Generation Loss

Generation
Loss

Elizabeth
Hand

Part One

Burning In

There's
always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer—someone like
Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great—she sees
that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the
change hits. If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or just
looking the other way—well, everything changes anyway, it's not like things
would have been different.

But
for the rest of your life you're fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else
knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I'd blown it.
Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I've never been good at
making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn't a big fucking hole in it?

I
grew up about sixty miles north of the city in Kamensic Village, a haunted
corner of the Hudson Valley where three counties meet in a stony congeries of
ancient Dutch-built houses, farmland, old-growth forest, nouveau-riche
mansions. My father was—is—the village magistrate. I was an only child, and a
wild thing as the privileged children of that town were.

I
had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the
world. I saw things that other people didn't see. Hands that slipped through
gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a branch but there
was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in
a soft, insistent monotone.
Cass. Cass. Cass.
My father took me to a doctor,
who said I'd grow out of it. I never did, really.

My
mother was much younger than my father, a beautiful Radcliffe girl he met on a
blind date arranged by his cousin. She died when I was four. The car she was
driving, our old red Rambler station wagon, went off the road and into the
woods, slamming into a tree on the outskirts of town. It was an hour before
someone noticed headlights shining through the trees and called the police.
When they finally arrived, they found my mother impaled on the steering column.
I was faceup on the backseat, surrounded by shattered glass but unhurt.

I
have no memory of the accident. The police officer told my father that I didn't
cry or speak, just stared at the car's ceiling, and, as the officer carried me
outside, the night sky. Nowadays there would have been a grief counselor, a
child psychologist, drugs. My father's Irish Catholic sensibility, while not
religious, precluded any overt emotion; there was a wake, a funeral, a week of
visiting relatives and phone calls. Then my father returned to work. A
housekeeper, Rosie, was hired to tend me. My father wouldn't speak of my mother
unless asked, and, forty-odd years ago, one didn't ask. Her presence remained
in the framed black-and-white photos my father kept of her in his bedroom.
While Rosie vacuumed or made lunch I would sit on his bed and slowly move my
fingers across the glass covering the pictures, pretending the dust was face
powder on my mother's cheeks.

I
liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped
from the trees into a field where the long grasses had been flattened by
sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror image of the grass,
black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane.
As I stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its
center until it resembled a vast striated eye that was all pupil, contracting
upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low buzzing began to
sound in my ears. Then I ran.

I
didn't stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back,
the eye was still there, turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else
ever spoke of seeing it.

My
sense of detachment grew when I started high school, but as my grades were good
and my other activities furtive, my father never worried much about what I did.
Our relationship was friendly if distant. It was my Aunt Brigid who worried
about me on the rare occasions she paid us a visit.

Brigid
was like my father, stocky and big boned and red haired. I resembled photos of
my mother. Tall and angular, narrow hipped, my mother's soft features honed to
a knife-edge in my own. Pointed chin, uptilted nose, dirty-blond hair and
mistrustful gray eyes. If I'd been a boy I might have been beautiful. Instead I
learned early on that my appearance made people uneasy. There was nothing
pretty about my androgyny. I was nearly six feet tall and vaguely threatening.
I wore my hair long but otherwise made no concessions to fashion, no makeup, no
lipstick. I wore my father's white shirts over patched blue jeans or men's
trousers I bought at the Junior League Shop. I wouldn't meet people's eyes. I
didn't like people looking at me. It made me feel sick; it reminded me of that
great eye above the empty field.

"She
looks like a scarecrow, Dad," Brigid said once when I was sixteen. She and
her husband were in Kamensic for a rare visit. "I mean, look at her—"

"I
think she looks fine," my father said mildly. "She's just built like
her mother was."

"She
looks like a drug addict," Brigid snapped. She was sensitive about her
weight. "We see them out where we live."

I
pointed out to the bird feeder at the edge of our woods. "What, like the
chickadees? We see them too," I said, and retreated to my room.

Several
months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I'd seen the
eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile
mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand
until his finger touched the center of my forehead.

There
was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears
ringing. It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a
camera. I sat at the breakfast table, turned it in my hands, and remembered the
dream. I saw my face distorted in the round glass of the lens, like a flaw;
like an eye staring back at me.

I
took an introductory photography class in high school and was encouraged to
take more.

I
never did. I quickly learned what I needed to know. I liked a slow lens. I
liked grainy black-and-white film and never worked in color. I liked the detail
work of creating my own photographic paper, of processing then developing the
film myself in the school photo lab. I loved the way the paper felt, soft and
wet in the trays, then the magical way it dried and turned into something else,
smooth and rigid and shining, the images a mere byproduct of chemistry and
timing.

I
didn't care if the pictures were over- or underexposed, or even if they were in
focus. I liked things that didn't move: dead trees, stones. I liked dead
things: the fingerless soft hand of a pheasant's wing, mouse skulls disinterred
from an owl pellet, a cicada's thorax picked clean by tiny green beetles. I
liked portraits of my friends when they were sleeping. I've always watched
people sleep. When I occasionally babysat, I'd go into the children's rooms
after they were in bed and stand there, listening to their breathing, waiting
until my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of nightlight or moonlight. I liked to
watch them breathe.

