In a recent edition of this newsletter, “The Algorithm,” I briefly recounted the surprise road trip my wife and I took through Texas to illustrate my love of novelty. It was a trip full of novelty, and it began when we flew to San Antonio, rented a car, and drove to Marfa, a small desert city in west Texas.
Marfa is a strange place, featuring a mysterious artist colony, UFO sightings, art installations (like the infamous Prada storefront, which is actually on the road to Marfa, not in the city); a jumbled juxtaposition of glamour and everydayness.
That weekend, Marfa was also the site of, unbeknownst to us, an influencer convention. You would think that this surprise explosion of Instagrammers in glitter onesies and neon wigs would have been the most interesting experience we had during the trip, but it was not.
Marfa was a stop on our way to Austin, our final destination and where we would see one of my favorite artists, Chastity Brown, perform at an intimate downtown club. You would think that this show (where the Indigo Girls’ Emily Saliers closed out the night!), also a surprise, would be the most interesting experience we had during the trip, but it pales in comparison to what we found when we lost our way.
We got lost on our way to Marfa. We got lost on a dusty stretch with no service, our GPS rendered useless, and so when we came to a fork in the road we went right and hoped for the best. Luckily, soon after we saw a gas station and pulled off there to ask for directions.
This was the kind of town where someone such as myself, a Black lesbian on a road trip with her wife, does not feel a sense of ease. The storefronts appeared empty and looked as if they had been that way for a long time, main street all but abandoned. We asked the cashier at the gas station register for directions, directions that initially made sense but decidedly did not when we looked at the map we picked up. My wife and I looked at each other, communicating with our eyes: Did he give us the wrong directions on purpose? We’re going to have to ask elsewhere.
As we drove slowly through town, looking for a restaurant or some other business to ask someone else for directions, I noticed a taxidermy shop. “Look,” I said to my wife, who is obsessed with taxidermy (remind me to tell you about something called a squallet that she brought to a coffee shop on one of our pre-relationship outings). My wife looked at me with an expression of near-maniacal glee and I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“Should we turn around?” she asked, grinning. Oh, lord. I thought. Here we go.
“Maybe they could give us directions!” she said. “Or we could be their next taxidermy project,” I muttered under my breath. I did not have a good feeling about this. Going into a taxidermy shop in a desolate town in Texas, where no one knew us and we knew no one.
These kinds of “adventures” are my wife’s bread and butter, her oxygen. Nothing makes her more excited than the twists and turns of a road trip, getting lost and talking to strangers, stumbling upon deserted hot springs or forgotten monuments.
Me? Sure, I love novelty, the disorienting pleasure of exploring a new place and discovering something that I’d never intended to find, but. This was Texas. And we were, are, who we are.
Nevertheless, my wife persisted. I agreed that we could turn around and she could check out the taxidermy, hopefully get us back on the road with a sense of direction and our destination in sight, but I was staying in the car.
I was true to my word, nervously watching through the window as my wife knocked on the door and peered through the dusty windows. The shop appeared to be closed. Oh well! I mouthed to her as she looked over her shoulder at me. I sighed with relief. No creepy taxidermy; we could find somewhere else to ask for directions.
As my wife headed back to the car, a figure emerged from the back of the shop. They must’ve called out to my wife; she turned around and began to walk towards them. No! I wanted to scream, like I was living in some bad horror film. It’s a trap!
The minutes stretched on as I anxiously watched my wife speak with the figure at the back of the shop, my hand hovering over the door handle. Should I get out? I kept glancing at my phone, hoping by some miracle a bar or two would appear on its tiny screen, indicating that we had cell service. I glanced up from the screen and there was my wife, jogging back to the car with a grin stretched across her face.
She opened the door and said, “Come on! She said we could come inside!”
She? I looked past her shoulder and the figure materialized into a heavyset white woman, young, a ponytail emerging from underneath a camo baseball cap. She was wearing dusty boots, jeans, a t-shirt, and a smile the size of Texas.
That didn’t automatically make this stranger safe, but maybe safer. How was I to know? What the hell, I thought. My wife has gotten us into all kinds of jams, from missing a flight back from New York to bringing home a dog that pees everywhere and chases our cats (and who is now my soulmate), but she’s never led me astray.
“What the hell,” I said aloud. “Let’s go.”
The Taxidermist’s Daughter
You might be thinking, as I was, this is when they die, but then I wouldn’t be writing this right now, and the story would be over. We didn’t die.
I can’t remember the woman’s name anymore, but she was a gracious host, inviting us inside her family’s closed taxidermy shop on a weekend and proudly showing us around the place.
It seemed that the entire animal kingdom was inside this tiny shop, from endangered species to the expected glassy-eyed antlered deer gazing down at us from their mounted, bodiless heads. I didn’t want to know who killed the leopard or how the hell it had ended up inside this place; I also didn’t want to offend our host and so I continued to ooh and ahh at the correct intervals.
