Beats All: Mortality, Salvage, and Queerness

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “Beats All: Mortality, Salvage, and Queerness” by Emma Wilcox. Emma is an artist and writer. As a photographer working with view camera and helicopter, she is concerned with environmental justice, land usage, eminent domain, and the role of individual memory in the creation of local history. She is co-founder, with Evonne M. Davis, of alternative space Gallery Aferro. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Women in Photography, the New Yorker, American Suburb X, Lolife and Black and White magazines, and has she has written for BOMB Magazine. A current project is writing about the archives of Newark’s ark-builder Kea Tawana. You can find her at emmawilcox.org.

---

1)

I hear my girlfriend stumble over one of the Hefty bags of dildos, a floor above me. The house is not small, and it is full of the sounds of people lugging boxes down the stairs and prying things off with crowbars as fast as they can. But if you’ve worked with someone a long time, you know their body, their sounds, you have a rhythm, you don’t need to talk much. You know what their sweat smells like and what gets them excited. For cleanouts, there’s a vocabulary of signals you don’t even realize you have, somewhere between that of a house raid from a bad TV movie and the courtship rituals seen in nature shows.

We’re not alone, don’t say anything stupid.

I got this shiny thing for you, the one I saw you noticing.

Head to the back bedroom quickly.

I know it’s her.

We’ve split up to get to more rooms before the men do. They were hired by the same woman who hired us, but she seems afraid of them. They get annoyingly secretive and won’t let anyone else be on the topmost floor with them. One is rampaging and riffling even more violently than they have been up to this moment, while the other watches the door. Can they do that? They just did.

This happens in the way that a lot of other things happen, especially these days. You must know what I mean if you ever watch the news. The backs of U-Hauls disgorging men in khakis, trucks videoed from above, on freeways, driving into crowds of people.

One guy makes a kind of inane and quasi-formal pronouncement, like “We’re clearing this area right now, you need to leave,” which you would think wouldn’t work, it’s so obviously made up, but the other guy backs him. We don’t know what kind of valuables they’ve found but clearly they’ve found something they think is good, and they don’t want anyone else getting at it.

The house must be fully cleared by end of day, which later becomes end of night. One of the things about gig work of any kind is the slight surface tension of everything: what the rules are, what you can get away with, what you’re willing to do, and the way authority can shift quickly, be gained or lost. Coming into a new situation, you have to figure out where people’s loyalties are, what brief alliances could form.

The former occupant is not dead. He is off site, apparently nearby, his memory gone to dementia. It’s the largest Victorian in a neighborhood of large Victorians, with a style that’s hard to place because every surface has been repainted, extended, emphasized, exaggerated, made more. And more was not enough. Call it Early Late High Psychedelic Fag: original existent elements all have had additional architectural salvage hot glue-gunned or screwed to them: stained glass windows have more stained glass glued on top, bannisters and paneling have been chopped, made bigger and reassembled. All but a few out of dozens of rooms are bedrooms, and most are wired up with different eras of surveillance tech. Each has a different color and apparent theme, and all make inventive use of repurposed materials. Closets lead to other, smaller fantasy closets. In one of these, dozens of fur coats have been cut up and glued to fully surface walls, floor and ceiling. It locks from the outside, and it’s scarily magical.

The roof is leaking on the top floor once we finally retake it. Our struggle is to reach a series of bedrooms up there, with the hope that they might be less picked over. We push through knee-high drifts of successive ransacks, moving as you would to cross a river with some current to it.

There clearly was a disorderly order to things in this house, a private world assembled, but it has been largely obliterated by the aggressive searches of those before us. And us here to do the same in turn. I think of hazy, imagined lost Atlantises, which is easy to do amongst piles of prism glass, baggies of smoked roaches, and reproduction Willendorf Venuses, in bulk, in various sizes.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything you could have brought into this house that wouldn’t have been accepted. Nothing rejected. An abundance. Hundreds of Polaroids rarely show fewer than three people at it. There is not much of anything at all that there isn’t dozens of, some of it still in yellowed packaging. In the garden, there are markers with the names of all the men whose ashes are there along with everything else that is here. There are boxes and boxes and boxes of pills labelled Life Extension Science. Life everlasting, in some care facility, but no memory of any of it that you lived. I bet you had good parties, whoever you were.

I read somewhere that lobsters are biologically immortal but that it gets too hard for them to molt out of their shells. They rot inside them and die because they can’t get out, too weary of the effort of changing. You’re you for a little while, and then you’re not. Shedding the shell and then you’re just a stranger in a Polaroid.

This should come as a relief. Did you come? Again and again.

