We’re Glad They're Dead

by Jeff Weinstein

AUGUST 18, 2011 TAGS: OBJECTS, DEATH ADD A COMMENT

Ages ago, in the pre-Internet past, for my column in New York’s Village Voice I wrote an ode to a ratty pair of socks. I had owned the stretchy, houndstooth-patterned items since college, and standing over the trashcan with those threadbare familiars in hand, I couldn’t let them go.

Smart readers will know why, but I was a dummy then, thinking only human beings were worth mourning. Not at all. Those ugly, ordinary socks had soaked up not just decades of perspiration, but also buckets of memories, and I would miss them dreadfully.

It wasn’t anything about them in particular. Their emotional “character” wasn’t apparent in the way they looked, not like a downtrodden pair of brown van Gogh shoes. Yet, for a reason I still can’t determine, certain objects sponge up emotional “sweat.” Though I wanted those socks to live, I had to bury them, and their eulogy was the most popular piece I published that year.

Now, with many more beloved objects in my life dead and gone, I switched directions: Are there things we’re actually happy to see disappear, stuff we’re thrilled will never breathe again?

The social media were born to answer exactly this sort of knotty question, so I posted the following on Facebook:

“Can kind Friends suggest objects or kinds of stuff you're glad are dead and basically gone: like girdles, 8-tracks, fizzy, bitter saccharin tablets. Working on a piece....Thanks!”

I wasn’t working on anything, at least then, but a plea such as that sounds less eccentric if you have a purpose.

The first response comes fast, from Tanya: typewriter ribbons.

Carolina follows in 30 seconds: menstrual belts.

Facebook comments tend to echo, so I wonder if there’ll be a ribbon-and-belt cluster, with garters and suspenders soon weighing in.

Actually, our themes take a few minutes longer to coalesce, as the next flurry illustrates:

Grace: slips. Linda: carbon paper, white gloves. Brian: fax machines, or “more specifically, fax paper.” Katherine: cassette tapes. David: “I like cassette tapes. I await the death of cell phones.”

Ah, the first appearance of prospective object grave-dancing.

Tricia: black-and-white TV. Tom: whiteout.

An image of secretarial constraint is beginning to take form on a Magnavox screen, so much so that Jennifer laughs out loud: “I'm watching Mad Men for the first time right now. Jeff, you've just listed almost the whole list of costumes and props!”

But don’t writer types as well as millions of others adore the Maidenform look and full-ashtray smell of that series? Don’t we want sleek IBM Selectrics back on our desks?

Apparently not, at least not my first responders. In the case of dead objects, Kelly Girl memory trumps romantic nostalgia. No working woman wants zombie nylons to rise from the grave.

Then, all of a sudden, the boys step in, with lists.

Nat: “Thermofax copying machines, bell-bottoms, oleomargarine with separate coloring packet, 3/4" video cassettes, foot-pumped dental drills, New Math.”

We go intercontinental, with David: “Maybe this was just in the U.K., but waxed toilet paper was an abomination. So too was all English food before 1989. I could go on -- waterproofs that weren't waterproof, cars that constantly broke down, tiny freezer compartments in fridges, paraffin heaters, nylon underwear.”

Tom: “WAXED TOILET PAPER??? Good God...”

Relax, Tom. You’re here and it’s dead. It is, David, isn’t it?

Tim chimes in about liquid Kaopectate (“talk about gag reflex”) and then, smart writer that he is, gets serious:

“Weird racist ads -- the Sominex Indian, the Mazola corn-oil girl giving us ‘richness from maize’ -- there were a lot of them. Now we mostly get the racism from the political ads.”

And then Tim goes on in a different mode:

“Darvon. I remember when it was the most prescribed drug in the country and it was worthless and deadly. Also, the old school anti-depressants, the ones that carried off Nick Drake.”

We’re way off-topic, because Nicholas Rodney Drake, a solemn and poetic English singer and songwriter, is a person, not a thing. He overdosed at age 26 on a drug called amitriptyline, best known as Elavil; whether or not a suicide isn’t clear. Amitriptyline, by the way, still thrives.

My old friend Howard, always the sharpest guy on the block, begins to empty his closet: double-knits. But he immediately switches gears: S&H Green Stamps. Did Mom buy his double-knits with stamps?

Dawn tries to upstage him with a Nehru jacket (“unflattering’), but she can’t know that I was bar mitzvahed in one. Howard comes back strong with a dickie: “I still have one somewhere.” Next, Earth Shoes. Linda buries them; I dig them up, missing mine. But I wear Crocs, de rigueur at any shoe funeral, so I’m not to be trusted.

As you can see, object death and interment has a personal side, and in some situations, peculiar friendships can result. Howard has never met Paula, but the peachy perfume of ether brings them together.

Paula: “Ether as anesthesia. I can still recall that smell from when my tonsils were removed in the late '50s.”

Howard: “Paula, I can still remember that smell, still remember the mesh mask, and being told to blow something off my nose. (It was, I suspect, the 'clever' way of getting a kid to inhale deeply.)”

He added that his tonsils were removed by Dr. Gladstone Hodge and was proudly told by his “progressive mom” that he was the first white kid to have tonsils extracted by a black surgeon in all of Brooklyn: “I've no idea if this is true, but if so, it is surely my footnote in history.”

Reading these surprisingly passionate responses, I am in a flurry of then-and-now confusion. Who made you wear those gloves, Linda, and though you may despise them now, were you ever proud of your delicate hands, so beautifully displayed? No one can feature Kaopectate as a symbol of constrained youth, but why do we snub the miracle of whiteout – a godsend to the lowly typists we were – and toss away our oh-so-cool dickies? I owned three, Howard, in different colors, and I know you weren’t exactly forced to wear yours.

It’s no secret that old things are coffins for our past. They remind us, sometimes in awful or embarrassing ways, that we were young, we were slow, we were ignorant of who we would become. Those rejected objects have collected our minor miseries, but the irony, of course, is that Howard and Paula’s ether helps them to remember now, not to forget.

Jeff Weinstein writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.

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