Search Results for: Tin House

Army of Me

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Toshiki Okada| translated by Samuel Malissa | An excerpt from the novella “My Place in Plural,” which appears in the collection The End of the Moment We Had | Pushkin Press | September 2018 | 13 minutes (3,377 words)

The phone is nestled between my belly and my thighs as I lie on my side on the futon. It must look like I’m warming an egg. In my mind I keep hearing a line from a song I listen to a lot, although I’m not listening to it at the moment. I have no reason to try to block it out, so it’s been playing over and over. Today is a Friday like any other. But I decided to stay home from my part-time job. I don’t feel like doing anything at all.

At this point I’ve only made up my mind to stay home, and I haven’t called in to tell them yet. The rumpled white sheet forms a ridge around my body, an almost perfect square enclosure which I’m finding it surprisingly hard to move from.

The song in my head was recommended by Nakakido, one of my husband’s friends, and my husband listened to it but it wasn’t really his thing, so he didn’t burn a copy or play it a second time, but I liked it, and ended up listening to it all the time.

My left hand keeps running through my hair, like I’m testing its thickness.

It’s morning. The futon mattress is nearly flat and has these soy sauce stains and other discolorations. Even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to get them out.

At around two in the morning (I could pinpoint the exact time if I checked my phone but I can’t be bothered), I got a text from somebody named Wakabayashi. I don’t know anybody by that name, so it’s probably somebody my husband knows. The text said something about the first anniversary of Nakakido’s death coming up and everyone should get together. Somehow instead of the text going to my husband, or just to my husband, I was included in the text, or maybe it only came to me. I was still awake when it came in, so I read it then. It didn’t make me sad, if anything it made me feel kind of uncomfortable, since I don’t remember my husband telling me something had happened to Nakakido. I thought he was still alive. Read more…

Losers’ Lunch

Illustrations by Paul Lacolley

Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2018 | 31 minutes (7,863 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 7.

Losers are a fixture of my workday as a sportswriter.

Talking to a person coming off court who was just dealt a crushing defeat, and offering some vague, platitudinous comfort to assuage their raw battle wound, is a necessary task in the job. On rarer occasions, I’ve talked to those who have just suffered a defeat so harrowing and derailing that it has them visibly doubting the viability of their career. But for most losers, even in down moments, there’s the credibility and dignity of having just performed for an appreciative crowd of some size in a respected, aspirational pursuit like professional sports.

There’s nothing remotely aspirational, though, about the Applebee’s restaurant I found myself in during day 6 of the 2017 US Open. And sitting across a table bearing mozzarella sticks and glasses of tap water, these were not my normal losers.

Rainer Piirimets, a three-year veteran of the tennis tour from Estonia, was knocked out of the US Open the day before, exiting Arthur Ashe Stadium in the early afternoon. His partner, a fellow Estonian who has been on tour for 10 years, sat beside him.

Piirimets left the stadium not through the tunnel to the locker room, but out a side gate. His wrists bore no sweatbands, only handcuffs.

The request for this interview was not made, as most I do, through the tournament media desk, but rather through a Facebook message. Piirimets eagerly accepted. Meeting at Applebee’s was his suggestion, but he wasn’t hungry—just eager to set the story straight after spending 10 hours in police custody the day before.

“We’re not criminals,” Piirimets said, a phrase he and his friend would use as a refrain over the next two hours.

Piirimets had sure been treated like a criminal the day before. While watching the third-round match between Petra Kvitova and Caroline Garcia, he was spotted in his seat in the upper deck (Section 331) by tournament security officials and escorted out. He was then arrested in a small room just off the concourse by police, who then perp-walked him out of the stadium. The cops steered him through a dense crowd of staring, perplexed tennis fans and ducked him into a waiting police car outside the tournament gates.

Piirimets, a competitive high jumper in his youth, was then put in a jail cell at the 110th Precinct in Queens, which he shared with, he said, an agitated, profane homeless man. After several hours in the lockup, he was brought to a court for arraignment before a judge. He was then released and given a summons to appear in court again seven weeks later. He doesn’t plan on attending.

His friend, who I’ll call Pete, was equally animated about the treatment Piirimets had received.

“To keep him for 10 hours in prison, for doing what?” said Pete. “He made a little mistake, no big deal.”

His crime was trespassing. Piirimets had also been kicked out of the US Open the year before, and during that first ouster he was given paperwork acknowledging that he was to be banned from the tournament grounds for 20 years. He said he didn’t think that threat was serious, and that he didn’t think he was bound by the forms because he didn’t sign the line at the bottom. Nor did he understand that trespassing was a crime that could get him arrested in the United States. After all, he said, he’s been kicked out of lots of tournaments, all over the world, and nothing like this has ever happened before. Because why would it? He’s not a criminal, he said, flummoxed.

What Piirimets is, he admitted, is a member of a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem: a courtsider. But with their hunters getting more and more adept, courtsiders—arguably justifiably so—have become an endangered species. Only the most stubborn of their breed persist. Even though sports betting is becoming legalized in the United States, they will still be persona non grata at this year’s US Open, which they will attempt to attend again.

Though only the second courtsider ever arrested at a Grand Slam event, Piirimets was the eighth caught in the first five days of the 2017 US Open, according to the USTA—which prides itself on “vigorously combatting” courtsiding and was quite excited to alert the media to his arrest. Twenty courtsiders—17 men and three women (none American)—had been caught during the 2016 tournament, hailing from as far away as Sri Lanka, each thinking they had the skills to beat the system. All were given notice of a 20-year ban from the tournament. Read more…

O, Small-bany! Part 2: Winter

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

Her name was Sally. Sally-bo-bally. The Salster. Sometimes we called her Butt-Wiggle, for the way she shook it when she saw us. Or butt-wig, for short. You know how it is with nicknames, the language of love. We found her on a rescue organization’s website. Sally! She was bright-eyed and smiling. Hi! Someone had tied a bandana around her neck. I adored her on sight. She was up for adoption the following Saturday in a parking lot behind a warehouse in Schenectady.

I’d never had a dog. My mother said it was dirty to have animals in the house.

We resolved to keep open minds and meet all the dogs, let the right one find us, not force anything, but it was always going to be Sal. She stood on her hind legs and wagged her whole ass at us. She was practically dancing. Sally-Sal! Jet black, with a short, shiny coat. Pit/lab mix? Pit/lab/hound? Pit/whippet/lab? Who knew. Who cared. The chemistry was perfect. Love at first lick. Not like poor little Buddy, over in the corner with a bad case of worms, or pretty retriever Julius, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. It was always going to be Sal. Four months old, spayed and vaccinated. No one else showed the slightest interest in her. She was ours. We filled out the paperwork and took her home.

***

Her eyes! The way she looked at you, and didn’t look away. So present and soulful, a real lover. She was like a person, if we’re talking about the most honest loving open deep good authentic funny sort of person, and how many of those have you ever met? She’d curl herself up next to you, close as she could get. She wanted to crawl under the sheets next to you. She wasn’t satisfied unless she had her body in the sweetest possible proximity to yours. She was like one of those rare massage therapists whose touch feels psychic: exactly where you want it, exactly how you want it. Magic.

I was never into dog memoirs or whatever, never understood that mad devotion to pets. Seemed weird to be that into an animal. It seemed fairly sad to be that into an animal. Like, why don’t you find yourself some more people to love? I didn’t get it. Now I got it. People are way overrated.

How creepy it is when people talk of “completing” their families, as though a family is a construction project or a vocational course, a finite thing, a theoretical ideal. How moronic and hubristic I find that attitude. It’s like the ugliest kind of nationalism, on a microcosmic scale. And yet. And yet. Sally gave us something new to love, and in so doing gave our family a new dimension, this whole new love to share between us. I felt a weird, delicious sense of… completeness. I was past having babies, but Sal was my sweet darling beloved lil’ boo. We were in love with her and in love with each other and in love with the way she loved us back and generally high off our own abundance of love and good fortune. There was this warmth in my chest. We redrew our goofy family crest to include her. We sang ridiculous songs to and with and about her. We spoke to her in a silly dialect. Dare I say it? We were happy.
Read more…

For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors

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Laura Esther Wolfson | An essay from the collection For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors | University of Iowa Press |  June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,516 words)

 

When I was a very young woman, I spent many months working and traveling in the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War would soon take many people by surprise. I was far from my mother and from everyone else who mattered. In the Soviet hinterlands, I met a woman I’ll call Nadezhda. She treated me like a daughter. She had none of her own. She clearly wished she did.

Reader, I married her son.

—————

There was more to it than that, of course. I met the son first, and, in the usual way, he brought me home to meet his parents. And the son was actually delightful. When he spoke, he grew irresistible. Small children (there were many in his extended family) were especially susceptible to his charms. They would wrap themselves around his legs when he stood up from a chair to keep him from leaving.

Those months spent in another language, an experience both freeing and confining, the tectonic historical shifts I witnessed at close range — these things changed me. That the changes might fade with time was unthinkable. I needed a way to bring it all back home.

I was too big to wrap myself around his legs the way the children did.

—————

I hopped over to the States to take care of some personal business, then circled back to Nadezhda, her son, and the rest of the family in those hinterlands I mentioned, which were in Soviet Georgia. Nadezhda had just become a grandmother by her other son, who was the younger by four years. The household now consisted of Nadezhda and her husband, the baby and its parents, the older son (my intended) and me.

Julia, the baby’s mother, complained to me about what I could see for myself: the family did not welcome her. The pregnancy had been an accident, their second. I say their second, but both mistakes were of course seen as entirely hers.

Read more…

A History of American Protest Music: Which Side Are You On?

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2018 | 8 minutes (1,536 words)

 

It’s axiomatic: In hard times, the vulnerable suffer most. Although the Great Depression left no American untouched, those who lived in the penury of Kentucky coal country bore a greater burden.

“In the early thirties I had one of my babies starve to death,” recalled Kentucky singer Sarah Ogan Gunning in Voices From the Mountains.

It literally happened — people starved to death. Not only my own baby, but the neighbors’ babies. You seed them starve to death too. And all you could do was go over and help wash and dress ‘em and lay ‘em out and sit with the mothers until they could put ‘em away.

On February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association reduced their employees’ wages — already at subsistence level — by 10 percent. The miners responded by organizing a union. Union members were either fired and evicted from their company-owned homes, or beaten and killed. Soon there was a general strike. Thus began a period of harassment and violence known as the Harlan County War, or more simply, Bloody Harlan. The sheriff’s department acted as enforcers for the mine operators.

