Wolf in Pants

The one soon to become a wolf would first slip off his clothes. Some stories say it was an adolescent boy. Some say it was a man. Pliny said the one to become a wolf must first hang his clothes on an oak, then swim across a pond. Varro called it a long pool. In City of God, Augustine said lake. Everyone agrees it took place in ancient Arcadia, home of Lykaion – Wolf Mountain. All the stories I’ve read mention shallow water with the power to make people into wolves. Water as a body that must be crossed to engender change. Water as an infinity loop between two beings, two lives lived very differently.

I wish I could ask these authors: Who is really meant to change in these stories? Historians call early werewolf lore another type of ritual exclusion. Once on the other side, the changed one, now a wolf, must find a pack and spend nine years among them. The challenge was to maintain his humanity. Without the prop of family or the society of his childhood, he must try to be a wolf who can remember the scratch of fabric. The way cloth breathes. The way skin feels vulnerable. In the end, he must change back to the person he used to be. Except he would always be a man who remembers protective fur, rejoicing in sharp teeth, watching his shape give way to another.

Pliny never said why communities decided one person must transform. None of these authors did. It’s possible the person wanted to. It’s possible it was necessary for community survival. A messenger to understand history as a metamorphosis. To speak of progress. To speak of means and ends. To remind everyone how power works. To change and to understand power on different terms.

***

No story describes very well what the werewolves did in their nine years, but I think I have a good idea having worked night shift for years at a homeless housing first project. Housing first, as it was explained to me in my interview, means people are offered a place to live right off the street. It’s offering stability before treatment, which is the opposite of how social services have worked essentially since the British developed Poor Laws in the 1500s. The project where I work is geared toward chronic alcoholics, so clients typically come from shelters, medical detox, county jail, or the mental hospital downstate. They are not asked to get sober to receive services – a method of harm reduction. Most clients are middle-aged. Although a few manage to achieve sobriety, most do not. Addiction is managed like any illness. Part of my job is to measure medication, ration beers, stack pints of bottom-shelf vodka, and roll cigarettes: all of which get handed out to clients at agreed-upon times. The point is not to wean clients off. The point is to keep them alive with an addicted body.

The name Lykaion contains lykos, ancient Greek for wolf with origins in the roots of light and dawn. Lycanthrope because wolves emerge at day’s transition. The body between light and dark. The space of a shelter. The space of night shift.

Heading to work, I leap into velvety darkness on my teal Craigslist bike with helmet, headlight, and bell. Sometimes feather-light after a fill-in shift at one of the other scattered site projects. Other times plodding from messy sleep in the back room of the coffee shop my friend Carrollann manages. Most of the time after having fallen asleep at the dinner table once again.

I might weave down the hill facing the bay or head straight for the bridge. But first, I must silk past the sides of the RVs and utility vans housing impoverished people. These vehicles feel familiar. They remind me of how the poor skirted view where I grew up in rural Nebraska. The bike lane provides space for me to remember the kids who slept in old school buses; my grandparents building a fortress of cans collected from other people’s garbage; friends putting macaroni on plates in wobbly single-wide trailers; babysitters in boxy wood houses insulated with hay, fearing the walls full of winter snakes seeking warmth.

The middle and upper classes have long been afraid of the poor and the night in equal measure. Unhoused people are reviled by the housed. They remain unseen in broad daylight. It is hard to understand how expensive it is to be broke until you are. It is hard to understand that cleanliness, matching outfits, handbags, and money clip wallets are all little carriers of class. They purchase entrance into the protective barriers of public buildings, restrooms, and shops. Class, we are promised, carries safety.

But the housing project where I work feels safe too. It looks unremarkable along the city’s upwardly mobile skyline. Just a blue tin building, always a bright light under the overpass. On shift, I have a homey routine of making awful coffee from grounds in clear plastic donation sacks knotted at the top. I pour two cups and play one last game of bones with Burt (not his real name), whose mind is too far gone from alcohol-related dementia to remember the rules. It doesn’t matter. I follow what he says because he’s having fun, teaching me how to negotiate his language of night where stars are much nearer and everyone’s skin is stitched to darkness. I understand why the rules never make sense in this place, at this hour. And I learn the faces he sees in the sky, his own constellations.

I dream of a moon so large it bumps against the earth. The dream comes to me on my break while sleeping vampire-style in my boss’s office on a makeshift bed of two chairs kissing. The clients and I are outside my elementary school. “Is that where you live?” they ask. I don’t say anything, and I also don’t leave. We continue to touch the sateen moon, marveling at our hands full of light.

