I am an Official BodyWorlds Donor!

From a letter to the Hula Rat:
I’m sitting here trying to write about the BodyWorlds exhibit, but I think it’s still a little too fresh. I mean, the trip went incredibly smooth, almost to the point where it was unremarkable. The airport has these express kiosks – you just pop your credit card into it & a boarding pass pops out. The worst part was the security check – I had to take my shoes off, Rob had to pretty much strip (shoes, suspenders, belt), empty our pockets… we took way too many coats. The flight was packed going out to LA – felt like sardines. Rob gets airsick, so he was adamant on getting the window seat, which meant I was wedged in the middle between him & some old guy who couldn’t figure out where to put his arm. I still love to fly, tho. Feeling the engines & that brief moment of weightlessness when the plane finishes its ascent & starts to level off.

I gave us so much time on either side of the flight because I figured traffic would be a nightmare – Monday morning/evening in Los Angeles? But it was bizarre – wherever we went, the traffic jam was going in the opposite direction. Rob hated the way people drive out there – too fast on the freeway, they cut you off, and the shuttle driver that took us from the airport to the rental car place was a lunatic, on & on. I was actually thinking to myself that it wasn’t that bad the whole time. The weather was gorgeous – cool, overcast, little bursts of sprinkles every now & then.

The California ScienCenter is huge – 3 floors. The BodyWorlds exhibit is split between the 1st & 3rd floors. There’s all these interactive exhibits set up throughout the rest of the museum – kiddy stuff, but me & Rob like to play w/stuff, so we didn’t feel like it was wasted on us. There’s a very mean one set up w/a tank full of goldfish – you push a button & the goldfish are subjected to a strong current of water, & then you push a different button & the current changes direction. We were thinking, “Gee, this place probably goes thru a lot of goldfish.” So anyway, we roamed all over the place, but the actual BodyWorlds part seemed very short compared to the rest of the place. The displays were sort of grouped in the middle of the rooms, w/a lot of airspace all around. The rooms had black wall-hangings, w/banners & murals of Renaissance-style anatomical drawings & quotes about the body from various people. A part of my mind actually was more drawn to the Renaissance art than the displays, but I could see where Professor Van Hagen drew his influences from. I saw a lot of ‘Wound Men’ (reference from ‘Silence of the Lambs’).

I also expected the actual body pieces to be cleaner, more… I don’t know how to say it… more dressed, smoother. I saw a lot of connective tissue, looking like frayed nylon sprouting from bones & muscles & organs. I think its called fasciae, but I can’t remember. I’ve butchered deer before, & it’s that white film between the skin & muscle– you leave it intact to act like plastic wrap & to protect field-dressed meat from flies. I saw a lot of it clinging to the flesh. It kind of bothered me, but then again, these are real people. Rob kept saying that nothing looked ‘real’ to him, which made it where he could go thru the museum w/out too many psychological problems. But I kept seeing loose shreds of skin & cartilage, dangling here & there, random bits of people that had flaked off & fallen out. I also was kind of bothered by the way the sculptors had sort of tacked on people’s eyebrows & lips. I think a lot of the cadavers would have looked better w/out the glued-on details. I could understand the use of dyes when it came to highlighting the veins – but wow – they picked an alarmingly neon shade of red to do so.

I’m not complaining about the exhibit – I stood inside, & just looked around before I started perusing & I almost wanted to cry or spread my arms & bless the whole thing, because I saw people of all ages looking into themselves, pointing, talking to each other – groups of kids ogling dangly bits… there was even a group of medical students treating one of the displays like a lesson – pointing at the various pockets & folds of an opened torso & naming them. I think that’s what really got to me the most – people getting intimately acquainted with their pockets & folds & ducts. I looked at a healthy knee & saw what mine is missing. Rob got a sexual rise from a few of the female cadavers – the very male instinct to look for hairy lips & clits, comparing himself to the male cadavers… got to see some of those medical marvels – the artificial heart valves & knees & hips & walked around w/a twinge in my left leg because I was thinking that instead of just having pins bracing the break in it, I could have ended up w/one of those huge metal plates.

I expected the cadavers to all be elderly people, but some of them were obviously from younger people. Nothing on the displays indicated anything about how or why the donor died, or who the donor was. Nothing to differentiate them except for variations in musculature & organs, & the obvious departure of male/female. Some of them, like the one posed as a basketball player, had huge shoulders & arms. One arm, in fact, still has me wondering how big the owner was – it was so ripped! You couldn’t tell race or culture. Other than minute forensic details we are very literally the same under our skins. Even facial features were hard to make out. I saw two cadavers w/almost the exact same nose – broken & crooked at the bridge. A group of black girls was intimately exploring one who was holding up his own internal organs, trying to determine how he died – one just kept saying, “Well, he wasn’t shot – I know because his insides aren’t all to’ up. My brothers insides were all to’ up. This man had an easy death.”

