Subtitle: Exploring the Power-Obsessed, Kinky Contours of my Unconscious Mind

*Trigger warning for discussion of abuse*

I’m so, so tired today.  This is partly because, at 2:30 PM, I’ve only just taken my generic Adderall (identified on the label simply as ‘amphetamine salt pills’), and partly because there was a blizzard last night, so every d-bag college kid in this neighborhood had to go running drunk through the streets throwing snowballs.  There’s also the fact that I had some late-night naked fun on Skype with Andy, the guy I’m dating.  Lastly, I’m tired beause the quality of the sleep I did get after drifting off around three AM was really shitty. I had another fucking dream about Sam. [I realize I haven't properly introduced him yet or explained what our deal is.  Don't worry, I'm doing it on purpose: I'm crafting a non-linear narrative. *pats your head condescendingly*]

Ever since that night in October of ’09 when I realized I could hear him even while I’m lying in my bed, I’ve been having these almost weekly semi-nightmares about him.  It’s never the same one twice.  No, my subconscious likes to conjure dreams that are thematically similar but just different enough from one another that I can never get used to them.  That way the resulting discomfort is always fresh and fun. The settings, for example, shift somewhat.  Most of the earlier dreams took place in buildings in exurban or suburban neighborhoods.  In one, Amy and I were living in a modest little house on a quiet street, next door to the mansion Sam shared with his beautiful wife and children. In another Sam lived below Amy and I in the same house, or barn, really— an abandoned wooden structure in the middle of an overgrown pasture on the edge of town.  More recently we’re back in the city—  different apartments in blighted areas of NYC, including a tenement-like flat which Amy and I inhabit adjacent to Sam in his warmer, cleaner, brighter apartment.

I’m consistently surprised by the detail in these dreams: gorgeous oak tables, purple, blown-glass light fixtures and a brass telescope in the lookout tower of his four-story, cross-sectioned mansion; a perpetually flickering sunset burning through the blown-out windows of the upper-level barn hideout, the floor of which is rotting and splintered; the broken beer bottles and stubbed-out cigarettes illuminated by the sodium streetlight outside the entrance to our sad little flat, and the broad balcony with a blue afternoon-view in Sam’s neighboring room. I guess the details make up for the usual lack of narrative. I say ‘usual’ because occasionally my unconscious mind will whip out unsubtle plot points: I find myself with Sam’s secret bastard baby in my lap where my cat should be, or I catch him sleeping with another college student.  Last night’s semi-nightmare was a variation on the latter.

“So I had an interesting dream last night,” I remarked to my roommate a when I got up at 12:30.  She was showered and in a good mood, while I was still in my pajamas, sitting on the futon with our cat (no baby!) while waiting for the coffee to brew.

“Yeah? About what?”

“Colette was here, you know, like she’s going to be,” I said in reference to Amy’s long-distance, sometimes-gal pal who’s staying here for a few days next week,  ”and she had a friend with her.  And both of them ended up having sex with Sam.”

“Oh-ho! What? Come on!” she replied. Colette, like Amy, is bi, and, unlike Amy, she regularly has relationships with men.  She’s in an open relationship with a guy right now, and I bring all of this up only to make the point that the possibility of her hooking up with Sam is not completely zero. From Amy’s reaction, it seemed she was now considering this.

“I know! And Colette didn’t know her friend was fucking him, and the friend didn’t know Colette was fucking him, and you didn’t know either–”

“Well obviously not,” Amy snorted.

“But I knew! I found out, and I was just like, ‘What the fuck, Sam, really?’ and then I told you and you were all, ‘Seriously, dude?’ ”

“Ahahaha. That’s pretty much exactly what my reaction would be.  Oh man, I have to tell Collette,” my roommate replied as she pulled out her phone.

I was a bit confused.  Why would Colette care?  She does’t even know who— And then a gear clicked into motion in my tired brain, and I remembered that Colette had indeed met Sam.  She’d run into him in the stairway with Amy some time last year and bonded with him over the fact that they were from the same midwestern city.  I remember this because Sam later shared with me his approval of Amy and Colette’s relationship.  Or, more accurately, he said, “Oh yeah, I met Colette.  I like her.  How could I not? She’s awesome— she’s from Ohio!”  I laughed, and he continued,”She’s pretty hot too.”

“Sam, she’s two years younger than us,” I protested. “She’s only 18, the same age as some of your students.”

“Well she’s not my student! She’s not even in high school! So who cares? She’s 18, you’re 20, big difference. I’m 32, it’s all the same to me.”  A few minutes later he asked, “So do you know how do they do it? I mean, is it, like, fingers or…?”

“It’s not my business, and it’s not yours either,” I snapped.

Remembering this anecdote didn’t improve my mood, and the coffee wasn’t helping either. “You know, I don’t actually think Sam would fuck her,” I remarked to Amy.  ”I mean, not now anyway.  I think he has a girlfriend,” I mused.  ”He’s home a lot more and  he hasn’t contacted me in, like, six weeks.  No booty calls— we haven’t talked at all.”

“I’m actually pretty sure I heard a chick leaving his apartment this morning.”

My cheeks burned. “Well, that’s good.  It’s about damn time.  And, actually, it’s perfect timing, because I’m seeing Andy.”

“Does Sam know that?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I haven’t talked to him!  And I’m not going to.  If he’s actually being responsible enough to avoid me when he has a girlfriend— because he knows he has no fucking self-control— well, hey, I’m not going to go try to talk to him.”

“Good plan,” Amy said.

“Yeah.” I finished my coffee.  ”I’m going to go take a shower.” [Real time interruption: It is now after dinner as I finish writing this, and Sam is home, and his TV is on, and I can hear him laughing, and he is SO LOUD, and oh my GOD JON STEWART IS NOT THAT FUNNY SHUT THE FUCK UP!]

Showers never wake me up, and this one was no exception.  In fact, thanks to our wacky water heater, the stream running down my back was hot enough to turn the bathroom into a sauna in five minutes.  It made me even sleepier, and I fell into a half-daze.  I moved lethargically and let my attention slowly circle the memory of when our hot water heater had broken altogether and I’d had to use Sam’s shower.   It was like a bad porno.  My entire life had been like a bad porno for months on end, and sometimes like a soap opera, too. And it wasn’t just similar in terms of content. Like porn and soaps, my situation with Sam was also addictive.  Six weeks is by far the longest I’ve gone without talking to him.  After maybe ten minutes (or six weeks, depending on how you want to look at it) my thoughts settled rather abruptly on the singular notion that I very much wanted to talk to Sam.

I don’t care what Amy or Andy would say. I’m not going to do anything. I just want to– I couldn’t put into words what it is I wanted to do, and so my thoughts became images, feelings. There was the year-old memory of Sam grabbing my arm as I tried to move away from him, and the attendant terror, brief but genuine, that washed over me before the word ‘No!’ shot out of my mouth and I pulled myself free. ‘I’m serious, Sam! I’m seeing someone!’ He just smiled. He knew I wanted him. He knew he was in control— he didn’t even have to show me physically.

I want to do that, again, in reverse.  I want the reverse of that. I pictured myself ten minutes in the future, getting out of the shower, getting dressed, getting all prettied up and going over there. I imagined us talking, just talking, and me asking if he has a girlfriend. I hope he has a girlfriend. Then I can be the one tempting him, and he’ll be the one who has to pull away. Not physically; I don’t tempt by grabbing, and he won’t pull away in fear. I’ll tempt just by standing there. I imagined him moving closer while I stood perfectly still. I imagined him having to stop himself. And failing, falling, reaching for my arm. I’d move away, but not out of fear— no, I’ll have seen it coming. I was predicting it. I’ll just step back and tell him ‘No. You’re in a relationship’ and walk away. Like last time, but different. Reversed. I pictured the shamed look he’d have as I left his apartment.  I’d be the one smiling, because he’d be the one wanting, which would mean I’d be the one in control.

I know that’s stupid, thinking that men who want to cheat on their girlfriends are doing it because I’m just so pretty and sexy, and God, I give the best head.  The moral failings of men like Sam have nothing to do with me, and even if they did, being wanted wouldn’t give me any legitimate power. I know this and I’ve known this for years.  Those grown men I ‘seduced’, when I was 15? Their transgressions had nothing to do with me, and I knew it, but I was trying to believe otherwise. That one man, when I was 13, that teacher? He wanted me, and he had a lot to lose. And I was not the one with power in that situation.  The persistent presence of Mr.— of that teacher in my nightmares rather attests to the absolute and terrifying power he had over me, and yet, paradoxically, I can’t get the darkest, deepest portion of my id to believe I was really powerless with him, I was victimized. If I could, I’m convinced my sexual obsession with power would disappear— I’d no longer think anything of men who would break the law or break up their relationships or pounce on me and tie me up just to have me. I’d no longer be excited by them.  I’d no longer be kinky.  As it stands, though, my kink is the one healthy outlet for these bizarre thoughts and desires, and I’m not going to let that go.

By the time I finally got out of the shower today, I was awake as I was going to be.  And I was daydreaming about roleplaying with Andy, not playing mind games with Sam.

Subtitle: A Rant-tastic Personal Retrospective of a Hallmark Holiday (with bonus kinky pictures!)

*Trigger warning for discussion of harassment and abuse*

[Edited 2/15 to add a link to the photographer's site at the end and replace photos with watermarked ones]

My relationship with Valentine’s Day is like almost all of the other relationships I’ve ever had: bizarre and sometimes hateful. I first fell in love on V-Day, when I was eight, with my twenty-somthing, queer as folk drama teacher. A few years later, V-Day began to consistently precede— in terms of both time and causation— some of the worst days of my life (may they cease to exist somewhere in the space-time continuum).  From the ages of eleven to seventeen I was, in fact, as convinced as a cynical, atheistic teenager can be that V-Day was cursed for me. It makes sense in consideration of the evidence. Briefly, getting dumped by my first boyfriend on 2/14/01 via a slip of paper calling me a “hairy hore,” teased by my entire English class when they found out and teased for an entire forty-five minutes at that because my god-forsaken middle school forgot to get a substitute teacher that day, getting detention because one of my friends kicked a classmate of mine in the shin in response; being dumped by my third boyfriend on 2/14/02 and eating all of the chocolate I bought him by myself; being terrorized by my pedophilic history teacher on 2/21/03, alone, in his isolated classroom, ostensibly in detention for something I’d done a week earlier but wasn’t informed of until that day, and finally confessing to him that I knew exactly what he was doing only to have him laugh in my face; making out for the first time on 2/14/04 with my fifth boyfriend, who I was with only because I had zero self-esteem and who I’d previously spent entire summers avoiding because he harassed me endlessly and teased my best friend for being fat and one day, after getting tired of hearing him talk about my tits, I snapped and slammed his head into a pole and yet there I was letting him grope my tits anyway; meeting up for the first time on 2/19/05 with a child psychiatrist I met online and letting him touch me; finding out on 2/17/06 that the married man I’d been having an affair with, who had told me he loved me, had lied to me about his wife discovering our e-mails and really just wanted an excuse to fuck a new teenager; spending a snow day on 2/14/07 with the parents I’d taken to court just months earlier for child abuse, texting some high school teacher naked pictures. But, hey, then I turned 18 and went to college and got normal, and the worst V-day since then was last year, when my friends cancelled our plans to hang out and so I spent the night getting drunk with my cat and crying about Sam before taking sleeping pills and going to bed around 9:30.

Well guess what Valentine’s Day? You are not going to suck this year. I just got the badass pictures back from those two photo shoots I did recently, and in less than an hour I’m going to have my phone interview with Kink.com. Then I will go to class, go to dinner with my pretty awesome sort-of boyfriend, have him tie me up,  and drink wine with him instead of my cat (well, she’ll be here too). So even though things are still very weird,  they don’t suck, and they won’t suck, and so FUCK VALENTINE’S DAY and its scary, angry baby mascot.

I’m including a handful of pictures below the fold as a preview of what’s to come. They’re dedicated to everyone mentioned in this post. To my neighbor; my parents; the many assorted pedophiles and creeps who knew better; the pre-teen boyfriends and classmates who should have known better; and the disturbing, baby-sized metaphorical representation of a bullshit holiday: please take these as a hearty fuck you. To my cat; my current ‘sort-of boyfriend’; my friends present and past; that queer as folk drama teacher who turns 38 this week, according to Facebook; and all of the commas, colons, and semi-colons that allow me to write such convoluted sentences: please take these as a sincere thank you for getting me through a decade of mostly crappy V-Days so I can finally be naked on camera, doing perverted things— exactly where I want to be.

*Trigger warning for the photos for bondage*

To see more from Alex at IntimateSketch (or even more of me, if you’re reading this before I’ve updated the Galleries page) check out his site. He is *awesome*!

Subtitle: There’s 22 Cents in Here— Not Enough to Build An Essay or Buy a Gumball

I think a lot, and I think these thoughts have to be shaped into essays before I can share them.

¢That’s not working for me right now. So here’s a series of two-sentence, two-cent thoughts.¢

I’m thinking a lot about privilege, power, and porn.