After break, I wait for Anthony (not his real name), the client close to my own age, to come home from trying to sell his methadone. It’s time to watch Bloodsport. We didn’t choose this movie as ours. It’s simply the only tape that hasn’t been stolen. Men cry out in sleep from the little first-floor rooms we call the Cubes. These spaces are just like an office cubicle except with a bed instead of a desk. There is a mini-fridge and an overhead light, but no door, no ceiling. Some of these clients are waiting for a studio apartment upstairs. Most of them are too sick to live alone. They have canes and edema. Sepsis and diabetic blindness. HIV, C. diff, hepatitis, missing teeth, blind eyes, deep scars.

When I wake up, I do a walk-through, hoping I don’t have a situation where I will have to put on the crinkly white hazmat suit that protects me from big spills, especially blood. I repeat the same motions every night. Check on the ones who fell asleep in their wheelchairs. Help a man who urinated himself change into clean sweatpants. Then wash a bloody shirt, diarrhea-soaked jeans, socks with cigarette burns. Bandage a forehead. Bring some Gatorade. Wink at the oldest client, who is having a slow cigarette under the no-smoking sign in the TV room while he watches Gilligan’s Island on mute.

Daylight, to me, feels complicated. It moves quickly toward disaster. Morning breaks and our state government has once again reduced food stamp availability. Landlords post their eviction notices. The shelter’s mental health unit door locks for the last time due to lack of funding. Clients having full-on hallucinations are turned outside. They won’t find their way back. They’ll buy a machete at the hardware store and hope to get to the evergreens without incident.

Alongside my coworkers, I protest outside the state capitol, begging legislators in session not to reduce housing benefits to disabled people. Briefly, on the 6:00 news, our group is shown doing a chant called human megaphone. We make ourselves louder with each round. It’s obvious from the tape: our chant is just an echo fading in the marble chamber. My parents don’t watch the video I post. They tell me I’m turning radical. But I don’t think it’s radical to say that it hurts to be invisible in plain sight.

***

My friend Kate says John the Baptist was the first werewolf. The search for this story has taken up quite a bit of my time. Going through libraries. Deep-digging scholarly articles undressing transformation, transubstantiation, rituals of sacrifice. Kate says, “It has something to do with not partaking in human flesh.” Pliny mentioned this as the single caveat for the excluded ones in Natural History. Augustine and Varro too. If a werewolf eats human flesh, he will never turn back. As if the water does not recognize his soul anymore. His body becomes a prison.

It is widely believed among scholars that ancient Greeks characterized the wolf form as punishment for human sacrifice. Arcadians who gathered atop Lykaion were considered rustic and uncivilized. They had their own world: feasts of spring; offerings to the round, fleshy she-wolf in the moon; athletic competitions held every four years called Lykaia, Wolf Games. Olympus was inaccessible and unimportant. Anthropologists say there is no evidence of human sacrifice on Lykaion or anywhere in Arcadia. The stories were just rumors Athenians and other more urban Greeks told one another about the less-advantaged neighbors with their grizzled kings.

City of God was not written to repair the social standing of anyone except Christians under Roman rule. After Visigoths sacked Rome in 401, the small cult Christians accepted under Constantine’s rule in the 300s were blamed. Rejection of Roman gods had angered too many deities. Augustine made the case for Christians by defining their moral superiority in terms of a dichotomy. Day is more moral than night. Christians more moral than Romans.

Augustine returns a couple of times to the Arcadians who swam into and out of human form. Perhaps he pictured a membrane living in the center of the water. An invisible line crossed. To become a wolf had to do with a shift in vulnerability, as well as a melding with new power. An initiation. City of God details Damarchos, the Arcadian man who ate a bite of human sacrifice to gain wolf-strength for the Olympics. Demons were at work here, Augustine believed. Humans who change form receive power that is not meant for them. Conservation, after all, is a form of innocence. To be pure is to never undergo metamorphosis – an impossibility.

III

After work, I start my daytime routine. First thing: strip. Removing my wolf skin, I begin to call it. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been kissed. Carrollann is the only person who hugs me. My skin loves to be seen by the remainder of morning’s dew. I love how it lavenders beautifully in shadows though I know all this is self-protection. I do it so as not to bring in bedbugs ever since a screaming client threw his heavy backpack at me at the shelter. It was clear why he was upset. His skin was addled with dots, rivulets of blood. He’d been bitten from head to toe. Minutes later, the bites hit my shins. Then his pain was mine.

Yes, it is winter. Yes, summer.

Before moving to this city, I’d never heard the term “garden apartment.” It’s a real estate euphemism for basement. As though living underground brings one closer to the earth. My front door is buried in evergreen bushes and reaching lilac trees. The place is a not-quite legal flat in a widow’s basement. It costs $500 a month, no bills. No laundry, no back door. There isn’t even a lease, which feels like an agreement not to exist. At one end, a bathroom with a camping shower, toilet, and sink leading to the bedroom. At the other, a hot plate and a little window looking out at my car’s tires. Connecting them is a cinderblock hallway with storage shelves and a boiler.

