bob Dylan didn’t seem to like me and seemed annoyed that I liked him so much. I listened to that album every night as I fell asleep the entire year before I left for college, not to mention in my car and in my room and on my headphones walking around while awake. It became the language for the new world of adulthood that was approaching,that as far as I was concerned couldn’t come fast enough.

Arguably, the defining experience of adulthood is falling in love. Dylan is disdainful of or resigned about or angry at all the Louises and Joannas and Maries and women-who-are-probably-Joan-Baez in the first thirteen songs on the album. He launches a whole host of emotion at women, in general and in specific, but it’s not until the final track that he deals with the central experience of maturation: Falling in love. Knocked on your ass, whole life given up to another person. Gone, surrendered, fucked, whatever you want to call it. Falling in love.

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is eleven minutes and twenty seconds of infuriating, boring, indecipherable music that has been accurately described as the greatest love song of the 20th century. For the length of an entire side of a record (as it was originally released), Dylan does nothing but list nonsensical attributes of the woman to whom he’s singing.  The lyrics are even more opaque than most of his songs. The music has no variation, dragging around and around in a circle. It feels like the end of the night, after the party’s been dismantled and the bar’s been closed and everyone’s gone home except one last drunk couple, half-asleep and slow-dancing to music only they can hear. The song is a closed experience, and feels the way it does when, in loving one person, you are happy to shut down and ignore the rest of the vivid, pointless, crowded world that isn’t them. It’s not for the people listening, the people buying the album, playing it in their homes, playing it at parties and on the radio. It’s for one woman. The list is an accounting; in love we want to gather the object of our feeling to us, as though if we could know them well enough, could list them comprehensively, we could finally fully possess them. The repetition, starting over again and again, shows how we never quite do, how we always fail.

I grew up, got into college, left home, moved to New York, got laid, got stoned, fell in love, betrayed people, left people and was left, hurt people and was hurt. Eventually I did all the things Dylan whines about on Blonde on Blonde. I never stopped listening to the album. When I finally did get stoned, it never felt enough like “Rainy Day Woman No.s 12 & 35.” Every time I take any kind of drug, I hope this time it will. But it never has, and being in love has never felt quite like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” either. Not that the songs were incorrect about the experiences, and not that the experiences have been unspectacular or lacking. But that, spectacular as they may have been, they never lived up to the Dylan songs that had first imagined them for me.

I tend to share albums and songs with the people I date, and therefore tend to lose a lot of music in breakups. I have ruined every single song and album and band and artist I have ever loved by associating it with a relationship. Every single one except Blonde on Blonde.  Perhaps that’s happy accident, but I don’t think so. My relationship to the album is already a complete relationship, in and of itself. Not only does it not need a flesh-and-blood relationship to link itself to, I don’t think it has space for one. I think the things we love most, we don’t want anyone else to understand. We are selfish with them as with the people we love, feeling that we will dilute their importance through sharing.

The way Blonde on Blonde sounds is what we miss about the people we love but choose to leave anyway, what we never get over about them. A friend of mine would say, much later, Bob Dylan made her feel like she’d known her Dad when he was young. When she told me this, I’d realize, perhaps just a little, why my Dad had bought six CDs on a train ride from Boston to New Haven and told me not to talk to him until I had an opinion about them. This is literally the music of my parents’ past, but it’s also the music of the things we can’t quite share with people, the attempt to make someone part of your past despite the fact that they can’t ever quite understand your past because they weren’t there. This album makes me feel like I knew my parents when they were young, and at the same time reminds me how much I didn’t, how much I can’t ever know what their life was like before me. When you love someone, it becomes painful that you weren’t part of their past, that they weren’t part of yours. This album is the attempt to make someone part of a past experience by telling them about it, the attempt to enter someone’s past by listening closely enough to the stories about it. We build our expectations of love, of getting stoned, of any life experience, from someone else’s stories. Those stories are always fictions. When we encounter the actual experience in our own life, the distance between it and the expectation is always present. This album manages to be an expression of that omnipresent distance, the ache and comfort at the center of it, raucous and elegiac, passed down imperfectly through generations.

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Sterry’s memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, sold for six figures one lucky afternoon in 2000 and became an international best seller that was translated into ten languages. Not only is Chicken a heart-punching story about seventeen-year-old Sterry getting sucked into the sex industry while attending a fancy, private high school, it is also about a homeless kid in Hollywood with acting aspirations and negligent parents, digging food out of a trash can to eat. It’s a story that kicks with loneliness, vulnerability, humor, and terror. Chicken doesn’t read like a confession, but sings its redemptive heartbeat.

I expected Sterry to be brittle after reading his stories, but he is everything but. While discussing the publishing industry, words like “Zen” and “karma” came up. “After Chicken happened,” Sterry said, “I swore I would help anyone who asked.” Another rare, beautiful thing about Sterry is that decades after he left the sex industry, he remains dedicated to the stories of sex workers. His first anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times Book Review, and his follow-up to that book, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, contains stories by people who have bought and sold sex (including one by me, “The Man I Gave A Handjob in West Hollywood Will Surely Blow His Brains Out Before I See Him Again,” which was snatched up from my blog by Stephen Elliott in 2010 and appeared in a different form on The Rumpus at that time).

In addition to being a writer, Sterry is a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and book doctor. He also authored The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published with his ex-agent and current wife, and his novella, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, was a finalist for the Henry Miller Award. He has written books about working at Chippendales Male Strip Club, the teenaged brain, how to throw a great pajama party if you’re a tween girl, a patricidal mama’s boy, and World Cup soccer.

Sterry and I talked on the phone about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the sex industry and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex. We discussed the possibility of being loved and the necessity of giving voice to our secrets, even when the probability of being reviled is high—especially because it is so.

 ***

The Rumpus: Your first anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, a collection of essays by sex workers and clients, is a follow up anthology to Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex (now in its fifth printing). How did you procure so many essays from clients and sex workers?

David Henry Sterry: When we did Hos and Hookers, it came out of two different avenues I was pursuing. First, I was doing a workshop in [San Francisco] centered on sex workers who had been arrested. Many were former drug addicts and street people. Every Tuesday for two years, we did this workshop. At the same time, I was being introduced into the sex worker artist/activist world because of my book Chicken. I did a one-man show in SF and Annie Sprinkle was in the audience. I was floored she came. Then I toured with the Sex Workers Art Show, where I meet this huge community of people. Hos are good networkers—you have to be. Very generous people in that world.

The two worlds had similarities: educated organizers, artists, and hard workers. And others were high school dropouts. The stories they told were very different. There is a great chasm—the abolitionists and the decriminalizationist. They hate each other. There are five-dollar blowjob-givers and five-thousand-dollar-a-night courtesans who get flown to Dubai in one book. I wanted to create that book. Once we put that book out, it blew up. So, I started a reading series called Sex Worker Literati, every month in NYC. I met a whole other crop of writers. People contacted me bummed that they weren’t included in the first book. So, people came to me after I put the word out and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to have a book of people who sold sex with people who bought sex together in one book?

