Lab Girl (16 page)

AFTER WE FOLLOWED
Dumpling's directive to Monkey Jungle and received the epiphany that we were all just monkeys working in a monkey house, everything started to make sense. When I was separated from the lab, attending some seminar or conference, it was the series of twisted e-mails from Bill that held me fast to what I loved about my job, even while trapped with pasty middle-aged men who regarded me as they would a mangy stray that had slipped in through an open basement window.
There's a place somewhere where I am part of the in-group,
I would remind myself as I stood alone with my buffet dish in some Marriott ballroom, apparently radiating cooties and so excluded from the back-slapping stories of building mass spectrometers during the good old days.

Each time I returned to Georgia Tech from traveling, I tried to throw myself into working even harder. I began to set aside one night a week as an all-nighter (Wednesdays) in order to complete the paperwork that went unattended while I served on committees tasked with documenting the potential obsolescence of chalkboards on campus. I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time.

As hard as I worked, I just couldn't get ahead. Showers became a biweekly ritual. My breakfast and lunch were reduced to a couple of cans of Ensure from the cases that I kept under my desk, and in desperation, I once threw one of Reba's Milk-Bones in my purse so that I could gum it during a seminar, trying to keep peoples' attention off of what I knew would be my growling stomach. The acne that I had never wrestled with as a teenager decided to make up for lost time with a magnificent debut, and I passed the workday biting my nails with ferocity. My brief forays into romance had convinced me that I would be relegated to love's bargain bin; none of the single guys that I met could understand why I worked all of the time, and nobody wanted to listen to me talk about plants for hours, anyway. Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me.

I was living on the outskirts of town, just where Atlanta ends and southern Georgia begins. I rented a trailer that presided over three less-than-pristine acres of Coweta County and paid extra for the additional privilege of caring for a geriatric mare named Jackie. I figured that this was worth the thirty-five-minute commute: I had always longed for a horse, and the fact that I was officially done with school and employed made it seem possible. Jackie was lovely and a consistently soul-nourishing source of equine comfort to me and made fast friends with Reba. My only complaint was that both my neighbor to the west and my landlord had progressed from being friendly to being creepy as soon as I got my bags unpacked.

It puzzled me that the makeshift garage of the trailer contained stacks and boxes overflowing with homemade VHS tapes. My landlord had given me some lame excuse as to why all these tapes couldn't be kept at his house, and I had shrugged and shut the door, not needing the space anyway. The more I thought about it, however, the more difficult it became to conjure up an innocent reason for him to have so freakishly much video stored well away from his wife and children. He was also always showing up unannounced and regaling me with how fascinated he had become that such a little slip of a thing like me was willing to live alone way out in the woods with no gun at her disposal.

In a similar vein, my neighbor to the west took to passing by of an evening in order to assure me that, although he may not have looked like he was up to it, his EMT training conferred upon him the necessary skills and experience with which to cut off my clothes in less than forty-five seconds should he deem it necessary. I eventually learned that in Georgia, when someone walks up to you wearing overalls with no shirt underneath them, it is unlikely that something good is about to happen.

After one year, the “check engine” light lit up on the first car that I'd ever owned. Because I had no idea what it meant, I took it as a sign and traded the damn thing in for a used Jeep, loaded up my dog, and moved into town. I secured lodgings: a long, narrow basement apartment that Bill promptly christened the “Rat Hole” within Atlanta's Home Park neighborhood. The Rat Hole butted up against the stockyard of a working steel factory, and I learned many interesting things, including the fact that the fabrication of steel involves dropping whole reams of metal sheets from twelve feet at regular intervals throughout the night. I spent countless humid Georgia evenings sitting on the back steps at the entrance of the Rat Hole, watching Bill's cigarette tip glow among all the other blinking fireflies and trying desperately to formulate some kind of Plan B against the background music of industrial drums marching me inexorably toward menopause.

Bill's lot was considerably weirder than mine, though he endured his with rather more nonchalance, and much more resilience, than I did. He had landed in Atlanta, happy to find that the monthly rent for a filthy firetrap in Georgia equaled one-tenth the monthly rent for a filthy firetrap in California, but after going ten rounds with Confederate bedbugs he was eager to declare surrender if not outright defeat. He bought a Volkswagen Vanagon (goose-shit yellow) and I helped him move into it, culminating in the strange experience where one loads up one's belongings and drives off to…well, nowhere, seeing as one is already precisely at home.

Before we had gone a block toward nowhere, we heard a hard thump followed by the yowl of a cat and we knew that we were passing the “Felisphere,” a fully functioning feline ecosystem that we had named after Columbia University's Biosphere project in Arizona. It was an old house inhabited by hundreds of apparently self-sufficient cats that patrolled the neighborhood, their activities disrupted only superficially by human traffic. I forced Reba to duck down in the backseat, knowing that canine hubris is never more tragic than in the face of superior numbers.

“Those cats never liked me,” Bill reflected. “They never wanted me to move in.” He stuck his head out the window. “So long, you furry assholes,” he shouted. “You won't have my shoes to piss in anymore.”

Bill was hard to find when he was living in the van: cell phones weren't common then, and, by definition, he didn't have a fixed address. If he wasn't in the lab, I simply had to go cruising around for him. I'd check the usual hangouts, knowing that if I did see the van, he was unlikely to be very far away.

“Welcome. Can I offer you a hot beverage?” Bill greeted me from a posture of repose when I walked into the coffee shop that he considered his “living room.” The place was located next door to a Laundromat (“my basement”), and he could reliably be found there on Sundays. On that particular morning, he was sitting comfortably in a plush armchair reading the
New York Times
in front of a gas-powered fireplace with a double latte in his hand.