¢I recognize my (racial, thin, able-bodied, conventionally pretty) privileges in being able to get into mainstream porn, and I want to do it so I can harness the power that comes with notoriety and use it to create porn for myself and for and with all of the less-privileged folks who are currently excluded from enjoying it. But I am really, really scared of the power that porn directors and producers wield.¢

… I’m thinking a lot about the relationship between my appearance and my exhibitionist sexuality.

¢How much is my exhibitionism dependent on being conventionally attractive? As someone who requires forty-five minutes of grooming every other day to meet the minimum standards of social acceptability (body hair, people. body hair), my membership in the Good-looking People Club is always tenuous, and I don’t want my sexuality to be that way as well.¢

… I’m thinking about sexual preferences and orientations.

¢If gender is performative, then isn’t sexual orientation really a preference? Or, really, aren’t physical characteristics more static than gender performativity and, therefore, (practical considerations for social norms aside) shouldn’t sexual preference be given the place orientation has now, as the ultimate arbiter of Categories of People We Like?¢

… I’m thinking about equivalences and dichotomies in human sexuality and whether they’re false.

¢How much is being kinky like being queer, or could it even be a form of queerness; is only liking white men— for me, as a white woman— any worse than only liking to be a submissive and receiving partner in bed; is sexual attraction more fluid than romantic attraction, or is it possible they’re not separate things at all? I hate not knowing the answers, and I hate that I don’t even know if I have to learn more or just think more to find them.¢

I think about wanting to discuss the traumatic experiences I went through, the abuse.

¢Although I need to openly address these things, I need even more to make sure I do it right. I am terrified of not making the readers feel my terror, and I’m terrified of all of the possible repercussions that come with speaking out.¢

…I think about my thought-processes, about my fucked-up brain.

¢I wonder a lot about the permanence of severe, chronic, medication-resistant Depression and whether and how to embrace it. I shake with fear and relief knowing that I can no longer be institutionalized as I would have been a few decades ago, though I can barely stand the opposite of institutionalization, of the present reality of being psychologically disabled: being invisible, being forced to assimilate.¢

…I consider my scars.

¢Abuse shaped my mind, which literally shaped my body, and all of the above are shaping my sexuality. These scars do make me visibly disabled; I don’t know if that’s good or bad, I don’t have any feelings about these marks, but I feel that I should.¢

I think about philosophy, and the people who employ it.

¢Philosophies are secular religions, and I’m an adherent to one, and I’m constantly waging non-holy wars along with all the other self-righteous progressives and shithead economic conservatives/libertarians/objectivists. We’re all full of shit, and we’re all going to lose, and I don’t know how much longer I can put up with dogmatic people or dogma or my OCD-necessitated clinging to it.¢

…I recognize that I am kind of an asshole, like everyone else, more or less.

¢ I go back and forth between really caring and trying not to care. I wonder if it’s humanly possible not to be something of an asshole.¢

I know I used punctuation to skirt the two-sentence rule.

¢Sorry, fuck you, and I’m actually not drunk. However, I think I’ll have a beer now and watch an episode of Community and then take a sleeping pill.¢

[Edited 2/22 to make the trigger warning more prominent and explicit]

It’s that two-week period after Valentine’s and before midterms, and that means it’s VagMons grind time here on campus (that’s ‘The Vagina Monologues rehearsal time,’ for the uninitiated.)  I won’t go into a whole shpiel about how much the play means to me, but I will say that it’s a huge reason I’m where I am today in terms of my sexuality and my life goals. When I first read the play in high school, I broke down crying right in the library, because I understood it. Or, I guess, I felt that it— that Eve Ensler— understood me.  I was thrilled to come to college and have a small part in it my freshman year.  Now, in my senior year, I have a slightly bigger part, as one of the Wear/Say women (…”If your vagina could get dressed, what would it wear?”/ “A pink feather boa!”…), but last year and the year before— prior to dedicating my free time to real-world, off-campus ventures— I was a co-director. I did the casting, the artistic direction, and I also helped plan V-Day events, which is a huge fucking bureaucratic ordeal at this college. Despite the logistical nightmare, we managed to put together a program the week before the play called The [Name of our college] Monologues, which gave students the opportunity to write and read aloud their own vagina monologues. It was powerful, powerful stuff.

I didn’t begin writing this post to gush about my love for all things VagMons (though, come on, even the t-shirts are awesome). I actually started out discussing something entirely different: how doing erotic photography is helping me reclaim my body from traumatic events in my past. I only got about two sentences in before I realized that it wouldn’t make much sense unless I talked about that past first, but I didn’t really know how to do it. Then I remembered the piece I read for The [Name of our college] Monologues. It wasn’t much of a reading; in spite of all of my flair for the theatrical, I could only manage a shaky recitation.  But afterwards I was really glad I did it. Now I’m really glad that I have the piece to share again, so I can explain my experiences without having to re-tell that awful story for the umpteenth uncomfortable time.  I’m glad I have this so that, in my next post, I can move on to writing about moving on.

Without further ado, but with plenty of {()}vagina{()} <3love<3  and a *Trigger warning for fairly intense descriptions of harassment/abuse and self-injury*:

Manual

(Or, How I Learned About My Body and How It Is Controlled)

This is not a vagina monologue.  This is a hand monologue.  It relates to vaginas only as much as one corner of the body relates to another– which is to say, a lot.

Being in that classroom exhausted me.  But it wasn’t til later that this deep, pathological exhaustion set in; sitting in there at the age of thirteen, gripping my notebook, I was never tired.  I was inhabited by a sort of caffeinated energy– a trembling, temporary force that didn’t pull me from the grasp of enfeeblement so much as tighten its grip and shake me within its fist. It rattled me to the tips of my own clenched fingers, this intensely powerful powerlessness.  I had no choice but to be hyper-aware of how my whole body moved.

I was very aware of my right hand, for example.  I did an experiment with it once. I had it press a pen lightly to my notebook and then I had my wrist move very slowly to the right.  I was so sad– and so relieved– seeing the level of seismic activity the ink revealed.  Then I realized that my tremors proved nothing. They did not prove that I was afraid any more than they proved that I was experiencing a side effect of my medication.  They did not prove that he was the source of any such fear any more than they proved that I was the source: crafting him into a villain for reasons that are still unclear.  No, the only thing that the tremors proved was that my hand was not completely under my control.

So I tried another experiment: I raised my hand for every question.  It didn’t matter whether or not I knew the answer– didn’t matter to me, or to him, because he still picked me.  Terrified– and knowing for sure now, the source of my terror– I stopped volunteering.  But he kept pointing at me, as if my hands had moved.  The way he kept calling on me, I wondered if they really had.  (Most of the time he said my last name.  He would start with a title: “Missss–”, and then he would look around the room, and many times his eyes would lock on me, and his hissing would be cut short by the iteration of my last name. Occasionally he used my first name– so occasionally, in fact, that it became almost intimate.  He transformed my name, my very identity, into something that made my face burn.)  The other kids thought it was funny.  They made a game out of predicting when he would call on me, when he would sit on my desk.  There was no point in guessing when he would look at me, because that was most of the time; from the front of the room, for two periods of history; from his desk at the back of the room, for a period of Spanish and then a period of study hall. Three hours a day.  It was so eery: everyone saw it, but no one took it seriously.  I thought that I was losing my mind, and I thought for sure that I was losing my body.

My hypothesis then became a theory, that I was not– that this body was not entirely mine.  I started to watch it from the dark inside. I would peer down from the very edges of my eyes, ostensibly at my notebook, but really, secretly, at the freckle on my sternum.  I watched how it moved with my breath.  Sometimes I took shallow breaths; other times I inhaled deeply, with disbelief and shame.  It was like I wanted him to see me.  I hated my self for this, and I hated my body.  After a deep breath, after the deep desire for him to look, there was an even deeper desire for his gaze to simply break my ribs.  I wanted to see my sternum crack and that freckle come to a fluttering halt.

There were a few times when it did stop moving.  Not from any physical trauma, no; but because I held my breath, because I was alone with him.  When he decided to hold me after school, keep me during lunch, pull me from another class– it wasn’t like I could say ‘no.’  But my body said ‘no.’  I wasn’t sure if this was proof that it was still mine– acting out my real desire to flee, or if this was only further evidence that it was not mine at all– it didn’t listen to what I told it to do.  My heart did not slow down, my stomach did not stop churning, my skin did not stop sweating or blanching.  And most of all, my hands would not. stop. shaking.

That one day in February was the worst; the more I tried to control them, the harder they shook.  They looked absurd, as if they were trying to fly away– trying to leave me. I didn’t want him to see.  I did something that my choir director had taught us to help us hold still up on stage for an hour straight: put my hands down at my sides and pinched the fabric of my skirt between my knuckles.  I sang songs in my head.  But he still saw me shaking, and I still heard him when he told me that he did: “You couldn’t possibly be more terrified right now.” He smiled.  Then everything went white, like my skin, and then I couldn’t see or feel.  My body had finally left me, like my hands had been trying to do all along.

As quickly as the whiteness took over, it dissolved, and I was back inside myself again.  But from then on my body was firmly out of my control.  My hands… tried to destroy the rest of my physical self.  One day when I was curling my hair I realized that my hands had turned the iron on my arm instead.   It happened again a few days later.  And then it was happening regularly, and my nails started tearing at my skin, too, and my fingers kept picking things up– pins and glass and knives and razor blades– and using them against me.  I was horrified.  I was so angry at them; how could they do this?  Other times I felt tenderly toward them; maybe, I thought, they’re just trying to find me again, digging under my skin to see if I’m still in there.

I hid the damage that my hands did, mostly with long sleeves, but somehow I still think he knew.  I think that’s why he started to back away, and I think that’s when the exhausted desperation washed over me.  If even he didn’t want me anymore, then who would? I sat quietly at the back of the class, where he disposed of me, and I watched his hands shake, one of them gripping a mug that– we had thought– was filled with coffee.  He did not look at me anymore.

One day, right before the end of the school year, he kept me after class again.  I was too far gone to be afraid, and he was too drunk to even smile.  Instead, he looked at me grimly and confessed that he knew what I was doing to myself.  I could have strangled him then, or I simply could have confessed that I knew what he was doing to himself, too.  I did neither.  I simply looked at both of our hands, noted how they shook in unison.  That’s when I realized just how long it would take to get my body back from him and under my control again.  Nearly seven [now eight] years later, I am exhausted, but I am almost there.

Subtitle: Dear Lori, Fuck You Very Much. Again. Love, Life.

[Edited for clarity on 3/1, 3:45 PM; Update added 4:30]

*Trigger warning for just about everything (harassment, physical and sexual abuse, gaslighting, victim-blaming, abuse apologism, self-injury, substance abuse and psychological distress)

Despite any and all appearances to the contrary, I am remarkably skilled at keeping things in perspective. Like all skills, this was developed over time and, like the greatest and most life-consuming skills (e.g. writing or killing people with one’s bare hands), was honed out of necessity.  I’ve probably been working on ‘perspective!‘ since becoming moderately socially aware at the age most children do— five or six or so— because it was then that I also began manifesting the behaviors of a severe Obsessive-Compulsive, something most children do not do. In such circumstances it doesn’t take a baby genius to realize she’s Behaving Very Irrationally and Should Probably, Seriously Watch That.  Watching it, of course, didn’t make it go away, and after trying to guilt and then smack it out of me, my dad finally thought to take me to a shrink around the age of nine, and the shrink thought to give me some SSRIs. The Prozac actually succeeded at making me pretty fucking normal. In fact, for a few years my life seemed to be entirely fucking normal, and I became as indulgently over-dramatic as any other healthy pre-teen. (Unnecessary supporting fact: my diary entry on September 11th, 2001 began with a recounting of the day’s tragic events and how they were revealed to me: by the unhinged rantings of our WWII-veteran Spanish substitute, who blamed them on the ‘idiotic’ nature of kids these days like ‘you, boy!’ ‘Boy’ just so happened to be the boy with whom I was completely infatuated, and this allowed me to segue into the other great tragedy of that day: the realization that he would never like me back.)

Well thank God for being severely sexually harassed by a pedophilic teacher, amIright? After that whole nine-month affair (which is far, far more complicated than that post might have let on), I was left alternately thinking ‘It’s all in your head, you stupid, crazy, self-centered bitch‘ and ‘It happened, and it was entirely your fault.‘ I was also left with medication-resistant chronic Major Depression, a self-injury addiction, and the never-fading social Dark Mark that is an institutionalization. Yeah, that really got me considering perspective again. I remember my shrink (the same one from when I was the OCD-flavor of crazy) gently telling me that, “You wouldn’t know a tennis ball if it hit you in the head, because people have been launching tomatoes at you your whole life and calling them tennis balls.” She was pointing out that my father was abusive and the rest of my family made excuses for him, and that my family, friends, classmates, other teachers, the teacher’s union, the principal, and the super-intendent made excuses for my abusive teacher.  ”I shouldn’t tell you this… and I can’t tell you anything more… but you’re not the first one to have complained about Mr. X,” she confessed. I considered the few whispered rumors I’d heard, the strange and telling reactions of the school administrators, and then I considered the fact that my therapist had pulled her daughter out of my class and put her into a private school the previous year.  Then I contemplated the fact that my dad did sometimes hit me and throw things at me and call me a cunt and my teacher did constantly leer at me and invade my personal space and use humiliating innuendoes in reference to me. It wasn’t a Hollywood-style ‘breakthrough’; it took months for it to fully sink in. But I did eventually recognize that despite being Officially Crazy and despite the sheer statistical improbability, I was actually one of the few sane people in my life, and I was covered in tomato pulp.