Sam Reece worked as an organizer for the National Miners Union. “Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam — that’s my husband — he was one of the union leaders,” remembered musician and activist Florence Reece. “I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn’t come home that night.”

The next morning, Florence, in her words, “tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall,” and wrote a new lyric to an old melody.

Come all of you poor workers, good news to you I’ll tell

Of how that good old union has come in here to dwell

Which side are you on?

 

If you go to Harlan County, there is no neutral there

You’ll either be a union man or a thug for JH Blair

Which side are you on?

Reece couldn’t have known that what she created would become the most durable anthem of the labor movement, and a template for protest songs for decades to come. “Which Side Are You On?,” written from acute personal trauma, has been universalized, both in lyric and musical modality. After making its way out of Harlan County and into a New York recording studio, it got modified to fit the message of countless underdog protagonists.

“Which Side Are You On?” quickly became an anthem in the union halls and picket lines. Jim Garland, another organizer and songwriter, immediately used it as a tool for protest. “In the course of such fights, songs expressed people’s feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together,” he said. “Rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying, ‘You’re a bastard,’ which might have resulted in a shooting, we could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”

In December, 1931, Garland and his cousin Aunt Molly Jackson travelled to New York to give concerts to raise money for the striking miners. They performed “Which Side Are You On?”, where it ultimately caught the ear of Pete Seeger.

By the early 1940s, Seeger was changing the face of American popular culture. He formed a band called the Almanac Singers with folk hero Woody Guthrie and singers Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. They sang folk songs — some they wrote and some learned from others — that were pro-union and anti-war. “They did not perform in costume, either of the concert stage or of the radio barn dance,” wrote Robert S. Cantwell in When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, “and yet their street clothes, in which they ordinarily appeared, ranged from pieces of business suits in various permutations and combinations to dungarees, workshirts, and construction boots….”

“Back where I come from, a family had two books,” remembered Arkansas-born Lee Hays. “The Bible to help ’em to the next world. The Almanac, to help ’em through the present world…We became the Almanac Singers.”

The first Almanac Singers album, Songs for John Doe, sold well enough in Communist bookstores to merit a new record. Talking Union was recorded in the same Central Park studio in May, 1941, and released on Keynote records in July. “Which Side Are You On?” was the last of its six songs. Even though they didn’t change Reece’s original melody or lyric, the Almanac Singers took “Which Side Are You On?” from the personal to the universal. It’s instructive to hear both versions. First, Reece, singing her composition in later years.

The melody for this song originated centuries ago in England, and is known as modal music. Modal music doesn’t have a key or chords in the way we would understand from, say, a Beatles song. Traditional Irish and Scottish folk music, which became the basis for Appalachian folk music, is modal, and predates 1650.

Reece’s performance is declarative and singular. She sings as an individual, without accompaniment or harmony. She sings to us as a group of individuals, each with a decision to make. “You have to be on one side or the other,” she once said. “In Harlan County there wasn’t no neutral. If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be.” She is asking us to decide, because even if the idea of community, in the form of a union, was comforting, the reality is that people were being picked off one by one.

The Almanac Singers’ version of “Which Side Are You On?” is an example of tonal music. (Again, think of a Beatles song, with chord changes and harmonies.) Pete Seeger begins with a stark, descending banjo riff — a foil for the upcoming single-string guitar melody — and then sings the first verse. The chorus is a haunting response to his call, sung by a group of voices. A community has formed, and what they sing is as much indictment as encouragement. Florence Reece’s modal melody, an artifact of Appalachian fiddle music, has been incorporated and expanded. We hear harmonies now, as sympathetic as a friend, as organized as a union.

Jim Garland, who brought “Which Side Are You On?” to New York, stayed and became part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, one largely founded by people like Seeger and Guthrie. It was an alternative world, one informed by a mix of races and cultures and classes. These folk artists collected and composed songs of the people, performed them in small clubs, union halls, and regional festivals, and made them available through recordings, virtually none of which were available to Florence Reece back in Kentucky.

Seeger had a knack for popularization. Remember, it was he who changed “I Will Overcome” to “We Shall Overcome.” Seeger also identified “Which Side Are You On?” as being pliable to other applications. He penned some new lyrics in support of the National Maritime Union in 1947:

The men who hate our union, they say we dodged the draft

Not one of those damn liars knows his forward from his aft

From there the song gained immortality. The Freedom Singers, a group formed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1962, rewrote the lyric to reflect their Civil Rights struggle.

Come all you Negro people, lift up your voices and sing

Will you join the Ku Klux Klan or Martin Luther King?

They certainly employed, to great effect, the Almanac Singers’ call and response arrangement, bringing altogether more church into the proceedings.

Len Chandler, a topical singer from Greenwich Village who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, wrote his own version:

Come all you Northern liberals, take a Klansman out to lunch

But when you dine, instead of wine, you should serve nonviolent punch

Through the rolling years, “Which Side Are You On?” has been adapted and covered by myriad artists, including Dropkick Murphys and Ani DiFranco. The question renews itself as each generation struggles against inequality.

The melody proved as durable as the lyrics proved malleable. Although Reece claimed to have borrowed the melody from an old Baptist hymn, the truth is much less sanctified. A listen to an a capella version of “Ho Lily Ho” by Appalachian singer Sarah Hawkes reveals the song’s origin. This is an ancient tune, also known as “Jack Monroe.” In most of its iterations, the song tells the story of a young woman who dresses like a man to find her lost lover in battle. In every version, fearlessness defines her:

‘Your waist is slim and slender, your fingers they are small

Your cheeks too red and rosy to face a cannon ball’

 

‘My waist, I know, is slender – my fingers they are small

But it would not make me tremble to see ten thousand fall’

Even if Florence Reece, the young and beleaguered Kentucky housewife, did not know the original song’s themes of transformation and bravery when she wrote her lyric, she carried them forward nonetheless.

Now it’s our turn. The new lyric has yet to be written, but the circumstances that will inspire it are with us daily. There may indeed be one humanity; there may indeed be “no such thing as other people’s children,” but right now this world is binary, and we are called to choose. Which side are you on?

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Not Quite Not White

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sharmila Sen | Not Quite Not White | Penguin Books | August 2018 | 30 minutes (6,053 words)

I had never seen a black man in person until I was 12 years old. If I search my memory hard enough, I can see a few faded newspaper photographs of West Indian cricketers in the Statesman. I can see dark-­skinned Africans within the panels of my beloved Phantom comics. There are faint recollections of black James Bond villains in Live and Let Die. If I squint even more, I can remember the evening when we crowded into our neighbor’s drawing room, watching Pelé on a black-and-­white television set, the first procured in our middle­-class neighborhood. The first flesh-and-­blood black man I saw was standing outside the entrance to the U.S. consulate in Calcutta, which is located on a street named after Ho Chi Minh. At the entrance to the consulate where Ma, Baba, and I had gone for our visa interviews, I saw two men in spotless uniforms. One was the whitest, blondest man I had ever seen in real life; the other was the darkest black.

The consulate smelled like America in my childish imagination. The air ­conditioned halls, the modern plastic and metal furniture, a water cooler from which I eagerly poured myself some water even though I was not thirsty. I breathed in the scent of wealth in there. It felt like newness on my skin. Everything was hushed, ordered, brightly lit. Not like my own loud, bustling city. Even the local Indian staff seemed to behave as if they were actually living in America.

I stood at the entrance of the U.S. consulate in Calcutta in 1982. In 1965, American immigration laws had been rewritten to allow for a greater number of non­-Europeans to enter the country. Not only were Indians and other Asians considered unwanted newcomers before 1965, even naturalization — the process by which a foreign­-born immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen — was disallowed for most who were not white until the 1950s. I knew little of this history when I entered the consulate with my parents. I did not even know I had something called race. Race as a category had not been part of the Indian census since 1951. I was about to move to a nation where nearly every official form had a section in which I would be offered an array of racial categories and expected to pick one.

In 1982, as it happens, it was not clear which race should be affixed to my person. Since the number of Indian immigrants was fairly insignificant in the United States until the latter part of the 20th century, the census barely took notice of us. At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, there were essentially three races acknowledged by the government — white, black, and Indian. My kind of Indians, the ones from the subcontinent, however, fell into none of these categories. No matter how mysterious our race, we were not considered white during most of the 19th and 20th centuries by the American courts. In 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau declared people from India to be legally white. A decade later, in 1980, we were officially reclassified as Asian by the government, at the insistence of Indian immigrant groups who believed that the new classification would afford us greater affirmative action benefits. Yet, what was to be done with the decision to make Indians white only a decade earlier? What would happen to those white Indians? “Self-­reporting” was the Solomonic solution to this problem. In order to satisfy the demands of the diverse Indian community, after nearly a century of shuffling people from the Indian subcontinent from one racial category to another, the U.S. census had finally thrown up its hands in despair and asked us to “self­-report” our race. In the 1990 U.S. census, of the native­-born population with origins in the Indian subcontinent, nearly a quarter reported themselves to be white, a tiny minority (5 percent) reported themselves to be black, and the vast majority chose to report their race using terms that pertain to South Asia.

Such an astounding array of choices was not always available to people from India who found themselves in the United States a century ago. If Ma, Baba, and I could have embarked on a time machine and arrived in the country eight decades earlier, we would have found ourselves in a different situation. If I had immigrated in 1909, I would have been labeled “probably not white,” but a year later — when the U.S. courts decided to change their opinion on the matter — I would have been “white.” If I was Sadar Bhagwab Singh in 1917, or Akhay Kumar Mozumdar in 1919, or Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, I would have been “not white.” Naturalization in the United States was reserved mostly for whites between 1790 and the middle of the 20th century. Non­white immigrants could not become naturalized and partake of the rights reserved for U.S. citizens. Indians were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until the 1940s. They could, however, toil in American factories and fields, offices and streets.

So Indian men such as Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind kept trying in vain to prove they were white in order to become naturalized citizens. But what actually made a person “white”? Could you be both “Caucasian” and “non­white”? As Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind all found out, yes, you could be Caucasian and also Not White. The courts ruled repeatedly in those early decades of the 20th century that naturalization was for “whites” only, and some “Caucasians” were not truly “white” enough to qualify.

That the two words — Caucasian and white — are used interchangeably today would come as a bittersweet surprise to all who were caught in the deep chasm between those labels a century ago. Yet, that is exactly the chasm in which people from the Indian subcontinent, an area that is second only to Africa in its genetic and linguistic diversity, were placed by the U.S. courts. In those early years of the 20th century, miscegenation laws could have prevented me from marrying a white American in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. The former governor of South Carolina and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, identifies herself as “white” on her voter registration card. Of course, according to the laws of this country, Haley can legally self-­report her race any way she pleases. The former governor of South Carolina was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from India, and the racial category she chooses for herself tells a complex story of the state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and where even today West African–inflected Gullah culture (brought by black slaves) does not easily mix with white French Huguenot culture (brought by white slave owners).

