Adam Golaski
SAN FRANCISCO ESSAY
PVD —> ORD
At the gate, I’m asked about my phone. It’s a flip. I’m not conducting a social experiment. The man who asks wears a Bluetooth earpiece. He’s from Minneapolis. Says, “I applaud you.” I don’t deserve applause. I’m easily distracted, I explain. He asks if I have ADHD. He’s squat, white, wears a red ball cap. It’s not MAGA. Behind me, a man tells his phone an anecdote: “They told me to order a couple beers on the company tab; I told them I already drank two beers.” I read Thomas Hardy’s “Barbara of the House of Grebe” from the Penguin paperback The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales (1979, Penguin). The man from Minneapolis tells me he can bring a thousand books on his phone. I brought two. In addition to the Hardy, John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1960, Penguin UK edition).
Wyndham’s novel is about the alien invasion of an English village (Midwich) circa 1957. In conjunction with the arrival of an object “not unlike the inverted bowl of a spoon” (36), the people of Midwich fall asleep. Two months later, all the fertile women of Midwich discover that they’re pregnant; the babies, born late May, are “perfect, ’cept for golden eyes” (89). The babies—the Children, as they come to be known—are not Homo sapiens, but an implanted other. The crisis, then, is reduced to an ethical question (posed by the village vicar): “Since they are another species, have we not perhaps a duty?—to fight them in order to protect our own species?” (158).
Before all the Midwich women realize all the Midwich women are pregnant, two Midwich men—the village doctor and a professor—discuss how to break the news. How dated, I thought—men making decisions about women’s reproductive health without women. No. Not dated. It’s Amy Schumer at the gynecologist’s office, examined by a “bunch of congressmen” in the “Dr. Congress” sketch. She asks, “Aren’t there any women on the Women’s Health Committee?” To which the congressmen reply, “That would be like letting the lions run the zoo.” The Midwich professor believes the women are psychologically equipped for an in-utero invasion—“…had I any reason to suspect that it might be an unexpected form of life, I should probably go quite mad”—and adds, “Most women wouldn’t, of course; they are mentally tougher…” (65).
Only obliquely is abortion considered by the novel:
One not-so-young woman suddenly bought a bicycle, and pedaled it madly for astonishing distances, with fierce determination.
Two young women collapsed in over-hot baths.
Three inexplicably tripped, and fell downstairs.
A number suffered from unusual gastric upsets. (60)
The Midwich Cuckoos was published exactly a decade before abortion was legalized in (most of) the UK. What if it was written after 1967? Would the Midwich women simply terminate the alien invasion? Or would the people of Midwich debate the morality of aborting sixty-one immaculate conceptions? The story could still work in Northern Ireland. And here in the States.
When the flight attendant offers drinks, I ask if there’s a seat with more legroom available. She says no. Coffee, then. When the flight attendant brings the coffee, she says, “I lied,” and directs me to two empty bulkhead seats. She apologizes for lying. I don’t care. I’m just grateful to be reasonably comfortable.
At O’Hare, at Billy Goat, I order a grilled ham and cheese sandwich (because it’s the cheapest sandwich, $5.15) and a bottle of Goose Island “312” (I misunderstood the price—it’s ridiculous, $8 + 92¢ [“liqtax”]; I’m not happy with myself, I didn’t mean to spend so much, I can’t really afford it). A short-order cook adds my ham steak to what’s on the grill—he’s at ease as he works. I can’t know if he’s happy at his job as short-order cook in an airport food court, but he appears happy—and for that reason it’s a pleasure to watch him.
I sit at a table next to a pilot’s. When I leave, we wish each other safe travels.