I can absolutely reassure you that I didn’t do a 180 and start seeing tomatoes everywhere. I was, and am, life-alteringly aware of how easy it must be to convince yourself and everyone around you that you aren’t causing any harm— that you’re just playing tennis. I encountered such an ability in that teacher, and then in another teacher my first year of high school (which is not-so-coincidentally when I stopped going to school). And yes, I encountered it in the dozens and dozens of grown men who wanted me to send naked pictures to them when I was 15 and 16, and the half-dozen grown men who actually met up with me for sex. While I recognize that I am not like them and never will be, I might just wake up one day and find I’m like my father, whose bone-crushingly, heart-stompingly, gut-wrenchingly, cliche-inducingly, awful ability to hit me in the face and call it private business has been the most painful of all, resulting in him and the rest of the family blaming me, still, for the child abuse charges that were brought against him by the state. As hyper-aware as I am of being hit with tomatoes, I am terrified of looking down one day to realize that I’m the one throwing them, just like dear old dad. After all, if I’m an Obsessive-Compulsive in remission and a barely functioning chronic Major Depressive, wouldn’t it also make sense if I turned out to be a deluded, violent Bipolar like the person who shares 50% of my DNA and almost twenty full years of my life?

Since finding intersectional feminism and progressive activism, I have been able to check these fears and reassure myself. I’ve also been able to further develop that perspective in recognizing my privilege and acknowledging that, in the global scheme of things, I have been dealt some relatively small issues. Every time I have a day like today I mentally acknowledge that I am not starving, I am not in a war zone, I have never been gang-raped or thrown in a concentration camp or forced to work in a sweatshop for sixteen straight hours for little pay. I’m young and white and middle-class and American, for fuck’s sake, and that is dodging a lot of shit and just as many tomatoes.  I also acknowledge that this doesn’t mean that everything I’m dealing with is easy; the fact that my problems aren’t as bad as ones I’ve never faced has little practical value for my psychological well-being, and so I give myself permission to hurt.

And I give myself permission to write this, to publicly say that I am not doing well right now. The real kicker is that, over the weekend, my Depression seemed to be lifting after weeks of being really, really bad. I was suddenly able to focus on things for more than twenty minutes at a time, and I was able to focus on things I didn’t even really like, like my fucking homework. I was so, so, sososo thankful that I was finally able to sit down and be productive, because I am failing my classes, and my school is threatening to pull my scholarships soon, and I have been using every tactic possible to avoid informing my father about this. Not thirty-six hours ago it finally looked like there was a solution, a spontaneous, tentatively promising solution in the unexpected functioning of my neurotransmitters. Relieved, I popped two of my newly-refilled amphetamine salt pills Sunday evening and sat down with my textbook. I paused.  There was this unfamiliar stirring within me that, I shit you not, actually took a few seconds for me to identify as the desire to be social. I wanted to see people, and talk to them, and to smile with them.

So when it started getting later Sunday night, and Amy came home complaining she had a lot of work to do too,  I cheerily offered her an amphetamine salt pill and then said I’d go buy us some Red Bulls too. She shuffled off to her room, and I energetically grabbed my things, grabbed the door knob, and… then I heard the downstairs door opening. And I didn’t even care! No, that’s not true. I cared… a lot. It’s just that I was in such a good mood that I shrugged it off, turned the door knob anyway, and bumped straight into my neighbor.  And his girlfriend.

“Oh!”
“Hi!”
“Hi! I—”
“This—”
” ‘mgoingonalate-nightcaffeinerun.”
” is Tara.”
“Hi.” I reached out and grasped this tiny, frail, cold dead fish of a hand and smiled.
“This is Lori,” Sam said, almost as if he expected me to forget my own name.
“Nice to meet you! Well! GonnabeoneofthosenightsformeandAmysogonnagetsomeRedBullsobye!”

I paused outside our building, shaking. It was not the generic Aderall. ‘Oh my god… she’s… ugly!‘ I was so genuinely thrown by this that it took me a second to recoup.  When I re-entered my apartment ten minutes later, Sam and Tara were laughing at The Daily Show. I put the chain on the door and walked straight back to Amy’s room still wearing my coat and holding both giant cans of Red Bull.

“Oh my god! I just met Sam’s girlfriend. The one who has been here like, every. single. night. this past week,” I told my roommate, as if by virtue of not being immensely irritated by this last fact she had somehow failed to notice it.
“Uh-oh…”
“And she is UGLY! She’s ugly! Oh my god, dude, she is so ugly, and I’m not even making this up. This is not an envy thing. This is an honest to god what the FUCK?!”
“Holy shit, what?” Amy sounded genuinely shocked and interested, which relieved me, because… let’s put it this way: my relationship with Sam has been an extreme source of tension in the past. I was glad she was sympathetic or at least curious enough to comply when I told her to access Sam’s profile on her Facebook right then and search through his friends list. None of the three Tara’s that came up had clear profile pictures, and it wasn’t until we clicked on the last photo to see the larger version that I knew I’d found her.
“Damn. A private page. Ok, so this is a picture of her taken in front of a building from really far away, which I remind you is something that ugly people use as profile pics all the time. But if you look really—”
“No, dude, shit. I can almost feel the ugliness radiating from her,” Amy replied. She was not being sarcastic. “Is that… is that a moustache? Or is that a—”
“That’s a shadow from her giant beak!”
Amy leaned in closer to the monitor. “Oh… oh man. What the fuck, Sam?”
“Right?!”
“Wow. He is way too good-looking for that,” she said, shaking her head.
“Well, fuck, at least I feel better. I mean, clearly I win this.” I gestured downwards with my hands, which were still clutching the two freezing-cold cans of cough syrup. I was secretly thrilled at the fact that I’d felt good enough to put on make-up, do my hair, and throw on a wrap dress with high-heeled boots instead of jeans and sneakers.
“You do win this one hands down.”
I gave Amy her Red Bull and nodded emphatically. “I am way better looking than his girlfriend, my boyfriend is way better looking than his girlfriend, and, fuck, I can tell just by looking at her that I give way better head.”
“You know I’m Tweeting that last part, right?” she laughed.
“DO IT!” I walked back into the living room and sat down on the futon triumphantly. When my cat meowed at me like she always does I simply whispered back, “Shush. Mommy won.”

I don’t know precisely when Mommy stopped winning, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours later. My increasing resistance to stimulants caused the Aderall to wear off soon enough, and I had already decided to save the Red Bull for the next day. I was going to need it, because I’d somehow failed at getting more than a page of my essay written between midnight and my crashing point.  What I did accomplish was getting one very obvious fact through my psychological defenses: if Sam is into someone who looks like Tara, it has to be for really a serious reason; his feelings for her have to be really, really deep, because Sam doesn’t normally do deep. I immediately remembered the last ‘deep’ relationship Sam had been in, and then everything made sense: the amount of time a woman as white as Tara was spending at his place— our place— in this non-white neighborhood where the only employers of people in her demographic are the university and Sam’s charity for inner-city youth, the hours the two of them were spending t/here— lunch hours!— and this chick’s indeterminate age (the ugly makes it hard to tell): she’s his employee, and she very well might be his intern.  Another one of his interns.

It was around this point that I shut my books and slumped into bed, falling into one of those dreamless sleeps brought on by drug-addled exhaustion. I set my alarm for 8:30 but somehow didn’t wake up til three hours after that. I rolled out of bed and went straight for my Red Bull. I took some more Adderal too, but when I looked at my essay I still felt utterly unmotivated. Amy was gone. The cat was asleep.  Just as I settled back down on the futon and dug my nails into the cushion to release the stimulant-fueled anxiety, I heard Sam and Tara come back for lunch.  They were talking at their favorite volume— just loud enough for me to hear their levity but not loud enough for me to make out their words.  My mood from the previous day had already slipped so far that I simply gave up on that over-due essay and logged on to Fetlife. I told myself I would just finish my nasty drink, and then I’d finally change out of my wrap dress, hop in the shower, and get on with my day.

But I stumbled upon something on FL— I don’t even remember what— that twisted me up inside. Something about ‘the scene,’ consent in ‘the scene’… did the original topic have to do with that or did it just trigger me to think about it? I started to rhythmically clench my jaw and bite my lip, and I pulled up the post I’ve been working on forever about what exactly is so wrong in the local scene. I suddenly felt I very much had to finish it.  ’I can’t finish it,’ I reminded myself. I can’t do it because I can’t figure out who’s throwing the tomatoes. Or if they’re tomatoes. I can’t… I’m still too close to it to know what happened.

I got up to pace and ponder this, but I was distracted by the voices across the hall. ‘Why are they still here? Why are they still loud?’ I stopped pacing by my apartment door, and I stopped chewing my lip. I simply bit down and held my breath. I could hear the shapes of their words, could make out the feelings behind them. It was upbeat, boring banter—couple’s banter. I must have stood there for ten minutes, barely moving, thinking about couples and consent and abuse and space, personal space, personal space. Then Sam’s voice: ”…like in that letter I wrote you for Valentine’s Day…” They were the only words I made out before I turned and walked back into my living room. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. I don’t know from tomatoes.

I sat down and convinced myself not to knock on his door and ask, “What about Valentine’s Day, Sam? Did you forget the drunk text you sent me three nights before asking if I was around?” No, no that wasn’t what I really wanted to ask him. What I wanted to ask was, “What about the time you offered to move out? Is that still on the table?” What I wanted to know about was my space, my personal space.

Personal space… I couldn’t write about it, couldn’t write about ‘the scene,’ but I could find other people’s words. Would that convince me to write? I dug through FetLife forum archives for hours, and I guess I found what I was looking for here, and in the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of victim-blaming comments in related threads. How could anyone know from a tomato after reading those? I crumpled up inside, resigned to not writing anything about ‘the scene.’ By that point it was 4:30 in the afternoon, and I’d missed both my classes.

And something was going on in the stairwell. Sam and Tara had been moving in and out for a while, and I’d been so wrapped up in reading variations on ‘bitch is lying’ that it hadn’t really registered. Now that it had, I looked through the peephole. Tara was bringing something into his apartment.
“Where should I put it?” she shouted.
Sam’s voice from down the stairs, “For now I guess you can put it with the rest of your purses.”

I recoiled. There was a white-hot flash in my whole body, a kind of breaking feeling I hadn’t experienced since… probably since the pregnancy scare with him. No, since finding out about… since… that thing in ‘the scene?’ I turned off all the lights, turned down the heat, locked myself in my room with booze and sleeping pills and a razor blade and hid under my blanket. I drank a few bottles of beer and then cut for the first time since I don’t even want to try to remember when. Finally around one I took two sleeping pills.

It’s past six A.M. now. Nothing worked. I still don’t know how to tell my dad I won’t be renewing the year-long lease on this place in August for my final semester. An extra four months, and possibly eight more after that if I can’t find a sublet-er? No. Nonononono. I’m not doing that, but I can’t tell my father why. And I can’t tell him there might not even be another semester. How can I explain this completely disabling Depression to him? How can I explain the triggers? How can I explain what it is to have never had a place to feel safe? He is the master of tomato-slinging, and I have to tell him where all this pulp is coming from.

Fuck this metaphor. I’m taking two or three more sleeping pills and calling it a very long day.

Update

Are you familiar with the old-school Nickelodeon show Hey Arnold! ? Are you familiar with the Pigeon Man episode? Allow me to (re-)familiarize you, because it is exactly how I feel today:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAhScVuMhgg]

(It’s only eleven minutes, and it’s cute. Just watch it. Update: If you can’t watch or listen, there’s a summary at the end of this piece.)

No, I don’t feel like Arnold, or like Chester the pigeon, or like… well, actually, I often feel like Helga. I think I loved this show so much as a kid because I had a unibrow and a dysfunctional family and an unrequited crush on a gold-hearted, gold-haired guy (who admittedly did not have a football head). This particular episode stuck with me, though, because I so did not identify with the Pigeon Man. Yes, Helga was pretty misanthropic, but, geez, it’s not like she stopped living with people altogether. How could anyone do that?