This place eats scenes from my life showing the ugly side of change. The time I was so tired I fell asleep standing up in the shower. Or when, exhausted, I pissed my pants sitting on the toilet. Or the week a date eventually called all the hospitals looking for me because I was too busy working extra shifts to call back.

Yes, it is a school day. Yes, spring break.

On shift, I run a broom across the ceiling of a newly vacated apartment. This ceiling is a universe of bedbugs. They fall in a long drape. My heart breaks. For everyone in the room. For the former tenant living there amid the chaos they could not stop. The effects of which we came to clean up for the sake of the others down the list who are waiting for a chance to live inside.

Each week, my hands swell from the bleach and rubbing alcohol used to clean mattresses. Superbug is now a thing because some bedbugs carry MRSA. In the quietest part of night, I help cut a man’s sleeve from his shirt. MRSA had eaten deeply into his arm, exposing the pink meat, the white tendon beneath. Sometimes all I can do is help the wound to breathe.

I’m not a student anymore but my mind still tries to keep time on that calendar. Like all children, I have been thrust into adult life, which does not abide by the same clock. Every day feels the same. I spend five days in the same black tee, cuffed jeans, warped bra, and beat-up running shoes washed, dried, and worn again. There is no schedule to figure out how to take good care of oneself. The constellation of worry I create for others occurs to me mid-afternoon. I need an economy that will show me what to do next.

Liminality is existing in a new space while still worrying about old things. My cheeks fall. My breasts shrink. I am beginning to feel thinner in daylight without the fur of night. Without the people who see me for what I am. My legs grow stronger from lifting bodies, pushing mops, organizing shelves, walking the hourly bed checks. Every day I put on this same outfit, I wander a little farther away from femininity. Grey hairs spread across my scalp, looking like finished forest fires from above. I tell people I am only 25.

I am learning to live when my resources are limited. When my need cuts off my belief. When my privilege cuts off my compassion. When my tired body approaches break. More than anything, I want to become the person my friends can call in an emergency. I am both longing to be responsible and not financially able to. Lack of money is its own between space. I look middle class to my clients but poor to everyone else. A myth of America is that there is no sea between the haves and have-nots.

Older stories say a werewolf is just a regular wolf cursed with a man’s mind. This is the backbone of werewolves in Arthurian legend. King Arthur met Gorlogan while attempting to learn what women want. Arthur’s wife had told him that she wanted him to ask for consent before kissing or touching her. All she wanted was to be heard. He decided he’d better ask some men about what women want instead, swearing he would not eat until he found out.

Gorlogan was the brother of two other kings Arthur had feasted with. However, at his table sat a horribly sad woman kissing a severed head. “Tell me about that woman,” Arthur said. And Gorlogan told him the story of a sapling planted on the day a boy was born. Whoever cut down the tree and tapped the boy with its branch could change him into an animal. The boy became king and let slip the secret to his wife, who fulfilled the curse. “You will be a wolf,” she said, touching the wood to his skin, “but with the mind of a man.”

A wolf was not a good outfit in medieval Europe. Back then, everyone was hunting and fighting. Serfs and women were not considered people so much as property. They were the first target in wars between their lords. Trapped in animal form, the werewolf needed a person who was not only willing to protect him, but also locate the branch that would change him back. Like a serf, a werewolf’s job was to prove himself worthy of the help of powerful people. And, finally, our werewolf found a king willing to help.

Once in human form, the werewolf returned to his kingdom, but this time with a vendetta. It’s hard to say if he changed from being a wolf or if he just became more himself. After all, no Arthurian legend has ever told us what women want. And so, allegedly a man again, the werewolf king ordered his ex-wife’s new husband beheaded. For her, he fashioned a prison at the dinner table. There, she was forced to kiss her new husband’s bloodied head every time Gorlogan kissed his new queen. “I am the werewolf,” he told Arthur winkingly. And then he had a good laugh.

***

Scenes move in and out of my body. Stabbings, names given to shivs, S.W.A.T. teams swarming, crack fights. When people feel heard they will share the emergencies they keep quiet. The insects, demons on the ceiling, voices no one else can hear, wounds that have somehow undressed themselves. I understand these are my job to see, attend to, speak up about. Childhoods spent sleeping in graveyards, sleeping in junkyards, sleeping in public parks while the sprinklers run. Another shift, and I wonder if this narrative of ache to anger will ever get old. I wonder if night shift is starting to affect my brain the way people tell me it will. Or if I am changing because of what I imbibe at night.

What I do on shift feels like a hidden identity. Another sunrise, and I promise myself to stay quiet about last night. I don’t tell anyone – not friends, not family, not the occasional first date. No one knows the address of the nondescript building that cloaks me five nights a week. No one understands when I explain my job gives police, hospitals, court systems, and citizens relief. We harbor the horror of poverty to keep the peace in the parts of the city where citizens, judges, politicians, and police sleep.

