by Sarah Reith
“Pour a little more of that right there,” she commanded. She was leaving for Israel soon, and she wanted to make sure the plants got a good dose of fish tar while she was still around to make sure I did it right.
I would find out later that fish tar is controversial in pot growing circles, where a unique strain of geeky redneck connoisseurship has developed in the rigorously amended soil. Some smokers claim they can taste the fish tar in the final product. Furthermore, they insist that this assault on their delicate sensibilities is more than any discerning consumer should ever be forced to endure. There is something imitative about this analytical yet highly subjective savoring of flavor and high, some odor on the breeze wafting into Mendocino from the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma counties.
At Serendipity Organics, the plants got sizzled with a black syrup of liquefied fish bones that had been putrefying in a giant plastic tank all year long, waiting for its chance to unleash the regenerative power of death. There is no pot snob jargon yet for “aftertaste of rotting fish,” so until there is, Alizarin will continue dosing her plants with fish tar. She couldn’t care less about wannabe oenophile stoners, just as the plane at fifteen hundred feet was beneath her notice.
Not mine. I am quick to catch the implications of ecstatic violence in sleek machines and crisp formations. I was almost fourteen when I came home to the apartment I shared with my father and found a level of mayhem beyond even his particular affection for chaos. Mattresses were slashed, with the glee that follows a long session of patiently sharpening knives. Cupboards were ransacked, dishes methodically shattered. Heavy pieces of furniture had been flung across the room, and books were strewn all over the floor, their pages torn, their spines snapped. A list of confiscated items and a copy of the search warrant attested to the orderliness of the operation. But Alizarin had never been raided. The light plane, with its crew of uniformed savages, was a theoretical outrage to her.
“So, ah, what about that small aircraft that just . . . ?” I splashed a little more of the vicious liquid onto the roots of an innocent plant. I was trying not to behave like someone who expected to re-enact a childhood trauma any second now. Would they shoot the sheep when they came? Set the barn on fire?
“Buzzed us,” Alizarin supplied, quickly, the way people do when proper nomenclature is important to them.
She pawed around in the dirt for a few seconds. Then she made a sound of extreme disgust—which made sense, considering the fish in the fish tar had been dead longer than it had been alive.
“They’re from out of state,” she said contemptuously. “From some Neanderthal province where they still spend thousands of dollars a day fucking up a few plants. Do you know there are children dying from abscessed teeth, right here in America? Infant mortality in our nation’s capital is worse than it is in some Third World countries. But let’s not pay for birth control. Oh, no. That would be un-Christian.” She seethed, glaring at the rotten sludge like it represented all the corrupt political morals she could think of.
“So what are they doing here, if they’re from out of state?” I persisted. “Are they federal?”
“No. They are from out of state,” Alizarin repeated. She sounded like she might be getting cross, like a lady in a novel. “They can’t bust us here, because California is semi-civilized. But they can send in their goons from Wyoming and Tennessee to pollute our air and our sound waves . . .”
It was training, I gathered eventually. Mendocino County was a training grounds for out-of-state marijuana eradication programs. The big game hunters couldn’t shoot anything on the wildlife preserve, but they could roar around all they wanted, sighting their rifles and learning how to track down their prey. Recently, wildlife biologists have been studying the effects of a predator’s presence on prey populations; how the expectation of a rattlesnake informs the movements of a gray squirrel’s tail; or how the grazing patterns of the Tule elk adapt when all the wolves are gone.
“So . . . what if they are federal?” I persisted.
Gray squirrels twitch their tails constantly when they believe a rattlesnake is in the area. Scientists hypothesized that it might be a nervous tic, a squirrel version of post-traumatic stress from multiple brushes with death. But then videos with hundreds of frames a second showed that frequent tail-twitchers are far more likely to evade a rattler’s strike than those with a more laid-back approach to things.
