The guy I’m dating in Ann Arbor is The One-Eyed Bat! He wrestles with a mask over one eye. He’s from a Mayflower family in Massachusetts, and he goes to Mexico to wrestle Lucha Libre-style. He jumps from the ropes onto his opponents and ensnares them with his black velvet bat wings. It’s an art thing.
When he drives us to Detroit, to photograph urban ruins, we pass this wiener sign outside the factory where they make them on Holbrook Street. The wiener is in big red neon, disproportionate in size to the building it is attached to by a giant skewer. The first time I saw the sign, I gasped and screamed out, A big red wiener! and he just nodded as the wiener cast its shadow on us, didn’t even crack a smile. The wiener sign says “Kowalski” and is in the city of Hamtramck, just outside of Detroit. Has there ever been a more delightful name for a city? H-A-M-T-R-A-M-C-K. It needs more vowels. I think about the missing vowels, and phonemes and epenthesis, and I think that Hamtramck seems like enough when you say the name, but not when you see the word. Sometimes he takes my left hand in his and blows warmth into it as we drive on ice-covered streets, and I feel happy. The first time he took me to Ypsilanti for another art thing, and we approached the city’s old water tower, named the Word’s Most Phallic Building by entities that declare such things, I didn’t say anything as we drove by its girthy base on Summit Street, the highest point in the city. He was talking about the themes of masculinity in his Lucha Libre project. Summit Street! I was hoping he would notice the delight on my face, but he didn’t. Okay, so I try to engage with his work, I say, uropatagium instead of fixating on penis. We talk about studies on how bats use their uropatagia in flight thrust, but when I call the membrane their bat butts, I lose him. So anyway, what scientists are saying is that wings are obvious, but bat butts are important, too.
And then we get to Detroit, and he makes art. I wander around the decay of these abandoned buildings, and I politely ease out of his frame, spinning on split floorboards, risking my life on tippy toes. He takes these photographs that make the desolation look like a movie set built just for him to explore themes of loss of industry and people. After elegiac pronouncements, he lights the shot, makes use of something that was once useful. Then, we fuck.
I am supposed to be writing. He’s a multi-medium artist. I don’t mean multi-media. He sings and plays guitar and dances and takes pictures, and he mentioned something about a unicycle once, and he makes films, and this wrestling thing too. He must’ve exhausted his parents. My mother says that I was sometimes so quiet she had to poke me to make sure I was okay.
I walk around. I don’t understand why everyone is in love with these ruins. I prefer the parts of Detroit with people in them. All of these places look like my childhood memories of burned out squats in Bushwick, where I was born brown like everyone around me, you know, before Bushwick was cool. Detroit feels familiar, but this is not my city, these are not my ruins. He is photographing a heap of books with mushrooms growing out of them. These dead books are my worst nightmare. I am standing off to the side under an art-deco archway, its red, blue and orange tiles fallen off and strewn at my feet. A faint light glows through a hole in the floor. I take a step forward, and a loud clanging echoes through the space. He looks up and tells me to be careful, and I think about pressing down harder. I want to make an offering to this place. I picture my congealed guts dangling off the jagged entrails of the building. I slide down carefully instead. I put down a knee. Other knee. Head tilts. I slowly uncoil my scarf from around my neck. I call him over.
Afterwards, we go to the gallery in Detroit where he’s showing the photographs of himself soaring above Mexicans in his flappy wings, black shorts and Lucha Libre mask. In one image, he stands on the ropes of a makeshift boxing ring outdoors in a field or what looks like someone’s backyard. He is gritting his teeth, stomach muscles bulging. He is beautiful. His tousled white-blond hair is peeking out of the half- face head mask that makes him The One-Eyed Bat! His body looks like a classical statue looming over his opponents.
They say that bats see better than humans. What I see is the torso from a David about to topple on all these smaller, rounder, browner men, but I don’t say it. I start waving my hands around the space. I tell him what I think about the lighting, how to arrange the photographs, not what I think about white bodies coming down on brown bodies in their own backyards.The gallery owner comes over and smiles at me like, you guys are such a great couple. I just keep trying to make some arrangement out of the pieces and pointing at the walls.
Image Credits: Gregory Bodnar
