THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.
—Susan Sontag
Before glaucoma forced him to surrender his license, my grandfather threw the key to his home office filing cabinet into a gulley off of a state highway, idled until he saw it land in a patch of wild violets, and never looked back.
After his death and a locksmith, my mother cataloging papers to throw away or shred, she found a black leather journal bursting with his small, insistent cursive in the drawer stripped with masking tape, miscellaneous scrawled in obtrusive red letters. Behind it, twenty more journals shoved against metal and file folder, arranged by year.
When she struggled to disengage them, the drawer hinged toward her. Journals plunging to the carpet. Journals limp beside garbage bags stuffed with tax returns and expired depository receipts.
Every man keeps a journal, even if he never writes a word.
To find a journal is one thing—a moment of graphite, pencil’s cruel liaison with paper. A moment of leather warming in my mother’s hand.
To hold an artifact, another.
What she found—Polaroids glued on back leaves. Naked men posed over beds, their hard cocks stretched on their bellies like sunning garter snakes. Barely legals standing akimbo, underwear cupping their scrotums. Entries itemizing names, price paid in US dollars, dimensions of each organ limp and aroused. The positions in which he fucked them.
Another entry—Happy birthday to me—40—I’m telling her—.
But the pictures whisper their own rapt truths.
Seventeen, air force, World War II—how he sewed them into pocket linings of his uniform with a needle he’d hide in his shoe. When he decoupaged them, creased and torn at the joints of folding, how he must have trusted that pain was the proof of survival.
Twenty-seven, Korea, men dressed as UN Madams and Juicy Girls.
Bus depots, alleyways, tryst after tryst— city guys lacquered into tight pants. Junkies so skinny their cocks looked like pythons. Hard up goodtime boys.
I don’t want to ask him, why did you marry my grandmother? I don’t want to ask him, what did it take for you to put yourself inside of her?
Instead, I’m writing on the first blank page I can find, you should have loved who you wanted.
I’m writing, to save you would have meant the end of both of us.