ORD —> SFO
I’m traveling to San Francisco for my niece’s bat mitzvah. From email to K: “I'm dreading the flight and wishing I could stay in SF long enough to do something more than just... go to a bat mitzvah. If I'm lucky I'll check out SFMOMA. I have the feeling that I will never go to SF again. My sister is moving to NYC this summer. It's just as well. I can't afford to go to SF.” I can’t afford to go to San Francisco. I’m traveling on my parents’ and my sister’s tab. I’m traveling alone because we can’t afford to go to San Francisco. From email to K: “My girls are terrified about my trip. [My eldest] is certain I'm going to die [on the flight] and has been bursting into tears about this (I'm determined to prove her wrong); [my youngest] complains that Mom doesn't play with her as well as Dad and has no idea how to properly make chicken fingers.”
K asked, “Why does [your eldest] think you're going to die on the plane? Is it because of the recent Boeing stories?” Two weeks before my departure, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, crashed. Everyone onboard was killed. My daughters watch CNN 10, a news summary for children. But there are other reasons. “[My eldest] read a book that posed the question, Would you rather be on a sinking ship or a crashing airplane?—and she started to imagine both scenarios, and then all of a sudden her dad was going somewhere without her on an airplane” (from email to K). And my children pick up on my wife’s anxiety about the trip.
I ask the gate agent at O’Hare about legroom. He says, “If I didn’t understand, who would?”—he means he’s tall too. I hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it, but we might be the same height. Six foot six (or thereabouts). He finds me an exit row.
My jet’s a Boeing 737, an 800 model; I assure my wife it’s different from the MAX 8. But what do I know? We fly; I read Hardy. Twice I performed a ritual I initiated years ago I don’t remember when and I can’t tell anyone about it that’s part of the ritual.
Within Thomas Hardy’s “Barbara of the House of Grebe” is a Pygmalion episode; Barbara keeps a marble statue of her beautiful first husband Edmond (“He was, indeed, one of the handsomest men who ever set his lips on a maid’s” [218].) in a locked recess in her boudoir and visits it during the night: “…with her arms clasped tightly round the neck of her Edmond, and her mouth on his” (236). A Pygmalion episode except, instead of the statue coming to life, it is mutilated and Barbara’s spirit dies.
SuperShuttle offers the cheapest transport from the airport to the hotel. Rideshare is not an option. A cab is $50. SuperShuttle, $17 (+ $2.75 gratuity, -$1.70 discount, +$2.00 booking fee [“booking fee” = fee for not using a smartphone]). When we land in San Francisco, SuperShuttle texts a link. To check in. I reply, I don’t have a smartphone. Three drivers with tablets and phones work out my reservation; a fourth takes me to the hotel. The “check engine” light is on. At every red light, the shuttle shakes.
SFMOMA
When last was I in San Francisco? During the drought (May/June 2015). All the public fountains were dry. Today, Revelation, Houston Conwill’s waterfall memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr., and the terraced fountain next to John Roloff's Green Glass Ship flow, and the Yerba Buena Gardens are green.
My father suggests I ask if there’s a AAA discount. There’s no discount. It’s $25. I’m expected to have $25. I don’t, but commit to adding $25 to my ever-increasing debt. When I assigned my creative nonfiction class to write a travel essay, I asked about potential pitfalls. A student blurted, “Privilege!” and grinned.
A woman speaking Mandarin touches a print (maybe a Johannes Brus?); a guard, a Black woman, says, “Don’t touch that,” asks, “Why would you do that?” Calls on her walkie talkie for someone to come check on the work. The guard says, “This is a museum, you don’t touch anything.” The woman, who appears to know little English, apologizes. Her male companion apologizes. Neither seems embarrassed, and both continue to take photographs in the gallery. A white woman with curly hair touches Zarina’s Tasbih (2011)—touches the sculpture so it moves. There is no guard in the room. The woman is with a chubby white guy and another white woman who sits in a SmartDrive wheelchair. The chubby guy says, “It’s a very English thing to shorten their name.” What could that possibly mean? In the next gallery, a guard asks the white woman with curly hair to wear her bag in front, which she does. A white teenaged boy sets of a proximity alarm in front of Gerhard Richter’s Fenster (2002)—the boy is startled and apologetic.
How can we negotiate invisibility and hypervisibility in productive ways? I’m not the author of this question, but I’m asking.