Rumpus: Why do you think it’s so hard for people to admit they have paid for sex? What does this mean culturally? Emotionally? Personally? I think that in the U.S., there is underlying respect towards anyone who hustles because of the materialistic nature of our culture, but also, historically, women mostly occupy the adult industry, so the current of sexism and disrespect also runs deep.

Sterry: I didn’t realize the enormous stigma attached to the statement to say, “Yes, I hire someone to have sex with me.” Easier to get people to admit they are a “whore” than to get people to admit they hired a whore. So I was looking for those stories.

I posted everywhere. I asked my friends. They were liberals, pro-sex artists, and yet none of them would admit it. I thought, Interesting. Here’s a billion dollar industry with no clients. A few gay men would say it publicly. It’s more accepted in the gay male culture for some reason, maybe because it’s so hard to be gay to begin with, they already are used to taking risk rejection in society to some degree. The worst thing you can say in any culture is “your mother is a whore,” but I agree with you that there is a certain respect for the hustler, somewhat begrudging towards someone who can make a living with their wits and their body.

Rumpus: Isn’t it interesting that early feminism embraced sexual freedoms and birth control, but kind of left sex workers out to rot? And what about the archaic shame that johns have? Should more clients speak out about their positive experiences with sex workers? What effect would this have?

Sterry: There were consciousness-raising groups in my parents’ generation and that empowerment has bled into the sex industry. Whereas you never hear yes, I have this empowered beautiful prostitute who made me cry when she gave me a blowjob and has opened my third eye. The shame surprised me. The only people who were heteronormal men who admitted to hiring pros used fake names. I mean, I am in touch with like 10,000 writers! Hardly any men would say they paid for sex and here’s my real name.

Rumpus: Have you ever paid for sex?

Sterry: Many, many, many times. I spent many years binging on sex. I was a problematic hypersexual. A sex addict. I would structure my days around when I could binge. I would work hard all week as a professional actor and screenwriter in LA and NY, and I would be off at five p.m. on Friday and I would line up a series of dates—some free and some paid for.

Rumpus: What kind of client were you as an ex-sex worker?

Sterry: Because I sold sex first in my life as a young man, I always wanted to be extra nice because I had clients who were mean to me. So, I was a competitive client. I wanted to be clear and nice—the nicest client. I didn’t want them to do a job with me if they were uncomfortable. At the same time, there were certain things I wanted to do and wanted done to me and I would tip nicely.

Rumpus: What types of things did you want from a sex worker?

Sterry: I liked to be more in control and dominating and I liked to have hard sex, not to the point of causing pain, but a little bit rough. So, that’s what I was looking for. I hired people from the top end—Beverly Hills, Park Avenue courtesans—to crack addicts in MacArthur Park and the Bronx. I’d get coked up and go on these benders. What’s interesting is that there are thieves on both ends that are masquerading as sex workers. Then there are beautiful, incredible sexual athletes at both ends. I did find that people at the lower end of the food chain tended to be more physically violent, but also more appreciative, as well.

Rumpus: Have you ever fallen in love or had a crush on a sex worker or a client of yours?

Sterry: I met this woman in the East Village. At twenty paces, she was a gorgeous blonde with a great body, and closer, she was beaten by life. She talked like a chainsaw, was so skinny and scarred. She was sweet, so I picked her up and she took me to her squat in Alphabet City. She was a crackhead, so she wanted to buy some crack first. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do some crack.” She smoked and mellowed and she was really into the sex.

So, I asked her, “Do you have any friends that want to join us next week?” Then she wrote my phone number on her wall. She put a star next to my name and I felt so good about that. This beautiful, fallen crack angel, writing my name on her wall with a star.

She called me the next day, and said she had some beautiful girl with her and she wanted a woman to make out with. We had this crazy threesome. I ended up painting her walls in her apartment and we became close friends. She kept saying she wanted a job.  She was so nice and so sweet, smart and funny. I hooked her up with a job. All she had to do was walk in the door and she would have a job. I even helped her pick out an outfit. But, she didn’t show up and I didn’t push her after that. I knew she was scared. Then I showed up one day and she was gone.

When I was a rent boy, I also had a big crush on a client who was a tantric sex practitioner. I was so untethered from reality in a certain way, I thought maybe I could just move in with her and be with her and her yoga friends. I wanted to be her son and her lover. I had a kind of love for the crackhead. It was a complicated relationship. I wanted to help her and I wanted to be with her, too.

Rumpus: It’s common for sex workers to leave “the life” and shut the door on their past. You have done the exact opposite. How and why did you end up in the sex industry? How long did you do sex work?

Sterry: I only sold sex for nine months, when I was living in a tiny apartment in Hollywood when I was in college at Immaculate Heart College. I was studying with nuns and focused on existentialism. They had no dorms and I had nowhere to stay and no money. So I wandered on Hollywood Boulevard. At that moment, I was on the streets. This guy had a t-shirt on that said “Sexy” and he asked me out to steak dinner. Of course I went. The steak was drugged, and he sexually assaulted me viciously, and I whacked him with my elbow and escaped. I was seventeen.

There I was at four a.m. on Hollywood Boulevard, where the predators were. I found a dumpster with a container full of fried chicken. A guy watched me and asked me, “Are you hungry? Are you looking for a job?” He was the manager of the chicken place, but also was the procurer of the sex industry in Hollywood at that time. He turned me onto the Hollywood employment agency on Sunset. This place was the most generic office you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, the secretary that worked there was so generic, you forgot her the second you looked at her. The man I met with was like Bob Newhart. The exact opposite of the pimp look—he was like a soft-boiled egg. And his specialty was underaged kids. So, he sent me out on my first job and the manager of the chicken place said if I pissed off the Bob Newhart guy, they would kill me.

The hardest thing about being a male hustler is that there are many things you can fake, but an erection is not one of them. I was very nervous that I would not be able to perform. This woman was very thin and very rich. She was mean. She would lay in a bed like she was in a coma. I was supposed to crawl under the covers and have oral sex with her. She didn’t move a muscle. And then she wanted my eyes closed. She was going to be on top of me. I was very nervous about that part of it. But I managed to do it. I found a mental porn movie. I would get into my personal porn in my head and disappear, and that’s how I was able to perform.

Sunny, my fairy godfather/employment counselor/pimp had me work for a week frying chicken. It’s horrible, miserable, greasy, stink work. After a week he gave me my paycheck. It was so small, it was horrifying. When he offered me real money to have professional sex, only a moron would turn down that money.

Rumpus: Where were your parents at the time? Did they ever read Chicken? What was their reaction to it?

Sterry: My mother had four kids and had just come out as a lesbian. My father had a mental breakdown and could not admit it. My mom was supposed to come live with me in LA but she never showed up. She decided to live in Oregon. I thought I could do all of this myself, which is typical innocent arrogance of a seventeen-year-old. My mother never read my book. My father read my book and didn’t speak to me for five years. He was angry. I never told anyone about my book until I had my deal. So I sent my family a galley of the book thinking they would be proud of me. My father called me, livid. “How dare you?” he said. He was screaming and shouting, completely beside himself.

Rumpus: How did you leave the sex industry?