Alizarin flicked a chunk of something not quite liquefied out of the stew that was gurgling into the ground. If zombies didn’t eat brains, I thought, this is definitely what they would eat. She shrugged.
“Then they’re federal,” she explained.
“Which means they can bust us,” I finished, surging to the head of the class on a wave of inspired thought.
“Well, yeah.” She looked at me like I’d just proven conclusively that fish tar stinks.
It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that I was disappointed to be overlooked this way; noticed, then ignored, by a representative of all institutional violence. But it’s a peculiar kind of suspense, to be tallied by some brazen, anonymous authority. It gives you an inkling of why some people believe being photographed is hazardous to the health of their souls.
Something intangible had been taken from us when that aircraft cruised across the sky above us; something that could now be used by someone whose purpose was hostile to our own. I understood that we hadn’t been harmed, exactly, but we could be, at the leisure of that hostile purpose. It’s the kind of awareness that can make a gray squirrel either twitch its tail to the exclusion of all else, or give up twitching altogether.
Alizarin’s home was not inconspicuous. It was perched on top of a steep, alignment-wrecking hill that did not quite qualify as a mountain, nestled in between a couple of imposing formations that did. It could very well have been invisible. But Alizarin had painted it bright Ukrainian Revolution orange—just in case any rookie pilots looking for a pot farm needed a point of reference. I could imagine their dispatcher, directing them to fly east from the house that looked like a giant flotation device, with green trim and purple doors.
There was a theory at work here. I never did figure out exactly what it was, but I think it had something to do with theater, with sleight of hand, with chutzpah and daring and charm. After all, pot is magic; and what is magic if not the discipline of diverting attention?
Alizarin planted tomatillos in the doorway of the greenhouse, and their foliage poured into the sun. They were eye-catching, but you can’t hide a family of pot plants behind a few vines with cheerful yellow flowers on them. Alizarin’s pot plants were so exuberant, they were practically turning cartwheels in the driveway. Great waves of resiny scent gushed into the yard, as relentless as the smell of the ocean—if the ocean were contained in a tiny plastic shed and placed directly in the summer sun.
Compared to the greenhouse just a few feet from the front gate, the open-air patch was almost discreet.
“I’m hedging my bets,” Alizarin punned, indicating the natural privacy hedge of coyote weed and manzanita.
I read somewhere that people who pun are incapable of murder; but the route to the garden was pretty unsafe. No European worker would ever tolerate conditions like that, unless it was within the context of an educational travel experience.
I should point out here that anyone who starts growing pot to make an easy living would be better off tending an irrigation ditch in small-town Mendocino County. The next time someone starts complaining about how pot growers sit around all day watching their investments grow, hand him a shovel. Pot is a crop. Crop cultivation is agriculture, which is a fancy word for work. Lots of work. And growing pot is a serious workout.
Alizarin and I slithered down a steep hillside, our path lubricated by a dense growth of shining poison oak. If we started moving too fast, we could always grab onto one of the slippery Manzanita branches, which extended helpfully into the path at about face level. This must be how all these leather-skinned pot gro
wers stay so slim, I thought, panting.
Next, we struggled through a waist-trimming section of chicken wire, tied to a branch with a length of orange baling twine. There was something almost superstitious about the level of slapdashery to the arrangements here. It looked like someone really believed that the malicious spirit of federal law enforcement would look at this chicken wire baling twine mélange of an enclosure and say, oh. This can’t possibly be a criminal operation. It’s much too slapdash. Let’s go someplace where people have fences and dogs. All we got here is a bunch of big tomatillos.
“These are my outdoor girls.” Alizarin indicated a small orchard of quivering plants, their limbs outstretched like a distressing number of hands with too many fingers. Out here, in the semi-wild, they had a more serious look than their greenhouse sisters, less like pampered courtesans and more like rugged backwoods prophets. If they were humans, their cheeks would be sunken, their eyes a little crazed. We doused their dirt with fish tar, too.
NOW THAT I knew how to look at color like I was insane, the next lesson was learning how to look at shapes like I was colorblind.