In the thirteen or so years since I first saw this episode, I have definitely come to understand how someone could do that. On several occasions, I have rather wanted to do that myself. Today is one of those occasions. I am fed up with exactly every person in my life. I broke up with my boyfriend last night after we had a wonderful time together, because he thought it would be really funny to joke about me calling the cops on my dad *just* for hitting me in the face (because, right, that was the ultimate and proximate cause, and of course that wouldn’t be enough). We had been talking about the shitty child welfare system, and I’d just harked back to that time (which, not-so-coincidentally, was also a time I felt like living with pigeons). My boyfriend, drunk, sort of bumped into me. “Hey, don’t call the cops on me,” he remarked.

Instead of losing it like Helga might have, I stewed for another hour or so, until we were both back at my apartment. Then I brought it up. Then I screamed at him. Then I told him we were done and threw him out. I slammed the door loud enough to probably wake up Sam and Tara, which reminded me how much I hate my neighbor. I’m also completely tired of my roommate, who always expects me to listen to her run-of-the-mill problems without ever allowing me to talk about my not-so-run-of-the-mill ones.  Do you know what she said to me when I blurted out that some guy (that sketch artist) had tried to assault me? “Well…. did you report it?!”

That exasperated, accusatory question was her only immediate reaction. Not “Oh my god, I’m sorry”, or “Do you want to talk about it?”, or “That guy must have been a complete fuckwad.” So, no, I haven’t told her about my kink or my sex work, because why the fuck would I? Oh, and do you know what my Vagina Monologues cast-and-crewmates said to me after I told them I had to drop out of the play to go into the hospital? Nothing. Not a fucking word. As if I had decided to drop out the week before the play just  to spite them.

These women, my roommate, they’re self-professed feminists. They’re also complete fucking asshole, victim-blaming, ableist shit-heads. My neighbor? Graduated from Yale and stopped playing professional sports to devote his life to underprivileged inner-city kids, and he thinks it’s appropriate to lie to his only neighbor and constantly cajole her in order to get laid. My now ex? Also a victim of child abuse at the hands of his dad, also thinks it’s appropriate to mock. Let’s not even talk about my parents, or my brother, or my grandparents, or my other friends. Let’s not, because I’m fucking tired.

I slept all day today. I was supposed to go to see my shrink (which probably would have been at least a little helpful, no?), but I forgot when the appointment was and since I lost my phone a few days ago, I couldn’t call and ask. Way to go, self. Yeah, did I mention I’m one of the people in my life I’m tired of? Because I am, and so that means I’m pretty much tired all the time. All I want to do is sleep, and then I want to get on that plane to San Francisco on Monday and never come back. The only thing that’s keeping me from doing that, honest to god, is my cat.

Of course they’ll come back— they’re birds. I trust them, I understand them. It’s people I don’t understand. You see, Arnold, it’s time for me to leave here. Some people are meant to be with people, and others, like me, are just different.

Maybe I’ll bring Panda with me and become the Cat Lady of Alcatraz. Yes, I’ll just grab her and fly toward the sun.

_________

Video Summary:

This short cartoon about a young blonde boy (Arnold) living in an unnamed city opens with soft music on the rooftop of a building. Arnold is training his three carrier pigeons, Lester, Fester, and Chester, the last of whom is acting strangely. Arnold brushes off the pigeon’s odd behavior and ties a letter to his leg for the bird to deliver to his friend Gerald.

The cartoon cuts to several hours later, on the stoop of the same building. Arnold comes out of the front door to see a bunch of his classmates waiting for him so they can play baseball. Gerald hasn’t arrived yet, and Helga, a young blond girl, teases Arnold for summoning him via carrier pigeon. Soon afterwards, Gerald, a young black boy, runs up and claims that there’s something wrong with Chester. The bird is flying erratically behind him, and then suddenly stops and plummets towards the ground. Arnold dives and catches Chester in his glove and says he has to take him to the vet. Another friend suggests he take the bird to “The Pigeon Man,” but Arnold doesn’t know who that is.

Gerald proceeds to tell the legend of The Pigeon Man, which has been “handed down from kid generation to kid generation”. He describes man who lives in “the pet shop district”among flocks and flocks of pigeons and claims that he’s rumored to be half-man, half-bird, perhaps of extraterrestrial origin. Another theory Gerald shares holds that the Pigeon Man is just a deranged guy in a chicken suit. After he’s finished his tale, the other kids clap for him, then repeatedly warn Arnold against visiting the “crazy, psychopathic freak.”  Now convinced that Pigeon Man is the only one who can save Chester, Arnold sets off anyway.

We cut to Arnold making his way up the stairs in an old, abandoned building filled with pigeons. On the roof he finds an elaborate maze of coops and cages, and among them, a man with a beak-like nose and an aviator hat caring for his birds. Arnold hands Chester to the man, who doesn’t talk at first, but simply examines the sick pigeon. Eventually he speaks, only to let Arnold know to leave the bird with him and come back the following day.

The next scene shows Arnold back on his stoop, explaining to his classmates that the Pigeon Man is not a psychopath. The boy then returns to the abandoned building to pick up Chester, who the Pigeon Man has cured with “time, patience, and the right berries.” Arnold talks to him about his life working with birds and asks if he ever gets lonely. The Pigeon Man claims he doesn’t, and they proceed discuss the man’s childhood, discovering that Arnold attends the same elementary school that the Pigeon Man went to. The recluse then reveals that his friends abandoned him when he was Arnold’s age and that he no longer trusts people. He then introduces himself as Vincent, and Arnold proceeds to invite him out for pizza, which Vincent has admitted to missing.

Three of Arnold’s classmates see the two out eating lunch and decide to go mess with the Pigeon Man’s stuff, “You know, like take all the birdseed out of one bag and put it in another bag!” The three boys run through Vincent’s building, knocking over all of his things and throwing them about. Eventually the birds attack them, and the kids knock over the rest of Vincent’s bird coops while escaping.

When Arnold and Vincent return, Arnold is shocked to find that the place has been destroyed. Vincent seems to have been expecting it, and in a resigned tone he tells Arnold that he has to leave. Then he imparts the words of wisdom quoted in this piece, admits to Arnold that he does appreciate his friendship, and reminds him to”always wash your berries before you eat them, and fly toward the sun.” The pigeons  grab onto parachute strings in Vincent’s coat and fly him off into the sunset.

[Edited for clarity on 5/3, 1:50 AM]

“And you say,/ ‘Hey I don’t understand/ you and your big city secret,/ big city secret.’ ”    

-Joseph Arthur

At first I thought it was an optical illusion. For over half an hour the only light out the window had been the bulb on the wingtip; I figured the scattering of gold was the bulb blinking, refracting through the mist, and landing back on the metal surface of the plane. It took a few seconds to register that the glittering was thousands of feet below. Were we in California yet? Maybe Nevada? I pulled the magazine out of the seat pocket in front of me and flipped to the map in the back. Surely we were no longer above Idaho or Wyoming. We’d passed over the Dakotas hours ago, and I’d struggled to catch a glimpse of the parts of my country I never expected to even approach.

The flight had been exceedingly dull. I’d hoped to sit next to someone interesting, but my seat mates were like everyone else on the plane: dressed in stuffy suits and sitting silently. The last person who had approached me had done so several hours and several thousand miles ago, in Penn Station. Despite the fact that I was stuffing my face with a bagel and wearing earbuds, the man (also in a suit) had felt it imperative to tell me that I had beautiful hair. I gave him a dead look and watched him hurry off. Three minutes prior another man had come up to bother me, asking for directions in a heavy accent and waiting for his daughter to better explain them in what I think was Russian. That man I didn’t mind. But the one after and before— another business man, this one intent on telling me about my face— made me want to spit cream cheese like a camel… if camels ate bagels. So I’d resolved not to even approximate That Guy on the airplane and instead went from book to book, playlist to playlist, eventually putting everything away to search for the lights. When I saw them I knew we had to be close.

Would some of those lights be the Golden Gate? I was suddenly very intent on seeing it, on proving to myself that I was where I wasn’t supposed to be. I mean, Lori was certainly expected to be in San Francisco, but me? No, I wasn’t supposed to be on a plane to anywhere, and as far as almost everyone knew, I wasn’t. I’d left my cell phone at home to make sure it stayed this way, because, being in college, my parents still pay my bills. What would I say if they saw a call from California on the next month’s phone bill?

“What in the fuck were you doing out there? How did— how did you afford that? What were you doing? Was this some modeling thing? What were you doing?”

“Something like what you were doing, Dad,” I’d reply, and with that the imaginary conversation ended. In real life, of course, my Dad could never be blindsided, could never be shut up. It was true, though, that San Francisco had always been his secret, his city. A print of the skyline had hung on our living room wall when I was growing up: black and white, before and after– 1906 and 1986. My father had talked about the earthquake like he talked about Kennedy, as if both national tragedies were early traumatic memories of his. I couldn’t explain his fascination with the place, and so I assumed it had something to do with its warm locale and exotic architecture. He likes those things– tropical places, nice buildings. That’s the fascination.

The real fascination became clear when he left, when he took San Francisco and a bunch of the furniture and moved to a shitty condo twenty minutes away. The whole time he lived there the city sat in the corner; it had no rightful place in that apartment. Nothing did. I resented its impassivity about this, about everything. Each time my father yelled the photograph remained still, glazed over, frozen in time. It looked coolly back out at me as if to taunt, “He loves me too, but he can’t hurt me. He loves me too, but I don’t even care.” I wanted to affect it, to break it, as a matter of fact— break it again. 1906, 1986, 2000. 

A few months later, at the end of the summer, my father left again, this time for San Francisco itself. I don’t think I ever would have known if it hadn’t been for the post card that my mother bitterly tossed at my brother and me. “Our twentieth anniversary,” she whispered. “And where is my husband? Off in California f— ooling around with men.” The postcard was a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, stretched out to its full, red length. It didn’t answer her; it didn’t have anything to say. I, of course, had a lot to say, but I wasn’t allowed to. My father’s coming out of the closet was a semi-secret: I could talk about it, but only with my brother and my mom, and only sometimes. Now didn’t seem like one of those times. Strangely, this silence about who my father was never bothered me. Or, not-so-strangely, really, when you consider his other secret, this one also shared amongst the four of us but never, ever spoken about: my father was becoming unpredictably violent.

When I looked out the airplane window on Monday night, I decided that this was no longer in any way related to the scattered shimmering below. San Francisco was mine now, my secret— my broken, beautiful, perverted city. And I had somehow made it there.  I pulled out my book on ecofeminism (had I brought it because I really want to read it, or because I wanted to assure myself I wasn’t betraying my ideals?) and settled in to wait for the flight to land. My powers of concentration were surprisingly strong. I wasn’t really anxious anymore.

________

This thought really settled in when I stood in the airport bathroom fixing my make-up. I’d worn the blue concert t-shirt to reassure myself and everyone else, but in the dim light of my destination and growing resolve, it seemed stupid: “Be kind to me/ or treat me mean,/ I’ll make the most of it,/ I’m an extraordinary machine (Fiona Apple, 2005.)” Real subtle, I thought. And the cartoon snail is a nice touch. I reassured myself that I looked hipster-chic and not childishly silly, though of course there’s a fine line between the two. But at least my make-up and hair looked good. This had struck me as important, because I’d decided that being picked up from the airport by Kink was kind of like being picked up for a date with a guy from OK Cupid: I had to make sure my first meatspace impression was a good one. I also had to make sure not to get killed.

First, though, I had to make sure that my ride was even coming. Since I had no cell phone with which to do this, I had to find a pay phone. I made my way quickly through the quiet terminal, not letting myself stand still on the moving walkways while still making sure to look carefully for any telephones that might be lurking in corners. I’d figured that, of any places left in the United States that should still have pay phones, airports had to be among the most likely, and yet I reached the escalator to the baggage claim without seeing anything besides a courtesy phone. I hadn’t checked any bags, having decided that it would be cheaper than $50 to purchase more toiletries, but I decided to go down to the baggage carousel anyway. There had to be a pay phone near there.

There’s one! Yes! I am awesome. I mentally patted myself on the back for— for the airport having a phone? and removed my notebook from my tote bag. As if to confirm any observer’s suspicion that I was a luddite, I proceeded to read from my hand-written itinerary (my printer is broken, I swear), scanning for the right phone number. I fumbled the area code the first time and pulled out more quarters, unreasonably embarrassed with myself given how desolate the place was. The second time, I succeeded.

“Uh, hi.” I cleared my throat (my head cold from Sunday wasn’t completely gone) and introduced myself as, simply, “Lori.” My embarrassment was bad enough, so I neglected to mention that I was the Adorable Lori; I figured I was probably the only one with that first name waiting for a Kink driver at SFO at 10:30 that night anyway.

“Oh good!” the man exclaimed. “I was afraid you’d bailed. I waited there for two hours and—”

“I’m— I’m sorry. My flight just got in.” It was an hour late.

“No problem! I’ll be there in, like, five minutes. Where are you?” he asked.

“I, uh…” I looked around. “I’m down by the baggage claim?” Stupid, stupid. “For United?” Not helpful.

“Okay, well go outside and tell me what number you see.”

“Outside? I— I can’t— just, uh, let me know what number to meet you at.”

“Well what number are you near?” he repeated.