Sterry: I wanted to stop working. It wasn’t making me happy anymore. The cash was intoxicating, so I couldn’t stop. I was scared. One day my pimp said to me: “I got you this job: it’s not sex, but you show up and smack this guy around and talk dirty to him.” What is sex? If it didn’t involve my genitals it was not sex to me, but it was a sexual exchange. The client was very presumptuous and told me to sit in his lap. He was sucking on my hair. It was revolting. My stomach turned over. I was so angry. All of the anger and rage came out and I beat the shit out of the guy. I thought maybe I killed him.

After that, I could not go back to working for those people. It was like I was a caged animal who lashed out. I hid out and left LA three weeks later. They never found me. I escaped to Oregon to where my mom was living with her lesbian lover. They accepted me back and I went back to school, Reed College for three years, and got my degree.

Rumpus: One thing I have heard a lot from people—from clients to people who are pro-sex and have a liberal view of the sex industry—is that it’s cool to be a stripper or escort as long as you don’t make a “career” out of it. Well, I did make a “career” out of it for twenty-plus years. The great thing about stripping is showing up with an empty gas tank and fifty cents, and leaving with four hundred bucks or more. Why do you think people say that? From where do these comments stem?

Sterry: The underlying assumption is the idea that it’s bad and bad for you. Another assumption is that the end result will not be a positive thing. If you ask a parent about their son or daughter—if they want their kids to be sex workers—they would never say, “Yes, I’d love for my kid to grow up to be a prostitute.” People believe it’s okay to dabble but not to get sucked in too deep. That shame is in our cultural DNA. I have friends who have sold sex, porn stars, strippers, surrogates, and some are very happy making their money doing this and some are looking to get out. The fact is, being a sex worker is a difficult job that is high-risk and high-reward, like my friend who works in the ER. Lots of people would not be able to do that job, or do the job of a firefighter. Not everyone is cut out to run into that building on fire. Sometimes you walk into someone’s life and his or her life is on fire, but you’re built for that job.

Rumpus: I am built for that job. I run through the fire of people’s lives all the time. Sometimes I forget to carry a hose.

Sterry: Important to remember your hose. It’s not for everyone, but for some people, it’s the best part-time job in the world if you are cut out for it. Meaning, you are emotionally and physically equipped to handle it.

Rumpus: Do you ever miss it? Would you ever go back to it? Have your views changed about the sex industry over the years?

Sterry: I was made an offer and I talked about it with my partner, and we discussed it and I decided to not do it. But, I seriously considered it. I never carried any shame about doing sex and getting money for it. The only immoral thing about the sex industry is when there is the lack of choice. That’s slavery. My main ideas about the industry have not changed. I feel sorry for those who try to shame sex workers. I feel bad for them for being an unenlightened, uninformed person.

Rumpus: I am currently heartbroken. Men I have dated seem to love my independence and sexiness, but eventually, they wind up using the fact that I have done sex work as a weapon against me, to hurt me or push me away. Is it a mistake to tell men I date about my history? Will I ever be loved and accepted? Male opinion, please.

Sterry: I never told anyone about myself for twenty years. But all of my secrets ate at me from the inside. Eventually, it consumed me. From the outside, I looked great: I had sold screenplays, I had a red sports car and all the trappings. And I was dying inside. I was married to this beautiful woman who was not very capable of giving love. I hated acting. I was a cog in a machine. My thought process was, Oh, you’re not happy? Buy a bigger TV.

I was a dancing monkey and I hated it. My addictions got bigger and my binges more intense. I found this beautiful woman in Harlem who asked me for a date. She took me to this crack house in Harlem, and her hands were big and her Adam’s apple, huge. In that dump, one crackhead hit me with a pipe and stole my money. Luckily, I come from a long line of hardheaded coalminers. They [the crackheads] all looked funny to me and I started laughing. Soon, we were all laughing. I just walked out.

That was my bottom. I vowed that I was going to tell my true story if anyone asked me and I was never going to hide again. Soon after, I went on a date with this literary agent, who liked a book I wrote, but then I told her my real story that became Chicken: Portrait of a Young Man for Rent.  I thought it would make people run from me, but that night, this woman—who was a well-educated, Jewish woman—thought it was so interesting. She told me, “This is the book you should write.” And, I did.

I believe that you telling your story will lead to someone giving you unconditional support and love. Antonia, you will find love.

***

Photograph of David Henry Sterry © 2004 by Lothian Photography.

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Click here to read the first of four interviews by David Henry Sterry with some of the contributing writers from Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other.

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• Paying to Play: Interview with a John

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Annie M. Sprinkle spent her “wonder years” age 18-40 in Manhattan, then returned to California where she has been based for the past twelve years. Sprinkle earned a BA at School of Visual Arts then became the first porn star to earn a Ph.D. (IASHS). She has been an activist in sex worker rights for forty years, founded Occupy Bernal, and is currently a passionate environmental activist pioneering the ecosex movement. A former prostitute and “porn legend,” she has proudly had sex with over 3500 people. She has also written and done photography for most every ‘80s-‘90s sex magazine as well as many non-sex publications like Newsweek and the New York Times, and has published five books with Tarcher/Penguin, Continuum, and Cleis Press. Annie Sprinkle’s guiltiest pleasure is reading the National Enquirer every week. For the past ten years she has collaborated with her life partner, artist Elizabeth Stephens. Visit Anniesprinkle.org, loveartlab.org, and her new site, sexecology.org.

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The Rumpus: Are there any correlations between your career in sex and your career as an artist?

Annie M. Sprinkle: Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist. Beth Stephens, my partner and collaborator, and I just did a live art piece in a Brooklyn gallery—Grace Exhibition Space. Our work is exploring the earth as lover, instead of earth as mother. So we built a bed frame and poured fifty-five big bags of fresh dirt into it. We took off our clothes and got into the bed of dirt. Then we invited our audience to take off their clothes and join us. On one hand, it’s very different than been a prostitute. But then again it’s not. We were paid to get in bed with total strangers, naked. In a sense we are turning art patrons into johns and jills. It’s fun to play in these realms. I think that in some ways, we are all whores, johns and jills.

Rumpus: Why do you think there’s such a stigma about buying and selling sex?

Sprinkle: It’s a pity that there’s such a negative connotation about paying for sex. There are very few out johns in the world. I really respect those few. Fred Cherry, who passed away, Hugh Loebner, and Charlie Sheen are the only out johns I can think of, after all these years. They are very brave. No one wants to admit they pay for sex. Yet millions of people do, one way or another. Being a john is actually far more stigmatized than being a sex worker.

Rumpus: Do you think being a sex worker would make it easier to pay for sex?

Sprinkle: I heard about a recent study where some researcher did a survey and discovered that people who have been prostitutes are ten times more willing to be johns than the average person. So, if you’ve been paid for sex you understand the value of that experience on some level.

Rumpus: Were your johns generally respectful of you?

Sprinkle: My johns adored and worshipped me, therefore they empowered me. When I was 18, 19, and 20, I had a poor self-image and needed attention. It’s hard for people who haven’t been prostitutes to imagine, but I think it’s often true. There can be a very symbiotic relationship happening.

Rumpus: Did you ever have orgasms with clients?