Indians were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until the 1940s. They could, however, toil in American factories and fields, offices and streets.

A hundred years ago, Indians immigrated to the United States in very small numbers. They were mostly agricultural workers who traversed the networks of the British Empire, sailors who stayed behind in American ports, or Hindu holy men who were invited to lecture in cities such as New York and Chicago. The Immigration Act of 1917 placed India squarely within the Asiatic Barred Zone, an area from which immigrants were not allowed to legally enter the United States. This zone would not be legally unbarred until 1946.

Contemporary racial labels used in everyday American parlance are an odd amalgamation of the geographic (Asian), the linguistic (Hispanic), and the pseudo­biological (black, white). The rise of Islamophobia threatens to racialize Islam and conflates race with religion. This, however, is not a new phenomenon in American history. Early 20th-century America was still in the old habit of seeing Jews as “Hebrews” — as much a racial label as a religious one. It also happened that many Jews themselves preferred this system— until the murderous actions of the Nazis in Europe—because Judaism cannot be folded neatly into the box we call “religion” today, a box whose dimensions are largely of Protestant specifications. Similarly, “Hindoo” was as much a racial label as a religion in early­ 20th century America. Today what is considered my religious background might have been seen as my racial identity had I arrived in America at the beginning of the last century.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson, changed the quota system that restricted non­European immigrants from coming to the United States. People like me were going to become a bit more common on American soil. Hindoo, Asiatic, Caucasian, non­white, brown, Asian, South Asian. During the era of self­-reporting in the early 1980s, I was a young girl faced with a plethora of racial categories based on a wild mash­up of genetics, linguistics, theology, and geography, who landed in Boston on August 11, 1982. The entry date is marked on my first passport.

I carried an Indian passport back then. Navy blue with thick cardboard covers. I received that passport in December 1979. On page four, there is a line printed in minuscule letters: “Countries for which this passport is valid.” Below it a stamp, in purplish blue ink, slightly tilted, partly smudged, is still vividly legible after nearly 40 years. It says (first in Hindi): sabhi desh dakshin afrika aur rodeshiya ko chhorkar — ALL COUNTRIES Except Republic of South Africa and Colony of Rhodesia.”

Before immigrating to the United States, I had never left India. My 1979 passport was an aspirational possession. Yet, I was already becoming aware of certain countries that were forbidden to me. My parents explained that India did not allow me to travel to South Africa or Rhodesia because of something called apartheid. There existed places where people like us had gone as coolie labor, as merchants and traders, and even as lawyers (the young Mahatma Gandhi practiced law in Pretoria in the 1890s), during the time of the British. But white people did not treat brown and black people fairly and each group had to live apart. Unlike my forebears who had borne the “malodorousness of subjecthood” for two centuries — as the Indian political scientist Niraja Jayal once wrote—I was fragrant with citizenship and protected by the laws of my nation. And those laws prevented me from going to Rhodesia and South Africa, places where complex designations such as black, colored, Indian, and white would determine where I could live, where I could go to school, and who I could marry. But in the late 1970s, when I received my passport, I barely grasped what apartheid really meant.

Caucasian but Not White. Not White and Not Black. Minority. Non-­Christian. Person of Color. South Asian. I never thought of myself as any of these things before the autumn of 1982. I had grown up back in Calcutta with an entirely different set of extended labels for putting people into boxes. What language do you speak? Which gods do you worship? Which caste do you belong to? Are you part of the bhadralok (the Bengali word for the bourgeoisie)? Do you eat with relish the flesh of animals, fowl, fish, and crustaceans? Do you eat beef? Or do you eat only plants and grains? “Veg” and “Non­veg” in India are almost as evocative and important as “black” and “white” in America. We can detect a person’s religion, caste, ethnic group from the foods they eat and the foods they shun. Every society invents ways of partitioning themselves and methods of reading the hidden signs displayed by those who wish to cheat the rules. A person of a lower caste might want to pass as a Brahmin; a Muslim might want to pretend to be a Hindu when caught in the middle of a riot; a Hindu might pose as a Muslim to gain entry to a restricted space. We were taught to be vigilant about such trespassers. An Indian’s surname holds a multitude of information about her. In India, if you know my surname is Sen, you already know which language I speak as my mother tongue, my caste, the religious holidays I celebrate, my likely economic class, my literacy status, whether I am vegetarian, the birth, wedding, and funeral rites I might have. Conversely, a last name that holds very little information is suspect. What is this person trying to hide? The way one pronounces a certain word, the way a woman drapes her dupatta over her head, how her nose is pierced, whether a man’s foreskin is intact or circumcised, whether a little boy has a red thread around his wrist or a tabeez, an amulet, around his neck signifies so many things in India. In some cases, it can mean the difference between being killed by a mob during a communal riot and being pulled into safety. We had all these distinguishing labels. But race we did not have.

***

I grew up in India for the first 12 years of my life with­ out race. After ruling us for two centuries, the British had departed in 1947. The India of my childhood was a place marked by what economists call “capital flight.” These were years preceding the arrival of economic liberalization. Before the Internet and cheap cell phones, our knowledge of the United States was channeled largely by a few Holly­wood movies, occasional headlines in the newspapers, magazines such as Life and Reader’s Digest, and hand-me-down clothing brought back by relatives who had immigrated to the West. Television had not fully arrived in India during the first half of the 1970s. We tried halfheartedly to imitate American fashion, eat American fast food, or listen to American popular music. Still, we were always a few years behind on the trends. Of course, we were also happy with our own popular culture. We watched Hindi films made in Bombay, hummed along to the songs aired on All India Radio, and ate delicious street foods such as phuchka and jhalmuri without missing global chains such as KFC or Mc­ Donald’s. Our drinking water was procured daily from the neighborhood tube well. Ma, Baba, and I each had our own official ration cards. These rations cards were used for purchasing government-subsidized basic commodities — rice, flour, sugar — which we used to complement our groceries from the local bazaars. I had never seen a mall or a super­ market before I came to the United States. Ma and Baba did not own a telephone, a washing machine, a television, a cassette player, a car, or a credit card until we emigrated. Our sole mode of personal transportation was a blue Lambretta scooter purchased by Baba in the mid­1970s. When Baba was not around to take us around on the scooter, hand­-pulled rickshaws, red double­-decker buses, trams, and the occasional taxi were the usual ways we navigated the sprawling metropolis that was Calcutta.

We vaguely understood ourselves to be Not White because our grandparents and parents still remembered a time when white Europeans ruled us. The Indian notion of Not Whiteness was shaped more by nationalism than by race talk. The subcontinental obsession with skin color cannot be explained solely through the American grammar of racism. In a subcontinent where melanin can appear in wildly differing quantities among family members, the lightness or darkness of one’s skin cannot easily be used to mark rigid racial boundaries. Yet, the preference for paler skin was clear to all in Calcutta. Girls with “fair” skin were supposed to fare better than those with “wheatish” or “dark” skin when marriages were to be arranged. I grew up reading numerous sentimental tearjerkers about sisters whose fates were determined by their complexions—the fair one always married well and the dark one was forever shunned by all prospective bridegrooms. Rabindranath Tagore’s famous lyric about the beauty of the black­-skinned woman’s dark doe eyes was quoted often in literary families, marked by the same self­-righteousness with which well­-off Americans buy fair trade coffee beans. Still, I never came across a matrimonial advertisement in any newspaper that boasted of a dark­-skinned girl’s beautiful doe eyes.

I was warned regularly not to darken my own light complexion by playing too long under the noonday sun. Mothers and grandmothers had numerous homemade concoctions at the ready for keeping my skin pale. A ladleful of cream skimmed from the top of the milk pail, fresh ground turmeric, and sandalwood paste, as well as numerous citrus fruits, flowers, leaves, seeds, and nuts, were our allies in the endless war against the sun’s skin ­darkening rays. Women walked around Calcutta brandishing colorful umbrellas during the sunniest days lest the “fair” turn into “wheatish” or the “wheatish” into “dark.” Some of us had complexions as light as any European, but we knew that an invisible line divided us from the pink-­hued Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese. In the comic books of my child­ hood, the colorists painted the Europeans a homogeneous shade of pale rose and reserved every shade from light beige to dark mahogany to the brightest cerulean blue for Indi­ ans. This is how I saw the world as a girl — Europeans were pink. We were not.

The Indian notion of Not Whiteness was shaped more by nationalism than by race talk.

It would be a lie of the greatest magnitude if I were to claim that I lived in a society of equals, in a society without barriers, hierarchies, and labels, before I came to the United States. I have already said that I grew up as an elite—a speaker of the dominant language of my state, part of the dominant ethnolinguistic group, and a follower of the majority religion. I was an upper­ caste Hindu Bengali. The maternal side of my family were haute bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, by virtue of their landowner past. Three generations ago, some of these landowners — called zamindars in India — had turned to law, one of the few professions open to Indians under British colonial rule. They trained in law in Britain and returned to India as barristers, dressed in European­-style clothes, living in homes furnished with massive Victorian teak furniture. In time, some of these ancestors — men of my great­-grandfather’s generation — had made the transition from practicing law to agitating for political freedom from British rule. Eighteenth-­century American colonies had seen similar professional trajectories from law to revolutionary politics.

On my father’s side of the family, our cultural capital outstripped our financial capital. Ours was a family of scholars and intellectuals. In some parts of our home state, West Bengal, the mere mention of my grandfather’s name endeared me to total strangers. I did not need to read the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction in order to learn that one can inherit cultural capital just as conveniently as one can inherit property, stocks, jewelry, or money. My paternal grandfather did not leave me a house or a trust fund. But he did give me a slight edge over my peers. Our school textbooks often included short essays on historical topics written by well-­known Bengali intellectuals. One of those essays focused on Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, a 19th century Indian queen famous for going to battle against the British who annexed her kingdom. Whenever we read that essay in class, I sat up a little straighter. We were supposed to take pride in our female ancestors who fought British men on the battlefield long before the independence movement was born. My pride, however, was of a pettier sort than grand nationalist sentiments. My grandfather was the author of that essay. Each time I saw his name in print, I felt a secret pride swell inside me. I was the descendant of a man whose writing was part of the official school syllabus. Even though I did not always tell my classmates or my teachers that the author was my grandfather, the knowledge itself was my cloak of protection. It gave me confidence — a bit of smugness even — that I took for granted. This is how elitism works.

