Permanent Exhibit Page 2
FOOL’S GOLD
Astronomers discovered a large, Jupiter-like planet orbiting three suns. At the Cascades, an iconic local waterfall, a man dove into the plunge pool to save his son, somehow pushed the boy safely to shore, but never resurfaced himself, and drowned. When soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo—who pays his personal hairstylist to style the hair of his likeness at Madrid’s “Museum of Wax”—suffered a game-ending injury during the 2016 Euro Cup, a moth landed on the bridge of his nose, and fluttered its wings; even so, Ronaldo—perhaps because he was so crushed—did not bother to brush it away. In an empty parking lot outside a movie theater, I watched a crow pecking at spilled popcorn—yellow kernels, vivid as tiny nuggets of gold—and thought: lucky. A friend of mine who knows how to hunt mushrooms and has a map in his head of neighborhood trees that produce the best ones—“chicken of the woods” is now in season—told me that some restaurants douse the trash in their dumpsters with gasoline to discourage homeless people from scavenging. As I cycled up a mountain road, I spotted a cup in a roadside ditch that said, “Eat like you mean it,” and once I got home, I slathered a just-nuked corn dog with pimento cheese. At the Blacksburg farmer’s market, Weathertop Farm displays a flip book of photographs that documents the trajectories of their chickens’ lives, from little yellow puffs to stately white birds in orange crates to featherless bodies at a slaughterhouse. Decades ago, one of my cousins, who had been raised a vegetarian for health and religious reasons, informed me that she’d only eaten animal flesh once in her life—a single bite of fried chicken—after which she’d promptly thrown up, a proclamation she’d delivered proudly, as if her body’s automatic rejection of meat was proof of a kind of innate and irrefutable purity. The ACLU wants to know if I think people’s religious beliefs are oppressing others in my community but the quiz they sent via mail was too long, so I slid it sheepishly—albeit responsibly—into the recycling bin. The sight of the American flag, I’m unashamed to say, does not fill me with hope. Still, I can’t get these lyrics—from the song “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes—out of my head: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see / And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” The phrase “Fiddler’s Green” may refer to an afterlife of perpetual mirth, an extrasolar colony in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, a regimental poem of the U.S. 2nd Calvary Regiment, or the community of newly and garishly unimaginative homes spaced too closely together and that surround the original block of houses built in the 1960s where my family lives, and that also block our view of the horse hill in the distance; whenever I see the brick columns that designate the edges of this neighborhood, and which are decorated with a capital F and a capital G, I can’t help but think: “Fool’s Gold.” For the first time in ten years, I hit every light on Main Street while it was still green, and though I silently cheered every time I made it safely through another intersection, I was disappointed to have arrived at my destination so early, because it meant then I’d have more time than I knew how to kill.
TOP SECRET
What once was more or less secret: the bunker beneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a 112,544-square-foot facility that includes eighteen dormitories, decontamination chambers, a power plant, a television production area and audio recording booths, a clinic with twelve hospital beds, medical and dental operating rooms, a laboratory, a pharmacy, a cafeteria, and meeting rooms. Its three-foot thick concrete walls were designed to shelter the members of Congress during the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, and until the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a trainload of congressmen from D.C. got halfway there, two of the four access points were disguised, simply, with signage: on a back door, the words “High Voltage” appeared, and on the sole elevator that dropped to bunker level, “Out of Order.” Last fall, I mentioned to my Advanced Fiction class that a friend of mine claimed that Virginia Tech had a secret meditation room—that if you entered the elevator in Johnson Student Center and pressed the right buttons, in the right order, that this particular elevator would deliver you to a secret room between floors—and when my students begged to go see it, I had no choice but to lead an impromptu field trip. Once we arrived at the elevator and pressed the right buttons, in the right order—according to the directions one of the students had found on Reddit—we found ourselves in a place that didn’t seem very secret or special at all: a room with an opaque skylight, a dingy lounge chair, carpet that desperately needed vacuuming, and a door that led—as far as we could tell by peering through its window—to a regular classroom. I visited Graceland once, and though I felt sort of like an intruder as I wandered past rooms with shag carpeting and mirrored walls and heavy drapes and stained glass panels of peacocks (the house struck me as quaintly modest in size, which granted the tour an intimacy I hadn’t expected) I couldn’t stop thinking about the part of the house I absolutely wasn’t allowed to