Sprinkle: Sure, I had orgasms with clients, even though it was kind of a taboo at that time to admit it. Women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex that much! Today whores are much more open about enjoying the sex. I usually kissed my clients if they wanted to kiss. I thought it was just way too weird to say “no kissing allowed,” That to me was uncomfortable. Blow jobs are okay, but kissing clients is still a taboo. I liked having orgasms with clients and that was kind of a taboo at that time, but I never paid attention to that. A lot of women I worked with didn’t respect their clients. I had some clients who didn’t respect me, but still you somehow made it work. One guy, he had a lot of money and he was pretty disrespectful, he kept trying to have anal sex with me and I didn’t want to have anal sex with him and he just seemed to really want to provoke me and make me angry and manipulative. And then I felt like ugh this guy really needs love. Gee, I’ll model love for him, I thought. I’ll kill him with kindness. I don’t know if my strategy had any effect or not. Perhaps it was simply my way of coping with a challenging situation, and I needed to pay my bills. Other women might have kicked him in the balls and thrown him out. But then whores have the ability to put up with behaviors other women would never manage to put up with. That’s why we deserve to be generously compensated. Some men can be very rude. On the other hand, some clients are absolute angels. One john always brought me a gift every time he came to see me. He brought me a pearl necklace, a ring, a bra or something. But eventually, as much as I really loved all the gifts, he fell in love with me, and he tried to weasel his way into my life. It was too much and I sort of had to ‘break up with him.” Yes, whores do sometimes break up with their johns. He was pretty devastated. He was in love and that was not okay. That was uncomfortable for me. I’m sure he soon found another whore to buy gifts for. A lot of women I worked with really didn’t respect their clients. I respected my clients, as I tend to see the intrinsic, unique worth of every person. I was raised Unitarian by humanist parents. I think the whore-client relationship is very influenced by our childhoods, our parents, what we bring to the table as it were. I had many clients who didn’t respect me, probably because of how they were raised. We’re all the walking wounded. But still, magically, somehow you made it all work. It was still a win-win situation even when it was all screwy and convoluted. We are all complex creatures.

Rumpus: Who was your favorite john?

Sprinkle: I didn’t call them “johns” but clients. So I had this client I’ll call Samuel. Not his real name. I saw him steadily for twenty years, usually twice a month. Over twenty years you really get to know someone. When I met him originally, he had three little kids, then they started growing up, getting married, then they’d have their drugs and alcohol problems, then they got divorced. . . Whenever we would get together I’d ask him, “How are things? How are the kids?” He was someone that I wouldn’t have been having sex with had he not been paying me. But I cared about him deeply and genuinely wanted to know about how his life was going. When his business took a turn for the worse, I lowered my price for him. Looking back I’d have to say it was definitely a type of long-term relationship. The only reason it ended was because I moved out of New York. He was a great guy. He owned camera stores. I met him when I was 18. We split up when I was 38. He saw me grow up too. He was a client, and also a friend. Such things are more common than people might think. This arrangement was not so different than many American relationships. That’s why the laws against prostitution have got to go. They are totally unfair and mean.

Rumpus: Have you ever paid for sex?

Sprinkle: There have been times where I have definitely felt like I was a john. As a pin-up photographer for ten years, when I was photographing men and women, to be honest, sometimes I felt like I was a john, especially when I was shooting guys because they—you know—they had to have big erections in the photos. So they would jerk off for me for hours sometimes, and then I’d pay them. I sometimes felt like a “dirty old man” and a “voyeur.” Because they were younger than I was, and I’d pay them, and they were working it. But that was okay. I didn’t mind being a john!

Rumpus: So, how has this experience changed your idea of the john/jill-providor relationship?

Sprinkle: I’m interested in the idea of expanding the idea of what a john is, or a jill. I also did a masturbation ritual which is called “The Legend of the Ancient Secret Prostitute” in a theater piece called: “Post Porn Modernist.” I was just fresh out of prostitution, so it was just an extension of that. Now that work is studied in many universities. In my theater pieces, I would do “Tits on the Head”—Polaroid photos for $10 on the stage. There would be a line of folks paying me $10 for their turn. It was public prostitution. I turned my whole audience into johns. But because it was in a theater context, an art context, it was socially acceptable.

***

First photograph © by Annie Sprinkle.

Second photograph © by Julian Cash.

***

This interview appears in prose form in Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Clients Writing About Each Other (Soft Skull Press).

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• Donna
• Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
• Who’s having a good time?
• The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #8: The Sex and Politics of Antonia Crane

 *** 

Loitering is not particularly difficult or physically demanding. It doesn’t, at first blush, appear revolutionary or even criminal. Consider that “loiter” is an intransitive verb. There is no object to it. It is all subject and subjectivity. To loiter requires simply that you stand around or sit aimlessly, without purpose, to choose a space because it happens to be in the shade, or just happens to be there. Anywhere. The key to pure loitering—the most honest embodiment of the word’s spirit—is of course to do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But it has become bigger than that. Revolutionary. To do nothing now in the name of loitering is also to repurpose in the name of purposeless an otherwise purposed space. And we are surrounded by purposed spaces. To loiter then is a kind of zen-like appropriation, a subjective possession of objective, though often marginal space; and perhaps this is enough to make it revolutionary, enough to threaten those who are invested in the purposing or owning of such space. It worries us when someone does nothing, even when they seem to be doing nothing on a street corner, a roadway median, an alley or some other marginal space. We’re so busy, so purposeful; and in our world of increasing technological connection, we’re always engaged in some activity. It’s hard for us to understand the nothingness of loitering.

Part of the trouble is that it is nearly impossible to define “doing nothing” from “doing something,” so people who truly loiter assume a kind of vague, dangerous amorphous potentiality. The ambiguity of their physical and moral position frightens us. After all, when is any one of us actually doing nothing in any space? Have you ever truly done nothing?

Even when I putter around my yard or sit on my front porch, thinking about whatever I’m currently writing or reading, aren’t I still doing something, even if that something is only thinking? I’m still using the space with an intent that seems to fit the space. I wonder how long I could loiter on my street corner, just stand around thinking and watching people and traffic without drawing unwanted attention to myself. I wonder if that time would be different if I lived in a wealthier, gated community on the North side of town, one of those places where they don’t really have street corners. What if I just stood around in the middle of a cul-de-sac? Or if I lived in a more poverty-stricken, gang-controlled neighborhood in a different part of town would my loitering embody a different potentiality? Of course it would. The objective nothingness in my loitering allows my subjectivity to be shaped to the expectations of the context.

Loitering then as an idea is as undefined, abstract, and subjective as happiness or suffering. It can be adapted and appropriated, shaped to fit the situation; and then laws or ordinances or signs that attempt to regulate loitering are the ontological equivalent of ordinances regulating or controlling happiness or suffering. They are perhaps the most common legislative manifestations of the conflict between subjective intent and attempts at objective measurement of said intent.

