“I don’t know why it took me so long to do it. When I look back,
I realize that I’d been dreaming about it my whole life. I never
liked to take baths. I felt about myself the way other kids felt
about their favorite blankets or their teddy bears. I didn’t think
that I smelled right after a bath. I didn’t really know who I was.
I guess it was shocking.
“I had the thought that, if the big people could do this to me,
then they could do anything they wanted. Of course, I had a vivid
imagination about what they might want to do. I also worried a lot
about going down the drain. Maybe I wanted to go down the drain,
because I wanted to see what was down there. Or maybe even then I
wanted to get away from it all.
“It’s a basic difference in temperament, I guess. Some people want
to get away with things and others want to get away from things.
Would I recommend what I’ve done to anyone else? Not exactly. I’m
not into recommending things. That’s precisely what I’ve been
trying to get away from. But, for a certain kind of person, this
might be something to consider.
“I don’t think that I’m the only person in the world like me. I
don’t think that I’m unique at all. When I started having sex, it
shocked me that I could do it. I think I was secretly hoping that
I’d be impotent so that I wouldn’t have to be bothered. I enjoyed
it, but there was terror in it, too. I had a hard time acknowledging
the terror. I was too timid to let myself know how afraid I really was.
I didn’t want to be responsible for creating or recreating the world.
“Somehow this all has to do with privacy. I was a lonely kid and
every success was a disappointment to me, as if I were trying to
smuggle a message out from inside, but lost my nerve at the last
minute, so that I just went on doing what was expected of me. It
was like struggling against an occupyiny army that knew all my
hiding places. I can tell you that there’s no such thing as a
lonely person who isn’t also damn mad.
“Now success is like any other addiction. You get used to it. You
give it human qualities. You make a relation¨ship with it that’s
really nothing more than a series of bad bargains. You try to
pretend that it isn’t happening. You try to pretend that what
you’re doing suits you.
“I went on like that for a long while. I don’t know what set it
all off finally. Maybe it was a smell. Or a look on a face while
I was walking down the street. All I know is that there was a
change. My imagination changed. I became more fretful at work.
My mind wandered. I tried to keep it under control by working more
and more. Nobody seemed to notice, probably because they were all
doing the same things. The worse I did inside, the better things went at
work. I can’t explain that period at all, except that it was very
alarming to have the sense that, as I felt worse and worse, wilder
and wilder, wider and wider of some barely perceptible inner mark,
what I did won more and more approval.
“Every smile seemed part of a plot. Each reward made me more
uncomfortable. The worst was to look around the office and see
that the young people admired me. I had become a sort of cult
figure. Two different and incompatible processes were taking place
within me. I remember wondering if I was trying to get myself to
snap.
“I realized that for years I had been sailing off farther and
farther from myself. Where do you go when you do this sort of
thing? I guess it’s into a kind of dream world, but one that isn’t
well thought out or worked out. It’s monotonous, repetitive and,
for all its allure, really very threatening. When you get back,
it’s damn hard to describe where you were.
“I sometimes wonder whether the life I had before ever really
happened. It had so little genuine connection with me that I wonder
if I didn’t make it all up. I guess I did make it all up in a
certain way. What I’m saying now is that the fiction was of very
low quality. I’d lost track of myself. I’d lost the scent of me.
It was bad craftsmanship.
“Or perhaps all this has nothing to do with it. I walked out the
front door of my house and came here one smiling May day. Maybe
that was my way of putting out a Mayday call. I’ve been here in
this big ramshackle dump somewhere north of New York and south of
Boston for a little over three years now.
“I go for months and months without even seeing anybody else. I’ve
mostly lost track of the calendar, but I do keep track of the
seasons. It’s astonishing what ends up in the dump. I found an
entire semi load of instant ramen noodles the winter before last.
I ate them for a long long time.
“I live in an old mobile home. What’s nice about this old mobile
home is that it isn’t going anyhere. I don’t have to worry about
its getting wanderlust on me. This dump is on the outskirts of
what used to be quite a large stand of oaks edging into pines. I
suppose the dump smells bad to other people, so nobody wants to
build much near here.
“To me it smells fine. It has a richness and complexity, a depth
and texture of scent that has a symphonic allure for me. In a dump
there’s no pretending about decay. Things go to pieces in all
different ways and at all different paces. Things crack in the
winter and rot faster in the summer. Flocks of seagulls come here.
That means there’s probably a coast nearby. I like their screams and
the way the wheel in the sky. I get red raspberries and black caps in
the woods. I eat fiddleheads in the spring. I even found a small patch
of morels. I may have lost a little weight, but not very much. I’ve grown
a long long beard. I cut my hair with a scissors from time to time.
“I don’t know why I bother, but I do. I guess it’s a whim. I
haven’t been sick a day since I came, which surprised me. It may
actually have disappointed me, because I’m not sure that this dump
wasn’t really a compromise, a halfway point along the road to the
underworld. When you want to get away from things, there’s always
a part that wants to get all the way away.