I wanted so badly to touch the displays, to run my hand down arms & up calves & cup buttocks & breasts, to put the back of my hand against cheekbones & jawbones, to run my fingers across the ridges of a brain or to down the xylophones of ribcages – but alas, the exhibit was strictly hands-off, & no photography, either. It was all so much poetry in red & white & gray. Still-lifes. Suspended animation. One of them, a runner, w/all his muscles separated & spread out from his arms & legs, reminded me of a Native American dancer w/feathered arm & ankle dressings. There were two ‘swimmers’ hanging from the ceiling – they could have been flying just as easily.

So in this celebration that is the human being, there were a billion warning signs leading to the room where a pregnant woman lay on her side, & fetuses floated in jars. It struck me as being overly sensitive, but it is California, & we just re-elected an anti-abortion/anti-birth control president back into office. No one seemed horrified at the displays, tho, and everyone we came in w/went & saw the pregnant woman. A man w/two young sons asked them if they wanted to know what it looked like when they were still inside their mom & they said, ‘Sure, dad’. One of the boys said it was incredible, beautiful, and sad because the baby & mother are so close together at that point. For me, it was blasé – I’ve seen fetuses in jars before. And pregnancy is the least interesting thing on the planet from my p. o. v. But I looked, just to be able to say that I’d ‘seen the elephant’, so to speak.

I liked the preserved slices. Whole people specially prepared & sliced up into thin agate-like pieces. Some so thin they could be laminated & used as stained-glass window dressings. Micrometers thick. I was surprised that none were done up like Da Vinci’s Microcosmic Man (you know, the guy standing spread-eagled in the globe). I probably would have bought one to bring home & hang in the sliding glass door. They were all sepia-tones of brown & black, & seeing the sun shining through them was actually quite ascetically pleasing. Soothing to the eye.

I didn’t feel morbid – trying to write about it now makes me feel morbid, & I’ll probably cut ‘n paste most of this letter into my livejournal page just so I won’t feel it necessary to make myself rehash it, but it will still be there. There was an odor, sort of a dry, static odor to the place, with an underlying meatiness – kind of like cheap beef jerky. I read somewhere that the plastination process was a boon to anatomists & medical professionals because it was odor-free, & I really wanted to correct them. But probably no one really noticed the scent – it was most noticeable around the ones under the strongest, most direct lighting. And it was so quiet, even with the school groups going through – it was like no one wanted to giggle or laugh or even make a loud “Ewww!” noise. Everyone (except for those most fascinated by penii) was respectful & the whole place seemed subdued. I wouldn’t want to be a night watchman in there. It’s bad enough that I’ve worked too many graveyard shifts to be able to sleep well alone in the house at night.

Gods, my fingers & hands absolutely ached to touch them, tho. I kept reaching out & getting sooo close, just wanting to brush them, just to run a fingertip over the ridge of a brow, or to follow the line of a muscle strand… On the 3rd floor was more of the same. The point of the whole exhibit was the differences between healthy tissue & that of diseased tissue, w/an emphasis on ‘lifestyle’ diseases – smoker’s lungs, clogged arteries, that kind of thing. Cancerous tissue, at least seen in slices, wasn’t very hideous. It looked like big black patches w/out veins or anything to differentiate the inner texture of the organ. I saw the difference between a healthy brain & one w/Alzheimer’s – in Alzheimer’s, the two cortexes actually begin to separate, & the brain itself loses mass. I was horrified & kept probing my head subconsciously. Another scary-looking thing was a hydrocephalic brain – a ‘bubble’ of excess fluid had built up inside the brain, & left a perfectly smooth inner cavity, like someone had molded the outside of the brain around a balloon or something, like maybe to make a costume headpiece or something. It was creepy.