I gritted my teeth. “I’m on a pay phone, actually. My cell…. died.” It was easier to explain than the truth was.

“Okay, well what are you wearing?”

“A blue t-shirt, and…jeans, and… Oh! I’m carrying a bright green bag. Like, very green. Electric lime. It’s obnoxious.” Thanks for that Christmas present, Mom.

“Green bag. Okay, I’ll find you. I’m in a white pick-up truck.” He hung up.

White pick-up truck…where do I— I realized that my first serious boyfriend had driven a white pick-up truck. I smiled, wondering what Rick would think now. Would he be pissed? Worried? This was incredibly shady: waiting for a man in a truck to take me to the headquarters/models’ quarters of the porn company I was going to be shooting for the following day. But then, I’d met Rick in a chatroom when I was 16  and he was 23, and we got together for the first time at a nearby mall, where I’d waited for him to pick me up in his white truck. The more things change, I thought, the more they still end with me wandering around looking for creepy guy in a white pick-up truck.

I decided to walk down to the first exit door near the highway off-ramp. That way I would be sure to catch my chauffeur as soon as he pulled in. After waiting for ten minutes minutes, however, I figured that he might have already arrived. I started cursing myself and turned around to head back to the pay phone when I heard a voice from behind me. “Lori?” It was coming from a black pick-up truck, but there was no reason for me to doubt that it was him. The initials on my day-glow gym bag wouldn’t have led a stranger to guess my name was Lori. “Hi!” He got out and opened my door, and I didn’t hesitate to climb in. Be kind to me, or treat me mean…

_________

To be continued….

Update:         Part 2,        Part 3,         Part 4

Trigger warning for harassment, abuse and self-injury.

My hair is longer right now than it’s ever been. Mostly it’s because I’m lazy and broke— if I can put off riding the subway to a SuperCuts, I will. I’ve been able to put it off for six months now without getting any weird looks, because I’m a woman, and I’m young, so long, wild hair isn’t an issue. In fact, long, wild hair is expected of a young, sexual woman. It’s even a sine qua non for some folks. And this, I am ashamed to admit, is the other, tiny, lizard-brain-dwelling reason why I will put off a haircut as long as possible: I am afraid that, like Samson, I’ll lose something of my power if I chop off any of my hair.

I cling to long hair like I cling to the sex appeal of youth, because hair is an indicator of age and sexuality. It’s also an indicator of gender, of race, even of ideology. Having the ‘right’ hair is having a significant measure of privilege in our society. Every time I go to the hairdresser’s, I’m afraid I’ll change my social status and lose my privilege; somehow, I think, I’ll end up getting rid of more than an inch or two of hair. I am afraid this will happen because the more I think about it, the more I want it to happen. Fear makes me angry, being angry makes me want to say ‘fuck you’, and I know that nothing says ‘fuck you’ to oppressive social norms quite like radically altering one’s own appearance (and this thought makes me afraid again, and the cycle continues…)

I know this because I’ve said ‘fuck you’ like this before. Twice.

The summer after eighth grade, after this bullshit had ended and the self-injury bullshit had begun, I took scissors to my shoulder-length hair and just started chopping. It was the day after my grandfather had had a massive heart-attack, and though we weren’t particularly close, it was traumatic because it was the first time I’d ever faced down the death of a family member. I remember looking at myself in my bedroom mirror that afternoon and getting angry at my appearance for no real reason. I needed to do something. So without any preparation, I picked up the craft scissors and sliced off three sections of my hair that were large enough to prevent me from changing my mind. An hour later I had a hirsute dresser, a scraggly pixie cut ,and a sense of regret that was anguishing. The anguish was in turn cathartic.

The second time I chopped off all of my hair was a few months later. I didn’t have much hair to chop, but what little I did cut off meant more than all the hair I’d gotten rid of that August, because it left me nearly bald. I had practically shaved my head. I was so shocked by my appearance that before I walked out of the bathroom, I put a towel over my head so as not to similarly frighten my mother. I’ll never forget the look on her face when I said, “Mom, I have something to tell you.”

“Oh god! What did you do?”

“I cut my hair again.” I thought this would calm her down, but it didn’t. I might as well have told her that I set my head on fire. When I took off the towel, though, she calmed down, shook her head, and just walked away.

I think this was the reaction I was going for. I didn’t want the outrage I got from my drama teacher (we were doing a period piece; he was apparently unfamiliar with the popularity of bonnets in 1860s America) or my choir director (we routinely performed in operas and for the governor; she probably had reason to freak out). I wanted fear followed by disappointment followed by indifference. Most of all, I think, I wanted this reaction from Mr. Z, my ninth grade history teacher.

Somehow, another history teacher had taken an inappropriate interest in me, and I didn’t know what to do about it. His approach was different from that of Mr. X, the middle school teacher. Mr. Z actually hung out with his students, ingratiated himself with them. Everyone knew why: when they turned eighteen, he moved in. He began grooming a few girls every freshman year, and there was probably something about my damaged self that attracted him. As I eventually learned, shaving my head had only further proved to him that I was damaged— an easy target. But a target he had to leave alone for a while. For a few weeks after I shaved my head, he rather backed off.

He was busy with his current target anyway. The first time I saw him flirting with this girl after I cut my hair– buzzed it, for all practical purposes– something weird snapped in me. I realized this when I re-read my old diaries a few weeks ago (not that I had forgotten, I just never really remembered):

[I edited this for clarity, but I'd still like to preface my fourteen-year-old prose with a general sic]

I was trying very, very hard to concentrate on Israel and Palestine but it was near impossible. Every time I looked up, there he was; every time I DIDN’T look up, there he was. I saw him sitting with the popular girls, heard him talking with them. In 1973… 1973… It was no use. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally, I went to sign [my name on the attendance sheet sitting on his table.] Well, it was the girls’ table really– who ever heard of a teacher going to sit with his female students in a huge cafeteria study hall… when people are STUDYING… and there are plenty of other places to sit? I found that Z [had finally gotten up] and I heard the one older girl say [in his absence]: “Remind me again why we’re sitting with Z?” Little did she know he had just walked up behind her again. He pretended he didn’t hear, and I went back to my seat with Ellen and Melissa, and once again, tried very, very hard to concentrate on HIS subject. But he was laughing and talking with these girls the whole time! I caught one sentence in particular: “You don’t think he’s hot? All of my Junior girls think he’s hot,” he was saying about another male history teacher. It was so obnoxious, and moreover, it was so creepy! I was going to fail his class, because he was loudly flirting with girls my age. Fabulous. I grew sicker and sicker as the period went on, my stomach churning and gurgling and flipping.[...]

The rest of the day I felt this sickness. I was going to fail, Z was a pervert, my life was a mess. I wanted to cut so, so badly, but I never got the chance. I finally went to the bathroom during Health, right before his period. I wanted to cut, but suddenly my most important concern was… putting on make-up? Was I trying to impress him? Did I want him to look at me and not those other girls? How was it he could ignore me when I was studying for HIS SUBJECT anyway? Why should I CARE???? I put my makeup away when I was finished and was about to reach for the plastic knife I had put in my bag at lunch, but I knew I didn’t have enough time. I went back to Health class.

I next found myself sitting in his classroom. We reviewed for his test. I didn’t do very well and he was upset. I felt like maybe letting him know why I hadn’t memorized the information yet. Of course, this wasn’t going to happen. EVER. So I sat still and listened to my stomach[...]

After [getting home] I sat down with a pen and made flash cards of things that had happened in Israel. Something I had planned on doing that morning.

I went back [to the high school auditorium for 6 o'clock call time] for the play like I was supposed to. It went well. Before hand, I even got to fix Alex Norton’s hair and he saw me undress and change into my costume. “Oh… sorry” he said as I stood there in my bra. I didn’t care. I was more worried he saw my arms. God, he’s so cute. But a Junior. [...]

Play went well. I was happy[...]

My dad was depressed and not very talkative when I asked him what he thought about the play. He [took me home to Mom's] and left without saying much. Mom was home from her business trip, and [my brother was in the basement,] playing video games. There was cursing and screaming and this God-awful noise coming from below. [My brother] was angry again. This is not unusual. The noises went on for awhile, during which time I felt sick and notes about Israel were open in front of me. The noises went on still and I heard steps on the stairs– [my brother] coming up. I didn’t want to deal with his shit anymore. I got up and held the door to the basement tight, planning to calm [my brother] down while he was still on the landing. I was not putting up with this anymore. My mom didn’t like this. She beat me with her fists until I let go, saying “What the fuck do you think you’re doing to your brother?” and I told her I was going to calm him down but she kept hitting and I let go. He came after me with a knife and I locked myself in the bathroom. I ran a comb across my skin, the first sharp thing to touch it in the longest time– three weeks. It felt nice and I sank down onto the floor. Besides me, a drawer was opened. An old razor was in it. I picked it apart with a bobby pin [and dragged one of the blades across my skin]. No razor had ever been as sharp as this one. It tore through my wrist without the slightest hint of pressure. It felt nice. After a while, my mom banged on the door and asked sweetly, “Honey, are you dead?” I barely heard her over the roar of the fan, but I thought to myself, Yes, yes I am.

[...]

“Gah I cannot do this!” I screamed the next morning as I tossed my history notebook back on the table. “OK, I had the play last night. How was I supposed to have time to study? I had a student council meeting and then I came home, made flashcards for this stupid test… and then it was time for the play! I had other homework to do afterwards!” I announced to Ellen and Melissa. It was ALMOST the [whole] truth. And I’d planned on getting up early, but was so exhausted I got up and turned off my alarm and collapsed back into bed without remembering.[...]

We all talked for a while about how much this test sucked blah, blah, blah, and then the subject slowly turned. We started talking about middle school, and Melissa mentioned how she really loved eighth grade and hated seventh. I said the opposite. She said to me “Oh the only reason you hated 8th grade was because of Mr. X.” After that, I don’t think the conversation was playful anymore. “That is entirely not true,” I remarked. And left it at that. (To be honest, I’m not sure whether that’s true.) (Oh, and did I tell you I learned that Mr. X and Mr. Z are acquaintances, and that they hatedeach other? Probably cause of their politics, and also cause they both dated Ms. I, and maybe even because each sees the worst of himself in the other. Who knows.) And all the while this Mr. X conversation was going on, Ellen was saying how wonderful he was. Meanwhile, I was feeling like crap and trying my hardest to study. The talk died down. Finally I stood up.

“Gah! That’s it. You think if I run to Z crying, he won’t make me take the test?” I asked. They responded with laughter.

“Do it!!!!” Melissa said. We all laughed and talked about it and after my fifth time of threating to do it, I finally strolled over. He was flirting with the same girls as yesterday.

“Psyched about the next student council meeting, [my last name]?” (Did I mention he’s an advisor for that too?!)

“Oh totally,” I said with feigned enthusiasm, sitting down. The girls kind of looked at me weirdly, but he smiled. There was no way in hell I was actually going to cry, so I put on my worried tone. “God, I’m reaaallllyyy going to fail this test.”

He smiled. “Shame.”  Apparently I wasn’t the first to try this.

“What… what’s on it?”

He smilesd again. “Let’s see… Israel and Palestine, India and Pak–”

“Ok, ok, I know. But, like… specifically?”

He smiled yet again. “Probably what’s in your notes.”

I gave him my best eye roll and then said, “God I don’t know if I can even take the test! I mean, I had the play last night and all…

And he smiled. “You can take it. Oh and I’m coming to the play tonight!”

“Woohoo,” I said sarcastically.  And he smiled. The whole time the [other] girls [at the table] had been talking amongst themselves, so it wasn’t terrifyingly quiet. Yet, I still felt like an invading bacteria all the same. Finally I wrapped up the conversation. “Agh fine! I’m studying!” He smiled as I walked back.

“So how did it go?” Ellen asked.

“I didn’t see any tears,” Melissa added[...]

What could I tell them? I wasn’t even sure what had happened. Why couldn’t I get to Z? All of those things he’d been saying to me about short skirts and teachers sleeping with students, his whole reputation, all of the rumors…What did I do wrong?

The week I cut my hair down to stubble was the week I started flirting back with “Z” with a vengeance, and each time I hated myself even more. It’s a secret that, I now realize, is shared by so many kids who are victims of some kind of sexual abuse: at some point we start wanting the attention, and frequently we will try to initiate it. As soon as we do, we tear ourselves to pieces with self-hate. We cut our hair, we flirt again, we cut our arms, we flirt, we put on lipstick and try to cover up the scars, we flirt, we stop going to drama practice and then choir practice and then student council and then school and then take to bed with our razor blades. Of course, it helps the destructive process if our families are also abusive and we already have a history of sexual abuse with another teacher whom our friends inexplicably love.

What were we talking about? Hair. Clearly, hair means more to me personally than all of the myriad things it already means in our society. Cutting off more than a little of my locks again would be a psychologically loaded action, and yet I can’t figure out precisely what it would mean for me. What would I be trying to accomplish now? The same thing I wanted last time, to assert that control over my sex appeal? Would it be a way of trying to prove that I’m not really desirable? That I am really desirable? Would I be trying to sabotage my modeling career or further it by fetishizing myself?