All the guards I encounter are people of color. Most are women. Most of the guards are Asian. 35.9% of San Francisco’s population is Asian, according to the US Census Bureau (according to 2018 estimates). I stand behind a barrier that blocks entrance to a gallery closed for repair. On the far side of the gallery is Jess’s Narkissos (1976–1991). This brings to mind the image of poet Robert Duncan’s face on the cover of the 1968 New Directions edition of Bending the Bow. Duncan and Jess (Collins) were partners. A guard, obviously of Japanese descent, male, elderly, informs me that the gallery is closed. I think he wants me to move along, but instead I ask when it will be open. He unfolds a museum visitor guide and studies it. His fingernails are neat and long. My own are not—a lifelong bad habit. He doesn’t know when the gallery will open.
Outside the gallery that houses Rodney McMillian’s In This Land (2019) is a pigeon. At first, I assume the guard who watches the bird is anxious about it—I ask, “What do you do to protect the art from pigeons?” The guard says, “Yeah.” Another guard says, “I hope I’m a better subject than the pigeon.” She means, I guess, I hope you’re making notes about me and not the pigeon. I’m making notes about you and the pigeon. They’re not anxious about the pigeon. It flies toward the Oculus Bridge, two floors above us.
Rodney McMillian’s In This Land reads horizontally but oozes to the floor. That’s where I’m most intrigued. Was the paint allowed to drip to the gallery floor and adhere there? I get down on my knees for a close look. The dried paint was cut away from wherever it originally dried. On the SFMOMA website, the dimensions of In This Land are given as “variable”; McMillian, in a video also on the museum website, says it’s “roughly eighty-eight feet long by about fourteen feet tall.” Of course, he didn’t make it in the gallery; it was painted in a studio, where the paint was allowed to dribble to the floor and set; then it was cut free and transported. Where it was cut it doesn’t lie flat on the floor. Aesthetically, this bothers me.
Ellsworth Kelly’s La Combe III (1951) looks great from the other side of the gallery, but I don’t like that the tape lines aren’t crisp.
I write “I love Sol LeWitt” when I find a hallway lined with his prints. His work is flat—even when it’s three-dimensional. His lines, precise—whether it’s him or interns executing the work (are interns more careful because they’re not “the author” but the executor?). A circular room of Agnes Martin untitled paintings—I favor those with minute grids penciled over acrylic paint.
Next to the name Jay DeFeo, I write “string.” There’s string embedded in her painting Incision—it’s “oil and string on board and canvas.” Incision reminds me of David Lynch’s most textured paintings from the nineties (or of the cheeks of the woman in the radiator in 1977’s Eraserhead). I don’t know a thing about DeFeo. Not about The Rose, began in 1958 by DeFeo, who layered and shaped the painting for seven years before it was moved from her studio to the Pasadena Art Museum where she continued to work on it; The Rose, oil on canvas eight inches thick; The Rose hidden behind a wall at the San Francisco Art Institute until 1993. I don’t even know Jay DeFeo is a woman.
I wrote “string” to remind myself I might like to incorporate string into my own work. Or hay—initially, Anselm Kiefer’s shaggy landscape Die Miestersinger doesn’t hold my attention. Not like Sigmar Polke’s Faust portrait on yellow plastic. But I keep returning for another look at the Kiefer. When am I ever going to paint?
On a window seat by a bank of elevators outside the Sea Ranch exhibit, for ten minutes, I make the following notes: Asian male and female, Asian female, white man, Asian female (Nirvana T-shirt), white man, Asian woman, white man and woman (red & blue plaid), Asian woman, white man with a purse, two white women leave bathroom, a Black woman and white woman leave the bathroom taking photos, older white man, South Asian youth, two white women, “Sometimes you see the city and think how beautiful it is,” South Asian woman with probably white male youths, two white women, two Latinas, South Asian male and female, young Asian woman listening to rose gold iPhone, older white male and female, Asian man with a gray ball cap, two Asian women, older white male and female, two young Asian women (beautiful plaid coat).