Sometimes I think about this when I visit the Food King market in my neighborhood, a subjectively happy place, a true neighborhood convenience store. It feels like home to me. I don’t even care that it costs me nearly twenty dollars for two six-packs of beer. The brothers, Mo and Najib, who own the Food King, emigrated to the U.S. from Yemen and are exceedingly nice to me, always calling me by name. They know most of their customers by name; sometimes Najib’s bespectacled son sits behind the counter working on his homework. Mo and Najib often talk about the weather and they’re usually listening to NPR on the radio. But they also have prominent “No Loitering” signs posted on the front of the store and a bank of video monitors that allow them to keep and eye on every part of their property. You have about as much time to linger in front of the Food King as you do in front of an airport. Pause too long and you will be hustled along.

Mo and Najib have to deal with challenges I can barely imagine. Fresno is a dangerous place filled with desperate people. Nobody really denies this reality. We just live with it. But Mo and Najib run a tight ship, more than most places. They keep their store clean and free of the crowds that loiter around elsewhere. They never hesitate to chase off the street-kids and panhandlers, the tweakers or the prostitutes; and I have to admit that I appreciate this, that it makes me feel somewhat safer as a consumer.

When I asked Mo one day about his “No loitering” signs and how he enforces the rule, he told me that he just tells any loiterers to move along, and if they don’t move, he might threaten to call the police.

“But would they come?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Maybe. But if you just mention the police, they mostly move along.”

“And if they don’t?”

“If they don’t, I take my stick out there and I tell them I’m gonna count to three and then I’m gonna hit you with this stick.”

Mo didn’t show me his stick but I guessed it was some kind of baton. I didn’t doubt his conviction. Mo meant business. To him the issue was all black-and-white, no gray area, no room for interpretation. This was his property, his Food King, and he was in charge of defining loitering in this subjective space. He also told me he had a gun under the counter if it came to that.

The Food King. Fresno, CA 2013

***

Perhaps the most extreme example of the threatening potentiality of loitering is in the context of an elementary school, an exaggeratedly purposed and morally charged public space. If you stand around outside the playground fence of a school, just stand there long enough, most likely your loitering will be seen as a threat and you will most likely be confronted by authority figures. In Fresno all the schools are surrounded by six-foot chain-link safety fencing. If you’re loitering around a school, regardless of your intent (maybe you’re studying the architecture of schools for a class) you might be arrested or at least just hassled and hustled along. There are signs posted everywhere forbidding all manner of activities, including dog walking, golfing, model-airplane flying, and loitering; and as a parent of elementary school children, I’m glad to see those signs when we take our dog there for walks. I don’t really care if you’re flying model-airplanes at my daughter’s school, but I do care if you’re loitering there. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re innocently researching something for a novel or an essay, maybe snapping photos with your IPhone, I just want you to move along and take your subjectivity elsewhere. An elementary school is a place where the objective truth of the context overwhelms the subjective truth of anyone who moves through the space. Your rights are necessarily limited there, and it doesn’t end at the fence. The rights-defining power of an Elementary School space extends well beyond the fences, past the sidewalks, into the streets, where the rules of driving are more stringent and more morally charged, and even further beyond into surrounding neighborhoods, where legal penalties for things like narcotics trafficking are increased. In such spaces the objective meaning of the place overwrites your subjective intent.

Hamilton Elementary School, Fresno, CA 2013

***

It is also the vague undefined nature of loitering combined with the impossibility of truly knowing or measuring subjective intent that has allowed anti-loitering laws and ordinances to be used as a weapon against civil disobedience. Martin Luther King was arrested because anti-loitering laws on the books in Montgomery allowed the police, regardless of the facts of that day, to define King’s presence, to shape his intent into something criminal, something they could use to control him. He was just attending a public trial. But anti-loitering laws allowed the police to arrest him for being black in a white space.

Attempts to criminalize loitering have been used more recently to try and control gang activity, drug sales, panhandling and prostitution, as well as to control populations of homeless people and protesters in the nationwide “Occupy” movement. These efforts, though often temporarily successful, are often doomed to failure, perhaps because of the very nature of loitering itself. Courts have recognized that anti-loitering laws often encourage racial profiling and police abuse of marginalized groups. Legislating loitering is like legislating nothingness.

In February 2012, New York City settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of citizens arrested over the years on anti-loitering charges that had been deemed unconstitutional. The city’s efforts to control loitering over a span of thirty years will ultimately cost them fifteen million dollars and require them to expunge thousands of arrests and convictions. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that this will change the way anti-loitering laws and ordinances are used to control marginalized populations in this country. We are simply too purposed and possessive of our objective spaces, too frightened by the potential of loiterers.

In other communities, perhaps due to the challenges of defining and enforcing anti-loitering ordinances, business owners are turning to less obviously confrontational, more passive, subjective, and subliminal deterrence methods. They’re turning to sound warfare as a way to avoid the whole messy enterprise of objectively measuring and legislating against subjective intent. Perhaps they’re doing this because it protects them from images of abuse and violence and the cultural resonance created by such pictures.

***

The Mosquito was invented in Wales several years ago.

Moving Sound Technologies has been marketing and selling the Mosquito throughout North America.  Many cities, municipalities, school districts, and parks boards use the Mosquito to combat vandalism 

The patented Mosquito is a small speaker that produces a high frequency sound much like the buzzing of the insect it’s named after.  This high frequency can be heard by young people 13 to 25 years old.

The latest version of the Mosquito is called the MK4 Multi-Age. It has two different settings one for teenagers 13 – 25 years and one setting for all ages. 

When it is set to 17KHz the Mosquito can only be heard by teenagers approximately 13 to 25 years of age. 

When set to 8 KHz the Mosquito can be heard by all ages.

In case you thought Mosquito is all about annoying sound that would force the loiterers to run for cover you would be in for a pleasant surprise!

The Music Mosquito is a complete music system that will relay Royalty free Classical or Chill-out music that would keep the teenagers away to some extent.

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  . 

Mosquito anti loitering device is a handy option to suppress vandalism and the issues of graffiti aggressively.

The Mosquito Device can help with Teen Loitering Problems.

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  . 

The Mosquito Device can help with Gang Loitering Problems 

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito Device can help with Vandalism Problems

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito Device can help with Grafitti[1] Problems

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito

***

At night now in Fresno or in your city they might gather beneath the glow of street-lamps, lurking around its penumbral cone of light. Packs of teenagers. Black kids. Brown kids. White kids. Brawny boys in baggy clothes, hats and team jerseys; pale, inked kids wearing white wife-beaters; girls in skinny jeans, high-heels and higher hair; or a population of bearded men smiling through meth-snaggled teeth, shuffling burnouts and tweakers with face tattoos, gang bangers with bulldog paws or red lips painted permanently on their necks; or maybe it’s those ubiquitous kids at a suburban mall wearing Polo shirts and skinny jeans, high-top sneakers, and puffy Tommy Hilfiger jackets and they’re loitering around Jamba Juice or the movie theater, around your neighborhood school, or outside your business every night. These are the loiterers, the idle enemies of consumption and purpose. These are the targets of subjective warfare.

