none bit he just watched the passersby, which was entertainment enough if the weather had warmed up and all the skirts and flip-flops and bikini tops had finally come out of hibernation. Occasionally he actually sold something. Fred also photographed weddings and did high school yearbook shots, if the parents didn’t take a look at Fred and decide not to drop their kids off with him (which happened), and in the summers he painted houses to supplement his income. Still, Fred Hoffman was perennially broke. He leased (not to own) this aluminum-sided fifties ranch, and had illegally converted the fallout shelter into a darkroom, where he spent a lot of time under red lights, breathing in the noxious miasmata of fixer, developer, and stop bath. Working with paint and photochemicals compounded perhaps with too much acid in the sixties (mostly the seventies, to be honest) had given Fred some nerve damage, and though he felt his wits were still intact, sometimes his words couldn’t quite slide through the electrical conduits from brain to mouth syntactically unscathed—they got bogged down somewhere along the way, always arriving late and in the wrong order. He also found himself talking in a slow, nasal, pained-sounding voice; his lungs straining to push air through a smoke-hoarsened throat. And at some point in the last ten years he’d gotten really fat.
Fred wanted to shoot nudes—atmospheric close-ups of milky hips and legs and torsos and breasts, black-and-white shots with very narrow depths of field, pale dunes of skin sloping into the distance like mystical desert landscapes, or maybe something like David Hamilton, delicate-boned girls splashing around in streams, wringing hair, sighing, perched lithely on logs like forest nymphs out of some titillating Greek myth. He was thinking about starting a Web site, though Fred wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, he only knew that he apparently hadn’t been paying attention at the precise cultural moment when everything suddenly turned into w-w-w-dot-whatever-the-fuck-dot-com. Any technology more cutting edge than the eight-track was as good as voodoo to him. But cell phones, computers . . . technology was the thing now. Somehow technology was supposed to save us all. The future was promising and bright. It was the summer of 2001.
Fred had met Lana in Troy, New York, at his mother’s funeral, when his scattered and estranged family got back together for the first time since they were kids. At the reception Mom was lying supine in a glittery electric-blue casket with a plush white interior, looking like she had passed out in the backseat of a ’57 Caddy. Fred said they should have buried her facedown so when the Rapture comes and Jesus floats down from heaven to raise the dead she’ll wake up and start digging in the wrong direction and we won’t have to ever see her again, unless she eventually resurfaces somewhere in China with fingers clawed to the knucklebones, hacking up lungfuls of dirt . . . Fred’s sisters didn’t think it was funny when he said that. Lana had been fourteen years old at the time and had recently gone all mall punk, with a silver bauble flashing on the curl of her nostril and her pretty little head totally befouled with this psychotic haircut, her hair shaved to the skull except for a Kool-Aid–green shock in front that dangled to the corner of her mouth, and she had a disgusting habit of chewing on it. Her mother—one of Fred’s older sisters—said she was “in a difficult phase.” Lana was doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, listening to the Buzzcocks, dressing like a hooker, and mutilating herself with safety pins. Her mother simply didn’t understand. Fred understood.
During that week, Lana and Fred would sit across from each other at dinner and exchange looks of exaggerated boredom while everybody else blithered about property values, retirement plans, PTO meetings, interest rates. Greasy, fat, bearded, long-haired Fred generally
Fred wanted to shoot nudes—atmospheric close-ups of milky hips and legs and torsos and breasts, black-and-white shots with very narrow depths of field, pale dunes of skin sloping into the distance like mystical desert landscapes, or maybe something like David Hamilton, delicate-boned girls splashing around in streams, wringing hair, sighing, perched lithely on logs like forest nymphs out of some titillating Greek myth. He was thinking about starting a Web site, though Fred wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, he only knew that he apparently hadn’t been paying attention at the precise cultural moment when everything suddenly turned into w-w-w-dot-whatever-the-fuck-dot-com. Any technology more cutting edge than the eight-track was as good as voodoo to him. But cell phones, computers . . . technology was the thing now. Somehow technology was supposed to save us all. The future was promising and bright. It was the summer of 2001.
Fred had met Lana in Troy, New York, at his mother’s funeral, when his scattered and estranged family got back together for the first time since they were kids. At the reception Mom was lying supine in a glittery electric-blue casket with a plush white interior, looking like she had passed out in the backseat of a ’57 Caddy. Fred said they should have buried her facedown so when the Rapture comes and Jesus floats down from heaven to raise the dead she’ll wake up and start digging in the wrong direction and we won’t have to ever see her again, unless she eventually resurfaces somewhere in China with fingers clawed to the knucklebones, hacking up lungfuls of dirt . . . Fred’s sisters didn’t think it was funny when he said that. Lana had been fourteen years old at the time and had recently gone all mall punk, with a silver bauble flashing on the curl of her nostril and her pretty little head totally befouled with this psychotic haircut, her hair shaved to the skull except for a Kool-Aid–green shock in front that dangled to the corner of her mouth, and she had a disgusting habit of chewing on it. Her mother—one of Fred’s older sisters—said she was “in a difficult phase.” Lana was doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, listening to the Buzzcocks, dressing like a hooker, and mutilating herself with safety pins. Her mother simply didn’t understand. Fred understood.
During that week, Lana and Fred would sit across from each other at dinner and exchange looks of exaggerated boredom while everybody else blithered about property values, retirement plans, PTO meetings, interest rates. Greasy, fat, bearded, long-haired Fred generally
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