My girlfriend’s niece is in her early twenties, and she says she is done fucking men. After we’re finished with the cleanout, she strides off, happily carrying a double-headed axe found in the house. She looks so much like my girlfriend it’s as if she was made some other way.

“It’s your child!” I joke, as always. I guess walking through the city carrying a giant labrys should get you somewhere, right?

2)

My girlfriend is trying to make her mom less sad and convinces her to go to an open house being advertised in the paper. It’s a mobile home, which is still what we call them even though they can’t be moved. The man’s health is failing long before his woman’s, and now they have to sell and move.  Every surface has been scrubbed to a high shine; it is bright and pleasant, and none of it will buy back his health. We can’t leave our bodies and get new ones like the hermit crabs in the classroom tank.

He sits on the screened patio among all the things of his life so quietly we don’t realize he’s there, but then he speaks, with effort, startling us by asking if we can take care with the door so his cat doesn’t get out. It’s had various owners and has outlived at least one. We don’t generally describe cats or houses as secondhand, but they sometimes are.

My girlfriend’s mother ends up leaving with the cat. It’s the kind that has extra toes, and it is so very, very old, walking slowly with bunched handlike feet splayed out, a tiny, haggard grand ballerina. At some point in its long life, someone taught it how to rise and stand on its back legs, a trick it still performed sometimes, unpredictably. I read about how to care for these kinds of cats, and I learn that they struggle to shed their claws: the nails just keep growing. They have to be trimmed.

 It’s like this: imagine if you put on a pair of mittens one day and didn’t take them off. The next day, you put another pair on your hands, over the first pair. And so on, every day you were alive. A thousand mittens, over just your two own hands. Can’t get free of that, can’t get loose. Can’t take them off.

My father’s last wife was the eldest of five children in quick succession, and her mother was tired and told her in passing, “put clothes on.” She was quite young and so she put on clothes over the clothes she had worn the day before, and again, until a teacher noticed she had on five dresses.

What I am trying to say, see, is that you have to know what’s you and not you.

What used to be you but isn’t.

When you aren’t that person anymore.

You ever get a toddler dressed or undressed? Head down, arms out, I surrender, stay still, they get stuck in their clothes with the dress half over their head, the buttons are lost, the zipper is jammed, they whine. Momentary panic. It takes a surprising amount of time before we can manage these things, and even then it’s only for a time, and then we might need help again before it’s all over. We forget things. We get trapped: I’m here, somewhere, inside this thing, let me out!

Everywhere now there are startups claiming they are disrupting this and innovating that, and I stand up for hours in dusty places reading old useless used books anywhere I find them, so I know that renting the goods, or not really owning anything, just paying by the day or hour, isn’t altogether new. They used to rent space in church pews for people to sleep sitting up, out of the weather for the night. I bet that will come back soon for more of us in some rebranded form.

Do you consent to the terms? It’s all provisional, it’s all conditional and it’s all temporary. Here’s the upgrade, the trade-up, the trade-in, you don’t get to keep anything, but you can trade while you’re here. I used to work with a man who told me he liked rough trade and that sometimes they would leave in the morning with your valuables, but it was usually worth it for the fun memories. He didn’t look sick when he smiled. At that time, it was routine to have fine sets of stylish men’s clothes, record and book collections, and boxes of snapshots arriving weekly in whole form at the Chelsea Salvation Army. I am just old enough to remember that.

As a teenager, I bought a vintage dress from a queenly older woman who ran a thrift shop with the help of a silent younger man she simply called white boy. I think they were doing long-term sub/dom roleplay, and they seemed rather happy, the terms and the nature of the exchange clear. She took in the dress for me, no charge except drolly noting my flat chest and describing the existence of push-up bras as if no one had ever seen one in this world prior.

Over the noise of the sewing machine, she told me about how she left home young and fell in with a bunch of hippies traveling in a van on country roads, that the world then was so big and there always was some little town where you could buy the old stuff from people, handmade clothes and family things, for real cheap. Then you went to cities to sell them to dealers and kept riding on down the road, on an easy living. One day though in the late 70s, she was handing a woman just a few dollars for all of her quilts. She decided it was time to quit with that long ride.

Find a new life, a new person to be. Shed your shell like it’s nothing.

3)

I was at this garage sale once, where it was briefly hard to see anything after coming in from the bright sun. There are tools, good ones, practically new, and lots of them, and one woman doing the selling. No one else is around. She rises with grace from her lawn chair in the dim coolness of the cinderblock room and gives a very low price for everything.

She then says, with pleasured urgency, “He might be coming home soon. Get out quick.”