In my hometown, the high school kids from outlying rural communities used to drive to downtown Lawrence, park their trucks backwards in the diagonal spaces along Massachusetts St. and set up lawn chairs in the beds. They watched the rest of us stroll past as if we were specimens in museums. Often we looked the part. Often things were said. Often there were fights. Often there was litter and vandalism. Several merchants installed strobe lights in the windows of their stores, leaving them on all night long as a kind of light-deterrent, a passive form of loitering enforcement. It worked, too. After a while nobody wanted to park or linger in front of those shops. There were fewer fights there, less litter and vandalism. But the lights also just made the business owners seem kind of mean and intolerant.

It doesn’t matter, really, what loiterers look like for the purposes of the Mosquito or for a strobe light. Such passive forms of loitering deterrence don’t discriminate on the basis of color, class, caste, or clothing choice. They cannot violate rights in part because we have few clear legal protections against noise or light pollution, despite its obvious influence on subjective experiences of happiness or suffering. Noise might not violate your rights. It can’t bend you over a counter and handcuff you, but it can violate your space and subjectivity. It can make it hard to think, even hard to do nothing.

What matters to the Mosquito is not the motivations of the loiterer, but simply that the subjective loitering body courses with blood and has ears with which to listen. In this way it is much like a bomb. A very smart bomb. What makes the Mosquito insidious is how it targets the age of the loiterer, his youth and the way his brain processes sound. Imagine a bomb that only wipes out people of a certain age, a bomb that targets only the young. The mosquito doesn’t care about the kinetic potential for chaos, for unpredictable behavior inherent in their stasis. It doesn’t care about anything because the mosquito is a machine designed to create an automatic physiological response, because its intrusion into your subjective internal space is silent, indiscriminate, and subtly violent.

The danger of loiterers at rest is that bodies will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The danger is the malicious pull of idle hands toward evil deeds. And the popular imagination associates loitering—a behavior defined specifically by its purposelessness—with all sorts of bad or illicit purposes; most notably property crimes like vandalism and graffiti, as well as with gang activity and prostitution. And because there is often little else for them to do, no other place for them to gather, teenagers—the ultimate in-betweeners—are regular offenders of anti-loitering efforts and ordinances. By their very nature, teenagers embody the conflict between objective rules and expectations and subjective intent. They live perpetually in the liminal space between outside rules and their internal wills. Teenagers are all subjectivity, all solipsistic fervor; they are in essence loitering between childhood and adulthood, embodying that marginalized space with intent that is often inscrutable to those of us living outside that space.

In my neighborhood, the loitering teens move between a series of spots, these odd sort of in-between places like the island of a parking lot behind Starbucks and Bobby Salazar’s Mexican restaurant, or someone’s yard, perhaps the community garden, up against the brick wall of the Brass Unicorn and the Starline or in the side-yard of an apartment building on Moroa Ave. You won’t find them outside the Food King, but nearby in side-streets and alleyways, lounging in various liminal spaces.

Much to the chagrin of many Fresno shoppers, we also find loitering teens on the wealthy, north side of town at the clay-colored strip mall called River Park, a palace to consumerism and multi-national corporations that, in effort to curb loitering, not long ago tried to ban unaccompanied teenagers from the premises. That didn’t work so well.

A parent or other objectively recognized adult had to be with any teenager on the premises. It wasn’t clear how the mall intended to enforce this, if they planned to randomly ID anyone who looked young enough to be a teenager. Perhaps they simply should have installed Mosquito anti-loitering devices in the same places they’ve installed Musak speakers and security cameras. We fear teenagers not because of their loitering itself—that gray penumbral area between right and wrong—but because the act of doing so suggests, by its mere existence, the possibility for harm, for mayhem and destruction. We fear their unbridled youth and all of its sublime potentiality. We fear their marginalization because it lives outside the boundaries of our control.

Banksy, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA

 ***

One day not long ago as I was driving home from lunch with a friend, I took a side street that parallels a major thoroughfare, a street known as a popular hangout for the Fresno street kids and the homeless. A homeowner who has been working on remodeling a large house that backs up to the street recently installed a painted wooden fence and stacked-stone planters surrounding mature pomegranate trees. He’s created a lovely little oasis of landscape architecture that would appeal to nearly anyone’s aesthetic; and as I drove past this oasis, I saw a loose pack of loitering teens lounging around the planters, smoking, pawing at each other, laughing, and doing nothing. All of them. Loitering. Just sitting there, doing nothing. And I felt this momentary urge to yell at them or drive them away somehow, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was jealousy. Perhaps it was fear.

Unless I’m writing or reading, I have trouble sitting still for ten minutes. I can’t imagine doing it for 2 or 10 hours. I wondered if the homeowner might want to think about getting the Mosquito anti-loitering device, if he might want to agitate their space and send out high-pitched squeals of deterrent noise. I thought this might be something that I would do if I owned the house; but even as I thought it, I cringed at the idea, the invasion and violation of space, as well as at the aesthetic and moral cruelty of creating an otherwise appealing place that would be simultaneously physiologically repulsive, a space whose 17 MHz of Mosquito noise would hurt the ears of young people.

These days when teenagers loiter across the street from our house, making-out or smoking weed from a can or a pipe or a blunt-wrap, I mostly ignore them. Some days I want to tell them to move along or to just smoke somewhere else. Some days I want to warn them that other people aren’t so understanding, that the police often patrol our street since it’s so close to the high school. But the most I ever do, if I’m out front with my kids, is give the teenagers a hard stare, maybe a wave to let them know I see them, to suggest they might move along.

I’ve thought about calling the police, but the Fresno police frighten me more than loitering teenagers. They shoot people. Pretty regularly. I don’t want these kids to get shot or even arrested. And besides I don’t really want to be that guy–the asshole neighbor who calls the cops on kids. The truth is they’re not hurting anyone except maybe themselves. They’re just hanging around because they can, because they have nowhere else to go. My friends and I did similar stuff in high school. We used to drive out into the Kansas countryside, down empty gravel roads, to find space where we could smoke or drink. These kids like to linger against the tall fence along my neighbor’s side yard and sit beneath the overhanging tree on the stacked railroad ties. It’s only a block from Fresno High School, away from the crush of other kids and just beyond the boundaries of school space. It seems safe enough, like a place where they can loiter in peace.

Who am I to deny them this space?

I watch them sometimes and I think about Mo and his stick, his gun under the counter. I think about the Mosquito and I wonder how I would react if the teenagers crossed the street, crossed the line and started loitering in my yard, if they even got close to my daughter and invaded my subjective space.

I’m not sure I would even count to three.

I like to think I’m a long way from those white officers in Moore’s photograph, those agitated and frightened white men who pressed King against the counter, twisting his arm behind his back, arresting him for eternity in the objective space of that everlasting image. But I realize I’m also guilty. I’ve let my own subjective fear shape the way I define loitering. I’ve let my imagination carry me away, let my own context—home and family, children and dog, yard and garden—condition the meaning of the teenagers’ nothingness and I’ve let it color their lingering at the periphery of my space. The street is the line, I tell myself. It’s a wide and fuzzy boundary between us. But it is a boundary.

One day a boy crossed the line. He approached the house. The kids were in the front yard. My girlfriend met him at the driveway. I’d gone inside for a minute and came out to see her walking back toward the garage. She moved with purpose. I followed her. The boy waited at the end of the driveway.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“He wants to borrow a soccer ball,” my girlfriend said as she smiled and walked past me, down the driveway and tossed him the ball. I felt my blood cool, retreating from full-boil. There was no danger, no threat. There was nothing for me to fear.