When
I was seventeen I fell in love with a boy from a neighboring village. He was a
year younger than me, fey, red haired, with sunken, poison green eyes: a
musician and a junkie. I'd hitch to his town and sit on the library steps
across the street from his big Victorian house and wait there for hours, hoping
to see him but also wanting to absorb his world, clock the comings and goings
of his younger siblings, parents, his golden retriever, his friends. I wanted
to see the world he knew from inside his junkie's skin, smell the lilacs that
grew outside his window.

One
day his sister came out and said, "My brother's inside. He's waiting for
you to come over."

I
went. No one else was home. We crawled underneath the Steinway Grand in the
living room, and I sucked him off. Afterward we sat together on the front porch
while he smoked cigarettes. This pattern continued until I left high school.
One night we broke into the village pharmacy and stole bottles of Tuinals and
quaaludes before the alarm went off then ran laughing breathlessly back to his
house, where he pretended to sleep while I hid in his closet. We weren't
caught, but I was too paranoid to ever try it again.

I
liked to watch him sleep; I liked to watch him nod out. I took pictures of him
and got them processed over in Mount Kisco. At night in my room I'd look at
those photographs—his eyes closed, cigarette burning in his hand—and
masturbate. I told him I'd do anything for him. A few years later, he got caught
burglarizing another drugstore up in Putnam Count His parents bailed him out
and he wrote to me, desperate and lonely, while he was awaiting sentencing. I
never wrote back. His family moved to the Midwest somewhere. I don't know what
happened to him.

He
was the only person I ever really cared about. I still have those photos
somewhere.

In
1975 I graduated from high school and started at NYU. I had vague plans of
studying photojournalism. That all changed the night I went over to Kenny's
Castaways to hear the New York Dolls. The Dolls never showed but someone else
did, a skinny chick who screamed at the unruly audience in between chanting
bursts of poetry while a tall, geeky guy flailed around with an electric
guitar.

After
that I quit going to classes. I took up with a girl named Jeannie who
waitressed at Max's Kansas City. For a few months she supported me and we lived
in a horrible fourth-floor walkup on Hudson Street. The toilet hung over a hole
in the floor; the clawfoot tub was in the kitchen. We put a sheet of plywood
over the tub and on top of that a mattress we scrounged from the street. I
didn't tell my father I'd been suspended from NYU. I used the checks he sent to
buy film and speed, black beauties, crystal meth. There was a light that fell on
the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it
made my eyes ache, my skin. I'd go down to see Jeannie when she got off work at
Max's and take pictures of the people hanging out back. Some of those people
you'd still recognize today. Most you wouldn't though back then they were
briefly famous, just as I was to be. Most of them are dead now.

Some
of them were dead then. I shot an entire roll of film of a kid who'd OD'd in
the alley early one morning. No one wanted to call the ambulance—he was already
dead, why bring the cops down? So I stood out there, shit-colored light
filtering from the streetlamp, and photographed him in closeup. I was nervous
about bringing the film to the place I usually went to. I had a friend at the university
process the film there for me.

"This
is sick stuff, Cass," he said when I went to pick it up. He handed me the
manila envelope with my contact sheets and prints. He wouldn't meet my eyes.
"You're sick."

I
thought they were beautiful. Slow exposure and low light made the boy's skin
look like soft white paper, like newsprint before it's inked. His head was
slightly upturned, his eyes half-open, glazed. You couldn't tell if he'd just
woken up or if he was already dead. One hand was pressed upon his breast,
fingers splayed. A series of black starbursts marred the crook of his bare arm;
a white thread extended from his upper lip to the point of one exposed
eyetooth. I titled the photo "Psychopomp." I decided it was strong
enough that I should start assembling a portfolio, and so I did, the pictures
that would eventually become part of my book
Dead Girls.

People
used to ask me what it was like to take those photographs.

'"How
do you think it feels?'" I shot back at the guy from
Interview.
'"How
do you think it feels? And when do you think it stops?'"

He
didn't get it. No one does. I can smell damage; it radiates from some people
like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they've
been, what's destroyed them, even after they're dead. It's like sweat or semen
or ash, and it's not just a taste or scent. It shows up in pictures, if you
know how to catch the light. It shows up in faces, the way you can tell what a
sleeping person's dreaming, if they're happy or frightened or aroused. I don't
know why it draws me; maybe because I dream of leaving this body the way other
people dream of flying. Not flying to a sunny beach or a hotel room, but true
escape, leaving one body and entering another, like one of those wasps that
lays its eggs inside a beetle so a wasp larva grows inside it, eating the
beetle until the new wasp emerges.

It
sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming
something new. That of course was before I disappeared.

But
taking a picture feels like that sometimes. When I'm getting it right, it's
like I'm no longer standing there with my camera, with my eye behind the lens,
looking at someone. It's like it's me lying there and I'm seeping into that
other skin like rain into dry sand.

Sometimes
it happens with sex. Once I brought a sixteen-year-old boy back to the
apartment. I'd picked him up at a club, dark eyes, curly dark hair, a crooked
front tooth, tiny scabs on the inside of his arm where he'd been popping
heroin, still too scared to mainline.