“Everything is just a series of shapes,” Alizarin assured me. “Like a jigsaw puzzle.”
To illustrate the truth of this maxim, she introduced me to Enid, a lady who looked very much like she had been a garden ornament in her younger more beautiful days. Enid lounged nakedly in permanent contentment, like a nymph at the edge of whatever fountain she’d lost. Her plaster curls were piled high atop her plaster head. She could have been a Gilded Age goddess, pondering Die Neue Sachlichkeit as she faded into obscurity.
Alizarin slathered a canvas with burnt sienna pigment, made almost liquid with odorless mineral spirits. Burnt sienna is a color that does not quite occur in nature, but is the base note of any number of skin, earth, and wood tones. It is warm and touchable and living, with just enough fire to make you sit up and pay attention. Thinned to a watery consistency, it softens the screaming bright white of a fresh canvas. Its fleshy glow leaches into the colors that are layered on top, making them look as if they know what it feels like to hold their breath and listen to their hearts.
Alizarin used odorless mineral spirits instead of turpentine to clean her brushes and thin her paints, which was a relief, because turpentine, in addition to being highly toxic, always makes me think about ringworm. When I went to live with my grandmother, I had a variety of fungal and parasitic infections, which she treated with honey—to acclimate my system to its new surroundings and strengthen my immune response—and turpentine, which originally comes from pine trees and which, she reasoned, is therefore good for you. It’s not the most exalted possible association for a budding artist, even one who is currently standing around making pictures of a naked plaster cast.
“You could drink this, and it wouldn’t hurt you,” Alizarin remarked.
She stirred the mineral spirits enthusiastically with her brush, as if she were creating a wholesome concoction that would give her the energy she needed to be plucky and successful. But those solvents could have triggered memories of every childhood fungal outbreak I had ever had. They could have promised every kind of cancer and brain damage and organ failure there is. I could feel my focus narrowing, the way it did when I was all alone again, learning how to talk. I didn’t care how much it hurt. I wanted it, now.
Speaking German rearranged my thinking. It made me soften my throat, then called on muscles in my tongue I’d never used. It made me greedy for the day when I could jingle phrases carelessly, like people who scatter handfuls of coins because they have so many paper bills. I longed for the day when I would be skilled enough to say one thing and mean another; when I’d be good enough to spot the truth in a joke or a lie.
I never got that good; though I did develop some skill at eavesdropping, which is harder than it sounds. Eventually, I could even talk to people on the phone—provided the reception was perfect and they were neither very old nor very young, and they spoke only in High German, at a moderate pace, using grammatical but not overly complex sentence structures. If they managed to refrain from talking about numbers or giving directions, I could make it through an entire conversation without feeling like I had just had a stroke. My failure to establish myself at the lowest level of the German academic hierarchy was the worst humiliation I had ever experienced, for the simple reason that I had never tried anything particularly difficult before. I didn’t know how to approach a challenge methodically, first by adjusting the way I looked at it and then by putting it together, one piece at a time, in relation to the pieces next to it.
But there was Enid, a series of shapes; and there was the teacup, with its riot of shadows. There was an alphabet in all those tubes of color; a grammar in the canvas and the brushes. There were inflections in the mediums that could be used to change the consistency of paint and make the brushstrokes watery or muscular, or so soft and pliant not a trace of the brush could be seen.
I could paint a mud pie if I wanted to. But if I rested a brush in the crook of my thumb—right there, where it jutted away from the paw and made it the hand of a human with something to say—then, I could tell a story. With a touch of green in the curve of a hip, I could make a thesis on the quality of light. With the angle of a brushstroke at a few key points, an assortment of facial features could become a character with a full range of emotion. It was as seamless and complex as turning a phrase in the language you dream in.
I wanted that. I wanted to try myself in a language where I wouldn’t be derided by a cruel professor, lectured by a pedantic prostitute, or constantly remembering a husband I would always think of as The John. I wanted a language that couldn’t be spoken, one that went deeper than words. I was ready to try again.