***

The first morning I woke up in America I could smell bacon frying. I was nearly twelve years old. I had spent the night sleeping in the living room of Baba’s childhood friend. This friend, an architect and the grandson of one of modern India’s most influential artists, was married to a white woman. She was cooking us breakfast in the adjoining kitchen when I opened my eyes. Their duplex apartment was right across the Charles River from Harvard Square. My parents slept in one of the two bedrooms on the top level, while our host and his wife had the other bedroom. The couch was allotted to me. It was a modest apartment. As a parochial Bengali girl, I had envisioned the wealthy West as the land of opulent overstuffed sofas, velvet drapes, crystal vases, and expensive carpets. This home was utterly confusing to my eyes. The dining chairs were made of metal tubes and woven cane; the lamps looked like crushed white paper balloons. I had imagined America was the land of rich people with air ­conditioning, big cars, cities laid on grids, and skyscrapers. A new world, a young country where everything sparkled and smelled good, unlike Indian cities where ruins, rickshaws, crooked gullies, and the smell of oldness prevailed.

When I opened my eyes that morning, the first thing I saw was a triangular neon CITGO sign. I had no way of knowing that this had been a beloved Boston icon since 1940. Being an immigrant child before the era of the Internet, Wikipedia, or Google, I was seeing America for the first time.

It was a week of many firsts for me. I had flown on a plane. I had traveled outside India. I had bacon for breakfast. Even now, if I get too complacent about my sense of belonging here — my ability to speak, dress, look, think like an American — I only need to smell bacon frying and I am a newly arrived immigrant again. That morning, I smelled it, heard it sizzling and crackling, before I tasted it. It was a complex animal smell, making my mouth water and my stomach churn in revulsion at the same time. Today, my favorite sandwich is a BLT. I greedily search for those salty bits of bacon in a Cobb salad. Yet, the actual smell of bacon frying is a powerful reminder that I did not always relish these tastes, that there was a time when I struggled to train my palate according to the custom of this country.

Immigrants are supposed to be delighted when they arrive in America — huddled masses who have reached their final destination. But in 1982, I was sad when our British Airways plane landed at Boston’s Logan Airport. Baba, who originally trained as a geologist, and spent most of his working life in India as a sales representative for pharmaceutical companies, had been unemployed for many years. Since the late 1970s, our middle­-class life in Dover Lane had been sliding imperceptibly toward the unseen basti behind the garbage dump. My bharatanatyam classes ended because the fees for the dance school had become a luxury we could no longer afford. The number of maids we employed dwindled as the household budget shrunk. Fish and fowl appeared fewer times on the menu until one day they disappeared completely. Ma went less frequently to the tailor to order new dresses for me. Instead, we waited for the autumn, when my aunts sent us the customary gift of new fabric — a few meters of printed cotton, enough to make a dress for a young girl — for Durga puja. We began avoiding family weddings because we could not buy appropriate presents for the new couple. We stopped going to the nicer cinema halls of Calcutta and began to patronize the shabbier ones where ticket prices were lower. Those trips to Park Street restaurants such as Waldorf or Sky Room became a distant memory. We went there only when a better­-off friend or relative treated us to a night out. The blue Lambretta was brought indoors and stowed away in our hallway as a reminder of happier times when we could afford the price of petrol. The sofa and coffee table vanished one day and instead of buying new furniture, we began renting it. Because new school uniforms were expensive, the hems of my blue school skirts had been taken down one too many times. I used to rub my finger over the light blue line, the part of the fabric that had been bleached with repeated washes and ironings. Each time the hem was taken down, the faded line of the old edge became a token of my precarious status as a member of the bourgeoisie. I began to ask girls who were older than me if I could buy their old school textbooks because new textbooks were beyond our budget.

As it happened, our downward mobility coincided with a meteoric rise in my grades at school. The more we moved toward the unseen world where Prakash and his mother lived, the better I performed in my examinations. In our brutal Indian school system of ranking students, I used to be ranked among the bottom five girls in a class of 40. That was when I was 6 or 7 years old. Baba became unemployed when I was 9. Suddenly I was appearing in the top ten, then top three, and by the time I was 11, I was consistently ranked first in my class after our examination marks were announced. Yet, I had to ask around school for a set of used textbooks as each new school year approached. I was no longer able to invite all my classmates for my birthday party where a cake from Flury’s, decorated with marzipan roses, would have pride of place at the table. No matter how hard my mother tried to keep my uniforms clean and ironed, my blouses were never as white as those of the girls whose parents bought them new uniforms each year.

Even now, if I get too complacent about my sense of belonging here—my ability to speak, dress, look, think like an American—I only need to smell bacon frying and I am a newly arrived immigrant again.

I became friends with the school bus driver’s daughter, who was enrolled as a scholarship kid. She was one of the girls who received a free loaf of bread during tiffin time. I never ate bread that tasted so delicious, when she began sharing them with me during the bus ride home. Other girls might go home to daintier snacks. I saw such homes in advertisements. Tidy middle-class Indian homes riding the wave of upward mobility. Homes with televisions that children watched with their parents; with refrigerators filled with rows of soft drink bottles; with toaster ovens in which beaming mothers baked cakes for their kids who returned from school looking as fresh as they had left in the morning. But children in downwardly mobile homes know that an atmosphere of fear, resentment, anger, and dejection awaits them at home. One wrong move, and the whole house can explode. One mention of extra money needed for a field trip, or the cost of a new dress for the school chorus, or an art assignment that requires costly materials, and everything can go up in flames. As much as I hated the crowded, hot school bus, I was in no rush to return to Dover Lane. The bus driver’s daughter and I enjoyed the free bread at the back of the bus, and she tantalized me with promises of fluffy kittens. My new friend seemed to have an endless access to kittens and each afternoon she promised that she would sneak one into school for me. She strung me along in this manner for months, describing the kittens in great detail.

I tried, with partial success, to mask the bitter taste of genteel poverty with the sweet taste of arrogance. Arrogant — there is no other word for how I felt when I sat on those rented chairs in our drawing room and studied my report card at the end of each term. A row of beautiful numbers — 95, 96, 97, 98 — written neatly in blue fountain pen ink. Those numbers made me feel strong when, in reality, I was weak and vulnerable. A girl in a poor Indian home during the 1970s had limited options, even if she possessed an English- education and her grand­father’s name elicited looks of admiration and her great­ grandfather once sailed from England wearing beautifully tailored suits. If I were to maintain the crucial space between myself and the boy who swabbed the floor, and Darwanji who washed cars at 4 a.m., and Jamuna whose father collected her monthly wages, and the maimed children who begged on the streets, I needed more than faded photographs of my ancestors leaning against elegant teak furniture.

In an irrational act of generosity, the Architect arranged a job for Baba as a salesman in a men’s clothing store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He helped us apply for green cards — a process that took nearly three years, over a quarter of my life at that point. The Architect had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and studied design at Harvard. He had lost touch with Baba for many years until one day he decided to look us up in Calcutta. Spontaneously, he decided to help his unemployed friend and his family. Immigration routes are patterned on kinship networks. Brothers follow brothers. Children follow parents. Grandparents follow grandchildren. Through marriage these networks become ever more expansive and intricate. A new bride follows a husband. A few years later her mother might follow. Then her brother and his wife. Entire districts from certain parts of the world might find themselves in a small American town as families follow one another across well­-established migratory paths. A new immigrant feels secure knowing there is a brother with whom one could stay for a few months until a job is arranged. A cousin might provide just the right tip to secure employment in a new country.

Occasionally, friendship trumps kinship. A sibling might distance himself from his less successful brother, and kinfolk might slowly inch away from a family member emitting the faint whiff of poverty. In a poor society, impecunity is treated as a communicable disease. If you stand too close to poverty, you might catch it. Others see the poor as lacking merit and virtue. We were becoming infectious, virtue-less, without merit. And suddenly, just as I had begun to adjust to a slightly lower social class by giving up the little luxuries — new school uniforms, meat at the table, the use of a scooter — a long­ lost friend led us to a new life. Without accruing any financial benefits for himself, without any social or moral obligations, what was the Architect’s motivation? Perhaps he remembered rainy afternoons spent chatting over hot tea in a canteen. Maybe he recalled the red laterite soil of his hometown. He could have missed speaking Bengali with someone who knew him as a boy. Or maybe he wanted to be near someone who knew how to pronounce his name correctly. Perhaps he wanted to fashion three new immigrants into his ideal of the American nuclear family. I can only guess. I became the unintended beneficiary of his whimsy.

We waited for almost three years in India for our visas because Baba was too nervous to emigrate without a green card. We were making a historic leap from one continent to another, yet we were an extremely risk­averse family. Many immigrants carry these twin traits within themselves and some even pass them on to the next generation. As risk takers we leap far from the safety of home. Having left the comforts of home we know all too well that there is no safety net of kinship or citizenship to catch us should we topple. This makes us cautious. We check the lock on the door three times before going out. We save more than we spend. We collect sugar and ketchup packets from McDonald’s and cannot throw anything away. At work, we beat every deadline in the office and never pass up a second gig to make extra money. We tell our children to keep their heads down, study hard, and always look for a bargain. As risk­averse immigrants, we do not rock the boat. If you  were a trapeze artist without a net below you, wouldn’t you act the same way? Anything else would be irrational.

Scholars who study immigrants such as Baba and Ma would describe them as the classic example of Homo economicus. Economic man makes rational decisions that will increase his wealth and his ability to buy nice things. In those early days in America, whenever people asked why my parents immigrated I felt a sense of irritation and embarrassment. I could not say that we were fleeing war or political turmoil. We were not exiles seeking political or religious freedom. We were seeking economic gains. We were seeking more money. That is a humiliating thing for a 12-year-­old girl to have to repeat in a schoolyard. My parents sounded greedy. Or, worse, they sounded like people who had failed to be successful in the country of their birth and sought a second chance in a richer country. Because I arrived with them, I feared I too was tainted by these labels — greedy, unsuccessful, Homo economicus. At 12 I had made no rational choice, but the accident of my birth made me Homo economicus all the same.

In a poor society, impecunity is treated as a communicable disease. If you stand too close to poverty, you might catch it.