“I don’t know if it was exactly lonely at first. I was very aware
of my own presence. Sometimes that was painful and sometimes that
was exhilarating. I can’t exactly say what became of the time. It
wasn’t broken up into little ticks and tocks. It wasn’t digital
time. It was like golden rich molasses sometimes and like a cold
clear rushing river other times.
“There were rapids and chutes and foam and spray and eddies and
swirls and long clean currents in channels that had been there a
long time. Sometimes time flowered and sometimes it flaked,
sometimes like snow and sometimes into flecks of gold. It wasn’t a
nything separate from me. I didn’t experience it as an enemy
making demands on me the way I had before.
“I’ve made friends here in the dump. The first came on a moonlit
late summer night. The dew shone in the grass. Clouds floated
like veils in the sky. It had been hot for a long time, so that
the nights came as a welcome relief. I was sitting on a pile of
old railroad ties in the midst of a patch of moss in a stand of
pines just at the edge of dump.
“Two small animals came waltzing by in black furs with white
stripes down their backs. Their walk had such a graceful silent
rhythmic lilting tilt to it that it sent shivers down my back.
Imagine my surprise and delight when one spoke to me.
“Hello,” it said, “you sure look like a newcomer to these parts.
We don’t see too many like you at night. Most of the ones that
look like you are bad news, so we try to stay away from them. But
you look a little different.”
“I am a newcomer,” I said. “I can’t say exactly how long I’ve been
here, but I’m getting used to it and I don’t mean anyone any harm.
May I ask your name?”
“My name’s Loser,” it said in a voice that was rich and caressing.
“Loser,” I repeated. “How did you get that name?”
“I don’t know,” it replied. “I’m just a loser. That’s all. It
seems like a perfectly ordinary name to me. It’s always been my name.
After all, if you’re not a loser, then that must mean that
you’ve never had anything at all, because if you have anything,
then, sooner or later, you’re bound to lose it. You might as well
enjoy it while you’ve got it. Among us skunks, Loser is a very
common name. It’s a name to be proud of.”
I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know how to respond to such a
thoughtful creature at the edge of a dump on a moonlit late summer
night. The timbre of Loser’s voice was such that I couldn’t be
sure if I was talking to a male or a female. I don’t know why this
seemed important to me, but it did.
I cleared my throat and said, “Excuse me, Loser, I hope you’re not
offended by my question, but are you a he or a she?”
Loser laughed and looked at me, as if just beginning to realize
what an odd character I was.
“Well,” said Loser, “if you can’t tell that by smell, then you must
be a pretty sorry creature. It’s a wonder you can get around at
all, especially at night. But you’re certainly not embarassed to
admit your weaknesses and I like that. I’m a he, and she’s a she.
Her name is Halcyon.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I replied, not so much amazed to find
myself talking to a couple of skunks in a dump on a summer’s night,
as wishing that I had a hat, so that I could get up and tip it.
Mostly with her hips and tail, she made a ravishing little gesture
of pleasure at making my acquaintance and said, “We certainly are
glad to meet you as well. Life in these parts can get a bit
monotonous, not that we’re particularly interested in anything new.
We’ve found our niche.”
Loser and Halcyon have become close friends of mine. Their
perspective on the world is so different than mine, refreshingly
simple, but also so straightforward. Actually, Loser is a skunk of
the world. He’s been around, ranging to the north and west of the
dump as well as to the south and east. He says he was born within
two miles of the dump and always comes back to it.
“We know a lot of skunks around here,” he said. “It’s a good place
to live and to raise children. Ours are all grown up now. We’ve
had several sets and they’re all gone. What’s left to us is just
ourselves. The dump gets bigger each year. We don’t know why, but
there sure are a lot more skunks around than when we were young.”
They were often curious about people and yet, the more I told them,
the less they seemed to understand. I always noticed that their
curiosity turned to polite attention in relatively short order.
Finally, after I’d known them more than a year, which for skunks is
a very long time, I asked them what seemed so strange to them about
people.
“I can’t exactly say,” murmured Halcyon.
“Nor can I,” said Loser.
“Only,” said Halcyon, “we think you’re different. We’re not really
interested in people. We’re interested in you because you’re the
only one we know.”
“There’s something about the way you think about yourself,” Halcyon
offered very tentatively, as if she were very worried about hurting
my feelings.
“It’s very hard to put into words, at least for a skunk without
much education,” Loser put in, as diffidently as he could.
“You seem to think of yourself as part of something else,” Halcyon
tried.
“At the same time that you seem to think that the something else of
which you think yourself a part is really part of you,” Loser said,
visibly searching for words.
“You flicker back and forth between being everything and being
nothing,” Halcyon observed. “Don’t get me wrong about this. I
think you are a very gentle man and that you don’t mean to hurt
anyone.”
“Yes,” agreed Loser, “and we’ve grown very fond of you. We’ve
enjoyed visiting you in your immobile home.”
“We’ve grown to love ramen noodles and a host of other things that
we wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for you,” added Halcyon.
“And yet,” I prompted as gently as I could, for I was genuinely
touched by their efforts to tell me something about myself I
obviously did not know.
I remember looking up to see the thin sliver of a new silver moon
in the sky. It must have been early in the fall.