see: the upstairs rooms, which had been kept sealed like a vault ever since August of 1977, and to which nobody had ever had access, except for Priscilla, Lisa-Marie, Graceland’s curator, and—because he had once been married to Lisa-Marie—Nicholas Cage, who purportedly sat on Elvis’s throne and tried on one of the King’s leather jackets. At the Magic Castle, a turn-of-the-20th-century mansion that is now an exclusive Hollywood club for magicians and magic enthusiasts, there’s a piano room where invisible Irma—the ghost of a woman who used to live in the mansion—will play any song you request for a dollar; I tried to stump her by requesting an obscure hymn, but lo and behold, as the keys began to move—seemingly by themselves—I recognized the melody. Whenever my son used to ask me to reveal the secret to the one magic trick I could perform—making a quarter disappear, then pulling it out of his ear or spitting it out of my mouth—I always said, “I’ll tell you when you’re ten,” and no matter how insistently he begged, I remained resolute, for years. Finally, on his tenth birthday, I woke him and said, “You know what day it is?” He did. “Okay,” I said, “watch closely.” I performed the trick again, slower than usual, taking my time to show him exactly how it was done: by holding the coin between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, I pretended to grab it with my right, while allowing the coin to drop into the palm from which I’d appeared to have taken it. My son watched, eyes blinking lazily, then shrugged. “I knew that’s how you did it,” he said. Then he jerked the blankets over his head, and disappeared.
HOLY HOURS
Patches the horse—who’d been taught how to answer the telephone, retrieve a beer from the refrigerator, ride in a convertible, and use his teeth to pull the covers of the bed he slept in over his shoulder—loved cheeseburgers. Maybe you know this already. Maybe you’ve seen the video where Patches’ owner pulls up to a McDonald’s drive-thru in a boatlike and possibly homemade white convertible splatted inexplicably with what looks like brown paint spots, and asks Patches, who’s riding shotgun, if he wants a cheeseburger, and the horse nods and then sure enough, after the drivethru lady hands over the food bag, the guy feeds Patches an honest-to-God cheeseburger. Thinking about Patches and how he learned to do all that he did and whether or not he might’ve cared had he known that those burgers he ate with such enthusiasm had been made out of the meat of fellow beasts of burden, made me think about Mister Ed, the talking horse. So I googled him. I learned that the actor Alan Young, who played Mister Ed’s owner on the show, started the totally false rumor that trainers encouraged the horse who played Mister Ed—whose real name was Bamboo Harvester—to move his lips by putting peanut butter on his gums. This was maybe a better and more crowd-pleasing story than saying, “Though we used to put a nylon string in his mouth, he eventually learned how to move those lips on cue, simply by his trainer touching a finger to one of his hooves.” In 1986, an Ohio preacher claimed that the “Mister Ed” theme song—you know, “a horse is a horse of course of c
ourse,” etc.—contained a secret message and that if you played it backwards, listeners would hear the phrase “I sing this song for Satan.” If you were a Christian teenager in the 1980s, as I was, you were no doubt disturbed—and also fascinated—by the idea that rock musicians might be secret Satan worshipers. You might have read Rock’s Hidden Persuader or Backward Masking Unmasked, and you may have watched the documentary Hell’s Bells, in which a man with a mustache and a mullet narrates the ways that the devil uses rock and pop and metal to turn humans away from God, and though a thirtysecond section of this movie focused on The Cure, which was my favorite band at the time, it also seemed that the evidence against them was pretty weak, not only because the narrator claimed that “the unappealing nature of the church and Christianity is the subtle message of the song ‘Faith,’” or because the documentary then featured a shot of the album cover overlaid with the lyrics “I cannot hold what you devour / the sacrifice of penance during the holy hour”—and not only because who could say for sure what “the holy hour” referred to, but also because the song seemed downright tame when compared to hits like “Blasphemous Rumors” by Depeche Mode, which claimed that God had “a sick sense of humor,” or to “Dear God,” a song by the band XTC in which the singer addresses the Almighty and says, “I can’t believe in you.” I was thinking about this documentary—and also about my boarding school’s assistant chaplain, who’d engineered a Walkman so that it would play cassettes in reverse, so students could listen to “Stairway to Heaven” backwards and hear Robert Plant sing “my sweet Satan” in real time—when an alert appeared on my computer, an email from a former student named Angel, who happens to be spending the summer working at her aunt’s real estate office in West Virginia, a state where, Angel claims, there are Trump signs everywhere, and she has to talk to clients who think Trump is some kind of savior, and that Obama is a terrorist, and that the people who deserve to be blamed for stuff are minorities and Millennials, both of which represent categories to which Angel belongs, and that she’d rather be at Virginia