The horse & rider were on the 3rd floor, at the very end of the exhibit. Saving the best for last. I could hardly look directly at it – it’s something I’ve anticipated seeing for so long, & I was actually standing there in front of it. I couldn’t have imagined the immenseness of it. The horse they used was enormous, almost a draft-sized horse & it was in a rearing position, & then the rider added another 4 or 5 feet to top it off. We were looking for support beams & wires – it’s not only an incredible piece of art & mortuary skill, but one of engineering as well. I felt bad for the horse – they took one of the hooves off it, leaving the tip of its toe-bone exposed to the world, & I believe that was a cruel thing to do, even if the horse was dead. I imagined it to feel like a finger w/the nail ripped off, leaving the bed open to any stray breeze. I wanted to pick the hoof up & stick it back where it belonged. Rob was far more entertained by the flock of seagulls that had taken over the ledge outside – they were looking in like, “Man, if we could get to that dead horse in there, we’d eat for a week.” The ledge outside was also littered in chicken bones, which, as I deduced, probably came from the KFC across the street. Cannibalistic birds – gotta love it. Mmm, feather-lickin’ good.

So I donated myself to BodyWorlds, & left a comment in the book. Bought souvenirs – pins & postcards, the catalog, the DVD… I am such a sucker, but I figured since they wouldn’t let me take pictures I can scan all the images into my computer one way or another. I walked out of there starving – I wanted some liver & onions, and some barbecued ribs. Rob promised me Tony Roma’s when we get the opportunity. (Hee hee) So anyway, we headed towards Wilshire Blvd., after much debate & discussion. Found a McDonald’s, which was so California-esque. Veggie Burgers, a Walnut & Apple Salad… & piped-in techno-muzak. The streets in L. A. are narrow compared to here, & going up Wilshire, w/all the little side-alleys, I could understand why Rob was nervous about driving. But it’s not like we were in Compton or Oakland or anything – I mean, it was mostly business high-rises & boutiques. I would have loved to explore a little more – gone in & gawked at some of the ritzy shops & antique places. It kind of cracked me up, too – we saw so many freakin’ Starbucks. Not one 7-11, but at least 20 or 30 Starbucks. It was also kind of amusing because a lot of regular retail stores are on the ground floor of these skyscrapers, like a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. Out here, Big 5 stands alone or is part of a Wal-Mart strip mall… in downtown L. A.; it’s on the bottom floor of some bank building.

We culminated our journey at the La Brea Tar Pits. It was sad. The last time I was there, I was like, 4 or 5. The place had only been open a year or so. I remember it as being much, much larger, like at least a half-a-day’s worth of exploration. I remember these huge ponds of tar, w/statue dinosaur dioramas carrying out imagined mini-dramas of prehistoric life. When we got there, it’s this tiny little museum tucked away in downtown L. A.... You’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it, or if you didn’t happen to glance over & see, from the street, the one remaining diorama of the trapped mammoth & its family. It’s not even really at a major intersection or anything. So we climbed the hill – crows were everywhere. The center of the museum has a beautiful arboretum, filled w/banana palms & flowering vines. There’s a koi pond w/some turtles along w/the fish. From the top, tho, it looks like the pit they put the velociraptors in in ‘Jurassic Park’, complete w/the funky grid work in the ceiling above it. At least at La Brea you can touch stuff – and touch I did. I touched everything I could possibly get my hands on, & took pictures of everything else. It’s laid out in a big circle. There are fewer fossils than murals & wall-displays, but it was still good in that nostalgic way. I just remember everything being bigger. Way bigger. Except the actual mammoth skeleton – that is still enormous. It dwarfs modern elephants. And people. When you come around the corner, there’s a low wall, mammoth knees… ribs…. the bottom curve of the tusks… and a low wall coming down from the ceiling. You have to get up past the curve to see the whole mammoth. And they’ve got it standing on a pedestal to boot – probably about 2’ up. The thing is just big. There’s a bison there, too – I didn’t realize that bison & camels had ridged backbones, which explains the humps. The bison was almost as big as the mammoth and in a way more impressive because there are more animals in modern times to compare the size to. A rodeo bull’s shoulders would come up to that bison’s chin, and rodeo bulls, especially the Brahma breed, aren’t little. There were lions & saber-toothed cats & short-faced bears (oh my!). And a wall holding a portion (about 400) of the dire wolf skulls they had found so far. Rob & I came to the conclusion that dire wolves were stupid (way more stupid than prehistoric coyotes - I mean, coyotes are still around - where are all the dire wolves?) (Well, obviously in the tar pits, but you get my drift) – something like 1600 (that they’ve dug up so far) had perished in the tar pits, along w/about 2000 saber-toothed cats. Saber-toothed cats weren’t that bright, either. Whenever I think about dire wolves, I always imagine this huge hulking beast of a wolf, big as a tiger or something, but from the skulls they probably weren’t any bigger than a German shepherd or Dobermann.