This choice to be a social worker is an unspoken betrayal to my family. Maybe it’s the fact that I continue to work for minimum wage even after graduating college. When we get together, I wear secondhand J Crew purchased just hours before. Articles I will sell back for store credit or cash. My grandmother insists my job is not real, that it is only a volunteer position. Like most middle-class people, she doesn’t understand that social work is more than something church-goers do on the weekends. It’s nice to pretend over lunch that I live in sun even while my mother sneaks me checks wrapped in my elementary school classmates’ wedding announcements.

I’m learning that the closer I get to poverty, the less people from my past recognize me. My mom’s checks let me know she is afraid my work is chasing away husbands. She fears I will end up living off the government – a burden to everyone. I know what she feels is America’s collective fear of single women. It is brutally married to the fear of the welfare state. On the news, I hear presidential candidates say that social service is a betrayal of the middle class. A betrayal of capitalism to help those who have nothing instead of letting them be eaten. A betrayal of generational wealth to offer housing at 30% income – even if that income is $0. America has so much money and people are convinced there isn’t enough for everyone. I am becoming unrecognizable in my belief that it’s not necessary for anyone to live outside.

Alan Greenspan, the 82 year-old former chair of the US Federal Reserve board from 1987-2006, is on TV. I am the first person at this laundromat, wearing pajama bottoms and a shirt that says, YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY FUCK YOU. The laundromat owner watches me with interest, forming a myth about me. Maybe it’s the one where I am homeless and here to beg for change. There are others. The one where I’m an alcoholic. The one where I’m a Communist. The one where I am unfit for love.

While folding my jeans, I hear Greenspan admitting the unregulated market he helped create in his tenure has caused widespread insolvency throughout the country. “Were you wrong?” Representative Waxman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asks him in front of a rich black and gold brocade curtain. “Partially,” Greenspan offers into the 24-hour news cycle.

Riding past shiny shop windows to get here, I couldn’t help but notice that wealthy people pay a lot to experience what poor people fear. They wear thin clothes and eat small portions of food. They go on diets and run themselves ragged for personal trainers. The poor wear thick cotton, thick soles, and eat thick food. We divide account balances by days remaining in the pay period. A hyper-awareness of what runs out when. How many months will these shirt threads hold? How many paychecks will I cash before I owe more than I make?

I wonder if the Arcadians had a word for werewolves who never came back.

***

Bisclavret had everything: a barony of land, the trust of his wealthy lord, a good set of armor, reciprocal love. His name roughly translates to “wolf in pants” in 12th century French. This is because he removed his clothes near the edge of the forest, then put them back on to change back into a man. By this time in folklore, werewolves could transform without water, wood, or sacrifice. To be a werewolf means to be born different instead of choosing it. Exclusion is not a ritual but a life story.

The narrator mentions that there are other wolves like Bisclavret. More and more every year. It seems he was one of the few who returned. Maybe the others never wanted to. Maybe the story of a werewolf has always been about what it looks like lose or hold onto our humanity – what really makes us civilized. The future in folklore is always civilization. The story of a werewolf shows us the necessity of seeing society from the outside to realize what it means to be civilized.

I try to think of why Bisclavret’s wife would steal his clothes, leaving him in wolf form. They had been happily married for quite a long time before he finally spoke of his absences. “Lady, I become a werewolf,” he said plainly. “I enter the vast forest and live in the deepest part of the wood where I feed off the prey I can capture.” It’s possible she was afraid. Or ashamed. This reminds me of the way middle and upper classes fear the poor who, for centuries, have been compared to dogs. “Eat the rich,” we chant in front of the news crews at the capitol. When my family asks if I’m going to get a real job, I bite back the explanation that I work here because jobs are scarce, because no one is hiring lit majors. In this America, writing and using my body are separate resumes.

Inside older myths, it’s easy to forget that people grow tired selling their time, energy, and bodies – as if this hasn’t become my own autobiography. Though Bisclavret the man was given land and position, Bisclavret the wolf was a victim of the most unfortunate game. The king took him in and controlled when he was dressed or naked. The werewolf could be his weapon as well as his connection to the woods a regular man dared not enter by night. Because the story of a werewolf story is about crossing, about our collective need for change. It’s found in deeper skin. In the water we swim. In a form that can’t hold onto itself.

Abby Hagler lives in Chicago. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in New South, FANZINE, Full Stop, and Bodega. With Julia Cohen, she runs “Original Obsessions,” an interview column at Tarpaulin Sky Magazine focused on writers’ childhood obsessions manifesting in their current work. Her chapbook There Was Nothing Left But Gold is available from Essay Press.