“You cut your hair again. I hate it,” I observed.

“It'll grow back,” Bill assured me as he rubbed his head. “It was just one of those Saturday nights, you know.”

There were certain things in life that Bill would go to almost any length to avoid, and one was going to a barbershop. The very idea of the physical intimacy inherent to the hair-cutting process overwhelmed him, and from the time that I had met him in California, he had sported long, glossy black hair that was not unreminiscent of Cher's. He was commonly mistaken for a woman from the back and endured constant suggestive sidelong glances from passing men, which then morphed into embarrassed and resentful surprise once they got full sight of his scruffy beard and masculine jaw. This did nothing to decrease Bill's social paranoia, and not long after moving into the van, Bill bought a cordless electric razor—the kind you find at a real haircutter's. He called me at 3:00 a.m. one night about a month later and excitedly relayed that he had shaved his head.

“It's very liberating; I feel great. Long hair is so fucking foolish, I feel sorry for guys who have it,” he said, expressing the total conviction one finds in those who have only recently been converted.

“I can't talk right now,” I stammered, and hung up nervously. I didn't like the idea of Bill changing drastically, and this was too much for me to absorb. Would Bill without all that hair still be Bill? I knew it was irrational, but I felt the need to avoid him for several days. I would see him soon and take it all in, just not right away. I kept telling myself that the shock would be too much, and so I kept making excuses and lying low. Bill noticed this, of course, and it confused him.

Eventually he called me from a pay phone in the middle of the night. As soon as I picked up he said, “I still have the hair, you know. Would it make you feel better to see it?”

I thought about it, and decided that it probably would. “It's worth a try,” I agreed. “Come pick me up.”

Bill arrived in the van, and I got in, avoiding eye contact. “It's at the reservoir,” he explained as we turned north onto Howell Mill Road. Finding a place to park the van for the night was an aggravating problem that Bill had to solve on a daily basis. This was greatly complicated by the fact that the van only barely ran, and so parking and breaking down were pretty much the same thing.

Several factors contributed to the complexity of the problem. The van didn't have reverse, so any parking space had to be pull-through. If someone blocked you from the front you were pretty much stuck there for as long as they stayed, and you had to guess where other people were going to park. The van also lacked first gear, so a slight incline was needful, as a rolling start was imperative to getting the van going in the morning. Worst of all, the starter didn't function once the engine was warm, so wherever you turned off the van, you had to stay for at least three hours until the whole thing cooled down enough to start up again. Fueling the van was a dicey arrangement, since the engine couldn't be turned off while filling. Pumping gas is not normally much of a high-adrenaline activity, but watching Bill slop the nozzle over the van's sparking muffler with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth could really get your pulse racing.

It was about four in the morning when we arrived at the reservoir's overlook, which wasn't much to look at, over or otherwise, truth be told. Bill drove onto a small hill and stopped the van (though not the engine) at a slight incline pointing down. “This okay?” he asked, his hands on the keys. He was asking me in code if I thought this was a good place to hang out for three hours before he shut down the engine.

“We went to the reservoir to live deliberately.” I signaled my assent by misquoting Thoreau. Bill usually referred to the reservoir as his “weekend getaway,” since it was technically water surrounded by trees and was ill policed during the weekends. In the harsh light of day it was an ugly square reservoir surrounded by a twelve-foot fence rusted through in places, plus a few odd scraggly trees that had been overgrown by kudzu.

Bill turned off the van, took his keys out, and pointed with them, straight ahead. “The hair's in there,” he told me.

“Where?” I asked, not sure toward what he was pointing.

“In
there,
” he repeated, pointing specifically toward the big sweet gum tree situated about ten feet in front of the van. I got out and walked over to it. I realized he was probably talking about one of the hollowed-out chambers in its trunk.

“Just reach in, it's right there,” he encouraged me.

I stood and considered it for a while. “No,” I declined, “I don't think I will.”

“What is your problem, anyway?” Bill said in exasperation. “You're acting like a guy shaving off his hair and then hoarding it in a dead tree on the wrong side of town isn't a totally normal thing. My God, you are hung up.”

“I know, I know,” I confessed. “It's not you, it's me.” I was quiet for a while, probing my subconscious. “I guess I just don't like the idea of that big a part of you just getting cut off and thrown away,” I explained, as well as I could.

“Duh! Duh!!
Duh!!!
” Bill exclaimed. “Neither do I! Of course fucking not.” His voice was tight. “That's why I am storing it here. I'm not a barbarian, for Chrissakes.” He reached into the hollow and pulled out a huge wad of black hair. He held it up and shook it under the light cast by the buzzing fluorescent bulb that was perched atop a well-graffitied pole.

I stared. “It is magnificent,” I had to concede, and rapturously. I was impressed by both the glossiness and the sheer volume of the snarl; from a distance it might have looked as if he were waving goodbye to someone with a dead cat.

We looked each other in the eye and laughed. From then on, when he shaved the hair from his head he always stuffed the product into the same tree and we would visit it occasionally, late at night. It was a comforting ritual, although I was sure that one of us would eventually get bitten on the hand by a raccoon while reaching in.

On the nights when we visited the hair, we'd often sit at the reservoir and brainstorm about a children's book based on Bill's life, which we both agreed comprised the most gleefully inappropriate material for such a thing. This particular installment would be called
The Getting Tree,
and it was about an arboreal parent figure that slowly cannibalized its offspring because of its progressive and oblivious greed. In one of the middle chapters the Boy visits the Tree soon after entering puberty, hoping to find within its arms a retreat from the vicious world of adolescence. “I see you're getting hair on your chest,” says the Tree. “Shave it off and give it to me,” it demands casually.