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When I was twenty years old and in my junior year of college in Indiana, on Christmas Break in 1969, I felt a need to return briefly to the Bay Area of California, where I had spent my freshman and sophomore years. I didn’t have any well-formed plans for the trip, but, on the way, traveling in my 1960 VW Beetle, I stayed for a couple of nights in Seward, Nebraska, where friends were going to school and completing their last week of exams before their own Christmas Break began. I slept in a sleeping bag on a dorm room floor.
A California schoolmate who had been planning to remain in Seward until his next semester began, upon hearing where I was headed, suggested that he’d like to go with me; he would see his family and find some other way back to Seward. I was happy for the company, and there was a bonus: the fellow had a sister who was in med school at Stanford. She lived with other students in a duplex a few miles from campus in a place known as Nairobi. My pal checked with her and found out everyone was going to be gone for the holidays, but I would be welcome, the sister said, to sleep there.
Though I can’t remember anymore how I got a key to enter the Nairobi house and can’t remember how long I stayed, I know I did get in and enjoyed the hospitality of the absent residents. I know I took three black-and-white photographs in that house, two of them carefully composed still lifes, with my twin-lens reflex camera.
I took a third photo, also a still life, but more journalistic than artistic, of an object with pharmaceutical implications. I have a contact print of that shot but have never enlarged it.
You may be familiar with Photo Number One, an arrangement of a record turntable, a Bob Dylan album (“Bringing It All Back Home”), a Smith-Corona typewriter without paper in the carriage, a wine bottle, a brightly flaring desk lamp, a handwritten draft of a poem on a cheap pad of paper, and the photographer’s two bare feet, one on each side of the typewriter. I probably used a tripod.
Photo Number Two depicts a human skull, lacking its top. I suppose I was the one who, for the sake of a photograph, placed that skull indecorously against a brick hearth and illuminated it with three plump, burned-down candles. Whose was it, I have come to wonder. Who, among the residents of that duplex, owned that skull, and whose was it, I think we might also ask, when it still contained a sentient brain within?
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