Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Then he turned toward Mayer, who was in a DO NOT DISTURB zone, feverishly working, and said, "Look at how fluffy her rats are. Squirrels are glorified rats with fluffy tails!"

  As he was leaving, he said, "The angle on your back leg is harsh. Wrinkled skin needs to be tucked in, and make the wax feet less lumpy." The door clicked shut. Mayer looked up and snorted, "It looks like a football!"

  In the morning, Mayer tossed me tweezers and said, "They'll work better for extracting the soft fine hairs out of the seam—which is dry and brittle." I refluffed the squirrel and set it in its display case. The judging started at five P.M.; I had only a few hours to preen. "Boy, is it warm, but I dare not open the window because of dust," Mayer said, breaking an intense stretch of silence. She looked like a mime. She wore white muslin gloves so she wouldn't smudge her Plexiglas display case. She held it up to the window, her huge brown eyes scanning for fingerprints. That night the case would enshrine one of her three competition pieces, The Dogs Bollocks.

  Mayer considers a title change. The Americans might not understand; they might find it distasteful. You see, in England, the expression "the dog's bollocks" is slang for "the best ever" (whereas "absolute bollocks" means "absolute rubbish"). For Mayer, however, it also literally means canine testicles. The testicles in question once belonged to a neighbor's terrier named Gus. Gus overstepped his bounds one day, as dogs tend to do, and Mayer noticed. It was a bad day for Gus. "He raped my bitches, so I had him castrated," she said coolly. Now Gus's testes floated in a small vial of vodka. A rat so alert it was terrifying mischievously rolled the testes down a laboratory shelf, dismantling a scientist's experiment. Mayer, who loves and identifies with rats and finds them intelligent, had captured more than just rat anatomy; she had captured the very spirit of the species—its playfully defiant soul. Mayer's lab rat sought revenge! When she'd first showed me the piece in Norfolk, she'd called it a Damien Hirst knockoff and said that she'd apologized to him for it at a party. Hirst had said, "That's not a knockoff; that's a compliment!"

  I carried Gray Squirrel, Yellow Dawn down in the elevator and through the grooming area. Had it been 1880 and this was the first Society of American Taxidermists competition, the squirrel would have been displayed among creatures lovingly preserved by pioneers who innovated a distinctly American style of taxidermy. Today their descendants were converging in a hotel ballroom. I stepped inside, holding my squirrel. The officials manning the doors read the label and exclaimed, "That girl's from Brooklyn!" One of the guys, Dave, was from Louisiana; he had on a CRAWFISH TIME T-shirt. He and an official named Carl carried the squirrel to the far back corner, directly behind an island of deer heads. They set it on a long table marked NOVICES.

  Dave said, "How many pieces do you see like that squirrel? None. How many squirrels do you see like that? Every day!" This buoyed my confidence, making me feel less the waxidermist—until Carl pointed to the crowd that had gathered in the middle of the ballroom. They were excited about something, but I couldn't see what. Looming high in the air above their heads, however, was the most stupendous, most glorious set of antlers imaginable. "Look at the Irish stag over there," Carl said. "That's a pretty unique deal there. Obviously, it's extinct. He used three different skins to make it, and he actually got the pattern off of ancient cave paintings. Those antlers are like nine feet across!"

  It was the biggest, most powerful stag in the ballroom, and people were drawn to it like a doe to a lek. Ken Walker had arrived the day before; now he was in Re-Creations, touching up his rack, which had got scuffed up in the cargo trailer during the thirty-hour drive from Alberta. "Customs went great," he boasted. "I'm sure it was that Smithsonian stamp in my passport!"

  Walker no longer resembled Grizzly Adams. He had shaved and cut his hair. He worked the crowd. "I took a huge chance," he told his fans. "It's a gorgeous animal. Moose are impressive, but they're ugly. This is beautiful. You can see the light through the septum! I'm happy. You can give me a pink ribbon, a purple ribbon...," he said, beaming. "Hopefully on Saturday, I'll be able to sing. They have a karaoke machine and everything." His eyes radiated the excitement of pulling off the impossible. Walker had wrestled with prehistory and won.

