Jonathan C. Lewis
Dressed in Black
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
At the Fowler Museum on the UCLA campus, I’m resting in the middle of a quiet quadrangle. Sheltered from the sun by a portico, a fountain gurgles.
Inside the exhibit rooms, a profusion of ritual masks, burial objects and votive offerings from every continent are united in a pulsing, almost panicky, search for death’s meaning. The grim international artwork of a Ghanaian artist is as subtle as a death blow to the skull. Painted on ghoulish skeletons and cigarette-smoking African animals, his message is spelled out in straightforward English, “Stop smoking. It kills...”
If only I smoked, I could stop. I ruin my health in other ways.
Exiting the museum, I locate a restaurant and settle in to read the lunch menu. A waiter walks by carrying plates laden with dead cows. Gourmet hamburgers, the house specialty, are topped with bacon, lamb or chicken. It’s like eating in a funeral home.
I imagine inconsolable cows searching for missing aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, friends. The sour taste of melancholy churns my stomach. I ask for a glass of water.
In my twenties, as a traveler traversing African game parks, I saw firsthand that my meaty meals meant someone, somewhere, had been hunting, catching, destroying or killing some living thing. Death in the service of delaying my death.
So, I turned to vegetarianism. I learned to survive on nuts, cheese and eggplant. When I realized that vegetarians miss out on a central ingredient of most local cultures—dead meat—I quit. I joked with friends, “I just couldn’t stomach not eating meat.”
Through the restaurant window, I’m watching my waitress on break—wearing black jeans, black blouse, black hairband and a name tag with black letters spelling Charlotte—puffing nicotine in long, pleasurable inhales. As she took my order, her gravelly voice coughed from behind a masked smile.
Like a tourist in my own country worried about violating local etiquette, I keep my mouth shut. I can’t think of a halfway acceptable sentence for telling a stranger, “Give up smoking.” It’s not the same as saying “have a nice day.”
At the Fowler, my takeaway, my teacher’s self-test, was the human imperative to save a life. My silence is complicity, a failure to teach. But then, her body, her choice.
“Fuck me,” I groan between juicy bites of my bloody red hamburger.
A few waiters smell of cigarette smoke. All the servers dress in black. I suppose the restaurant owner thinks they look chic. I think they look like morticians.
Maybe my worn-out waitress wants death. She might be seeking freedom from bossy head chefs, poor tippers and aching feet. In a coffin, she won’t have to take out the garbage, pay bills or deal with closets in need of decluttering.
The cow carcass on my plate grows cold. I leave a healthy tip, write “have a nice day” on the check and head to the door.
Over a lifetime, my inventory of regrets has grown. The time I drove past a roadside accident because I was late, and told myself the police were on their way. Not speaking up when a faculty colleague was unfairly attacked. Now, I’ll add not talking with a smoker.
A cigarette-sized part of me dies.
