| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** Spencer Dew lives in Chicago. His collection fo short fiction, Songs of Insurgency, is upcoming in spring of 2008 from Vagabond Press. His website is www.spencerdew.com." |
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| Leopard and Parish |
| by Spencer Dew |
| "The cathedral has its moods," says Stanley, quoting Henry Adams, notable anti-Semite and practical model of beltway bile, putrescence, and people-skill. "There's cracking there. And there, see? And this whole area was flooded, up to two inches. I had to call a company with a pump and fans. I had to stay quite drunk." Stanley at least keeps his sense of humor. "But this is a security state," he says, "It is unwise to complain."
He leads me up from his basement, past various oil paintings of generals and presidents and men on horses. There are a few that are just of horses. I know from previous conversations that these paintings are reproductions of paintings, but, as Stanley says, they set a certain tone. He is ensconced in DC life, these days, teaching biology to college students and lecturing anyone who's around, on his free time, about the decline of Christianity and civility. Plus, he makes sub-genre amateur porn. From the gabled windows of his third floor study we watch the excavations, or, at least, the motions of the crane. They are building a gymnasium at the National Cathedral School, dwarfing the spire of the thing itself with what will eventually be a ribbed dome and an underground parking garage. "Commerce over spirit," says Stanley. He would say more, likely, but his student assistant, Emma, distracts him. She graduated, she says, from another school: "public, as in black," but what she really wants to talk about is reading the Webster's for the pictures. She has photocopy blow-ups of dictionary illustrations with her, spreads them across the coffee table: Abutment, Artichoke, Backhoe, Bayonet (Definition 1). Apparently she's just started. Stanley's study has two couches and three stuffed leopards, plus a whole case of birds and small mammals, a skeleton of a tapir, various books. There's also an opium pipe, and Emma, the student assistant – the work-study, as she says – is availing herself of it. "Such fine visual economy," she says, gesturing with one of the B pages. She appreciates factory-made furniture, assembly line parts, the square edges of Masonic script. She wants her next tatt to be a carpenter's level, right there in the elbow. "That bubble," she says. "That reminder of balance. That sense of threat." She unzips a boot and hikes up her skirt, showing us something like a circuit board etched into the flesh of her calf and thigh. She's almost all inked up, she says, and pulls her sweater over her head to show us the Mayan calendar, ceremonial designs from Chinese bells, and her tits, which, Stanley observes – presumably for my benefit or possibly as a reminder to himself – are eighteen months shy, today, of turning twenty-one. "So much math," says Emma, "so much science." She sucks the pipe some more, then lolls back against the couch, her neck whiter for the green-black of the apocalyptic mapping that arcs up across her clavicles. Sometimes I scold Stanley about his use of university resources. I mean, the man will get fired one day. "I don't touch them," he says, indignant. "No," I counter, "But you take photographs." Later Emma will pose astride the tapir skeleton, and, off balance, break a vertebrae, though not one of her own. "What they're doing, they're effacing it. This, my friend, is a sign of the times, rendering the church, its structure, its symbolism, obsolete." For a pornographer, Stanley has a lot of moral indignation. He waxes righteous about things like this. "A gymnasium," he says, "A celebration of secular competition, all the poisonous spirits of the contemporary world." Earlier in the week there'd been a gas leak, men in hazmat suits, neighborhood speculation of terrorist attack. But for Stanley, it is that the cathedral itself is shrinking, that its profile is being diminished by the construction – this is the real attack on what matters, on what he calls "our way of life." Emma sleeps on the couch, in her boots only, her skin a mesh of inked lines, hooks and curves. We work on the pipe, plus some port, very dry, with a delayed punch to it. Stanley has theories about port, too, about how it should work. It is, he says, a practical drink. He is a practical thinker, a man obsessed with the logic of things and, at the same time, in awe of their capacity to inspire awe, worshipful of the wonder of nature, as he says. Stanley tickles Emma's naked ass with a peacock feather and lectures me on baraminology, his specialty, which is a sort of sub-genre creationism. Like all academics, he lives in the sub-genres of the world. He lectures me, too, on the decline of our identity as a Christian nation, America, founded by true patriots and zealots, those unafraid to excommunicate or expel, though for this lecture he cannot make as many allusions to comparative zoology. "The Soviets, they put gyms next to churches, or on the grounds of churches, over the remains of churches. The godless Soviets, they shoot up little girls with steroids and train them to do flips and beg for fish like seals. The godless Soviets, with their theories of evolution and interest banking, loansharks, the welfare state…" Stanley has a problem with the Soviets. Some of this is related to an ice-skating accident from his pre-adolescence. How it usually goes with Stanley is that he passes out, wakes in the morning with yet another hungover work-study, wildly apologetic, citing scripture to her and begging her not to go to any of the assorted deans, let alone the media. I've been involved in one such sleepover, and that girl was savvy enough to ask for cash. "I'm a starving student," she said, "And I have you for biology lab. And you've taken pictures of my breasts." That was far from all he'd taken pictures of, but today's children, as Stanley argues, have become callous hyperexposure, immune. "They're getting their picture taken every time they walk down the street or visit a store or order coffee or board a plane. It just doesn't register to them, that it's somehow an invasion of privacy, that their body belongs to them." What Stanley does with the photos is trade them on-line, not for other photos but for altered – "used" – version of the same. He finds men in chat rooms who are interested in a very specific art or act, ejaculation on photographs, men who, in turn, enjoy photographing the result, sending Stanley back, in return for the original, a photograph of a photograph, a painted portrait, as it were… Sin, for him, is mainly a matter of belief. There are sinful actions, sure, like sodomy or disrespect of one's elders, but his own peculiar desires – being extrabiblical, so to speak – are not directly implicated in Christ's plan. "Look," he says, "I'm a believer. The light and fire of God's truth is upon my mind at all hours of the day. So I have hobbies. I collect taxidermy. I take photographs." Neither phrase quite gets at it, of course, though he does have some taxidermy, mainly birds and small mammals but, as I said, three leopards. Some he sought out himself, the rest were from a museum auction, a liquidation sale. "The lack of interest in knowledge, that is a sign of bad things. When we build our gyms above our schools, our churches, our homes…" Sometimes I think that, in truth, Stanley doesn't really care. His basement keeps flooding, and its walls crack, and this bothers him, but all the opinions he links to the situation are an opportunistic twitch. Likewise, I wonder, if his opposition to evolution isn't tied to the fact that, in creationist circles his African fieldwork credentials are golden whereas, in the general scheme of comparative zoology, he's pretty inexperienced, hardly published, and sort of a hack. So he wears sweaters and deck shoes and talks of his Lord and Savior as an object of the nostalgic past, dismissed by the heathen present, and as a purging force, always coming, a sword-fast future wherein lots of people, he tells me, will die. "Not like in those apocalyptic novels, where we all live in bunkers and have a party of it or whatever," he says. "No, Jesus will come and people's skin will peel back from their bones, the hearts of sinners will sear inside them, like hot coals, burning their way out." And he takes light puffs from his opium pipe and swishes his port around in the glass, studying the viscosity of it against the sides, then he paces around the couch where Emma is sleeping, his Polaroid land camera in both hands, snapping photos here and there at angles he feels will provide the most rewarding display of surface, images the addition of jism to will seem most inspired, most overwhelming, and most natural. |
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| Feb. 2008 |
| 102 |