SLC’s Featured Non-Fiction

“The Butterfly Collection”

by Michelle Koufopoulos

Wednesday April 4, 2007

I think it’s the eyes which unsettle me. Open, but… blank. A deer who placed herself in the headlights hoping that this just once the danger might wake her up. She’s frozen and willing, a strung out ex-Beauty Queen. The kind of Barbie you wouldn’t want your child to play with, but it almost doesn’t matter because maybe she’s already broken. Crazy and smiling. No, not crazy. Just numb or apathetic or too tired to give a damn. She’s lips ticked to perfection, and that’s enough. Blonde and lovely, but I don’t want to look at her too long. At the same time, I can’t tear my eyes away. I want to shake her over and over until she seems alive. Maybe then it could be all right.

Photo: Blond girl with shiny lipstick, N.Y.C. 1967 (pg 77)

It never burned him. You’re not supposed to tell them that, the crowds who come streaming in to watch the freak shows unfold before their eyes, the strange magic which horrifies as much as it entrances. It would shatter the illusion, and here, especially, appearances matter.

It’s been twelve years now since the day he first joined the menagerie. He lost all his taste buds as a child, some accident he no longer remembered. He had been so young. But it made getting the job easier. You still had to be careful, though. Especially with tiny carnivals like these. Funds were low, and that meant products and equipment of cheaper quality. Including the fuel he was lapping every day. On occasion, he worried about toxins and asbestos and cancer. About this act he so successfully performed. It still wasn’t enough to make him retire. He was forty-six. He did it on a whim. He did if or money. He did it because he could.

Photo: Fire Eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956 (pg 7)

The woman’s face is tight, er eyes furious, profile stern. The man walks beside her, lips drawn, looking weary. Perhaps they’ve had this argument many times before. Perhaps it’s just one of those things. The couple’s age seems to suggest husband and wife, as does the angry familiarity of their body language. It’s much easier to berate someone if you know they will stick around. Safer. I wonder what they thought about being photographed in this state, so completely revealing. If they noticed Diane Arbus, camera lens at the ready, starved to capture raw human emotion. In the moment, they might not have cared, too involved in their conflict to shatter the intimacy by acknowledging a stranger. I suppose it could have been staged, as many of her photographs were, deliberately arranged in a manner which was almost, uncomfortably, manipulative. Yet this one seems too real, somehow.

Photo: Couple arguing, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960 (pg 238)

Strange and cruel. Those were my thoughts when I first came across this particular photograph, and even now, going back to it, I still find it troubling. An elderly woman in a wheelchair, blanket over her legs, warm cardigan and orthopedic shoes. And a witch’s mask. It’s this mask I have difficulty with, a run-of-the-mill Halloween-variety mask, with stringy white hair and large black eyes, missing teeth and decaying brown skin. It could have been Halloween, the day this photograph was taken. That could explain why this woman was sitting outside her apartment in the cold, waiting for passerby, waiting for young children to giggle and scream. It could be age mocking age, our notions of terror and irony converging on one each other. I almost hope it was that. This woman’s choice, and not Arbus’s, to put her in a mask and click the shutter. I don’t know exactly why that particular scenario so unsettles me, only that it does. I guess it would feel… degrading. That was the line she walked, wasn’t it? Voyeurism and guilt, truth and sin. It makes it all so blurry.

Photo: Masked woman in a wheelchair, Pa. 1970. (pg 91)

Really, he works for the Stock Exchange. Wakes up each morning to put on a dark blue suit, pin-striped tie, shiny black shoes. Always clean-shaven and a comb slicked through his hair. He kisses his wife goodbye before leaving each morning and pats each of his three still-sleeping children on the head. He stops to grab a cup of coffee from the bakery on the corner, and then heads downtown to Wall Street. He leaves work at five on the dot, after straightening his desk and chatting idly with the man who shares his office. As he steps out onto the street he thinks to himself that tonight is the night he’ll go straight home. Help his wife make dinner, proofread his son’s spelling homework. Tonight will be the night he’ll be there. Even as he thinks these thoughts his footsteps carry him the wrong way, back to the subway, to secrets and sex and that strange sort of freedom he finds too seductive to tear himself away from, no matter the cost. By the time he enters the small dressing room, blond wig in hand, his family is the farthest thing from his mind.

Photo: Female impersonators’ dressing room, N.Y.C. 1958 (pg 23)

She looks crucified, a quirky female Jesus spread-eagled against a dilapidated tent, arms outstretched, skirt flapping in a silent breeze. Her head is tilted back, hair falling down her neck, brushing against her shoulders. Her skin is ghostly pale, almost translucent against the blacks and grays of her surroundings. A bejeweled sword rises out of her gaping mouth, a misplaced Excalibur, her flesh a human stone. It is somehow vulgar and holy all at once.

Photo: Albino sword swallower at carnival, Md. 1970 (pg 304)