I don’t know. All I know is that there are plenty of beautiful women with very short hair, and plenty of beautiful models with very short hair. I know that whatever I decide to do, it will hardly be the worst thing I’ve done.

Disclaimer: I am going to head some bullshit off at the pass, and explain a few things to my less intelligent and less compassionate readers before they put their fingers to their keyboards. 1) Talking about abuse is not wallowing in it; it’s working through it, and it’s raising awareness that shit like this happens in the mid aughts in upper-middle class white suburbs with top-rated school districts 2) Talking about smaller, specific instances of abuse does not prevent one from acknowledging, caring about, or working to stop other, larger-scale instances of abuse. For example, it is possible to discuss how shitty it is not to be able to study what’s happened in Israel without being distracted by a pedophile teacher or an unstable mother or a brother chasing you with a knife AND ALSO acknowledge that such a situation pales in comparison to a lot of the shit that goes on in the West Bank.  Capice? Capice.

Updated 6/6 with information about the identity of the commenter quoted herein

Trigger warning: for sexist, racist, ableist, slut-shaming language, verbal abuse, and suggestions of physical abuse

——

I am so, so tired of having my sex work, my past abuse, and my mental illness thrown in my face anytime I DARE criticize someone online. I am tired of being called stupid. I am tired of having the fact that I’ve done porn used against me as if it’s a dirty little secret that proves that I have no self-worth, integrity, or intellect. I am tired of not being listened to and being forced to explain myself again and again to no avail, and then being lectured about my impolite tone.

I am tired of getting constant verbal abuse from strangers anytime I dare to point out that something *MIGHT* be problematic.

That’s been my life every few hours for the past week, and if I walk away, the assholes will probably win, but if I keep fighting, my health is liable to get even worse, and the assholes will also probably win. So I’m going with the former option, but not before making clear to everyone that

this

is

bullshit,

and it’s bullshit that I’m not just getting from ideological opponents. I’m getting it from fucking self-professed allies. THAT is why I don’t tell people in my everyday, offline, vanilla life more about myself: because I know that people are almost universally bigoted, hateful, and abusive, and it already literally makes me nauseous and keeps me awake at night.

Before I finally fall asleep, I have some unsolicited advice for people online and off-:

shut the FUCK UP and just listen when someone tells you your shit is oppressive, and do NOT start being a nasty, abusive fuckhead. If you ignore this advice, you’re going to get exactly what you give. I’m no longer above throwing verbal abuse back your way. I don’t just mean snark and mocking. No, I will drag your shit into this too, and I don’t give a fuck what kind of person that makes me, as long as it makes me the kind of person you aren’t going to fuck with anymore.

Oh, and for the people in my life who want to physically abuse me? Reporting it or writing about it just isn’t working for me anymore. I’m carrying a knife on me from now on. Touch me, and I will actually, literally cut you. If you happen to touch me when my knife is inaccessible, I will come back for you. I don’t give a fuck what kind of trouble it gets me into, as long as it means I won’t be having anymore trouble with you.

I can no longer afford to address oppression* and abuse from a moral high ground. Consider this your warning.

*I’m not talking about accidental fuck-ups. I’m talking about persistent, nasty bullshit.

UPDATE 6/2:  I’ve had a huge spike in blog traffic and a huge spike in trollish comments, all thanks to the folks at the second link. I decided to click over there again to see how things had progressed, and it appears that people are deeply troubled by the fact that I am not still engaging with them. Since I’m generous, I’m going to go ahead and let them know *exactly* why I’m not commenting there anymore: because my original comment that the OP “might want to be careful” with gendered, racial stereotypes was met with

explicit racism and sexism, including

• the assertion that most hucksters *are* brown, and that’s just how it is
• the declaration that there aren’t more women atheists because women are just learning science
• ironic sexism in the form of pet names, and the reassurance that this is okay because I have a porn/burlesque name that I use elsewhere with the word ‘adorable’ in it

knee-jerk deflection and denial, including

• assertions that I’m just prejudiced against atheists
• the reassurance that atheists can’t be racist or sexist because they “question everything”
• the suggestion that I should just “act like I belong” and not point out racism or sexism because that only reinforces difference
• the reassurance that no one was trying to be exclusionary
• the accusation that I am playing a victim on purpose by “reading too much into things”

and personal attacks, such as

• accusations of being self-pitying and “crying”
• repeated assertions that I cannot be a real feminist because I do porn and that I lack integrity because of this
• the allegation that the porn I do is pedophillic
• repeated declarations that I can’t write, but at least I’m hot
• repeated declarations that I can’t write, and also I’m not hot
• repeated accusations of being a pseudo-intellectual who just isn’t very smart
• the claim that I don’t know enough about sociology
• the reassurance that I was never slut-shamed (because dragging the fact that I’ve done porn into the argument was simply… relevant?)
• the reassurance that I was only slut-shamed because I “set myself up for it”
• the accusation that I am egotistical, because… something about my ‘About’ page
• the assertion that I only commented to get blog traffic (because I totally knew shit would blow up just from posting three or four one-line comments)
• the stated belief that I have “serious issues”
• the suggestion that I kill myself
• and, finally, the accusation that linking to someone else’s piece as a means of explanation for my original statement is intellectual laziness, followed by the implicit expectation that I should have to deeply engage with people who have just done all of the above things.

This, my atheist friends, is why I don’t want to engage with you. Now please grow up and move on.

Update 6/3: Growing up and moving on doesn’t seem to be a workable option for many people. Maybe it’ll help if I publish one of those comments you all (the people making those comments) are dying to see. But then, really, I need to stop updating this. Please stop giving me such good material.

This is from a chap named Custador (you’ll see he was also one of the guys leaving some of the nastiest comments at the second link) whose email address appears to be gofuckyourself@hotmail.com, and whose IP address is 86.25.245.207

This one’s for you, Lori, since I know you haven’t got the spine to publish it on your own egofest of a blog: You’ve totally misrepresented the discussion at UF, as well as out-and-out lying about the views and opinions of people posting there. Do you even realize that, of the people shouting you down for your bullshit, able-bodied white men were in the minority? I’m quite serious. You behaved like an utter moron and then spat the dummy when you were called on it. Nobody with a firing neuron could read that entire thread and think you came off as anything other than a complete twatwaffle. I know you’re too stupid to absorb what I’m saying, as well as so self-deluding that you’ll never force yourself to examine your own behaviour, and you’ll certainly never do anything so potentially damaging to your false self-image as learning what “feminist” means and comparing it to yourself – because, deep down, you know fucking well that you’re not one. By the way, my other half, who happens to be a former Women’s Officer of Oxford University Union and is a staunch feminist, asked me to tell you that she finds your misogyny disgusting.

Tell your lady friend I say hi!

Update 6/6 

So I just realized that this guy Custador— the same one posting many of the nastiest things in the original thread— is actually the author of the post, and one of the authors of the blog. This isn’t some random Internet troll but a major part of the online atheist community. Stunning.

Four things: 1) I am utterly failing at writing right now. My concentration is so terrible I can’t even string my thoughts together, which is why I’m using numbers. 2)I have been counting down the days until I could move out of this apartment since a month and a half after I moved in, and I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have less than two months left. Fifty-four days, actually. 3) I want to publish something, and I have a lot written in diaries. Plenty of it is about this apartment, and plenty of it written in an elaborate narrative fashion that might qualify  as blog-worthy. 4) In consideration of 1), 2), and 3), I figure that maybe it’s time to let you know what the shit is actually up with my living situation.

One more thing: You should want to read this because it is the proximate cause of my getting involved in kink. Also, it is entertaining in a trashy novella/ soap opera/ Penthouse forum sort of way. Persuasive, right? (I hate to tell you the Penthouse and soap opera parts come later, so I’ll put it in parentheses.) So without further preface-ado, here’s the main ado. It’s a lot of ado, so feel free to bookmark it and stop back next week so I don’t have to publish anything else for awhile:

_______

Unheimlich

Part One
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
In der Angst is einem <unheimlich>. Darin kommt zunächst die 
eigentümliche Unbestimmtheit dessen, wobei sich das Dasein in der Angst 
befindet, zum Ausdruck: das <Nichts und Nirgends>.  <Unheimlichkeit> 
mein aber dabei zugleich das <Nitchtuhause-sein.>

-- Martin Heidegger, as quoted  in House of Leaves, pages 24- 25
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

_____

We didn’t see our apartment until the day we signed the lease— until the day my father signed the lease, in February of 2009.  The landlord had given us a tour of the building’s (only) other apartment, and it was beautiful… and so clean!  Not that that matters.  I  just remember seeing the dishtowel with our university logo and the men’s shaving cream and being incredibly impressed that college boys could keep an apartment looking so nice.  (If I had paid more attention, I would have seen the one detail that confirmed this place was not owned by tidy college boys whose parents could afford a real furniture set: the photographs on the walls were framed.)  It probably helped that the place was completely new— including the pre-installed, black and chrome appliances, and the real stone tiles, and the hardwood floors, and… all of it was cheaper than the one-room dorms.  

“Your apartment will be the same, just the floor plan’s a little different, “ the landlord informed us.   As long as it still had two bedrooms, who cared?   Raj and I would finally be able to close a door without sexiling one of our roommates. 

______

David was roommates with the guy I dated for a year-and-a-half.  He was also good friends with my roommate, Amy, all of which would have been swell if this had been that year-and-a-half that Raj and I were dating. We weren’t even talking to each other.  So, naturally, when Amy went to visit David that night in September of 2009, I stayed on the couch. I went on Facebook.  I was fine with this— really— because work was exhausting me, and I had to get up at six the next morning. I could have gone to bed right then and gotten a glorious nine hours of sleep, but— you know, the Internet is funny like that.  I was wasting my life online when, for the first time, my doorbell rang. Not my buzzer, but my doorbell. ”Shit, fuck, shit, goddamnit, fuck,” I murmured.  I was a mess, my apartment was a mess, even my (long-haired) cat was a mess, but I couldn’t not open the door. I stood up and carefully smoothed out my dress.

_____

Amy and I were careful about conveying our interest to the landlord, but we cautiously let him know we were interested. I also cautiously let my father know we were interested.  He insisted on coming up the next weekend to look at the specific apartment we were going to live in, and it didn’t matter to him if the tenants were busy or if the landlord was busy or if Amy or I were busy or that his foot was broken; he was going to see it right then.  It had taken me several months— several brief-like e-mails and one very long, painful conversation— to convince him to let me live off-campus; I was just relieved that he was following through.  Then he actually came, and I saw the mood that he was in.  I tensed up.

_____

I took a deep breath and opened the door and—

“Hi. I’m Sam.”

Oh, Amy was not lying: this man was objectively, universally attractive. He was painfully attractive; he was one of those few people who, when they walk into a room, make everyone else feel suddenly and totally self-conscious.  He was that guy.  But he was also my type of guy. He was *exactly* my type and not just that; no, he looked like every guy I’d had a crush on growing up thrown into a blender and set to “super crush.”  It was uncanny.  My friends later told me that I must be exaggerating, but I am not.  My friends have also suggested that, maybe, I looked at him and saw things that weren’t really there.  I didn’t.  He was my gorgeous (gay) drama teacher; and he was the most adorable (and brattiest) boy in the entire middle school; and he was my biggest celebrity crush of all time— Lance, from NSYNC (yes, the gay one).  Fuck, he was even my current celebrity crush, Michael C. Hall, a.k.a. the guy who plays that charming, handsome, sociopathic serial killer on premium cable.  Sam was every single one of those people times underwear model, and he was my neighbor.  I wanted to vomit. Instead, I told him my name.

____

I’m not even sure if he asked me how I was.  Dad was very focused on the apartment. “This is good,”  he said brusquely.  “On the main road, right near campus, and it’s not really an apartment building so there won’t be roaches.” The two apartments were set adjacent on the second-floor of a two-story building, the first floor of which was occupied by a travel agency. 

My father made his way up the stairs on his crutches (which took time, because he repeatedly fell and repeatedly refused help) and he, Amy, and I were let into 2A.  The only major difference— besides how messy the two college girls had left it— was that the living room was smaller, because the apartment had a patio. 

“Oh my god, yes!  This is awesome,” I whispered.  

“Dude, I can smoke my shit out here!”  Amy replied.

_____

“I think I met your roommate, Amy, but I just wanted to, like, formally introduce myself,” Sam continued.

“Yeah, um, she told me she met you,”  Specifically, she’d said, ‘I met our neighbor, and it was so bad.  I was cleaning the bathroom so I was all disgusting, and I opened the door and this guy was— like, like a Ken doll— and I totally didn’t know what to say. He introduced himself and then Blue started meowing, like always, so instead of telling him my name, I just said, “That’s our cat.” ’

“And I’ve sort of met you, right?”