  Now he had to beat the score sheet. It should be easy, considering he was the only competitor in Re-Creations. Everyone else had dropped out. "No one wanted to lose to a Canadian's fake animal," he said with a shrug.

  I congratulated Colette and said it must be a relief to be here. She shook her head and said, "Show me the money!" Then Ken sprinted downstairs to the trade fair to raid the Russian-made lion eyes before they were sold-out.

  Downstairs, in the café, Mayer's assistants, Dave Spaul and Carl Church, were drinking cans of Red Bull. They've worked with Mayer for years: they've gone to Hirst openings with her, seen her spend an entire week painstakingly mixing colors for cow hooves, and watched her collapse from exhaustion on the kitchen floor. They know that this type of devotion is absurd, that no matter how hard a taxidermist tries, he or she can never bring the animal back to life, yet they admire her persistence. Still, they wondered how the Americans would view her rats. "At our shows, we accept her work as different and outrageous because she's known for that, but out here it could be viewed differently. She's never been judged before by people who know so much about anatomy and techniques," said Spaul.

  Church added, "It could offend people. It's like the testicle thing. I must have seen a dozen white-tailed deer eating corn on the cob. There's nothing wrong with that, but you'd never see a white-tailed deer in a gallery. But you would see Emily's work in an art gallery in London and see it next to a Damien Hirst, and it wouldn't look out of place."

  At two P.M., Mayer, with a final fluff with a paintbrush, surrendered her rats to the show officials who carried them inside for judging. I headed over to Novices through flocks of vibrant birds and deer galore: whole deer; truncated deer; deer transformed into planters; deer hollowed out into fountains with running water; deer trapped in barbed wire. One deer display was extraordinarily weird: two deer heads stuck to a frozen pole by only their outstretched tongues. The title rivaled that of a Damien Hirst sculpture: As in Nature, One Hand Helps to Feed the Other, Just Like in Life We Can Always Use the Help of Another.

  Novices was filled with mounts from as far away as Australia (a kangaroo head) and as nearby as Waynesburg, Ohio (a turkey), and Belding, Michigan (a yellow perch). I scanned the rival mallard hen, the bufflehead, and the gray fox. A trio of pintails named Rites of Spring sat near the panfish dubbed Last Day of School. In the middle of the table, a Milltown gray squirrel raced across a wire.

  People stopped by to comment. John Schmidt, the master sculptor who makes manikins for Van Dyke's supply company, said, "Ain't no country squirrel. Usually you see cornstalks and that kind of stuff instead of wires. You didn't use a form—that makes you a sculptor."

  Markku Natri from Finland said, "It looks like a cat."

  Then Roger Martin, the guy who had donated 250 specimens for the Behring hall, said, "You're one of the smartest competitors I've ever seen. All you can see is the light bulb. It's like looking straight into the sun. Everything is in plain view, but you can't see it. Great strategy!"

  Finally, Mayer approached. She glared at my squirrel and snarled, "It looked like a football. But now it looks like a baseball. It's better than that trumpeter swan in murky water that looks like a coffin."

  At the WTC, it is customary for the judges to critique all the mounts to help competitors improve as taxidermists. My judge, Jessica Stevens, a pretty blonde from Alabama in a leopard-print cardigan, gave my squirrel an 85, a second-place ribbon, but ticked my score sheet with numerous violations. She glanced at the squirrel, took a deep breath, and led off with the positive: "I know it's an urban squirrel. You used your imagination." She smiled again. Then she continued: "Anywhere you have shrinkage, I want you to rebuild it." She pointed to the ears and hind feet. "You've got to retexturize and even it out. You want it to be
plump-looking." I nodded, though I happen to find svelte squirrels attractive. "If it was falling off and stunk, I would not say that," she said with empathy.

