Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  I frowned at my face in that Men’s room mirror, fearing that I was an impostor and had no right to speak as a vagina specialist at the Houston Sheraton. As I washed my hands, I lost confidence in the second paper I’d soon be sharing with my colleagues, “The Dialectics of Vaginal Hegemony: A Cultural Praxis.” My opinions on women’s issues seemed—for that one painful moment at the mirror—flimsy, inconsequential, and unethical.

  For more than a minute I considered the radical act of not delivering my paper at all, not speaking on the topic at hand, but rather asking questions instead, placing myself in the subservient role of the student and becoming “teachable.” Then I washed my hands. The life of the academic, as we all know, is fraught with such moments of doubt. Practically every evening we have to push through our suspicions of fraudulence, usually with the aid of alcoholic lubricants.

  Minutes later, I strode into the conference room with my shoulders back, my pocket square sharp as a knife. I hit the stage running. “Let’s get it started,” I called out, rotating my fist above my head. “Woot, woot, woot.”

  The older gentlemen, it should be noted, were counting on me for energy. In their eyes, I was a spry fifty-nine-year-old progressive who brought a spark of defiance to my field. In fact, they still called me The Kid, a handle that tickled me. Here I’d been flown into Houston (at no small expense to the university where I hold an endowed chair) to discuss the contemporary American vagina primarily, to shed light on this murky and controversial subject, while touching briefly on the Global Vagina and the Vagina of Emerging Nations (you really can’t get around it these days, but you have to wear kid gloves), and that’s exactly what I intended to do. This conference provided us all with the consistency we appreciated: a few laughs, a few questions, maybe a tepid argument resolved with a handshake or even a fist bump. Afterward, we’d grab a nice dinner at the hotel and maybe catch part of the jazz show in the hotel bar, where the drinks flowed well past 11:00 p.m.

  As I said, I brought top-notch enthusiasm to the stage that afternoon, but almost as soon as I entered the conference room, I noticed a disturbing trend. The men in the room were less receptive to the topic after lunch. It seemed like they didn’t want to think about the historical vagina at all. They yawned rudely without covering their mouths, and completely ignored my PowerPoint presentation.

  That might have been the low point of the conference for me had there not been an unexpected disruption. A new attendee, a first-timer named “Hal,” stood up during my précis on the antebellum vagina, tore the salt-and-pepper wig off his head, stripped off his handsome blazer, and revealed himself to be an impostor. We were shocked and appalled by the protrusions stretching out his shirtfront.

  “Give me that microphone,” Hal said in a shockingly high-pitched voice. It was then that I realized that Hal was not a man after all. He, I mean, she was on the stage before I could react and snatched the microphone out of my hand. “You all value abstract terminology higher than common sense.”

  All the other men at Hal’s table stood up and disrobed. I determined, after a moment of peering over my bifocals, that these six were not gentlemen either. There were now seven women in the room. A note on our conference: we had never once excluded women. They were welcome to submit papers, and many of them did. It was simply a statistical anomaly that none of them had been invited to present their work before us.

  The intruder motioned to her crotch with the microphone. “The ‘historical vagina,’ as you call it, is with us here today. The entire history of the vagina is right here, boys. Look no further.”

  “Fascinating theory,” I said, leaning over and speaking into her microphone, my microphone, knowing that the men were counting on me to remain unruffled, “but let’s leave your little vagina out of this and move on to—”

  “Careful, pal,” she said, aiming the cocked gun of her finger at me. “My vagina never did anything wrong to you.” She glared at me. Then she paused and took a breath. “My vagina and I have been through quite a bit together,” she said, her voice amplified in all four corners of the room. “We have traveled the world together. Paris, Detroit, Anchorage, Hanoi, so many memories.” She laughed quietly to herself. The other women grinned, perhaps recalling their own high points with their vaginas.

  I felt out of my depths for a moment. My scholarly work had been anthologized and widely admired, true, and several awards for pedagogical expertise had confirmed what I had always thought about myself, but I’d never seen anything like this before, and I didn’t appreciate how this dislocation made me feel.

  In an attempt to restore order, I continued addressing my audience. “Let’s shift our focus, gentlemen, to the twentieth century—”

  “Enough!” said the woman with the microphone. “You know, I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. But you forced my hand, sir. You don’t know the first thing about the vagina.”

  With malice aforethought, these seven trespassers began to unbuckle their belts, to unzip their slacks, to hike up their skirts and dresses. We were frightened by the threat of what we might witness under the fluorescent lights. We blushed and turned our heads. A pale septuagenarian in the front row clutched his chest. It had been over twenty years since he’d seen one outside the pages of a book. His neighbor, a heavyset scholar in his mid-fifties, waved a handkerchief over the old man’s face and said, “Ma’am, you’re killing the chair of my department.”

  None of us was prepared for something like this. The intrusion was shocking. We would have liked advanced warning—a “trigger warning” as the kids call it nowadays—and perhaps the option to down a few cocktails first. We would have appreciated the option to say no or yes. This was a lurid and inappropriate display, a spectacle to be countenanced only behind closed doors, under the covers of a marital bed or a hotel room, in the secret dark, not during an academic conference in the broad daylight of Houston, Texas, the taste of barbecued brisket still in our mouths. We couldn’t turn the page, nor could we hit a button on the keyboard. This was real, this was shocking, this was sudden, this was illegal.