I wished we could pretend to be expats. Expats are glamorous and cosmopolitan. Cool expats like Ernest Hemingway sip Bellinis in Harry’s Bar in Venice. Modern expats are the well­-heeled white Europeans or Americans one encounters in cities such as Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai. They are foreigners who have moved to distant shores for all the same reasons as a humble immigrant — higher wages, more job opportunities, greater purchasing power, and faster upward mobility. White expats often hold themselves apart from natives in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, seeing themselves as superior. They send their children to the local American, British, French, or German school. They go to restaurants and shops frequented by others who share their tastes. They have their own clubs. In the West, we do not begrudge white expats their seclusion. New immigrants in America, by contrast, are perceived as undesirables who bring down the real estate value of a neighborhood. The women wear strange garb, their ill­mannered children run amok, and their grocery stores emit unpleasant odors. Meanwhile, white expats add value to their surroundings. Shanghai’s French Concession is chic because of the presence of white folk. European expats add glamour to the high­end restaurants of Abu Dhabi.

We weren’t chic expats or political dissidents with lofty ideologies. We were three people moving from a country with fewer resources to one with greater resources. I doubt we added glamour or value to our surroundings.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

To this day this small exchange — repeated endlessly throughout my years in the United States — instantly determines the social hierarchy between my interlocutor and me. I wish I could say my parents possessed some extraordinary professional skill for which an American institution wooed them. We did not hold noble political or religious convictions that were at odds with the government of India. There was no war raging in my city and we were not being resettled. Homo economicus has a duller, more prosaic story to tell.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

The native­-borns nod and feel pleased that they are citizens of a country that offers better everything — jobs, homes, clothes, food, schools, music. I would feel the same if I was in their shoes. It must feel good to be born in a country that has more wealth than other places, to have the hardest currency in your wallet. It must feel good to be generous and invite others — after intense vetting and preselection — to share in this plenty. Even though I had no say at all in my family’s decision to emigrate, I felt my shoulders weighed down with the plenitude of the host country. This plenitude of which I was to be the grateful recipient was evidence that white people were superior to people like me. How else could one nation be so wealthy and another be so poor; one country have so much to give and another stand in a queue to receive? The inequality of nations was surely a sign that some races were morally, physically, and intellectually superior to others. The inequality of nations surely had nothing to do with man, but was shaped by Providence.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

***

From From Not Quite Not White, by Sharmila Sen, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2018 by Sharmila Sen.

Boo: A Reading List About Ghosts

red, green, blue, and orange pac-man ghosts painted on a gray wall, with bright green grass on the ground
Photo by Jason Whitaker via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

Tonight the subject is…ghosts. (Cue “WoooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo” sound effect.) Ghost stories seem to point to a reality beyond our own — or, at the very least, to an expanded understanding of what exactly this plane of existence encompasses. And from a philosophical perspective, I’m half Mulder and half Scully, which means I can find deep spiritual fulfillment from things that I’m 100% sure are total bullshit.

I was raised in rural western New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from the beautiful farmlands and forests of eastern Pennsylvania. Both sides of the river are dotted with 17th and 18th century homes and outbuildings, and many people speak of ghosts as matter of factly as my old neighbors in New Mexico speak of aliens: Maybe they hadn’t personally seen one, but their cousin sure did, and he wasn’t nuts. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I, too, have met many reasonably rational people who report ghost stories. I had a friend whose mother, a salt-of-the-earth woman with common sense and a practical nature, told me with no tongue in cheek about the ghost that lived in their farmhouse.

“I think it’s a little boy,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get that sense. He’ll leave cabinet doors open. I can feel when he’s in the room and when he isn’t. When we first bought the house, I sensed him here. I could hear him rattling around in the basement. After the cabinet doors thing kept happening, I said out loud, ‘Hey, we don’t mean you any harm. We are going to fix some things in the house but we aren’t going to mess anything up or tear anything down.’”

She said she felt things were very nice after that, and that he still did the cabinet thing sometimes and she would say “Hello!” out loud when he did. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she said. “He’s mischievous but not mean.”

Like my friend’s mother, I was raised Roman Catholic. My relationship with the religion today is tenuous at best — I dislike corruption and mass sexual assault in any internationally franchised corporate entity, whether or not they get nonprofit status due to centuries of political influence — but I give credit to my loving Irish-Catholic father for teaching me an important lesson about belief. (My father, it must be stated, is also not a fan of homophobia, financial misappropriation, abuse, or incense.) Along with giant curly hair, he passed on to me a nearly prayerful awe for science. But his approach to spiritual belief — and belief in spirits — is deeply respectful, more so than my own. He said, “I think it would be arrogant to assume we know everything about this world and if other worlds exist. We don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe elements of energy or what we call a soul do stick around. And I do believe people who say they’ve seen things. Whether or not they were real ghosts, I can’t say.”

My religious background and the relatively open-minded attitude of my parents also influenced my curiosity about telekinesis, astral projection, astrology, clairvoyance, and the bestselling Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” books. It certainly vaulted me in the general direction of witchcraft. Though I am a member of no religion and have a healthy skepticism about many things, I retain the desire for spiritual fulfillment and a connection with the divine. I also like ritual; I recently paid someone a couple hundred bucks to do a healing ceremony with me in a beautiful old house in Los Angeles. (It involved tarot, prayer, and creating a spell bag. I got to write down a list of things and then set that list on fire. It was great! Ten out of ten, would recommend.)

There are many genres of paranormal tale, and I believe the greatest of these is the ghost story. Do we see the people who’ve died before us? Is this simply wishful thinking? And if it is wishful thinking, why do some people report terrifying apparitions none of us would ever wish to see? Is this a collective human tendency to hallucination, or mental illness, or are ghosts really real? I don’t know, but I do know I’ve gotten to read some very good stuff on the subject.

1.  “Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?” (Tiffanie Wen, The Atlantic, September 2014)

Wen leads with three anecdotes about women who believe they may have captured images of ghosts via iPhone camera. Wen herself is one of these examples, and she does a medium-deep dive into why folks in our modern world still believe in specters and ghouls.

Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

Wen cites examples from Asia and mainland Europe, and consults scholars and scientists to figure it all out. By the end of the article, I came to the conclusion that there’s simply something wrong with the iPhone camera and the way it captures images, and that it was probably something notorious asshole Steve Jobs knew about and couldn’t fix.

2. “Ghosts Definitely Don’t Exist Because Otherwise The Large Hadron Collider Would Have Found Them, Claims Brian Cox.” (Andrew Griffin, The Independent, February 2017, suggested by Kara Hansen)

The headline alone is hilarious. Before reading this article I had no idea who Brian Cox was, but his photo told me this dude was wild, because he is giving us “deeply-moisturized Mads Mikkelsen on a casual science journey” realness. I’d also heard of the Large Hadron Collider, probably on an episode of Big Bang Theory or in an article I skimmed, but I didn’t know what the hell it was either. Now I do!

The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.

Sounds dope. What does all this have to do with ghosts? Well, Brian Cox, who is a TV-friendly professor at the University of Manchester, thinks the LHC would’ve seen a ghost if ghosts were real. It hasn’t, so ghosts are not real. Also important: Cox has a Beatles haircut, very on-brand for Manchester. And he was in a band, much like my friend Brian, who is a physicist but also half of the hilarious band Ninja Sex Party. Maybe they hang out.

Oh, Cox also has a podcast called the Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I plan to become obsessed. So he said some smart-sounding thing about all this on his show, and fellow TV-friendly scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was all, “Friggin’ excuse me?” Except what he actually said was, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” And Cox was like, “Yes.” Anyway, I’m going to become a Brian Cox fan, probably.

3. “The 10 Best Ghost Stories” (Lauren Oliver, Publishers Weekly, October 2014)

Lauren Oliver seems like a really neat person. She’s also a talented author. And while my columns here are reading lists and I don’t usually link to other lists, I’ll make an exception here. Oliver collects her favorite ghost stories, and I’m terribly embarrassed to say I’ve read none of them. I’ve certainly seen Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and I know it has key differences from the book. And I’ve seen any number of film, stage, and TV versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Anyway, I’ve got to get my shit together and check out all of her recommendations before I myself am dust and ashes, at which point I’ll pass on to my next life, or stick around this plane as a lingering ghost, or simply be dead and gone. Regardless of what happens, I doubt I’ll have much time to read.

4. “The Truth About The Paranormal” (David Robson, BBC, October 2014, suggested by Kara Hansen)

Robson opens with an anecdote about a naked Winston Churchill encountering the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I am here for any and all naked Churchill stories, and to put it in the lede is a bold and brave move, so probably this article should get whatever the British Pulitzer is called. (It should be called the Bareass Churchill.)

His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.

Read on for information on damage to visual processing centers in the right hemisphere of the brain, symptoms of epilepsy, and other reasons you might think you’ve seen a ghost when you haven’t. Turns out sometimes your brain tries to fill in missing information when, for example, you catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable in low light. Also turns out there are no more Churchill naked tales in this article, but you should still read it.

5. “The Spookiest Ghost Stories From All 50 States” (Mental Floss, October 2017)

There are so many delightful stories here. I’m highlighting one from Connecticut, our nation’s dullest state, as a reward for being a nice place to stop for a pee at the many Dunkin’ Donuts shops between Boston and New York.

In 1970, famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to combat the spirit of “Annabelle,” a demonic presence attached to a giant Raggedy Ann doll. For weeks the doll had thoroughly freaked out its owner, Donna, moving from room to room, leaving handwritten notes, and even attacking a friend who suggested Donna get rid of the doll, choking him in his sleep. Finally, a priest exorcised the doll and the Warrens locked it away in a special case designed to check its malevolent influence. But even that wasn’t enough to save one brash visitor to the Warrens’ museum, who reportedly taunted the doll and died in a motorcycle crash on his way home.

* * *

In high school, my mom and her sister threw a party when their mom was away. My football-playing, pot-smoking, drag-racing (not in the RuPaul way, sadly), respectful-of-ghost-believers dad (remember him?) showed up with his giant cloud of curly red hair and found her Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, and proceeded to arrange them into a coital tableau to make his dumbass football bro friends laugh. My mom was enraged and embarrassed because she was trying to impress some guy and my dad was stealing focus. The point is, adolescent boys are gross and my mom wouldn’t go out with my dad for another year.

I’d tie it back into spectral ghosts but I keep picturing Raggedy Ann humping Raggedy Andy at a hormonal teen house party in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1973 and now I’m snort-laughing on a flight to Dallas. Because for me, the most compelling part of ghost stories will always be the tales of who we used to be. Pantomime doll sex is just a bonus.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

Pair These Wines With Armageddon and Veal

Elias Funez/The Union via AP

Thousands of cases of unsold wine gather dust in the back room of the Renaissance Winery in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, northeast of Sacramento. These reds are some of the best the state ever produced, so why are they wallowing in boxes? For The San Francisco Chronicle, wine critic Esther Mobley visits Renaissance to examine the winery’s rise and fall, what distinguished its glory days from its early days, and to tell the story of the Fellowship of Friends cult, who settled on this land not for its fertility, but its isolation.