“It’s OK,” she said.

The boy and his three friends, another boy and two girls, set up “goals” in the middle of the street made of wadded-up fast-food bags and wrappers. They played soccer on the asphalt for a while, darting out of the way when cars came. They were out there long enough for my kids and I to drift back inside. The boys flirted shamelessly with the girls and showed off with the ball. All of them laughed a lot. They seemed so happy. I watched them through the windows near the front door, listening to the sounds of their youth. They moved with ease and grace between the curbs, lingering in the in-between spaces with such sweet purpose.

***

[1] Sic. All italicized passages taken from the Moving Sound Technologies website.

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I’ve spent the last couple months in the company of writers, mostly poets, mostly men. I am growing weary. The group I hang with is large and fluid—I’m not naming names, not pointing fingers, I like these people—and yet an issue I cannot ignore has begun to emerge: when it comes to many of the men in the company, mid-thirties and younger, making conversation, even with women present (older, younger, students, professionals, I’m a grandmother for Christ’s sake), the topics frequently revolve around who is sleeping with whom, which female is more fuckable, which poop or dog-cum reference is the funniest, and what is the latest text from “the Korean girlfriend.”

It’s not that I mind swearing, not that I dislike racy humor, not that I’m a prude—the more sex the better, I say—but self-aggrandizing dick jokes get old fast. At one point, just to balance the conversation, I suggested, loudly, to another woman in the group that we begin starting our sentences with “My vagina is so tight…”

After one poetry reading and various levels of alcohol consumption (not to offer mitigation, just setting the scene), two of the younger women in the group (younger than me, that is) were repeatedly propositioned and pawed by more than one man in our company, even though the men knew the women were in long-term committed relationships and, more importantly, were entirely uninterested in a bit on the side.

My personal issues with some male colleagues have been slightly different. On reminding a colleague about a deadline, he told me not to “scold” him. This, in spite of that fact that (a) I was the project manager, and (b) it was a simple deadline reminder. If I had wanted to scold, it would have sounded less like “We need X by Y date” and more like “You are consistently lacking in follow-through, and I’m getting fed up with your inability to make deadlines, so pull your thumb out of your ass and get it done.” Yeah. That.

On the night before a poetry reading I had arranged, I got an email from a young writer saying he didn’t think he could read the next day, as his girlfriend hadn’t brought her proper ID and so couldn’t get into the reading venue (a bar) and he didn’t want to leave her alone. My email response: “Alrighty.” This writer had cancelled on me before, so really, what was there to say? In response, I received a lengthy plea asking me not to be cold and to try to understand and Would you leave [name of my husband] alone in a hotel while you read? You bet your fucking ass I would—in fact, my husband was clear across the country at that very moment, taking care of all domestic matters including a new puppy who was shitting all over the house.

I have five children. That’s enough.

***

Back to the weeks of concentrated writer events. One man offered as a compliment “You look rape-able.” One man seemed compelled to check out and comment on the breasts and legs of all the women we passed (or perhaps it just seemed like all) on the street, at the bar, in the restaurants. One man I was talking to opened a conversation with “You know that chick…” It turned out he was referring to the late-thirties editor we had just been chatting with, but it took me a minute to figure it out, because not in my wildest dreams would I have referred to the mature, professional woman as a “chick.”

This kind of crap went on and on. It was exhausting. Exhausting to figure out how to respond to the relentless misogyny from men who are otherwise kind and educated, who would never think of themselves as chauvinist assholes. I have heard more than once from this crew, “Most of my favorite poets are women.” If I were to guess, I’d bet that the lot of them vote pro-choice, support the Violence Against Women Act, and consider women well capable of intelligent, complex thought. I certainly don’t assume that all men under 40 would engage in the kind of language and behavior described above; indeed, I know of many who would never do so. And yet, after the past several weeks, its frequency is far beyond what I thought possible.

What is up with all this dehumanizing language? Honestly, I have no idea. But I do know this. If “good guys” feel perfectly at ease using degrading language that objectifies women when talking not only to one another but also to women they purportedly respect, then the bullshit that came out of the GOP this past election cycle (vaginas that can tell the difference between consensual sex and rape, for example) can be explained. A big pile of reasonably aware and well-intentioned people doing thoughtless shit creates a solid set of stairs for unreasonable, ignorant assholes to say and do what most of us (men and women alike) would deem shockingly destructive.

The group I was spending time with recently was mercifully spared a flood of “That’s what she said” jokes, though I have surely been drowned in them before. The only recent instance went something like this.

Woman referring to her sandwich: “That’s too big for my mouth.”

One of the men at the table: “That’s what she said.”

Me: “That’s what he is hoping she said.”

***

So I’ll offer this: in addition to being exhausted and discouraged by the relentless barrage of bathroom humor and frat-party antics, I’m bored. I’m in this world of poetry and books for ideas and language and beauty. Seriously. So I’ll say to whoever needs to hear it, put your shit back in the can and let’s talk about things that might actually be funny or engaging or matter once the whiskey has worn off.

Last year, a good friend of mine was deeply injured by a woman he had been in a relationship with. For his birthday, which occurred in the middle of the mess, I gave him a vintage nutcracker in the shape of a pair of women’s legs. Was this me buying into the same bullshit I’m talking about here? I’m not sure.

While preparing an essay for VIDA the other day, I reviewed the guidelines and saw the following description of one of the essay categories: “For you alpha personalities willing to be bold and opinionated, for this feature we send you five to seven provocative questions about life, writing, or current happenings.” Huh. Are women who are willing to articulate their opinions automatically “alphas”? Perhaps that’s how we are currently characterized in our culture, but surely that will not be the case in a world where opinions are valued based on merit and not based on the gender of the speaker. Even VIDA, an organization working tirelessly to increase the awareness of women’s accomplishments in the arts, can fall prey to language that protects misogynistic tropes.

So, again, here’s what I say to anyone who needs to hear it: let’s get together, knock a few back, have an entertaining conversation about literature or human nature or something hilarious one of us saw on TV. But here’s the thing: the moment you start talking about the tits of the woman at the end of the bar, or referring to grown-ups as “chicks” or start getting me confused with your mother, that’s the moment I move on. Not because I’m offended or uptight or a bitch, but because I’m bored. Get interesting (and perhaps help shift our cultural consciousness at the same time), or get out of the way.

That’s what she said.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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While cartooning will always be a part of Ariel’s life—she teaches a Graphic Novel Workshop at The New School and collaborates with comedian Kevin Seccia on the recurring webcomic Ariel and Kevin Invade Everything—she’s also been working on her first prose novel, ADAM, which will be published next spring. We recently had the chance to discuss the evolution of her career as a cartoonist and writer, and her forthcoming book about a young man’s formative summer in New York City.

Ariel Schrag, Cartoonist & Writer
Listen to the profile by clicking on the play button below.

***

Ariel has kept diaries since she was seven. Here’s one of her first.