  She shined her penlight onto the right hind leg. She examined its narrow face, directing the light onto its eyes. "Its eyes are not in alignment." She grabbed a photograph of a squirrel. "This is what we're trying to achieve. See how soft he looks? Around the mouth is where you had the most problems. Make the mouth slot as small as possible. Tuck it from the outer corners in toward the center—that applies to deer or bobcats or whatever. Tuck in your nose..." The nose. I was in trouble. The poor thing would have suffocated if it had been alive, which it was not, a fact that offered some comfort as Stevens pointed out more faults with my anthropomorphic double. "You've got to put pins or something in the nostrils. If you're going to be a squirrel taxidermist, you've got to start looking at squirrels." I lowered my head and nodded.

  "It's going to be hard to get this personal reference unless you're at a zoo and can get some good photos. The basics are still there. This animal is harder than any large animal because of the details—the tiny feet, the tail. I would never be a squirrel taxidermist. I have to for my clients, but they're not my love. Your love may be squirrels, because you're not going to come upon a bobcat in the city." Again she was right.

  She flashed an incandescent smile and continued. This was humbling, but I took it seriously. "You're dealing with such delicate features. You're dealing with a tail that has a bone, and if the bone doesn't come out intact, you can't get the fluff or the flow. If you tear a squirrel tail up, you're not going to duplicate its expression. You've got to learn to blow it out with a hair dryer. I don't want it blown out like a porcupine, but it should be soft like you see in nature. It's hard to duplicate what God made. They are like people. They are not all the same."

  She paused, working up her nerve. She was about to ask me to feel the squirrel's genitals. I grimaced. I arched a skeptical eyebrow. I stared right into her eyes. She stared right back. Neither of us was smiling. Then, reluctantly, I reached in and felt around. I did not feel sex organs. What I felt was a thready knot. My squirrel was, anatomically speaking, a Barbie doll, as my editor later explained. Grinning, Stevens said, "We have to deal with genitals—whatever—especially with males. If it's just squished up there..." She paused, blushing. "It's hard to critique a life-size bear for a male [taxidermist], but you have to do it. And they have to deal with it."

  Then she summed up: "I'm looking forward to you enjoying this—not just for your book. You might develop this into a hobby. You might become a competitive taxidermist. It's opened up a whole world to you that you never knew existed. This is an art, and now you appreciate that. You may have thought taxidermy was just stuffing an animal—mounting an animal—we hate that term. But it's an art. We don't want to be thought of as Norman Bates. We are artists, and we have a great respect for God's creatures."

  That was the official critique. Now Jack Fishwick was walking toward Novices. He had just judged hundreds of birds, yet he had fuel for one last squirrel. "The light bulb's the wrong color! This should be the red-light district," he said disarmingly, before he went for the jugular. "Squirrels on wires aren't this shape. I don't think you fully understand what you are doing. The hips are two big lumps, and they stand out. The ears need to go in more. You should have taken two squirrels and skinned one to study its anatomy. You're blind! A lot of American taxidermists hunt turkey, and the closest they get is thirty yards before they die. I think it's very good for a first attempt ... but you have been hanging around taxidermists for the past two years—perhaps the best taxidermists in the world. You have an advantage! You are not starting at rock bottom. You have tons and tons of info you could have studied."

  "I could spend thirty years studying Picasso, and when I'm done, I'm not going to be Picasso," I said.

  "Taxidermy is not art. It's a highly skilled craft," he said.

  "You mean I could be as good as Emily?"

  "Yes—if you're dedicated enough. Anybody could be the best in the world. But not anybody has the dedication."

  "What about the Carl Akeleys of the world?" I ventured.

  "He wouldn't stand up to the work that's done today. Our best is better than he was. Mankind always improves."

  Only in hindsight do I realize that he was right: my squirrel missed the mark because I didn't love it enough. I didn't have the reverential love for the species that consumes all great taxidermists, both in Carl Akeley's time and now.

  In the end, Mayer took fourth place in Small Mammals. Her rats had tied for first place with a fawn and a cougar and its cub, but the judges considered erosion molding unconventional and gave her fourth place. They also docked the rats because their eyes were asymmetrical. After the show, Mayer said, "Animal faces are never symmetrical." She held a mirror up to half of her own face and said, "See how strange I'd look if my face were symmetrical. No one's face is symmetrical!" The big winner that day was the fawn, which took Best of Show.