The ’70s were a ripe time in California for new belief systems. Contemporary to Burton, elsewhere in the Golden State, the charismatic leaders Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Franklin Jones and Sun Myung Moon were finding their own fervent followings. As Saron Rice, a former member of the Fellowship of Friends, describes that period: “If you couldn’t afford to climb a mountain in Tibet, you found a guru in California.”

What distinguished Burton’s Fellowship of Friends was its insistence that consciousness — the Fourth Way’s ultimate goal — could be achieved through rigorous study of the fine arts. So when Burton bought this sprawling, remote property in Oregon House in 1971, he christened it Apollo, dedicating it to high culture. He attracted a congregation of intellectuals and creative types. “Everyone was an artist, a poet, a psychologist or a sculptor,” says Gideon Beinstock, another former member who was to become Renaissance’s winemaker.

Visit Apollo today and you can still tell how this place once thrived. Funded by its members’ monthly tithes — 10 percent of their income — the Fellowship was, at least for some time, flush. It had its own opera company, theater troupe and ballet. Its museum housed an elaborate art collection; years later, its set of antique Chinese furniture would fetch $11.2 million at a Christie’s auction. At one point it had its own proper zoo.

This Xanadu lacked just one essential stately pleasure dome: a vineyard.

Read the story

To Be Clean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (6,673 words)

I closed the sheer maroon curtain of the private dance nook and needled my eight-inch stilettos through the G-string I’d kicked off minutes earlier to Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” On the single chair, where I usually hovered nude over men, I sat and counted the money I’d made. Only $9. It wasn’t a money-making night. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my younger sister, Melissa, had told me earlier. I was sad, and no one wants to give money to a sad stripper. Even if she fakes happiness, the customers seem able to sniff out insincerity, and it repels them. In six weeks, I’d be moving 3,000 miles away. From Portland to New York. How could I leave my sister behind? What about Melissa?

After wiggling back into my minidress, I stood, forced a smile, and strutted back into the club. I was there to make money, so I had to find a way to become genuinely cheerful. But my motivation deflated after only a few steps. I’ll just go to the bar — watch the girl on stage — and find my bearings. Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” was playing, and only one girl danced to that song. Mya.

Mya swung upside down, topless, on the monkey bars that lined the top of the stage. Her breasts, not even A cups, were perfect. I admired her dark amber nipples as she swayed in the air. Her wavy black hair hung like a lion’s mane. Sparkling red lip gloss framed her smile. Every seat was filled and a few stragglers even stood off to the side, delighted by her.

Mya appeared carefree. I needed to be like that.

When I had been on stage, there were only two men. A few others had come up and given me pity tips.

“You want a drink?” a man with a deep voice asked me. The question jolted me out of my head. I looked at the speaker peripherally. He was in his early 30s, young — unlikely to spend real money. Occasionally younger men came into the clubs in Portland to hit on the strippers. As if the dancers were not trying to make a living, but trying to find someone to date.

We loathed these customers.

“Sure,” I said and smirked.

“Let’s do a shot. Do you like that whipped cream vodka stuff?”

I shrugged. I didn’t, but it was Mya’s favorite, and that alone made it appealing. The times Mya and I had taken shots, we’d leaned into one another, our cool skin touching. She always smelled like peaches and wore shimmering outfits with glittery jewelry. “Bling it and they will come” was her stripper motto. I’d had a crush on her for two years.

Many nights, while it was slow — common in 2010, deep into the recession — we’d sit together at the bar. We’d both loved dancing at first, and we were both ready to move on with no other job to move on to.

“If you could do anything,” I’d asked her, “what would you do?”

“I wanted to be a vet when I was growing up, but it feels so far out of my reach.” She looked down at the bar instead of at me.

“I bet you could start small. Maybe a vet’s assistant?”

She thought it over. “I know I would still need education of some kind. I feel like I’m too old for that now.”

I laughed. “You’re one year older than me, right? Twenty-six?”

She nodded.

“I’m taking community college classes — my sister, too,” I said. “You aren’t too old. I’ll help you. I’m good at this kind of thing.”

She grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling. She grabbed my arm and leaned in to kiss my cheek, then pressed her face to mine, staying there for several seconds before moving away.

I learned we both had orange cats that had male names but were girls (hers: Bobby; mine: Raja). That she loved David Bowie and Prince. That like me, she was first-generation American. However, she was proud to be Mexican American. That was not like me — I rejected my Russian and German lineage. I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me. And even though we’d sometimes make out after hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do more.  

The customer handed me my shot. “I’m Rob, by the way,” he said. This will do it, I thought, this will drown out my sister. We clinked glasses before downing the syrupy-sweet liquor in one swallow. My stomach warmed and I became light-headed. The rush of the first drink on an empty stomach. My shoulders relaxed. My chest loosened. Everything was going to be alright.

“You don’t seem like the other girls that work here. You’re better than this,” Rob said.

I rolled my eyes. “So many men say that, thinking they are being clever or complimentary, but I’m going to let you in on a secret.” I motioned for him to get closer, then whispered into his ear, “The girls I work with are my friends. We hate when customers say that kind of shit.”

“Yeah, but I mean — ”

I placed my pointer finger to his lips. “Shh,” I said.

Rob, like I thought, wasn’t interested in getting a private dance. Or spending money on anything other than drinks. There was no way to make money off him. I surveyed the room from my place at the bar on several occasions, considered introducing myself to someone else — tonight was uncommonly busy. But, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too raw. Opening myself up for any form of rejection, even the faux rejection of the club, might break me.

That was most of dancing. Approaching man after man who delighted in saying no to women who would probably never even speak to them outside the club. Rob bought another round, and I eased into the fact that tonight was going to be another dud. At closing, I had little more than $100. In the beginning of my stripper career, almost four years earlier, a friend had told me: “As long as you make a bill.” Then and still, $100 a night didn’t seem like enough for this job. I’d wanted to make $500 that night, what I used to average. But I hadn’t even made $200 in months.

After the bouncer yelled for everyone to “get the fuck out,” the dancers shuffled into the dressing room. We kicked off our heels, standing flat-footed as we disrobed. Mya wasn’t even five feet tall and once we were both naked, she embraced me, our hot and sweaty bodies stuck together. I loved it — the feeling of being glued to her even for a moment. I breathed her in, peaches and tangy body odor.

“You’re so sexy,” she said and laughed.

Me? No, you are!” It was the first time all night I’d been happy.

She gave me a peck on the lips and then we dressed quickly in jeans and T-shirts.

Mya and I walked out to the parking lot with the bouncer at our side. October was usually wet and cold in the Northwest, but this year it was still dry and warm so it felt like a summer night. My attention was on Mya, so at first I didn’t notice that Rob was standing to our right, in an empty parking space. He tried to convince me to go with him right then “because we had a real connection.” The bouncer stepped between us and told Rob to go, but Rob persisted. I started crying. It was the third time in three consecutive shifts that a customer had waited outside for me.

I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me.


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“Why does this keep happening?” I asked Mya. The other times I hadn’t cried. I’d made it clear they were crossing boundaries. This time, though, I felt helpless. As helpless as I’d felt earlier that day with my sister. I thought of all the men that had hurt me, and all the men that had hurt my sister. I wanted to take it all away from her, or at least I thought I did.

“It happens to all of us,” Mya said, shrugging. “But you’re too upset.” She took my hand and interlaced her fingers with mine. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

She guided me to her beat-up black Honda Accord. It wasn’t the first time Mya had tried to get me to go home with her. Many times, she’d purred into my ear, “Please come to my place.” And each time I had wanted to, but fear took over. What did it mean that I wanted it? I suspected I was bisexual, but had been told repeatedly that bisexuality wasn’t real. Well-meaning friends and less well-meaning customers told me I was simply bi-curious. I’d heard this so often that I was confused. Was what I felt for Mya only curiosity? It seemed like more. And that scared me. So I’d refuse. And she’d say, “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to be with me?”

I really do, I’d think, but shake my head and leave.

Now, Mya opened her passenger-side door and shut me inside as Rob yelled over the bouncer’s shoulder, “I wasn’t trying to make you upset. I just like you for real.”

I cried harder. The idea that he thought he liked the real me was too much to bear. He didn’t know the real me. No one there did.

“Ignore him,” Mya said as we sped off in her car.

At her place, Mya guided me to her bathroom. She kneeled down, turned on the bathtub faucet, and let the stream of water run over her fingers. “I’m going to give you a bath,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She stood up and ran her fingertips along the side of my face, then tugged at my clothes, removing each item slowly, and told me to get in. As I settled into the warm water, she poured rose bath gel onto a loofah and massaged it until it was foamy.

“I get the feeling that wasn’t really about the customer. What’s going on?” she asked as she rubbed the loofah over my back in soft, circular motions.

I took a steamy floral breath. I wanted to lie. It seemed like too much to tell Mya the truth, but the truth was too close to the surface.

“Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,” I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

I pretended it hadn’t happened. I pretended it hadn’t had any effect on me. I needed to be the stronger, older sister because so many people — including our mother — made the disappearance of the girls about themselves. Melissa needed me to let her have space to grieve without another person co-opting it. But what happened had also been so painful for me that I couldn’t face it.

“I can’t even imagine,” Mya said, shaking her head. She dropped the loofah, then cupped water into her hands, releasing it over my shoulders. The water cascaded down my back.

“Right after the second girl went missing, my sister—” I stopped, unsure if I should go on.  

Mya looked into my eyes. “You can tell me.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked, perplexed. It seemed like I might infect her with my pain. I never wanted anyone to see me like this. The suffering was off-limits and only allowed in private.

“Oh, Natassja,” she said, as if that was enough of an explanation. She touched my face and pulled me in for a kiss. “Let’s go to bed and cuddle. I won’t try anything, I promise.”

She took my hand, and I stood. Opening a towel, she patted me dry. She rubbed thick shea butter that smelled like peaches all over my body. The cream warmed quickly, melting as she applied it to my bare skin.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

I nodded, though it wasn’t quite true. But I wasn’t crying — and that was close enough.

She led me to her bed and untangled my hair with a brush, one of my favorite sensations. It was one of the only tender things my mother had done for me as a child. I begged her to brush my hair until I was a teenager. Mya had no idea, but she was soothing me exactly in the way I needed.