We hit the gift shop, run by a really nice Spaniard named Trino – I popped a complimentary comment card into the comment card box for him. He was just a nice guy – so nice that I was convinced he was gay, but apparently he’s just a beautiful & pleasant girly-man. He didn’t care one bit that we touched all the merchandise & played w/everything we could reach, especially because I bought stuff there, too. He was talking to a couple about a display at the Art Museum – some guy has taken fimo clay to heights never believed possible – there’s a sculpture of a horse done completely out of fimo – it looks like one of those Chinese lacquer-ware statues w/all the different cells of color… goes for a mere $15,000. I guess it’s almost life-sized. Absolutely gorgeous, but my brain goes, “$15,000?! For fimo?! Deadhead Play-Doh?! No fuckin’ way!!!”

From there, we went out into the park itself. Due to the rain, you couldn’t really tell that any of the pits were tar pits (which probably led to more than a few dire wolf deaths way back when), and the lake was really the only active pit – there was one gas spout that would bubble up occasionally. The other pits are small – you can’t even smell any real fresh-asphalt smell. And the active excavation pit is closed for the Winter – it’s only open in the Summer anymore due to funding, & also because the tar is easier to dig when it’s warm. I wouldn’t want to work there in the middle of July or August – that’s seriously got to suck. There was one pit I remember – when I was little, you could go down this ramp that overlooked an active excavation site, & on the walls they had bas-relief dinosaur skeletons in plaster, so it was like you were going into a ‘real’ field dig pit. But now, it’s just concrete walls & it’s all gated off. By climbing up the gate a little, we could see the shoulder blade of something sticking up out of the tar. It seemed deeper when I was little. Everything seemed bigger, more, deeper, smellier, more amazing & impressive when I was 5. I guess that extra 2’3 ½” in height & 25 years in between made a difference in my perspectives…

We took Wilshire up to Santa Monica Blvd., got on the 405 & somehow made it back to our rental-car place, & Rob endured another harrowing ride on the airport shuttle. Did the express check-in, stripped for the security people & almost lost one of the BodyWorlds pins in the x-ray machine… & we sat in the food court at LAX for 4 hrs. Our feet hurt & I had blisters, anyway, so we weren’t seriously complaining about just sitting there. The flight back was surprisingly empty. I love to fly at night – the pilot stayed fairly low, so we never really lost sight of the ground. All those lights. Rob kept asking if we were still in L. A. & I was telling him we were probably over San Bernardino by that time… then a strip of pitchy blackness & the lights of Las Vegas appeared. The pilot seemed to feel it necessary to show us the Stratosphere up close ‘n personal, & took a very roundabout trip to the airport – we passed the South end of the Strip, downtown, our house… and when he landed the plane, it was way down at the Mandalay Bay. It’s like, no wonder the taxi process was so long – he landed about 10 miles from the damned terminal!

That was my day in L. A. I miss it – when we were driving down Santa Monica Blvd., I had my window open so I could feel the ocean air & get that salty smell in my nose. It was great because there’d been rain earlier in the day, so it was really humid. I never appreciated just how verdant & lush the landscaping is in So. Cal. till now. Birds of paradise, palms (real, healthy palms, not these over-landscaped p.o.s. we’ve got out here), pepper trees, grass. Flowery viney things. Love it. LAX is so different now – no Hare Krishnas, no homeless, but a lot more plants & landscaping. It’s also not spread open anymore – it’s just different. Narrower. The food court at the Southwest terminal had a Gordon Biersch… and a Starbucks!

Rob’s not real happy about my body donation – says he won’t come visit me. Oh well. I’m not doing it for him, anyway. A part of me expects some goon squad to show up & make sure I’m still young when I die (heh heh) so that I’ll leave a good-looking corpse. Ann never made it out… had to work. Bleh!
I don’t know – it felt good to leave the city for awhile, get out of town, walk in the open air, see a new place, and breathe different air. But it was good to get home again, too. Especially for my poor ol’ feet. I’m not used to all the walking & standing that we did. I took a butt-load of potassium when we got home to stave off any Charlie horses that might accost me in the night. Getting up to go to work yesterday morning was sheer Hel. Rob’s had to work these past 2 nights – yesterday I was so skittish – it’s hard to fall asleep & there’s all these outside noises that seem to surround me when I’m by myself. Rob got on my ass about leaving a loaded shotgun under the bed, but if it makes me feel more secure, I’ll probably do it again & not let him know about it. I don’t know how I’ll feel tonight – I’m tired, but I don’t have to work & I’m off from the dayjob till Monday. We ran all of our random errands today – even fed the snakes, & tomorrow’s Veteran’s Day, so neither one of us have a damned thing to do tomorrow – we could just sleep. But I’ll probably just go to bed when I start nodding off at the computer.