An important early influence was Ariel Bordeaux’s pioneering minicomic Deep Girl.

Here are some of the reference books on Ariel’s shelf.

Here are some of the personal effects she keeps in her workspace.

And here is a brief video of Ariel at work:

***

Photos and video by Allyson McCabe.

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• ALBUM #2: Angela Jimenez
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez

I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

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Watts O. stood six foot four, had flaming red hair and wore round gold-rimmed glasses that John Lennon would have liked. He saw himself as a Renaissance man, raised on a farm in Minnesota and then educated at both Carleton and Oberlin Colleges. Later as he rode the rugged plains of China, he read aloud the Romantic poets to his trudging mule, shared the wisdom of Shakespeare with his probably baffled manservant, and waxed poetical about the purple hills in the distance.

By all accounts, he made friends easily with the Chinese and was wildly successful at spreading the Gospel. Under his watch the Congregational mission in Shansi Province grew many times over. He built a hospital, schools for the Chinese children, a library and roads that proved useful for decades. He enlisted Red Cross aid for Shansi and raised needed funds for famine relief from congregations back home. The Reverend Pye’s efforts were tireless, although his journals reveal an exhausted figure. At the age of forty-eight, he was thrown from a mule out on the trail, his chest stomped upon by the animal. Soon TB filled his weakened lungs and he died. He left his wife, Gertrude, and a five-year-old son, Lucian (my father), and a compound of missionaries in search of a leader. Most of all, he left behind those Chinese out on the plains and in the mountain hamlets who would no longer be visited by the surprising white giant of a man.

I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I can almost forget why he was there. But then there is the fact of the small leather bound tally book. In cribbed penmanship he catalogued the Chinese names and numbers. On a “good day,” the totals reached the twenties or more; on a “bad day,” a mere one or two. He gave sermons to famine-starved citizens at windswept crossroads. He stayed up late into the night listening to potential congregants weep about their fallow fields. He ate paltry meals at their tables, and in return for his kind and attentive ear, they accepted his offer of salvation.

It was then that the miracle ostensibly occurred. And although he had offered relief to some hearts and minds, the fields remained withered and famine was widespread. The country he left behind in 1925 when he died was rife with turmoil caused by internal battles and external invasion. The presumption that Chinese souls needed saving and that an outsider’s religion could do so was soon held up as yet another example of colonial arrogance. The Communist Revolution began the process of eliminating Christian chapels in cities and distant enclaves as China headed in an altogether different direction.

During my childhood as the war raged in Vietnam and conflict tore apart campuses and cities, I did my best not to think about the missionary side of my family and certainly never boasted of the Reverend Pye’s successes. For me, he was a blatant example of American imperialism. I was ashamed to claim him.

That is, until our parents were moving out of the family home and several generations of possessions had to be dealt with. From a dark corner of the attic, I pulled boxes that held my grandfather’s journals and hunkered down to skim the faded onion skin pages. I unfolded the linen cloth and studied the intricate, carefully drawn map of a rural China from long ago. Out of my grandfather’s traveling Bible fell copious notes for sermons, and when I opened his tally book, the leather made an audible crackle.

And here is what I found that day: a writer. In his journals, the Reverend effectively described camel caravans climbing mountain trails, orchards laden with exotic fruit, foul-smelling village streets and the many voices and attitudes of the Chinese around him, as well as the remarkable beauty of a place unspoiled by industry. He also recorded in more clichéd language his Christian beliefs and assumptions, but it was in his descriptions of every day life that I found him not only genuinely appealing, but also not naïve about the complexities of his position there.

“If the Orient seems strange to us,” he writes, “we should remember that we are seen just as strange to the Orient. The Chinese think us dirty, lazy and superstitious in the west. Dirty, because although we bathe, they detect a very decided odor. Gertrude had a sewing woman last winter who had never been near foreigners before, and after three or four days gave up the job, as badly as she needed the money, and the reason was that she simply could not stand the foreigners’ odors. Mr. and Mrs. Gilles were asked one spring not to walk into a neighbor’s peach orchard where they had been accustomed to walk, for it was thought that the crop failure was due to the odor of their bodies. They think us dirty, too, for the way we use the handkerchief and replace it in our pockets. To a refined Chinese, the sight of a person blowing his nose in the handkerchief and then putting it back in his pocket is actually nauseating. The point in dispute is an excellent example of how the different races may regard the same matter differently and each consider themselves innocent and the other guilty of the same offense. We think the Chinese wanting in cleanliness because, though they do not expectorate into their handkerchief, they will dust their shoes with it and wipe out the tea cup before pouring your tea. Exactly the same distinctions are made to show that we are lazy and superstitious.”

Reverend Pye expresses his intent to be open-minded and unbigoted and seems amused when he senses the Chinese judging him based on his race. One late afternoon, he wrote in his journal as he sat outdoors at a rough-hewn table in a poor village: “A crowd of about thirty watchers is pressed about me as I write, discussing the typewriter, the mysteries of foreign letters, my filled tooth, and what it can ever be that makes me ‘white,’ instead of brown or yellow. They have come to the universal belief that since we drink milk or use it in our food that is the explanation. One man has with great satisfaction just informed the rest that anyone of them could very shortly become just as white as I am, were he to use milk for a few months. They think our color is only artificial. I have heard tell of the story of a Chinese school boy in class when asked the color of the Negro replied, ‘black.’ And the American Indian? Copper color, was the reply. And the Englishman? White was the reply. And what color is the Chinese? Man color, proudly answered the youth. And so it should be.”

In other journal entries, he used the ornate, poetic language of his time to capture the transporting qualities of the countryside: “We lay around, letting the old sound of the mourning doves and the sight of the hills sink in. They sound and look just as they did when we were youngsters back home. Man and his language change while nature and the birds remain. We do miss the dear home faces. But will rest and get new visions for the days to come. There are lots of visions you can’t see, but just feel them, and after all, feeling is perhaps only the soul’s way of seeing. Something that comes to us as light as melody and as color, thrilling us with the sentient harmony that we often hear ripple from the throat of the music-made bird: that same thing that came to us times without number in childhood, and that comes to us now on run-away days like this one, under blue skies and green woods, and despite all that has gone before, and all that may come afterward, and it makes you take off your hat to the joy of living.”

My grandfather’s words revealed him to be a more complicated and nuanced person than the single-minded zealot I had presumed him to be. Before I knew it, he was transposing himself into a fictional character in my mind, because fiction is the best way I know to explore the contradictions inherent in being human. Through odd twists of the imagination, the Reverend Watts O. Pye became The Reverend in River of Dust—a man who is both foolish and wise, witty and overly serious, all seeing and yet blind.

But because The Reverend in my novel is ultimately an invention, I have him experience a crisis of faith that my grandfather never had. The real Reverend Pye died believing in his own convictions. And yet, for me, it is his written words that suggest a more honest and startling miracle—one of a heart and mind revealed across both distance and time. His was never actually a simple story of a man, a mule and a map. And the miracle he promised remains dubious at best. But if one does exist for me, it is buried in the fascination of getting to know an ancestor so long dead and in coming to terms with the moral complexities of his mission.

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Listen to Virginia read her essay:

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Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

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