A child sees Woman Shaving Her Leg (George Segal, 1963) and says, “He’s taking a bath.” (Maybe I first saw Woman Shaving Her Leg as a slide in college?—in a modern art history course. J took that class with me, wrote a paper on Vasily Kandinsky. She was proud of it; when she learned I earned a higher grade on my paper she was annoyed. Maybe rightly so? I don’t care for Kandinsky’s paintings. Don’t find his music-to-color associations or his art-mysticism interesting, either. Kandinsky’s Composition IV is the cover of the textbook J and I used, Hunter & Jacobus’s Modern Art, third ed. I don’t like George Segal that much either, but there it is, Woman Shaving Her Leg—zap! recognition, a sculpture iconic in my memory. When J and I spontaneously took a Greyhound from Boston to NYC [was someone else with us? I don’t remember] we spent several hours in that MOMA, also enjoying the zap of seeing work we’d studied. Specifically, Constantin Brancusi’s brass Bird in Space [1928]. I like Bird in Space.)
My museum ticket documents my arrival at 10 a.m.; it’s 2 p.m. I must go soon. A white woman sees René Magritte’s Les valeurs personnelles (1952), says, “That’s interesting.” I can’t linger in front of Wayne Thiebaud’s Student (1968)—an oil on linen of a woman seated in a desk chair, with a blank pad but no pen visible; behind her a clock (12:22 p.m.). Is she bored? She wears green canvas sneakers. I can’t revisit Christopher Wilmarth’s Long Beginnings for My Brother (1974), etched glass, steel, and cables. (In 1987, Wilmarth hanged himself. His New York Times obituary concludes, “Funeral arrangements were incomplete.”) I must go, to meet my parents at 2:45, to travel to the bat mitzvah that begins at 3:30. A choir of high school students sing eerily in the museum lobby beneath Julie Mehretu’s massive HOWL, eon (I, II) landscapes. Mark Rothko’s spooky No. 14, 1960—“red and blue and purple vibrates.” If I could stay all day, I would. Alexander Calder’s Moths II (1948)—blue and white.
SFO —> JFK
Airbus A330-200 is replaced with a smaller plane; the gate attendants need to drop thirty passengers from the flight to Philadelphia. I text my wife. She writes, “That’s ridiculous. Why would you get bumped? We bought those tickets five months ago. AND I paid extra for an exit row!” and “Am I allowed to ask why? American Airlines says your flight is on time, etc. I’m not happy.” Is Airbus A330-200 a MAX 8? My phone edits texts and lets me know: “Preceding msg. modified, media objects were removed” and “Enhanced message not translated.” During the night, I sent myself the following text: “vampire circus matryoshka rosebud prince & the pauper sweet virgin.” A gate attendant asks, “Would you be willing to go anywhere else?” Yes, I tell the attendant, if he can guarantee me a seat with extra leg room.
The doctor and the professor decide to enlist a woman—the professor’s wife, Angela—to present what they know to the women of Midwich at a “Special Emergency Meeting of Great Importance to every Woman in Midwich” (67). The vicar introduces her:
And I want you to know in advance that she has the endorsement of Dr. Willers and myself for everything she is going to tell you. It is, I assure you, only because we feel that this matter may come more acceptably and, I am sure, more ably, from a woman to women that we have burdened her with the task. (68)
Although Angela is admired for her strength (“[Angela] is grand, isn’t she? I wonder how you or I would have stood up to a shock like that?” (62)), she is only a face for what the men wish to communicate to the village.
Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos was adapted to film by Wolf Rilla in 1960 as Village of the Damned; John Carpenter remade it in 1995. There’s no emergency meeting in Rilla’s film. In Carpenter’s, the meeting is substantially different. Barbara (a diluted Angela equivalent), from Midwich and herself pregnant, is shouted down at the town meeting; her husband intervenes and introduces Susan Verner, a scientist conducting research for the government. Verner says,
I want to start out by saying that we are all very concerned about your well-being, but ultimately it will come down to individual decisions and I understand that these decisions will be probably the most intimate, personal, difficult decisions that you ever make in your life. However, because your pregnancies have attracted intense scientific interest, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, those of you who decide to have your child will have all prenatal expenses paid. They’ll also receive three thousand dollars monthly as an allowance, if you allow your child to be examined and tested on some sort of a regular basis. Look, I don’t want you to interpret this allowance as some sort of a pressure. It isn’t, it’s your decision. And if you decide to terminate, then of course you have the right to do that, and you can do it privately or if financially unable a medical team will be brought in next week. The choice is yours.
The nearest Rilla’s film gets to the subject of abortion is during a near-silent scene in a pub, where there are only men; one father-to-be, brooding over a pint says, “I hope that none of them lives.”
Seated by the window is a school teacher with a blue birthmark on her chin. She takes extra blankets “because the kids love them.” She reads Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Seated beside me is a man on his way to Helsinki. The teacher reads, blows her nose a lot, drinks a vitamin-C packet. Helsinki watches a subtitled film. I make note of passages in The Midwich Cuckoos that directly consider women’s lives. For instance:
It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way—so what sort of an idea can he have of this?—Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used?—As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator…. Of course you can’t understand how that feels—how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. (87)
I daydream about the movie I would make from The Midwich Cuckoos. My students, reading with me Ovid, are keen to point out that the Olympian gods do not obtain consent from the women they impregnate. I ask my students, “Does a god require consent?” I ask, “What is required of a god?” I ask, “Was God obligated to send an angel to Mary?” If another film is made from The Midwich Cuckoos, it should be made by women.
Thomas Hardy’s short story “The Distracted Preacher” ends with an author’s note; he explains that the story ends as it does because “the marriage of Lizzy and the minister was almost de rigueur in an English magazine at the time of writing” (98). The rest of Hardy’s note describes what end he would’ve written. In the book’s introduction, Susan Hill writes,
The original ending of the story is not successful, as Hardy knew, but we must accept the reason he gives for it in his note to the 1912 edition. The preferred conclusion may well have proved psychologically more likely and artistically more satisfying, but it is difficult to gauge its complete rightness when Hardy only adds it in its cursory form instead of rewriting the last pages of the story entirely. (24)
I dunno. Did Hill not consider that Hardy’s author’s note is the actual end of the story? That to simply replace the end he had initially written to better sell the story with “the ending that would have been preferred to the writer” (98) would somehow be incomplete and untrue?
JFK, what I see of it, is crummy the way so much of NYC is crummy. However, the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” sounds great in the bathroom. Text from my wife: “Great. Now you have a five-hour layover in JFK. We’re leaving here at 6 p.m. and going to find dinner at that South Bay strip mall. Then we’ll see you at 9:30. All of us at our wits’ end. Trying to stay positive, but we all just want to go to bed. See you later.” At the gate, a white man sits across from me: a pale blue, short-sleeve polo shirt, oatmeal-colored sweater vest with a red seal stitched on the breast, chinos, brown loafers with no socks. Gray hair, slim. A blue—not quite navy—blazer and a leather bag on the seat beside him. He’s at work on his laptop. Text from my wife: “Good! And we’re gonna try the Wahlberg brothers (of New Kids on the Block) restaurant… Wahlburgers. I know you’re jealous.” I am. I pay attention to the airport music: Wings’ “Let ’Em In”; “That’s All”—not solo Phil Collins, but Genesis; “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—not Billy Joel, but The Four Seasons; a song I note as, “What Bowie is this? ‘Let’s Dance’ era”—I note the lyric “She got everything”—it’s “Blue Jean” from Tonight (1984), the album that followed Let’s Dance (1983); and Coldplay—could be any number of songs, but I’ll call it “Paradise.”
ADAM GOLASKI is the author of Voice Notes (Spuyten Duyvil). His work has appeared in Fence, The Lifted Brow, McSweeney’s, The Smart Set, and A Velvet Giant.