***

“I started making amends,” my sister had said earlier that day as I pulled out of the Portland Community College campus parking lot where we were both taking classes. “And I need to tell you something.” Melissa took a deep and loud breath. I glanced in her direction, the crook in her nose visible from the many times she’d broken it when we were growing up, and then I looked back to the road.

My sister was 21, four years younger than me, and a year and a half clean. Snippets from the first time she received a jail sentence flashed before me. The court officer hauling her away. That I’d tried to tell her that I love her, but a different officer blocked me. She’s my sister, I’d said dumbly, pushing forward against him. I could feel the stiff bullet proof vest under his uniform. He grabbed my upper arm and threatened to arrest me, too. I went limp, and he dragged me to the exit of the courtroom, then flung me out into the hall. Stunned, I rubbed my arm. Red fingerprints would change to a ringed bruise that I continued to rub until it disappeared. It took two years: my sister in and out of jail. But once faced with time in prison, she finally stayed clean.

“Go for it.” I smiled.

I thought my sister might apologize for the time she stole my last $20. I’d called my mother that day and told her what Melissa had done. My mother didn’t believe me. It’s all the money I had in the world, I said, then sat in my car and wept. It was during one of several failed attempts to stop stripping.

Or I thought Melissa might apologize for one of the many times she’d accused me of being her reason for relapsing. In response I’d yelled, my voice strained, cracking: I’m the only person that’s ever truly loved you. Then calmly told her she could no longer be in my life as she sobbed. Later, I clasped my hands on my neck. I wanted to feel all the discomfort of my sore throat; the self-imposed punishment of my cruelty. The awareness that I was trying to guilt her into sobriety came over me, but we still didn’t speak for months. And the truth was that I did worry it was my fault. If it was my fault, it also meant I could control her — her addiction — but that I was failing. I owed her an apology, too.

‘Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,’ I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

“OK, this is it,” my sister said. “I was thirteen the first time I shot up heroin.” She stared ahead. I was confused. This wasn’t an amends. It seemed more like a confession. Prior to this, she’d insisted that she never shot anything into her veins. I hadn’t believed her, but I never suspected she might have been only thirteen.

“What do you mean? How?”

“It was right after Jessica went missing,” she said evenly, “when everyone realized that Allie hadn’t just run away.” I looked at her and she was looking at me. Her grey eyes stared straight into mine. She pursed her lips, and only moments later, unable to hold my gaze, she looked out the passenger-side window.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of her friends, and how she suffered as a result, was her reasoning: the catalyst for her use of heroin. Except it wasn’t really. In that moment, I thought maybe if that hadn’t happened, she would’ve tried heroin later, at a more appropriate age. When she was 18, or 21. It was illogical. Is there an appropriate age to shoot up heroin?

I knew she’d tried meth by accident — it had been laced in some weed she’d smoked, when she was 11. She started smoking cigarettes and pot at 10. She’d been drunk at a Girl Scout meeting when she was 9. She posted pictures of herself high on Ecstasy on Myspace when she was 15. Her eyes glazed, dime-size pupils almost swallowing her irises, her jaw clenched. A purple pacifier hung around her neck. I don’t know when she started snorting cocaine, I just know it was her “favorite.” The drug she used compulsively, that she could never turn away. When exactly does an addiction start?

“But who gave it to you?” I asked. My chest burned and became itchy as hives blossomed there. I looked straight ahead so she couldn’t see the pain I knew would be obvious in my eyes. In the last year and a half, she’d transformed. The longer she stayed clean, the softer her face. The more she smiled. She rediscovered that she was nurturing, often playing with our younger cousins: rolling around in the grass, chasing and tickling them. She laughed. Thinking back to the little girl she was, the one that got so lost, was unbearable.

“It was Samantha’s stepdad. Remember her? I practically lived over there at one point.”

I remembered. Neither Melissa nor I knew our respective fathers. She latched onto men as result, but I tried to stay away from them. I learned early the damage men can do — at the hands of a family member — and it was something I wanted to inoculate my sister from. But, though the same man didn’t hurt her, I’d been powerless to stop others. Samantha’s stepdad had been one of the men I believed might hurt my sister. But there were many. There was the friend’s father that took Melissa on camping trips — only Melissa, no one else. Another friend’s stepdad that gave Melissa beer and requested back rubs from her. The paramedic who bought Melissa stuffed animals.

I’d begged my mother to stop letting my sister hang out with grown men. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d say. “She just wants a father and these men are willing to be something like that for her.”

She’s in danger, I’d plead.

“What do you mean it was Samantha’s stepdad?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

“He was the one that laced the weed that one time. He said heroin would take my pain away and asked me if I wanted to try it.” She sighed.

I nodded, continuing to look ahead at the road, fuming, but trying not to appear rattled. I was afraid she’d stop entrusting me with this information if I reacted too strongly.

“So he found a vein and did it for me.”

“Did it help?” I asked.

Her growth seemed to have been stunted at the age of 10, and I’d been worried about her lack of development. My mind went back to her skinny arms and legs. She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

“I mean, the pain went away, but I started vomiting. It was awful.”

“Why’d you do it again if you hated it?”

“Because I’m a drug addict,” she said.

I was living in my first apartment by then. Melissa had been navigating the world without me. It stung — the idea that I had left her right when she needed me.

“It was my choice.” Her dark brown ponytail bobbed as she turned her head away from me before going on. “I have to take responsibility for it.”

In her addiction, she never stuck with anything. But now, she showed up each morning for classes at the community college. She maintained employment. She had become responsible, and yet, it seemed like she’d taken this ethos too far.

“But you were a kid.”

“Still, no one forced me. And it’s OK. I’m OK now.”

My knuckles whitened as I gripped the steering wheel, trying to focus on the bridge we were about to cross. We drove past Lucky Devil Lounge to the right, the club I’d be working at later that night. Melissa didn’t know I was stripping again. Months earlier, I’d quit and sworn I was done for good. She wasn’t the only one who lied.

I’d started stripping for the same reason I was doing it again: I needed money. But I’d long ago recognized the high I got while dancing. Nothing else made me feel the way dancing did. No substance could compare to the rush of getting naked for men — men who couldn’t touch me. Men who paid me to tease them, but couldn’t gain anything real from me. I could be as sexual as I wanted and no one could have me. That made me feel like the most powerful woman in the world. And that was the hardest part of quitting. I didn’t want to let it go. Even though, as time went on, the highs came less often. The façade that I had all the power had started to crumble. But, I longed for it anyway.

Was her addiction that much different?

Neither one of us spoke again for the rest of the 30-minute drive to the halfway house where she was living. In six weeks, I’d be moving to New York to study creative writing at the New School. I’d felt OK about moving because Melissa was clean, in school, doing well. Suddenly, I was unsure. How could I leave her? How could I have ever left her? It was irrational and I knew it, but I wanted to reach back into the past and change everything.

***

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, around midnight in the dining room of the duplex where my mother, sister, and I lived, I was hand-sewing a dress for a porcelain doll that would become Melissa’s birthday present when she turned 14. After finding the doll at a craft store for $3, I decided to make my sister something she’d always wanted. I designed my own pattern, using an old newspaper to trace it before cutting it into pieces. I based it on a Victorian ball gown and used shiny, satin fabrics in Melissa’s favorite color: purple, in several shades. And also designed a hat, purse, and parasol to match.

While Melissa was staying at a friend’s house, I was silently, carefully working on the dress when my mother started screaming from the top of the steps.

“You’re being too loud!”

Her sudden yelling startled me. I pulled the stitch I was working on too tight.

My mother stomped down to the dining room. She wore a baby-blue terry cloth robe, and her hair was a frizzy, wild auburn mess.

“You’re being too loud,” she yelled again, pointing at me. In a movie, it would’ve seemed exaggerated and funny. I held the needle strung with lavender thread perfectly still, as if moving would ruin the entire gown. As if I’d move and provoke more rage from my mother.

“I’m so sick of your shit,” she continued.

“I’m just sewing,” I said meekly, as if it weren’t obvious. “I haven’t been making any noise.”

I knew I was making a mistake. If she believed I was making noise, it was fact. She’d done things like this throughout my childhood. She’d burst into my room in the middle of the night, screaming into the darkness at me to “shut up.” I’d wake, confused. This was embarrassing when I had friends over. They’d whisper after my mother went back to bed, “Why’d she do that?” I’d smile weakly, unsure of what to tell them.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” she shouted.

The required reaction to these outbursts was simple: say I was sorry; say I’d be quiet.

I set the dress down while slyly examining the stitch I’d pulled too tight — I hadn’t ripped the delicate fabric. I looked over to her, but I didn’t say what I knew she wanted to hear.

“OK. I’ll go.”

The next day I found my first apartment. It was behind the mall where I worked, and the complex itself was rumored to be the most crime-addled place in the Portland metropolitan area: mostly drug deals, but also an occasional murder or rape. I didn’t care. Or more accurately: I couldn’t afford to care. I shared a one-bedroom with a friend. Rent was $450 a month; $225 each.

I thought about taking Melissa with me. Our mother wouldn’t object. On random slips of paper, I calculated my budget over and over, trying to figure out if there was a way I could afford to take care of both of us. It was 2002, and the minimum wage in Oregon was $6.50. Even if I managed to get 40 hours between my two part-time jobs, it wouldn’t be enough to adequately support myself, let alone another person. Melissa couldn’t come.

She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

As I grappled over what to do, I asked my closest friends, “What about Melissa?” They told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty; my sister wasn’t my responsibility.

Soon after I moved out, our mother refused to buy my sister school clothes or supplies, something she’d done several times to me. Extended family members or other adults in my life always picked up the tab, and I was both grateful and humiliated. These same adults called me when they found out I’d moved out. They all asked: What about Melissa? How can you leave her alone with your mother? They externalized my internal dialogue, and it deepened my guilt.

So, I did the one thing I could: I picked up the tab for my sister — I took her school shopping.

“Can I move in with you?” Melissa asked while we wandered through Target.

She wasn’t privy to my obsessing about taking her with me; the many pieces of paper that I’d calculated my budget on — then recalculated and recalculated and recalculated. I thought she was just smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking alcohol. I’d been concerned about those things, but she’d already tried heroin and I’d had no idea. Her request sucked the air out of the store. We stood in the fluorescent-lit aisle of office supplies. I focused on a package of gel pens and shook my head. She never brought it up again.

***

“People kept asking me, what about Melissa?” I said to Mya, her arms wrapped around me, her legs tangled in mine. It was a week after she’d bathed me. After that night, I went home with her every time we worked together. “And they were right. How could I have left her? How can I leave her again?” I stroked Mya’s hair.