Beach, with her English bulldog, or in Atlanta, with her boyfriend, whom she once painted an eight-foot portrait of in a style that made him seem like some kind of baller gangsta saint—with a halo. Thunder boomed overhead. I welcomed it. I was at home by myself, safe in a house, supposedly writing, actually getting nostalgic about thirtysomething-year-old documentaries that purported to uncover the secrets of demon-inspired rock music when I realized that the windows in my car were down. I couldn’t help, at this point, to miss my old neighbor and good friend Chris, who works at the Radford Arsenal, a plant that produces propellant for missiles used by the United States military, and who used to call me whenever it was starting to rain because he’d remember that he’d seen that I’d failed—once again—to raise my car windows, but now that we’ve moved across town, Chris cannot see my windows, and my new neighbors are either less observant or content to let me lie in whatever bed I make, which means that today I had to run outside, into a downpour so furious that it made the air brighter, as if the day had every intention of washing itself clean.
BRING ME THE HEAD OF GERALDO RIVERA
My best friend’s mom’s boyfriend used to refer to G.I. Joe men as “dolls.” “Hey,” he’d say, “you guys playing with your little dolls again?” and though we’d try to argue that they should be referred to as “action figures,” and that it was ludicrous to apply the word “doll” to a character like Serpentor, who, according to G.I. Joe comics, had been cloned with the help of Destro and Dr. Mindbender, who’d raided tombs the world over to harvest genetic material from history’s most ruthless conquerors, so as to engineer the perfect Cobra leader, I worried that my best friend’s mom’s boyfriend might be right, that in the end our Joes were nothing but meaningless play pretties. On the occasions when my friend and I visited his mom’s boyfriend’s log cabin, we checked out the geodes arranged on a mantel, the dead flying squirrel in a freezer, and the picture of Jesus who, if you stared at him long enough, would suddenly open his eyes. We loved my best friend’s mom’s boyfriend’s record collection, and spent afternoons flipping through his vinyl, listening to Andreas Vollenweider—a famous new age harpist—or studying the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Whoa,” my best friend said, when the boyfriend pointed out Aleister Crowley, whose bald, pale head sat at the top of the left-hand crowd of people, between Sri Yukteswar (an Indian guru) and Mae West (famous Hollywood actress). We knew Aleister Crowley was trouble, that he was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, and drug addict, and that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page had been so obsessed with him that he’d bought Crowley’s house. I admit that recently, when I thought about the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the name that first came to mind was not Crowley but Anton LaVey, the author of The Satanic Bible and the founder of the Church of Satan. Crowley and LaVey look nothing alike; Crowley, at least in his later years, bears a resemblance to an avuncular British bureaucrat, whereas LaVey, with his goatee and shaved head—the result of a lost bet, and not, as he liked to claim, as a tribute to the tradition of ancient executioners—granted him a decidedly Mephistophilian appearance. If you were alive in the late 80s, you likely saw at least a portion of Geraldo Rivera’s two-hour documentary “Exposing Satan’s Underground,” which was part talk show, part “investigative journalism,” and whose “featured guests” included Zeena LaVey, a sultrylooking blond dressed in all black who happened to be Anton’s daughter, and who had the distinction of having been, at age three, the first baptism performed by the Church of Satan. She and her partner Nikolas—a severe-looking dude with black hair, black clothes, and only one ear—had taken it upon themselves—in part because her father hadn’t been interested—to defend the church, which had been targeted by the media as bearing responsibility for the supposed wave of abductions and ritual abuse slash sacrifices slash murders that had been purportedly committed in the name of Satan, whose literal existence, it’s worth pointing out, LaVey and his church members didn’t even believe in. Zeena and Nikolas would both eventually renounce Satanism and the occult, though their dedication to mysticism remains; they co-wrote a book about “sex magick,” a series of ritualistic practices based on the idea that sexual energy can help people transcend the ways that they normally experience reality, and in 2002, they founded the Sethian Liberation Movement, which “allows people to learn and practice magic without answering to an oppressive sect and helps free ex-cult members from their troubled pasts.” Vice magazine published an article by Zeena, in which she meditates on the subject of vice itself, and concludes by saying, “By resting in simply what is, instead of always trying to fix what is perceived as a defect, we open ourselves up to infinite possibilities.” It—the article—is worth reading. I’ll end this by saying that Zeena—in addition to all the other things she is—is also a musician, who’s recorded a number of songs and albums, one of which, I am pleased to report, is titled “Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera.”