4)

It is indescribably filthy, so I won’t.

Actually, I will: our eyes water before we even get inside. She has kept her hair, and it’s in a girlish bob curling under her chin, which is adorned with prim lips that, jutting out, give her the look of a judgmental animal ancestor, another kind of living being that we share some DNA with. She can barely move, and has barely moved, from where she is going through her papers. They have two days left till the closing on this fancy, stinking house, where there is nothing to salvage, and we are only doing it for the cash. He seems to want us out of the bedroom where they laid down for a few hours after staying up all night.

He is visibly concerned the next day when we return and directs us to move faster: yesterday it was sort and pack everything into labeled boxes, now it’s all into trash bags that rattle and bulge. By dusk, it’s just hurl it loose into the van. This is how it goes. You figure out what’s necessary, and you also lose some things along the way.

Also: it’s so, so hard to need anybody, for anything.

She has apparently never thrown away any of her many passports, all of her faces since young womanhood, a record of places her theatre career took her. I decide to put them in a stack I tell him about.

“Do you think she saw you?” he asks, below the tones she can still hear, and I realize he hasn’t told her that, for hours and hours, we have just been taking it all away rather than letting her slowly approve our every gesture from her chair. He is afraid of the anger of the person he has long loved.

That night we round a curve, and the van fills instantly with a nasty chemical fog. There’s a hissing sound, and we realize a spray can has punctured. My girlfriend pulls over. Coughing and cursing, I locate an ancient, crusty cleaning product I’ve never heard of, from like, the beforetimes, Reagan-era, labeled BEATSALL. We can’t stop laughing and screaming “IT BEATS ALL!” at everything we see, including the sunset.

There’s a way to be, when you do cleanouts. Each situation is different, but people are usually vulnerable in some way and not, as is said in expansive euphemism, “at their best,” or “feeling like themselves.”

Who among us wants to be judged over how things have come to be? Over what goes on in our homes? Usually if things were going according to plan, we wouldn’t need to be in your house. The model here is the people who work at The Leather Man, down by the piers, who come into the dressing room and ask gently, “all is well?”

Move with dignity and purpose, not too fast or slow.

Speak carefully.

Sight lines are important.

Consent gets complicated. Who is in charge?

5)

When we fight, I can’t seem to talk to her. We’re always on the road, in the van, and I’m two feet away from her, and I can’t reach her.

I want to say that it’s not me, that I’m actually somewhere inside of a thousand mittens and a week’s unwashed dresses. I swear. The real me is here. And you are here somewhere too. Do the people we used to be matter? I wish I could reach you. If we’re still alive we have some options but when I’m sad I forget that. I want to be other people, have a different face or story. I want to shed my memories, forget everything I’ve said or done or have it be forgotten.

You meet a lot of widows when you do this. Women tend to last, and the one who has hired us makes this sudden loud high sound that’s like a laugh but not when she walks into the bedroom after we’re done. What she is seeing is where the bed that is now gone has left a delicate shadowy outline of dust and fine hairs. All afternoon, we hear her speaking at intervals to herself or to someone who isn’t there. It isn’t always kind words.

We realize at one point that she is speaking to us. She’s found something good and tells us so: fragile newspapers untouched since the 40s when they were used to wrap some dishes. We’ve got the time; it was an easy job. It actually often makes people feel strange when it all comes down to a few boxes, when it doesn’t take long. We linger on the pretty drawings of shoes, perhaps drawn by closeted boys in the art department, and read out loud the ads for midnight cruises to Cuba from Miami, figuring out what it would cost in today’s money to buy An Unforgettable Night.

6)

The two women get out of their car very slowly, each with a cane. Their skins are nearly the color the Sherwin Williams plant in Newark calls optical white, which you can smell when the wind shifts summer evenings. Melanin dots here and there on rope-veined, thin, thin arms, one has scars from new knees, the other walks with a braced ankle. They seem to delight in the cooling breeze, the cheap dishes on my tables, so much mirth. They pick out various things I’ve trash-picked or been given.

I ask: “One box or two?” The more butch one (subtle but discernible, like bird coloration) answers, “Oh no no honey we’re both going to the (emphasis) same place.”

The more femme one, who seems to see better behind her shades, drives them both away into the dusk. I hear them laughing, and one say to the other, “Audrey, haven’t I told you to not tell me what to do...?” She nearly takes down the mailbox getting out of the driveway, and then they are beyond sight.

You don’t get to keep everything, know everything, all at the same time, while you’re here. I know that now.

But don’t be afraid. We’re both going to the same place.