“Oh, uh, on the patio.” A few nights after she met him, Sam walked past our patio while Amy and I were sitting on the edge.  I couldn’t see him that well in the dark, from ten feet up, but I could still tell that he good-looking. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said.  I was totally nonchalant.  And then, for some unknown, ungodly reason, I ended our brief conversation with a double thumbs-up.  ‘Well,’ said Amy, ‘That’s our cat.’

“Yeah, and that was awhile ago.  I totally should have stopped by earlier.”

“Oh, no, it’s no big deal,” I replied. No big deal that he had to stop by while I was looking like a total mess.  I was still acutely aware of my faded make-up and my messy hair and my cat-hair-covered shirt-dress… and socks— oh sweet Jesus, the clashing, giant white socks.  I was also very aware of how unkempt the apartment was, and so I opened the door only halfway and tried to fill the rest of the frame myself.  I wanted him to go away, and I also wanted him to never, ever leave.

“So what year are you guys?”

“Junior.”

“I guess you have your majors picked out then?” He kept asking leading questions, and after a few minutes I realized that the conversation was not about to end.

______

Amy and I had no further questions, but my father had plenty, which was totally normal and fine, at first. And then he started asking things like, “Tell me the truth, because I’ll find out: you’re not an absentee landlord, are you?”  

“This is how I make my living, Sir.  I don’t do it half-assed,” he spat back. That’s when my father asked to sign the lease.  

“Amy hasn’t talked to her parents—”  Dad stopped me.  

“We don’t want anyone else taking this place,” he said by way of explanation.  He signed the papers, and then he hobbled back down and drove off.  Amy was silent. 

“I— Uh, I’m sorry,” I said.  Even when my dad did things right he did them wrong.   “If it’s a problem for your parents…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence.  

“It’s okay,” she replied.  Then she shrugged. “I kind of see why you need your own place,  anyway.” 

“Yeah,” I said quietly.  “Summers and holidays are pretty long.”

_____

I had no choice. “Do you want to come in? I mean, it’s kind of rude of me to just stand here—”

“Oh, it’s—”

“We can go out on the patio.” Then he wouldn’t have that much time to look at our disgusting living quarters or that much light to look at my disgusting self.

“Oh, sure,” Sam replied

“And, uh, do you want a beer?” I felt obligated to offer. I felt like that was what real adults did. 

“Oh, that would be great.”

“Great!” I could not wait to tell Amy that I was on our patio. Talking. To Sam.

“So, what’s your major again?”

“Uh… Sociology.” I laughed. “I really have no idea what I’m going to do with that, I just… I’ll probably end up at a non-profit. I mean, I hope I do! I’d like that.  I’d like to start a non-profit, cause I’m really into this idea of theatre as community activism and— I am talking a LOT!”

He laughed too. “No, no, not at all.  And that’s great.”

“Well… what about you? Are you a grad student?”

“HA! No. No, I’m done with school.”

“But you went to [my university].”

“Uh, no, actually.”  There was a pause.

“Where’d you go? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Oh, no I— Yale.”

Holy crap. He what?  “Wow. Jeez!” I squeaked.

“I just, you know, I try not to be a jerk about it and bring it up all the time.” 

“Oh no, I mean… well, hey, compared to [my university]…”

“[Your university] is a great school.”

“It’s… well, it’s not bad…”

______

This wasn’t what I’d really wanted.  I’d planned to completely move out of my parent’s house the day I turned eighteen and separate all ties.  I’d keep working my minimum-wage job at the animal shelter.  Maybe I’d go to the county college to get a vet tech degree, and then, maybe someday, I could put myself through a liberal arts school.  I was so, so tired of school anyway— tired of constantly battling a bureaucracy and myself to get by with my disabilities.  I just wanted to walk dogs, and I actually might have done this if I hadn’t grown up where I did.  Living my whole life in a wealthy town where 98% of the kids go on to university— some 30% to ivy league schools— I had always been expecting to go to college myself.  It’s much, much harder than you would think, overcoming that kind of social conditioning.  My guidance counselor didn’t have a very hard time talking me out of my vet tech fantasy. 

_____

“So, um ,what did you major in?” I asked Sam.

“Comparative religion.”

Oh shit. A relationship with a religious guy wasn’t going to— wait, relationship?!  “Are you… religious?” I asked cautiously.

“No. I was for a time, but… no.  I’m pretty much an atheist.”

Yessss. “Same here.”

After fifteen minutes of talking there still hadn’t been any awkward gaps in our conversation.  I was thrilled, and eventually I was bold enough to ask, “So what’s a, uh, Yale guy doing in this neighborhood?” I gave him a self-aware smile.

“I… run a non-profit here.” He smiled back.

“Get. OUT!” I blurted.

“For kids,” he continued.  All of a sudden I saw Amy, teary-eyed, giving a passionate speech at our wedding reception. “It’s a sports program, and we do tutoring and that kind of stuff, too.”

“That is… amazing!  It’s like… I mean, like I said, I’d love to do that so I think that’s— great.”

“We have a good number of students from [your university] who work for us, actually.  Tutors.  We always need tutors.”

We started talking about equal-access education, and it was…  beautiful.  There was one thing that was nagging at me, though.   So I brought the conversation carefully back to Yale and found an opportunity to ask, “When exactly did you graduate?”

_____

“You’re smart enough, Lori, to do anything you want after graduation,” my guidance counselor said. “We both know you really want to go to college, and you deserve it. You deserve to have your parents pay for it.  You won’t even see them most of the year.” Except, just at I’d expected, ‘most of the year’ wasn’t nearly enough.  And just as bad as the summers at home was the year-round control my father got to exert because of my financial dependence.  Worst of all was my reliance on him for my healthcare.  It gave him an excuse to continue to be so completely, personally involved in my life that there was  no way I could ignore the daily calls and/or texts and/or emails.  I needed him because I needed my medication.  I felt completely trapped.

____

“I know what you’re doing!” Sam laughed.  You’re trying to find out how old I am.”

‘Not smooth, Lori,’ I scolded myself. “I, you know, was just curious…” I tried to look cute. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me!”

“No, no.” He smiled.  “But… how old do you think I am?”

“You want me to guess?!”

“Come on…”

“I… really… I’ll be honest, you could be anywhere between, like…” I paused to give the impression that this was not something I had been considering for weeks. ‘The weird thing is,’ Amy had responded to my second question about him, ‘is that it’s completely impossible to tell.’ (My first question, if you were wondering, was: ‘Your kind of ‘hot’ or mine?’  And her response: ‘Everyone’s’)

“Well?”

“I’ll be honest, you could be anywhere between, like, twenty-five and thirty-five.  And— and that’s a good thing!”

“No, no, definitely.” He laughed again, and waited.

“You really want me to guess an exact age?”

“Go for it.”

“Ummm…  ttttwww— ttttthhhhhh…iiirrrttyyyy…,” I gave him an exasperated look. “….yyyy…. ffffuuu-iive?”

“Thirty-five?!?!” His voice rose in pitch.

“I, just—”

“Do I really look thirty-five?!?!”

“No, I just— you run a non-profit!  I figured you had to be… older!”  Stupid, stupid, stupid; even if I’d gotten it right he’d have been more annoyed than impressed.

“Thirty-five!”

“Not that you LOOK thirty-five… I mean, like I said, you could pass for so much younger. I was just—” I gave him a sly smile, “  just incorporating all of the evidence—”

“Haha, no, no.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’re not that far off.”

“So…thirty… two?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Oh.”

“But… my birthday’s in December.” My birthday is in May.  I found this mildly amusing.

“So— you must have worked really hard to get to be, like, head of a foundation, huh?”

“Ha, oh, no, it’s not a foundation.  It’s just a small organization.  And… I started it.”

“You started it!  How old were you then?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four!”

“But I was just lucky.  I really had no idea what I was doing, I had just gotten back from Europe, I just— knew people…”

“Europe… Should I even ask—”

“I used to play sports professionally.  I was on a national team.”

“Oh my GOD!”

“Like I said— lucky.”

___

Somehow, I got lucky and made it almost halfway through college before my family situation became unbearable.  There was no way I could drop out after getting so far, but there was also no way I could keep going through every day feeling like I was.  Maybe if I just… if I could just have my own space—  one that wasn’t loud and vomit-filled like the dorms and, more importantly, one that I could go to whenever I needed.  A space that no one else could control.  Oh God, except financially. That thought kept rushing at me, and I kept pushing it away. Once my dad signed the lease he wouldn’t be able to just stop paying, I reminded myself.  And it was true.

It was also true that living off-campus was cheaper and more conducive to studying and “a good ‘next step’ in achieving independence.”  I said much more than this in the novel-length e-mails he insisted I send him.  Funny enough, even though it took months to convince him, he turned around and used my rhetoric to sway Amy’s parents in a day. 

I’m not sure, though, if it was the written messages that made my father change his mind.  I think he just came to terms with what he knew were my real motivations.  As he told me one day in a diner that January of 2009, “I know we can’t be around each other, and I know we will never have a real relationship, because it’s unhealthy for you, because you think it is.  And that’s just that.”  I dug my nails into the booth and bit my cheeks, hard; the truth is, no matter what your parents have done, you will always be waiting for them to say that they’re sorry and that they love you and they want to work things out.  And it will still rip you up inside every time they tell you the opposite.

_____

“I don’t usually bring this stuff up,” Sam continued. “I don’t want people to–”

“Oh, no, no! No!  I’m not trying to– I just think– I think that that is really awesome.”I blinked rapidly, and promptly realized that I couldn’t be more obvious about my sudden crush if I’d written his name on my eyelids. I kind of wanted to be obvious.  I wanted to see if… fuck, who was I kidding?  I probably wasn’t even a grown-up to him… and, also, I looked like shit, and, also also, I was a fucking unsuccessful little nobody. I wouldn’t have been worth his time even if he didn’t have a girlfriend, which absolutely had to be the case. I was just not worth his time.

_____

It hurts just as badly when they say nothing at all.  My mother had simply faded out of my life until I got very sick that spring of 2009, and she drove up to [my university] to take me home.  She waited patiently through the half hour it took me to get down the stairs of my dorm.  She cleaned up my vomit in the car, she stayed up late into the night in my bedroom getting me to drink water and helping me get up to use the bathroom.  When I had to go the hospital, she made sure I went to the one where she worked so that she could visit me as much as possible.  She put on a mask and gloves and sat with me during her breaks and late into the nights.  But there was one thing she would never, ever do for me: leave my father.  When I finally acknowledged this, on my third night in the hospital, I broke down and cried. 

I resented needing her when I was sick, and I was sick well into that summer.  The original infection had cleared up, but my pancreatitis– which the doctors had incidentally discovered— had not.  As a precaution, I was taken off my psychiatric medications ‘until further notice.’  My depression got worse, and I kept coming down with colds and sinus infections.  This is the thing they don’t tell you about chronic Major Depression— it destroys your immune system.  By the end of July, though, I was feeling a lot better.  And I was about to get away: August first was when the lease began. 

_____

“Thanks,” he smiled. “The answer to your original question is 2000, by the way.”

“Huh? Oh! Class of 2000! Right!”  Oh my God… Class of 2000… Only a few days prior I had been talking with a childhood friend: ‘Remember how we thought it was so cool being the Class of 2000?  I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years since we graduated from elementary school.’ 

“Hey, I gotta go meet a friend at [the local bar],” Sam told me then.    

“Oh.  Yeah, I have to get up—”

“You can come, if you want.”

“I— Sure!”  He liked me!

“And invite Amy!” He liked me not.

“I think she went out with her friend, but, yeah, I’ll text her.”

“Awesome.” He stood up.

“Oh, but… um…. I know [the local bar] cards, and….”

“You’re not 21 yet?”

“Eight months!”

“Well, it’s no big deal.  I know the owners— their daughter is in my program.”

“Oh, sweet. But… I’m not, like, intruding on you and your friend, am I?”

“Hahaha no, no.  You’ll like Ben.  He sort of founded the organization with me. He’s a good guy, an old friend.”

____

Literally. But who doesn’t love cantankerous old British men?  Especially when my hot neighbor is sitting next to one, and isn’t he soooo cute?   That was my drunken logic when, two hours later, I introduced my companions to my friend Sasha, one of the dozens of upperclassmen who were now pouring in.  I had lost all self-consciousness about sitting in a college bar with a thirty-one-year-old and a sixty-three-year-old sometime around my fifth beer.  Coincidentally, that was also when I started dropping words like ‘transmisogyny’ and ‘ecofeminism,’  “which is basically the logical conclusion of the theory of intersectional oppression! That, you know, in order to destroy this fucking hierarchy amongst ourselves— humans— we as humans need to eliminate all manifestations of our oppressive tendencies, including the exploitation of the environment and other sentient beings!!!!”

“What rubbish is that— ‘oppress’ the environment? ‘Oppress’ fucking trees?!”

“Wait,” Sam leaned in.  “What does ‘sentient’ mean?”

“For real?” I was shocked and  a little horrified.  “You went to Yale,” I informed him.

“Hahaha! Jeez, Ben, this girl is smarter than both of us!  I swear! We have to get her to tutor the kids!”

