Joe Exotic went to my high school. A family friend of mine attended Laramie High School at the same time as Joe, though they didn’t run in the same circles. The friend remembers the young man who would become Joe Exotic as having been “loud.”
In more normal times, Joe Exotic would already be fading from our collective memories. The popularity of Netflix’s Tiger King—of which Joe is either the hero or the bête noire, depending on how you feel about a number of things—peaked over a week ago. But these are strange times, and I suspect the characters who have arrived in our lives on glowing screens during these past few weeks have been haunting many of us with more tenacity than usual.
The scene in Tiger King that I’ve had the hardest time letting go involves a tornado. Joe Exotic’s zoo was in Oklahoma, a place where vast black vortexes often lurch over the plains. The possibility that a dark cloud could decide to descend from the sky and wreak mayhem all over your ambitions is a problem for the owner of an open-air big cat zoo.
Because everything about Joe Exotic’s life is overdetermined, of course we see Joe encounter a tornado. And of course he has to confront it. Joe rides out to meet the tornado, or at least to point at it and strike some poses. A lightly built man with a belt full of ammo, chattering into a walkie-talkie and riding around pointlessly on an ATV as doom approaches. It’s tempting to conclude Joe is just a damn fool. What exactly does this guy think he can do to a tornado? Is he going to shoot it with his tiger-striped gun?
One of my last days at Laramie High School was spent huddled in a windowless hallway, waiting out a tornado. The school building both Joe Exotic and I attended was a brick Atomic Age wreck, riven with passages that jutted off at weird angles, infested with pigeons that my chemistry teacher used to shoo away with a broom. My math classes took place in a double-wide trailer.
On the day of the tornado, 750 or so students and everyone else in the building had to shelter in place in the high school’s most airless corridors for a couple of hours. Not long past the end of the school day, but long enough to make us restless. Hundreds of teenagers sitting against cinderblock walls in cargo pants and Laramie Plainsmen maroon-and-gold hoodies, murmuring about escape. Could they really keep us here, after hours? The lines of authority grew blurry. But we stayed where we were, because we’d been told to do so. Because it was safe.
After the principals let us go, we went home and learned that the only thing the tornado destroyed was the steeple of an evangelical church.
There are a lot of melodramatic lessons you could draw from a tornado sniping a steeple, just like you could get maudlin about Tiger King. You could say the show captures something essential about American self-mythologizing. All these dreamers strike out toward the horizon and build their own fiefdoms full of quasi-mystical apex predators. They all end up replicating different kinds of tawdry, usually illegal community: Joe’s Western outlaw band; Doc Antle’s [alleged] sex cult; that guy who used to run an actual drug cartel. These ways of living court doom from the get-go. You ride out and meet the tornado because you always knew it was coming.
Only Carole Baskin understood the value of turning her realm into a prestigious institution friendly to people who listen to Morning Edition, founding the kind of non-profit that might attract summer volunteers from Vassar. There was a time in my life when I might have thought it would be fun to volunteer for her. And of course, insofar as the story has a victor, it’s Carole Baskin.
I say all of this not to lionize (tigerize?) Joe Exotic or anyone else. We all saw the same documentary series. Joe’s zoo is closed, and the man himself is in federal prison. His first mistake was believing he could write his own myth at the same time as he lived it. After that came other, less poetic mistakes. Joe lost control of the story, but let it not be said that he didn’t try his best to tell a damn good one.
My own story has taken a turn for the dull. Since my spring break a few weeks ago, I’ve been back in Laramie. I guess I’m not going anywhere for a while. I’ve been staying inside, just like everyone else who’s able, staring at screens. It’s for the best, and I’m lucky. Outside my window, the weather has been unstable, rollicking, stormy, as it always is during spring in Wyoming. You never know what’s going to roll in over the plains.
On this visit, I haven’t yet driven past the plot of land where my high school used to be. It’s just an empty field now, next to the bones of the dinky football stadium. They left one of the gyms from the old school intact, a brick cube towering over the dead grass. I miss the building I knew so well, of course, just like I miss the delusions I had in those final days as a student there. Like Joe Exotic, I wanted to do bigger things than to hole up in a windowless room, sheltering in place.
I wanted to ride out toward the horizon, even if it was stormy.
Welcome back to A Lonely Impulse of Delight!
Thanks for signing up! I’m going to keep playing around with the format for this newsletter. I’ll definitely do more full-length essays on various arts and culture topics, but I may also try out other forms. And I’m thinking I’ll use this space at the end to drop notes and so on.
What I’m Reading:
I recently finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, my first time reading her. Strange, creepy book, of course—I might write about it in this space. I’m now working on Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, which is more of a winking fantasy romp. Both of these will be covered on my podcast, Podside Picnic, which is worth checking out if you’re enjoying this newsletter.