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 were united in a pulsing, almost panicky, search for death’s meaning. The grim artwork of a Ghanaian artist was as subtle as a death blow to the skull. Ghoulish skeletons and cigarette-smoking African animals spell out his message in straightforward, startling 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. She’s puffing nicotine in long, pleasurable inhales. As she took my order, her gravelly voice coughed.
Like a tourist 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.”
My silence is complicity, a failure to teach. At the Fowler, my takeaway was the universal human imperative to save a life. But then, her body, her choice.
“Fuck me,” I groan between juicy bites of my bloody red hamburger.
She’s wearing black jeans, black blouse, black hairband and a name tag with black letters spelling Charlotte. 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 convinced 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.