  “We are not here to see that,” I complained, unable to conceal the childlike whine in my voice. I spoke through tightly clenched lips. “We are here to talk about the conceptual nature of the vagina. That is all.”

  “This is it,” she said, pointing to her still-clothed crotch. “What more do you need to know?”

  “This has gone too far,” I said. “Have you no shame, madam? We are not here to indulge in pornography.”

  I motioned to the security guards. Two bulky male students—scholarship boys who were fulfilling their work-study obligations—began inching toward the interlopers but kept a respectful distance. Dressed in matching red golf shirts and black slacks, the word SECURITY embossed on their backs, the boys approached with darting eyes, hands open at their sides, clearly unprepared for this incursion. None of us knew what to do next.

  The woman with the microphone said, “But why does this vagina scare you? Why do you feel the need to govern this?”

  I checked my notes. I flipped through the pages hoping to land on a rebuttal.

  “Gender is a social construct,” she said to me. “That’s all. Dude, stop looking at your notes and listen to me for one second.”

  Grudgingly, I gave her my attention.

  “You’ve been conditioned by a system that imprisons your thoughts and actions,” she said. “You’ve been commodified. Break free, man. Break out.”

  I flipped through all nineteen pages of my paper, looking for a relevant quote with which to rebut her hysterical arguments. Marx, I thought, would help me. Surely Karl Marx could carry me through this predicament. Hadn’t we all found clever ways to ignore his secret sexual liaison with his own housekeeper, the laborer he employed, in order to admire his groundbreaking ideas about the working class? Or Freud, I thought. Save me, Uncle Siggie. Okay, yes, he’d made a few mistakes with Dora and also believed the vagina to be a tomb that symbolically represented the abse
nce of a penis, but I was certain he’d written sensibly, rationally, coldly, about this very topic. The only way to combat this woman’s outsized emotions was to perform an object lesson in stone-cold logic. My notes appeared to me as if they’d been written in a foreign language. The words literally blurred before my eyes and became unreadable. Sweat broke out on my high forehead. I had almost conceded defeat. But, but, but, in the end, I knew, this was a job for Michel Foucault, bald, beautiful, masculine, academic as hell, a thinker who focused on the relationship between power and the body. Her microphone-seizing gambit was a power play, pure and simple, and only Foucault could save us from it.

  “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,” I shrieked, quoting Discipline and Punish, “nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”

  My colleagues breathed a collective sigh of relief. Here was the soothing balm of academic jargon, sweet jargon, here was the brain asserting dominance over the body, the intellect governing feeling. We were out of the bordello and back in the classroom, where all the unpredictable heat and spontaneity of the body was safely quarantined, hidden, repressed, contextualized.

  I had found my voice. My back straightened and my legs felt steady beneath me. “Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles,” I said, now quoting from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, flexing my fifty-nine-year-old muscles a bit, I admit, “but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.”

  The woman with the microphone laughed. That’s all. She just laughed, an act of brutality. She registered the sweat on my glazed forehead, the terror in my eyes of being exposed as a fraud, the quaver in my whiskey-textured baritone voice, the liver spots on my hands, my pot belly barely concealed by dress shirt and tie, my penis defenseless as a mushroom cap in a bog of moss, and she simply, carelessly, cruelly laughed at me, as though I were nothing more than a turbulent child.

  “Are you laughing at me?” I asked.

  She smiled. That smile shattered me. She knew it right then and there, knew exactly what she had accomplished, and didn’t have to say another word. Her pitying smile pierced me more deeply than any steel or lead weapon ever could. Her presence alone had altered the conference forever. I felt as though she were looking at an old oil painting on the wall of an empty museum, a quaint but meaningless artifact. She handed me the microphone and turned back to her collaborators.

  They returned to their table, no longer in disguise, and waited for me to deliver my presentation. The words caught in my throat. I couldn’t understand a single word of what I had written. I looked out at the audience, unable to ignore the presence in the front row. My throat was a desert, my brain a broken toy.

  My inquisitor took pity on me. “We don’t intend to cause any more trouble here today,” she called out. “Let’s go, gals. We’ll be at the bar if you need us or want to continue this discussion in a civil manner.”

  I watched them leave, filing out of the room with dignity and grace. The old men in the audience looked to me with drowning eyes. They hoped I could put the experience into context. As a representative of the next generation, I owed it to them to carry our cherished ideals into the future. A good leader would have synthesized the relevant materials and situated them historically. He would have soldiered ahead without even acknowledging the disturbance or he would have stitched the crisis into the fabric of his own argument.

  But I was not up to the task. Instead I watched the impostors depart through the back door. They were still smiling, laughing, unburdened.