  That night, Fishwick was having dinner with a group of European taxidermists in the hotel restaurant. One of them was Peter Sunesen from Denmark. Sunesen's shop, Naturværkstedet, is as meticulous as a dentist's office. He is among the best bird taxidermists in the world, and Mayer has hired him for Hirst commissions. He's won the Danish, European, and Scandinavian taxidermy shows and has taken the WTC twice. He loves to do taxidermy, and he loves to talk about it. "I'm an Aries; I can talk forever," he said. I didn't doubt that. The best taxidermists talk like they preserve, each word a preenable feather. But my mind had gone into anatomical overdrive, and so I said, isn't it a bit odd to compare an Irish elk to lab rats, for example, to determine Best of Show? "It's a world show, and it is a show," he said. "We'll never know who's the better composer, Lennon and McCartney or Mozart. They all did brilliant music, and so it's a matter of taste, of preference. Some of the things in this show are impressive one time, but it hasn't got the lasting effects upon you. To improve too much is to get away from music.

  "I love to watch birds, to hunt them, and eat them; everything about them. But it's the live birds that interest me—the excitement of getting it right. Can this curlew fool the birder? That's the standard I try to obtain."

  He paused and added, "It's the same intimate sense that you have for your spouse. Someone who knows you intimately will know you have gained weight or that you are tired, but the judge who doesn't know that species won't know that. When I walk into that room, I see versions of nature that are distorted and wrong, and then every so often I see the real thing ... but it's rare. It's the jizz that will tell them apart: the nervous action ... The jizz is made up of everything."

  Later that night, the BYOB wind-down party was being held in one of the Crowne Plaza's large banquet rooms. Unlike the previous night's awards ceremony, with its teenage "Liza Minnelli" in a sequined gown belting out "All That Jazz" and its tuxedo-clad taxidermists reciting the Lord's Prayer, this was just a party. People were seated at round tables, chatting, drinking, having fun. It was as dark as a nightclub, and it felt like one, too.

  In the front of the room was a big stage with a microphone and a karaoke machine. People had already signed up to sing their favorite songs. One of the first to perform was Jerry Jackson, the blond taxidermist from Michigan, who had competed in Novices with a deer head and a raccoon. Jackson and his wife went up onstage and sang a duet, "Summer Lovin'" from Grease. Jackson is normally humble and introverted. Onstage, however, he let loose. He and his wife harmonized, filling the room with teenage romance. They finished. Everyone clapped. Then they sang "Falling in Love with You."

  Soon the dance floor was a swaying mass of crooning taxidermists. Mayer, Fishwick, "Vinnie the Butcher," and Team Sweden were all twirling and twisting. I looked around for Ken Walker. I didn't see him, but everyone knew he was going to sing. At some point, someone belted out "We Are Family," prompting more and more people to get up on the dance floor. By the time Roger Martin play
ed the harmonica, the room was packed.

  I sat in the back, nursing a drink. Eventually, Ken showed up at my table. He was talking nonstop, happy with his blue ribbon—already over the sting of his hulking stag losing Best of Show to a Bambi-like fawn. "How are you going to end your book?" he asked. I shrugged and said, "It's still going on." He leaned in and mentioned something about those old mounts that the Smithsonian had destroyed. He shook his head but didn't dwell on it. Not here. Not tonight at the World Show. The MC was calling him up onto the stage:..."Three time World Champion and world champion singer is going to sing..."

  Ken ran up and grabbed the mike. He nodded, scanning the crowd, revving up. He's done this a million times at clubs all over Alberta. His hunter's hands clutched the mike. He tapped a steady beat with his trapper's feet. He was wearing a khaki hunting shirt, not the requisite black suit. He had no props: no guitar, no black sunglasses. But it didn't matter. He had the jizz.

  The first five notes were electrifying: doo doo doo doo doo. It was one of the most famous rock songs ever—the only song that outsold the Beatles when it was released in 1964 (two years after Ken was born). Everyone hummed the guitar riff before he sang a word; they knew this song by heart. He tapped the beat, his head nodding.

  "Pretty woman walking down the street ... Pretty woman, the kind I like to meet...