WELL OF SOULS
My dad called to tell me that I shouldn’t worry about running into deer on my bike; I should worry about running over a snake. Running over a snake, he explained, especially on a curve, would lay me out. My dad knows a lot about snakes; he lives with my mom in a house on property that borders National Forest, and before the house was built, when the land clearers arrived to cut and burn trees, they killed upwards of sixty copperheads and rattlesnakes. In the last quarter of a century, my parents have killed nearly a hundred. Often, when my father kills a venomous snake, he cuts off the head, peels the skin off like a banana from its body, which continues to writhe and jerk, then razors open its belly, to see what it’s been eating—I’ve seen him pull out all kinds of things, and once watched as he unfurled the sopping wet tail of a squirrel. If he finds fetuses inside a dead snake, he counts those and adds them to that year’s total killed-snake-tally. He’s kept a few as pets before, in terrariums, on a screened-in porch—there’s a picture somewhere of him blow-
drying a frozen mouse to make it warm enough for the snake to be interested. Once, when moving a stack of logs on my parents’ front porch, I decapitated, using the blade of a shovel, four copperheads. Regrettably, I also ended up killing a black snake who, before I identified him, was just another writhing body I had to contend with. My mother has video of me with a Ziploc bag of these snake heads; when I raise it to the camera, one of the heads opens its mouth—like a yawn—and bears its fangs. I grew up thinking that the serpent was the most beautiful creature in the Garden of Eden, and that it had wings and could fly through the air; in my head I pictured glittering ribbons slithering through the air. Flying snakes—or Chrysopelea—don’t really fly, but they can glide for long distances by sucking in their stomachs, flattening their bodies, and making continual serpentine motions, undulating laterally from tree to tree. Remember the “Well of Souls” snake pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Turns out, not all of those snakes were snakes: some of them were legless lizards; others, pieces of rubber tubing. To generate the sound of thousands of snakes slithering around on top of each other, Ben Burtt—a famous sound designer who used a scuba regulator to create Darth Vader’s iconic respirations in Star Wars—slid his fingers into a cheese casserole and rubbed wet sponges against a skateboard’s grip tape. To create the whistling noises made by the spirits leaving the ark at the end of the movie, Burtt ran the cries of various animals—including humans, dolphins, and sea lions—run through a vocoder, a device that was invented by a man named Homer Dudley, in part to help the United States communicate its military secrets during World War II. Whenever I hear the name Homer, it makes me think of the old mountain man who lived not far from my father’s office—an old man who only had one ear and carried a buckeye in his pocket for good luck, and once gave one of his doctors a toothpick, then much later told him it had been carved from a raccoon’s penis. I hadn’t known this as a kid, but Homer also carried, in his wallet, a bear vagina—an old, hairy piece of leather that he’d bring out as a curiosity, a kind of conversation piece. Perhaps that’s the same spirit that inspired my father to use the United States Postal Service to send my son the skin of a snake he’d recently killed. It arrived in an envelope, in a Ziploc bag. We opened it but it smelled bad and was greasy in a way that struck us as unpleasant, so we closed the bag tight. It stayed like that for a long time, until one day, when cleaning out a drawer, I came upon the skin again, and after thinking about how strange it was to have in my possession the outer covering of a creature that had once been alive—that had survived childhood, learned to hunt, hibernate, absorb sunlight, perhaps even mate—I admired the crossband pattern, and threw it—with little fanfare—into the garbage.