“Are you paying attention?” Alizarin asked sharply. She held a hard-bristled brush in her hand. “I’m talking about shapes. Do you see the shapes on our friend Enid here?” Enid was ignoring us as she contemplated the depths of her missing pool. “I don’t mean the paint stains, or whatever the hell that is. Just pretend she has a rash or something. But you can see the shapes, right? The light and shadow shapes? See how you can tell one butt cheek is further away by how much darker it is?” She clacked the handle of her paintbrush on Enid’s far butt cheek, which was mottled by paint stains or mold. “Of course, it’s smaller, too, but that’s perspective. We’ll do perspective later. For now, just put the pieces together.” She set the brush down, like she was in a hurry to get rid of it.
“I’d better go take some Hyland’s,” she said abruptly. “I think I’m getting poison oak.”
Alizarin wore sandals, even in the garden, and her toenails looked like she’d been using them to claw her way out of a gravel mine. Contributing to this effect, the blue-veined skin on the tops of her feet was starting to display a garish rash. She left me alone in the studio, walking like she wished she didn’t have to use her feet to do it.
I was alone. The drapes hung down across the windows, as motionless as if they might be waiting for the danger of the day to pass. There was no place cool in all the world just then. The sun poured in around the curtains, illuminating dust motes as they rained into the corners, down upon my scalp, and into the cleft of Enid’s plaster ass.
I could smell the sweat of female plants, yearning with desperation powerful as grief. It swelled on the currents of unmoving air. Then, slowly, under its own power, it propelled itself across the valleys and the silted creek beds, over hedges and high wooden fences, in search of the vegetal love that tells us all our stories about who we are and why we die. Further off, in shadow, I could hear the clatter of a chopper, moving fast. There was urgency in that sound, a perception of terrible need. It sounded like the grinding of a hundred thousand teeth; of dumb erections bumping blindly in the dark; of searches for phantom seraglios and mountains of data that don’t make any sense.
I picked up my brush and began.
THE ADULT BUTTERFLY has one task only, which is the creation of more butte
rflies. Each of these winged insects is a meditation on impermanence, as fragile as a watercolor on tissue paper. Some species don’t even bother developing mouth parts or a digestive apparatus, as if processing food were too base an activity for beings whose one great purpose in life is the creation of more ephemeral beauty.
Other butterflies do eat, but should not under any circumstances be eaten themselves. Their participation in the food chain is reluctant, and conditional. For example, the swallowtail butterfly is toxic to predators because in its caterpillar form, it devours several times its body weight in leaves from the Dutchman’s pipe, a member of the birthwort family of plants. The mottled red and white flower of this hardy vine is large and curved, with a blaring mouth at one end and a testicular bulb at the other. It looks like a cross between a sea horse and a tuba. The heart-shaped leaves are loaded with alkaloid toxins, just as scarlet oil paint is thick with mercury, those slabs of light, with lead.
When the caterpillar nestles into its cocoon, it digests itself with the enzymes it has made from all the poisonous plant matter it’s consumed. This self-cannibalizing approach to puberty activates certain cell sets that were dormant in the larva and allows them to develop into the structures of the adult animal. These cells are called imaginal discs, as if the cellular fantasies of the chomping, heaving, defecating caterpillar envisioned a future where it would be lighter than breath, with sunshine streaming through its watercolor wings.
It shifts the focus on casual lepidoptery, when you know the social butterfly is either starving to death or is a deadly appetizer, desperate to achieve its purpose before it runs out of time. In Germany, where bedtime stories often feature little children being tortured, no one uses the term “social butterfly” to describe a human being with an active social life. It’s as if all that enzymatic soup stuff were just a little grim for people reared on Der Struwwelpeter, with its whimsical illustrations of juvenile delinquents having their thumbs cut off and falling into wells.