“Think she can handle the older ones?

“How old is ‘older’?”

“You know, the high schoolers,”  Sam said casually.

 “Like… up to eighteen?” Like, a year and a half younger than me?

“Yeah, eight through eighteen.”

“Ohhh,I don’t know…Do you guys,” I cleared my throat “just do the business end or do you help with—”

“We tutor them too!” Ben exclaimed.

“I told you it was small,” Sam nodded.  I imagined Amy as my Maid of Honor again— this time there was interference with her microphone.  She looked confused. She tapped it, waved it about.  ‘Is this on?’ The speakers screeched.  “Is this– Lori… WHAT THE FUCK?!?! His kids are practically our age! We need to talk!”

——-

“We need to talk.” My father burst into my room two nights before I was supposed to move into the apartment. 

“Can you… knock?”  I don’t know why I said this. He’d been doing it for twenty years, and I only had two nights left. 

“Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know this was your house.”

“I can’t— forget it.  Forget it.”

“We need to talk about how you’re spending our money.”

“What?”

He waved an invoice in front of me. “This furniture—”

“You told me to buy the furniture.”

“—you picked out the most expensive—”

“You said it was okay!”

“Will you be quiet and let me finish?”

“No! Because this is ridiculous!  You don’t get to all of a sudden change your mind about shit and then blame it on me! You aren’t going to make me feel guilty for this!”

“So come on, Lo– where’s Amy!?!”

“I, uh— I don’t know.  I’ll call her.”  Clearly Sam was not interested in me.  He was being friendly— just wanted to meet both the neighbors.  To my disgust, this was disappointing and not relieving. I dialed Amy and waited, lost in my own paranoid thoughts.  ’He works with ‘kids’ almost your fucking age.’ I reminded myself. ’This is like—’ Amy picked up. “Hey!” I greeted her. “Did you get my text?  Oh, well I’m at [the local bar].” I tried to sound nonchalant. Given my state, though, I was probably pretty transparent about how excited I was to be drinking with Sam. “No, dude, you don’t need to change.  You— yeah— well, just bring David.  Oh.  Oh, well, you can probably bring a skateboard, too.”   I turned to Sam. “She’s coming!” I announced and took a celebratory swig. “Oh, and she’s bringing her friend David.”

“Her boyfriend, you mean.” Ben corrected me.

“No, no, they’re just friends.”

“A guy and a girl can never just be friends,” Sam said without a trace of self-awareness.

“Oh? Even if the they’re both gay?”

“They’re gay?” Ben asked.

“David and Amy?  No.  That was rhetorical.”

“Touché,” Sam interjected.

“But I’m pretty sure David thinks Amy is gay.  Which is bullshit.  Just because she skateboards and doesn’t subscribe to all of the rigid heteronormative—”

“What if she is gay?” Ben raised an eyebrow.

“She’s not gay, because I would be the first person she’d tell.”

“You sure about that?” He winked at me.

“I’m sure! It’s not just that I’m, like, her best lady-friend and roommate, but I was on the executive board of the gay-straight alliance with her!”

“Oh?” Sam smiled and finished his beer.

“As *allies*.  Not that… sometimes… well, I know it takes people a while to realize they’re not straight sometimes,” I said.  If only Amy had gotten there a little faster, she might have stopped me. “Like, my dad…” ‘You know you are drunk,’ Amy always says, ‘when you talk about your dad coming out of the closet.  Which is a clue that you should stop.’ Except it’s the only story I can tell about my family.

_______

“Listen. We need you to return the furniture.”

“What?! I’m moving in in two days!  And I told Amy I’d buy the book case!”

“We need you to return the furniture.” I was silent. “We need you to return the furniture.”  His voice was monotone.  “We need you to return-—

“Stop!” It never worked when he was like this, but I still tried.  I always tried.  “What is this?  Where is this coming from? Why couldn’t you have told me this earlier?”

“We need you to return the furniture.  We don’t have the money—”

I had already lost. “Fine! Okay! Stop trying to make me feel guilty about this!” 

_____

“Oh, I— sorry,” Ben replied

“Wo-ow” said Sam

“Oh, no it wasn’t bad.  Anyway, he decided later he was bi and my parents got remarried when I was fourteen.  But that’s not the point!  The point is, if Amy ever does figure out that she’s gay, I know she trusts me with this kind of stuff.  I know she’d tell me!”

We started talking about relationships, about the pros and cons of dating guys versus girls.

“Look, all people are hard to deal with in relationships.  I mean,” I was very serious, very casual. “are you in a relationship right now?” I asked Ben.

“Christ, I’m done with that stuff.”  Sam and I laughed.

And then I just asked him: “What about you, Sam?”

“No, no.” Yes, yesssss.

“Well, I’m not either, but I went on a date the other day with this guy and, and I mean, maybe part of the problem is that he’s a lawyer…”

“Woah, how old was this guy?” Sam asked. The conversation was going just how I’d planned.

“Thirty.” I wasn’t lying.

“Oh my god!”

“I mean… I like older guys.  So what?”

“Men my age, eh?” Ben laughed.

“No!!!! But… anyone under… thirty-three, I figure that— AAAAAmmmmyyyyy!!!!!””

She came over to our table and glanced around suspiciously.  For a second, I wondered if she was high.  And then I remembered Ben.

Sam introduced them. “This is Ben. He works with me.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Amy! And where’s your boy who is a friend?”

“Uh… David?  He’s outside, um… with our skateboards.”

“Well hey, that’s not fair,” Sam said quite seriously. “And, you know, it’s getting pretty loud in here…”

_____

Whenever I began yelling back, my dad really started in on me. I knew this, and I never… What did it matter? I had two days left.  I was not holding back. “Why can’t you just knock, and then explain what happened like a normal person, and not make me feel like it’s my fault that—”

“It is your fault.”

“What?!”

“There.  It’s your fault.  I said it.  Are you happy?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“It is your fault, because if it weren’t for you, maybe we’d have the money to pay for this furniture.”

____

Twenty minutes later, Sam, Vicki, David and I were sitting on the patio chairs, drinking. (Ben had gone home, which was maybe for the best.)

“What is this?” Sam asked.

“This?  As in my music?!  It’s the Gossip!”

“Who?”

“It’s cool, man.  They suck,” David chimed in.

“Do you listen to anyone I’d know?”

Amy disconnected my i-Pod and scrolled through the artists. “Just a bunch of female singer-songwriters and dance-pop.”

“Dance-pop!?!” I looked over her shoulder.  “Dude, are you talking about Blondie?!”

“Lo, don’t take this the wrong way,” Amy responded., “but you have the gayest taste in music of anyone I know.”

“You know a lot of gay people,” David observed.

“Exactly.”

“Well, hey, why don’t you all come over my place, and I’ll show you what real music is,” Sam said.

“Oh-ho, harsh, bro.” David remarked.  “But it’s, like, 2:30.  I gotta bounce.”

“Oh shit,” Amy said.  “I forgot I have to get up tomorrow, by, like, ten.”

I said nothing about needing to be up by six.  “Well, I’m free.”  I smiled at Sam.

“Great! “  He turned to the other two, “ Hey, good night, guys.  Nice meeting you, David.”

“I’m just going to go to the bathroom real quick,” I said to Sam as we walked back inside.

“You can use mine…”

“Oh, but” —I needed my makeup— “what’s the point, right?”

“OK, I’ll leave the door pegged.”

I ducked into the bathroom to fix my broke-ass face, and right before I left I undid two more buttons on my shirt-dress.  My bra was showing. It seemed like a good idea.

_____

“No. NO,” I protested.

“If you didn’t feel like you had to DRAG the authorities into our family business–”

“GET! OUT!” I yelled at my father.

“Why are you so angry?”

“I am NOT listening to this!  GET OUT of my room!”

“What’s wrong with you, Dolores?”

“I’m not playing this game! GET OUT!”

______

I hurried over to Sam’s apartment.  It was still as immaculate as it had been way back in February.

“You want another beer?”

“Ummm… okay.”  He handed me a Stella Artois (a grown-up beer), and I sat down in the middle of the giant couch that ran the length of the living room.  “So you consider Bob Dylan to be ‘your’ music?” I asked. He sat down a few feet away, and in the light from a lamp I could see for the first time that his eyes weren’t brown, but really a dark, beautiful blue.

“Oh, you know who Bob Dylan is!”

I turned towards him, inching my dress up in the process.  I leaned forward a bit to show some cleavage and then I blew it all with a single, “Dude!” I might as well have given him the thumbs-up again too. “I— who— who doesn’t know about Bob Dylan?”  I asked, trying to soften my voice. My father had played his music all the time growing up, and my brother and I improvised a parody of ‘Tamborine Man.’  We even did the voice.  We hated Bob Dylan.

“Look, Lori, if there’s one thing you have to know about me, it’s that I, like, live under a rock.  My job is my life, and when I do have free time… well, pretty much the only pop culture I consume is The Daily Show.”

“Sweeeeeet!” Why did I have to sound like a stoner? Why couldn’t I be smooth, and charming, and…charming, like Sam?

“Yeah, I’m kind of a political junkie,” he replied

“I could tell, from our conversations earlier…”

“I totally thought I was going to go into politics.  Christ, I even worked for Ralph Nader—”

“YOU WHAT?!?!”

“Hey, look, this was back in 2000 before he—”

“NO! I. LOVE. RALPH. NADER!”

He laughed.  “That makes sense.”

“What was it Jon Stewart said about him in the—? Oh: ‘Ralph Nader was second only to Al Gore in costing Al Gore the election.’ “

“Ahhhh I swear I have a man-crush on Jon.”

“I swear that that is the most awesome thing a heterosexual man has ever told me.”

He smiled sweetly. “Not all heterosexual men are insecure and talk about cars all the time.”

________

Two days later, my mother and I loaded everything into the two sedans ourselves, and then we each drove up to New York.  I was going to keep my father’s old car for a while, because he was not coming… which was perfectly fine.  I didn’t think about it once I started driving.  Instead, I spent the whole hundred miles trying to calm down my new cat.  No radio, no singing, just her constant crying and me telling her it was all fine. 

_______

I should have been enjoying our conversation a lot more than I was.  But I was way too focused on my dress and on how much of my skin was showing.  Eventually, it became clear that it didn’t matter. Sam was obviously not into me, and it was 3:30, and I needed to go to bed. I took one last sip of beer and then, out of nowhere, Sam leaned in and kissed me. My internal monologue switched off for the first time since God knows when.  I was only focusing on his lips and his tongue and how his curly hair felt in my fingers and— and it was amazing.  He was amazing.

‘Tambourine Man’ came on the speakers just as I started to unbutton Sam’s shirt. By the time I was running my hands down his smooth, perfectly sculpted chest, I was convinced that Bob Dylan was the scrawny, caucasian Barry White.

____

Soon enough we were vertical again and had migrated to the end of the sofa nearest his bedroom. I had a flash of common sense.  “Wait,” I said.  “You’re— we’re— this isn’t just because we’re both drunk, right?  You aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and be like, ‘Oh fuck, I just made out with my neighbor’?”

“No, no,” Sam assured me.  “I really like you. You’re really beautiful, and really smart…”

“I’M beautiful?  YOU’RE beautiful! You’re so far out of my league!”

“What? No way. I never imagined that you’d go for me.”

We climbed into his bed.  “Hang on a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.  Before I could register what was happening, Sam had already un-pegged my apartment door and his.

“What are you doing?!”

“Well, it didn’t make sense to leave the doors open. With your roommate sleeping, I figured… you know, it wasn’t safe.”

“I don’t have my keys!!!”

___

At six in the morning, I was awake, but not quite as I’d planned to be twelve hours before. Instead of rolling out of my bed I was banging on my apartment door like a fucking asshole.

“Hey,” Sam said when Amy finally opened the door.  He was still shirtless, and I must have looked like hell warmed over. I will never forget the look on my roommate’s sleep-swollen face as comprehension of the situation set in. I looked at her and sincerely apologized.

____

When I drove back down to Jersey to give my father his car, he did not apologize.  I didn’t expect him to.  And it didn’t matter.  It was fine. I had the apartment.

____

I said good-bye and followed Amy inside.

“Did you guys—”

“No!  No. No sex.”

“Are you using the Bill Clinton definition?”

“Actually, no!” I exclaimed.  “I’m proud of myself.” I then said goodnight to her and collapsed into bed. I slept until seven P.M.  When I woke up, I realized I had probably just lost my job. I shuffled into the living room to process what had happened. I was pacing back in forth in my fish-patterned PJs, scratching at my disgusting hair, trying to decide if I should have cereal or pasta… when I heard the doorbell ring.

_____

A week after I met Sam, I did not have my apartment anymore. 

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“ In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny.'  Here the peculiar indefiniteness 
of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally
 to expression: the ‘nothing and nowhere.’  But here ‘uncanniness’ 
also means ‘not-being-at home.’"
-- Martin Heidegger as quoted in House of Leaves, pages 24- 25

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