I waited what seemed a long time and then prompted again “And
yet…”
“Well,” said Loser with a sigh, as if he were not at all sure it
was a wise thing to say what he was going to say, “this flickering
back and forth between everything and nothing frightens us.”
“It’s not that we’re frightened by you,” Halcyon said in a tone of
resolve. “Not at all. In fact, we feel very close to you. If
anything, we’re frightened for you.”
“You see,” Loser said, “this flickering back and forth between
everything and nothing is not something that a skunk would do. No,
a skunk is a skunk is a skunk. That’s it. That’s all there is to
it. That’s the end of a skunk’s mentality. A skunk is a skunk is
a skunk. That’s where the matter rests. There’s a great comfort
in that.”
“Of course, some skunks are a bit better at being skunks than
others and some skunks are a bit worse at being skunks than others,
but the range of variation is not great. The differences aren’t really
of much interest,” Halcyon said. “No skunk feels either particularly
diminished or augmented by these differences.”
“As I said before,” Loser agreed, “a skunk is a skunk is a skunk
and every skunk can count on his or her skunkness, whereas with
you…”
“Well,” said Halcyon very very gently, “we wonder if there’s
anything about yourself that you can count on? Is there anything
about anyone else that you can count on? Doesn’t this flickering
make you dizzy or tired or nauseated or discouraged? Isn’t there
something you can do to stop it?”
This last was said with such genuine sympathy that I found myself
crying. I could not have said why I was sobbing. Was I crying for
myself or for everything around me, for the past, the present or
the future?
The two skunks stood and looked at me, regret visible on their
faces. With the ineffable dignity of animals, they kept still.
A week or ten days later, when I met Loser by himself in the hour
just before dawn near the bend in the creek at the southwestern
corner of the dump, he came up to me with a very serious expres≠sion.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“About the talk you and I and Halcyon had the other night?” I
asked, because it had been very much on my mind as well.
“Yes,” he nodded. “And Halcyon and I have been talking about it.
We’ve never had a talk like that with any other creature. So it
was a new thing for us and new things take getting used to. Since,
for skunks, because we can count on our skunkness, there’s not much
that’s new, this business of ‘getting used to’ itself is new and so
takes a good bit of this ‘getting used to.’ that we don’t quite
know how to do.”
He pawed the ground in front of him, lifted his tail, fluffed it
out and looked down at the ground. He seemed quite abashed.
“I really can’t take credit for it. I think it was Halcyon who
figured it out. But I don’t mean to put all the responsibility on
her. We talked together, not just once, but a number of times, at
all hours of the day and night. That’s unusual, too, because we
skunks, since we can count on our skunkness, aren’t big talkers,
especially with the ones we’re most intimate with. We tend just to
do the same things day after day. Anyway, what she said made sense
to me.”
Loser stopped. His tail seemed to relax. He lifted his head and
looked up at me with great lucid limpid eyes, faintly green at this
expectant hour that was neither quite night any longer nor quite
yet the beginning of day.
“If you flicker back and forth between everything and nothing and
you can’t stop yourself, then you might also find yourself anywhere
in between without knowing how long you could rest there, only that
your stay was going to be temporary. You might find yourself
turning into a seagull, a rabbit, a red fox, a bush, a tree, a
flower, a patch of moss, a stone, even, say…”
Here Loser hesitated, looking down again, as if to break a
connection grown too strong.
“…a skunk in a dump.”
I don’t know what has prompted me to write this partial account of
myself. I haven’t thought of doing anything like this since I was
in college thirty years ago. Certainly, it has to do with my two
dear friends, Loser and Halcyon. Also, it may have to do with the
fact that, after all this time, I do have just a little contact
with other human beings.
A little girl of about eight years with blonde hair and blue eyes
saw me walking in the woods one day. She followed me back into the
dump. I was frightened to say anything to her. She watched me and
I watched her.
“Mister,” she said after a bit, shyly, but with determination,
“What’s your name?”
I was totally nonplussed by the question, since I hadn’t spoken to
anyone in years. I didn’t dare say that I had totally forgotten my
own name. I was so flustered that I just said the first thing that
came out of my mind.
“Loser,” I said. “That’s my name.”
She leaned her head to one side and looked at me in a not unfriend≠ly way.
“That’s a funny name,” she said. “My name is Julia. What did you
lose?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I only said, “That’s a long, long
story.”
“That’s all right,” she said very gently, “I like long long
stories. I don’t like short ones. They go away just when you’re
getting used to them. I like this dump. I don’t like it when
things get thrown away. I’m going to come to see you every day.”
So she has. Sometimes, she brings along her friend, Alex. I think
he’s nine. They remind me of my own children. I can’t say no to
them. But they worry me. I start feeling responsible for them.
My two skunk friends are very nice to me and they understand my
plight, but really there isn’t a thing they can do to help me.
This morning Julia and Alex shocked me
“Mr. Loser,” Julia said, “Alex and I have been talking. When we
grow up, we want to be just like you and live in the dump. Do you
think there’s enough room for three people in a dump?”