I didn’t agree with the taxidermy, but the sense of danger and unease slowly ebbed away as we traipsed through the shop and the owner’s daughter regaled us with esoteric details about each animal. She grew increasingly animated as she asked us what we were in town for. Were we there for the festival?
What festival? we asked. Come to find out, we were in town during its infamous pig wrestling festival where, our host told us, they greased up the pigs and then the townsfolk chased them, trying to catch them.
“What happens when you catch them?” I asked. I shouldn’t have.
“Well, you wrassle ‘em down, throw ‘em in a bag, and then—you stick ‘em!” our host bellowed, miming shoving a knife into a pig.
“Oh,” I replied, forcing a smile. “I see.” I could not look over at my wife because if I did, I knew one of us would laugh or worse. I could not think of a more stereotypical thing to hear during my first time in Texas, but there it was. We were in stick ‘em country.
The townsfolk wrassled ‘em and stuck ‘em; at least after that, then they ate them? I felt sad for these pigs, squealing in fear as they were chased and then stabbed to the delight of the town, but then again, I suppose the only difference between the people doing the sticking and me is that they kill their own food with their bare hands, and I buy mine in the grocery store.
“Well, I guess we better be going,” my wife said; discovering this pastime was most definitely our cue to get out of there. We bid our farewells and got back on the road.
Even though we stumbled upon an influencer convention, met Chastity Brown, and listened to one half of the Indigo Girls, even though we embarked upon a trip that I had no part in planning and so every experience on the way was a new surprise, why is it that the taxidermist’s daughter still stands out so vividly in my mind? Why do I feel so compelled to recount this story? Why is it that, years later, my wife and I still get teary-eyed with laughter when we say, “And then you stick ‘em!” to one another?
I suppose it’s because I was proven wrong. I definitely enjoy being right (to a fault), but I would rather be wrong when I assume a certain smallness in a person that turns out to not be true. When I come up against my judgment and discover I may not always have to be so scared, that the world isn’t always unwelcoming and unkind.
We had nothing in common with the taxidermist’s daughter, we were strangers, but she was more than kind to us; she was welcoming and warm. Yes, she gave us directions that got us to where we needed to go, but more than that—and this is big when you’re out there in the world as a queer, Black person—not once did she side-eye us or ask if we were sisters (you’d be surprised how often we’re asked this) or mention Jesus or size us up in the way I’ve come to know all too well.
I’d made an assumption about the town (which was kinda spot-on; it was stick ‘em country), but I had also made an assumption about the people who lived there and the woman who welcomed us into her family’s store that was closed for business that day. She didn’t care that we were two married women or that one of us was Black, and if she did, she didn’t let on, not for one minute. (And, seeing as I like making assumptions so much, I’d even hazard a guess that we weren’t the only lesbians in the shop that day.)
I’ll never know if our host was “one of us,” as my wife and I like to joke, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what she liked to do for fun, and that her interests diverged wildly from my own. What matters is that we were lost, and she helped us find our way.
The Friday Finds
Action. I hate that we have to do this, that we have to keep saying this, that this heartbreak never seems to relent: Call the San Bernardino Sheriff's department and demand the release of all information connected to Ryan Gainer. On March 9, Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old Black boy with autism, was murdered by the San Bernardino sheriff's deputy. We demand justice.
Listen. “Home” by singer-songwriter (and Sonoma County resident!) Hannah Mayree. Big ups to my friend MS for introducing me to Mayree’s music and her badass nonprofit, The Black Banjo Reclamation Project.
Watch. True Detective: Night Country. I don’t care what the haters say (they're all misogynists anyway), this fourth installment of the True Detective series is the best. Sure, I didn’t see seasons two or three, but I don’t need to to know that this iteration, written and directed by Issa Lopez and starring the indomitable Jodie Foster and incandescent Kali Reis, is haunting, mercurial, dynamic, and bone-chillingly mysterious. Set in Alaska during the darkest time of year, when the seams between worlds begin to unravel and time seems to bend, detectives Danvers (Foster) and Navarro (Reis) must solve an increasingly complex murder case that may or may not be connected to the case that drove a wedge between these former partners. The women centered in this show are complicated, messy, human. Absorbing and gorgeous.
Read. Come & Get It by Kiley Reid. I LOVED this book! My IG review: Kiley Reid, author of 2019 standout Such a Fun Age, is back with Come & Get It! An irresistible and delicious campus novel, Come & Get It explores desire, ambition, and how far we’ll go to get what we want. As always, Reid’s characters are intricately drawn, nuanced, complicated, delightful, even treacherous. Unputdownable!
That’s it for this week—thank you for being here.
‘Til next time,
Emma