  I abandoned my notes on the lectern. I removed my nametag, dismounted from the stage, and hustled through the conference room with my eyes lowered, skirting between the tables and chairs, straining to overhear their conversation as they filed out the back door. Men reached out to pat me on the back, trying to console me, but I shook them off. These women had answers to questions I’d never asked. I longed to join them at the bar to listen, to hear what they had to say. Nothing in my life seemed more important. The world was changing. Only a fool would have ignored it. What a great resource women could be for my next book! I could probe them for specifics and pass their insights off as my own.

  Just before I exited, though, a man cried out, “Joists! We haven’t mentioned joists. That might solve our structural problem.”

  I confess I was intrigued. So I hung around a little longer, eager to hear what the other scholars, my peers, would say in response.

  BENEFACTOR

  The man who teaches me to see with new eyes what I see everyday—that man is my benefactor.

  —Paul Valéry

  This is how Parker broke into the art world. He was on his couch, eating a salami sandwich, when a captivating woman appeared on his TV screen. “For only nineteen ninety-nine a month,” she said, “you too can adopt an impoverished artist. Help keep some struggling painter or sculptor alive in this economic downturn. These artists truly need your help, friends. Just look at this poor fellow.”

  A man in a Slayer T-shirt and denim shorts limped into the frame. His pitted, unshaved face was etched with years of suffering. Scraggly hair, sad tattoos. The woman, an actor in her late twenties, held her ground with admirable dignity, ignoring what must have been a heady stench. Her clean auburn hair was pinned up on her head, as if she had a dinner party to attend after taping this promo. Parker sat forward on his couch, transfixed.

  “Help end the suffering, friends,” she said. “This artist needs a sponsor like you.” Still smiling, she turned and placed her regal white hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “Careful,” Parker said to her, now sitting on the edge of the couch, hammered after another night of solitary drinking.

  “Can you find it in your heart to change this man’s luck?” she said, looking directly into the camera. “Please give now. Operators are standing by.”

  Before he knew it, Parker had his phone in one hand and his credit card in the other. He laid his half eaten sandwich on the arm of the couch. “I want an artist,” he said to the toll-free operator. “That’s what I need. Definitely.”

  The operator wasted no time in gathering the necessary data. “Congratulations, sir. You’ve made the right decision. May I have your name, please, and your credit card information?”

  Two weeks later, the first of several information packets appeared in his mailbox. Parker learned that Gerry “The Balls” Husk, his adopted artist, was a forty-seven-year-old “up and comer” who was currently crashing on a buddy’s futon in Red Hook. Because he couldn’t afford to buy clay or plaster, Husk made intricate sculptures out of food products stolen from Brooklyn supermarkets. His most accomplished piece to date was a lemon Bundt cake with cherry icing, a work he called Satan’s Hollow (Key Food, #1).

  The enclosed bio was surprisingly thorough. Gerry had attempted suicide twice since his wife had given him the boot. He’d been busted several times for public intoxication. During that difficult time, he prowled Red Hook at night and spray-painted the words “Eat My Death” on parked cars, brick walls, and subway cars, but he refused to sign his work for fear of the persecution great artists have endured throughout history. Then: nothing. Gerry “The Balls” Husk was blocked. So he moved into a men’s SRO and started doing crystal meth.

  Parker, Gerry’s new benefactor, was thirty-two, single, and a nightly drinker. He longed for a meaningful relationship in his life, but he always second-guessed his decisions, couldn’t commit to anything for long, and in the process had made his life small. A therapist once tried to explain to Parker that he was emotionally anorexic, due to unresolved childhood traumas. Parker dealt with it by never going back to therapy.

  The enclosed biography of his artist came as a welcome distraction. Gerry “The Balls” Husk eventually fought his way back from the brink of suicide. He did a stint in rehab,
eighteen days, and made a strong comeback in the fall of 2009. His one-man show in the Bedford Avenue L Station garnered quite a bit of critical attention. His most remarked-upon work was a coffin-shaped Jell-O mold in which he suspended a McDonald’s French fry and a razor blade. He called it The Last Supper.

  “Jell-O’s my strongest medium,” he told a student reporter from Stuyvesant High School, a junior fulfilling his journalism credit. “I want to dry hump the world,” the artist said.

  The article ran on page three in The Spectator and this renewed attention to his work fueled Husk. He was back!

  Parker tossed aside the pages. A Bundt cake? The Last Supper? It all seemed a little silly and forced. Dry hump the world? What did that mean? A part of him wanted to walk away from the whole enterprise, demand a refund and maybe even an apology, but hadn’t he done this a thousand times before, inched closer to something challenging only to pull away again? And maybe Gerry’s stuff was innovative. Who was Parker to question Gerry’s vision?

  He retrieved the bio from the floor. “You don’t have a degree in art history,” he said aloud. “So why are you pretending to know what’s good or bad?”

  As a benefactor, Parker had to put his own prejudices and ignorance aside. His adopted artist needed room to grow without outside interference from him or anyone else. But Parker couldn’t stop thinking about that Bundt cake. It didn’t resonate—not at first. But on the train to work he kept thinking about it. Who didn’t enjoy a Bundt cake when it came right down to it? They were delicious and you could cut them so easily on account of that hole in the center. Each slice came out perfectly.