“It makes perfect sense why you’d feel that way, but it’s misplaced. You realize that, right?” She traced the side of my body with the back of her hand.

“I thought that was true for so long. Now I’m questioning everything I’ve ever done. I feel like I failed her,” I said. I pushed Mya’s hair behind her ear.

“It wasn’t your job to protect her. It was your mother’s,” Mya said.

“I feel like I should take her with me when I move to New York.”

“You can’t fix what already happened. You know that, right?”

I didn’t know that. I believed, inexplicably, that I could still correct the wrongs of the past. But I didn’t say this. I shrugged, then tilted my face up and Mya kissed me deeply. We pawed at each other. Her skin was warm putty in my hands. I bit her neck lightly, then stopped.

“Oh my gosh. I completely forgot to ask,” I said. “Did you register for classes?” The last time I’d been over, we researched what it would take for Mya to become a vet assistant. Only an associate’s degree. We’d both done a happy dance in her living room that night.

Mya smirked. “I did,” she said. “I start in January.”

“You’re starting veterinary school right when I’ll be starting classes in New York. New beginnings for us both.”

“We should celebrate that,” she said, grinning. She climbed on top of me, and for a while I forgot about everything but her.

When she fell asleep, I listened to the even, slow pattern of her breath. I never wanted this to end, but the fact that it had to almost made it easier to just let myself feel. To be in the moment. To not worry about what could go wrong. Four more weeks and I’d be living in New York. Four more weeks to spend entwined with Mya. I opened my eyes. Orange light shone through her curtains. It was already past dawn.

Mya shifted in her sleep, reached out, pulled me in. And even though she was smaller than me, she made herself the big spoon.

***

I’d been living in New York for a year and a half, studying creative writing, when Melissa moved to live with me. By then she was three years clean. After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

Her first week in the city, we were walking down 2nd Avenue in the East Village when she remarked, “It’s a junkie’s paradise here.”

I froze. I’d worked at a sports bar on 2nd Ave. for most of the time I’d lived in New York. I scanned our surroundings. Everything familiar was still there: the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the bodega on the corner, the bars that lined the street, the indie movie theater, the Eye and Ear Infirmary, bags of trash. Those were the things I’d always noticed. Yet it was like Melissa did a magic trick.

Suddenly, instantaneously, I saw the block the way she did.

A girl in clean, ripped clothing nodded off on the corner: a street kid. She leaned against a building, then slid down to the ground, as if in slow motion. Slumped over, she stayed there — her head hanging, eyes closed, jaw slack. I spotted at least three other street kids nodding off, dotted along the sidewalk, just like she was. My skin prickled with the realization that I’d brought my sister into this world.

Six months later, Melissa and I stood in the bathroom of our apartment. “I need to tell you something,” she said, while pulling her right eye taut and then drawing black liner across her lid. She was getting ready for work. I’d been waiting for this conversation.

“So, I relapsed,” she said, then started lining her other eye.

“I know,” I said. A mix of rage and sadness filled me. Though she’d been able to maintain employment, paid rent on time — was acting as a responsible adult in these ways — her behavior had become more and more erratic. As were her moods. She stopped smiling. She didn’t laugh. Her face hardened. She stayed out many nights. Sometimes it was clear she was hungover, her eyes rimmed red, her face slightly swollen. And she’d lost at least 20 pounds.

“I knew you did. That’s the only reason I’m telling you. But don’t freak out. I have it under control. There is such thing as moderation. And you know that I never even got to drink legally, right?” She looked at me expectantly.

After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

“I need to think,” I said, then shut myself inside my bedroom. I did not have faith that she could keep it “under control” long-term. Our agreement had been that we would live together as long as she was sober. I’d considered this a formality. Of course she’d be sober. And we’d have a dry home. This changed nothing for me. I didn’t often drink, and never at home.

My hard-drug experimentation was also over. It had been brief, and my primary motivation had been to understand my sister. The one time I tried cocaine ended in uncontrollable sobbing. The one time I smoked heroin resulted in dizziness and nausea. In both cases, all I wanted was for the intoxication to end. And, afterward, a deep sadness settled over me that lasted for days. The only drug I tried and liked was MDMA. It made me feel like I could love, and more importantly, trust freely. I’d had a similar sensation with Mya, except no drugs were necessary. I didn’t feel compelled to actively seek MDMA out again. After experimenting, I felt no closer to understanding my sister or her addiction. My relationship with stripping was still the closest, but stripping was no longer appealing.

When I’d moved to New York I didn’t want to risk not finding steady work, so I’d started dancing at what was considered one of the most upscale clubs (and the first strip club to be traded on the stock market): Rick’s Cabaret. But, of the nine strip clubs I’d worked, this one was the seediest. The first time a customer grabbed my ass, I asked a bouncer for help. He said, “You’re a stripper.”

In New York, touching was against the law, but no one heeded this. I started slapping customers regularly. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even when I’d worked at a club that allowed touching, the girls decided who touched them and how.

One night at Rick’s, a customer whipped his limp dick out in a private room. When I told him to put it back, he asked, “What am I paying for then? Can’t you at least give me a hand job?” He, like the majority of the predominately white and rich clientele, felt entitled to extras. I left the VIP and refused to return until a bouncer helped. A manager eventually lied to the customer, telling him there were cameras in the rooms so that he’d cooperate. This customer claimed he was a famous music producer. The next day I verified this using Google.

Even on nights that I left with $2,000, the high I used to feel was missing. So much about stripping I had loved, but once it was done fulfilling my needs, it had been easy to stop. After six weeks, I quit.

Melissa’s plight wasn’t as simple. She’d experienced so much so young — I never blamed her for wanting to ease her sorrow.

After Melissa admitted she relapsed, I sat on my bed, hands shaking. I needed to tell her to move out. How was I going to do this? We avoided each other for a few days. Then I mustered the courage to approach her. She lounged on our red couch, playing Candy Crush.

I stood, lingering over her awkwardly and said, “If you aren’t clean.” I took a breath. “Then you need to move out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it’s under control.”

“I don’t care. That’s the deal.”

It worried me to kick her out, but if I let her stay I’d be enabling her, which was the only thing that would be worse. I gave her 30 days to find another place.

“You’re being dumb,” she said.

I started shaking again. “You have to leave,” I repeated, before going back into my bedroom and burying my face into a pillow so she couldn’t hear me cry.

She must’ve known I was upset, but I tried to hide it from her. I stopped eating because nausea settled in, becoming my new norm. My skin turned sallow and splintered capillaries dotted the puffy skin under my eyes like bright red freckles. I cried often, but never in front of my sister. I thought I was done worrying that she might die or go to prison because of her addiction. Three years, I believed, was enough to know that it was over. Now I understood that “one day at a time” really meant one. day. at. a. time.

***

I fell asleep soon after realizing it was past dawn, entangled with Mya. What could’ve only been hours later, we both rose. We went to brunch. We ate off each other’s plates. Sometimes we got manicures. It was like having a best friend that I also had sex with. This, I realized, was what I had always wanted. I opened up to her in ways that I never had to a man. And in this I felt comforted. I was falling in love, but unlike with a man, I didn’t try to stop it. I let it be. Even with the knowledge the end was sure, it didn’t scare me. I felt like I could love her, but I wasn’t worried about what it meant. I assumed we’d stay friends. I assumed that what was between us would forever be sacred, no matter what else happened. To be with her felt safe. And in a way that I’d never experienced before.

My attachment to my sister wasn’t healthy, I suddenly knew.

And so, after my sister confessed she’d relapsed, absorbed in grief, I’d lie in bed and remember my time with Mya — how she’d soothed me when I’d needed it most. She’d bathe me, and I’d take steamy, floral breaths. She’d nuzzle up to me and I’d feel her warm minty breath on my neck. I’d stroke her hair, tuck it behind her ear. We’d gaze into each others eyes, and neither one of us looked away.

“She’s not your daughter,” she’d said. “And at this point, she’s grown. You need to let go.”

I didn’t listen to her at the time, but I knew that Mya had been right. And that two years after she’d said those words, I needed to listen. I needed to love my sister in a different way. To believe that things could be OK if I wasn’t trying to control where she lived, or what she did. Though our intimacy was so much different, I needed to take the lessons I learned about loving Mya and apply them to loving my sister.

Melissa agreed to move out instead of getting clean, and I tried to accept her choice. I meditated on let go.

Slowly, the color returned to my face; I realized I was starving and shoveled food into my mouth. The responsibility I’d been harboring for my sister started to fade. I stopped asking, What about Melissa? I began to understand that I could love my sister, but not take responsibility for her.

Three weeks after my sister told me she’d relapsed, she told me she was clean.

“And I’m committed to staying that way,” she said while shuffling her feet and wringing her hands. “Can I please keep living here with you?” She picked at the lavender nail polish on her thumb, then raised her head and looked at me.

It seemed like I couldn’t rightfully kick her out if she was sober, but I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth. As much as I tried to let go of the responsibility I’d felt for her, it wasn’t as simple when she was standing before me. My head started to ache. I rubbed my temples.

“Natassja,” she said. “I swear.”

I clenched my jaw, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.

“Please give me another chance.” She picked at the last bit of nail polish on her thumb. Sunlight illuminated the fleck of lavender as it floated to the hardwood floor, and I watched it as it fell.

* * *

Natassja Schiel is writing a memoir about her time working as an exotic dancer on the island of Guam titled Tumon Strip. Her work has most recently appeared at The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Opossum Literary Magazine.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

The Horse Was a Lie (The Horse Is Here With Us Now)

Ernst Haas / Getty

Levi Vonk | Longreads | August 2018 | 7 minutes (1,927 words)

In the prelude to Mario Chard’s “Caballero,” we are presented with a car crash. We are told that the crash happened in the desert, that there was no one around. Two accounts of the crash exist. The first is a succinct description by the Associated Press:

Eight of the 14 people in the Chevy Suburban died
after it rolled several times on U.S. 191 a few hours
before dawn Monday. Salas-López, originally from
Guatemala, told investigators he swerved to miss a
horse. He was arrested after fleeing into the desert…

The second is a quote from the sergeant investigating the crash:

The passengers say no, he wasn’t swerving to miss a
horse, that he was fondling a female passenger in the
front seat of the vehicle.

At first it seems an all-too-familiar migration narrative, the harsh coalescence of movement and death, of sexual exploitation and isolation, which has become a defining aesthetic of the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course the coyote lies. Of course the victim dies. We find ourselves in bitter but accustomed topography.

Instead, “Say it was a horse,” writes Chard in the first canto of “Caballero,” and we move into stranger territory. Read more…