Читать книгу The Telling - Zoe Zolbrod - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe second person I remember telling that I had been molested was a man I took up with when I was twenty. It’s possible that I told other friends before then, but if I did, it was the same version I told Heather, it was a story of sexual activity passed like a V.C. Andrews novel. With Carl, it was a little different.
We had met in West Philadelphia in 1988, where I had moved for the summer to stay with Reba, my best friend from high school, who’d been renting out the attic in a group house. The decrepit Victorian was filled with anarchist kids and counter culture types, and was a gathering place for neighborhood squatters and itinerant punk rockers, with one or two hippies living in the school bus parked out front. I was as titillated in the presence of these colorful ragamuffins as I had been at twelve hearing about sex from someone who’d had it. I’d been attracted to alternative cultures even before I knew there were such things—since Suzanne in her rags and feathers, since the Clash appeared on Saturday Night Live and raised every hair on my body while the girl at whose house I was sleeping guffawed and mocked. I’d picked my college based on a belief that punk and bohemian types congregated there, and I’d made my plans for the summer between sophomore and junior year on a similar basis.
I had only been sort of right about the college. When I arrived at Oberlin, I was surprised to see so many copies of On the Road by bedsides and on bookshelves; hitherto I had felt the book to be my own personal bible, handed down to me by my special father and unknown to anyone else my age. But it took me less than a semester to realize that my fellow students were more likely to have bought their crushed velvet and cracked leather at Agnes B. than at Salvation Army counters, and to have slept off their CBGB’s hangovers in homes on the Upper West Side rather than in an Alphabet City tenement, as I presumed real punks did. These differences mattered.
Meanwhile, plenty of my new acquaintances were surprised to learn that not everyone paid for SAT prep classes, and they were confused by rural experiences that weren’t covered by Outward Bound tuition or had at a summer home, amused by the low prices in the town diner that was still too expensive for me to visit more than once a week, despite my food service job. Some of the big-city transplants were less incredulous about rust belt realities than wearied by them. Used to being among the financial and cultural elite, they were outspoken in their annoyance at the high number of fellow students who had been the strangest people in their Midwestern hometowns. They missed New York and compared notes about hot spots.
I had a complicated relationship to these cool-club rich kids (“rich” to me meaning anyone who didn’t receive financial aid). I wanted in, to some degree—I certainly didn’t want to be pegged as an outsider—and so I studied their habits carefully. I filed away the derisive comments, and used them to sharpen my sense of myself for years. But I also used them to blur my own origins. At my twentieth college reunion, when an undergraduate acquaintance told me that he’d always thought I was one of those people who attended Saint Ann’s, a private high school in Brooklyn that bequeathed to Oberlin many a sartorially impressive art major, I felt, to my chagrin, as if I had won some kind of lifetime achievement award. But the victory was hollow, because I never wanted to be a daughter of the privileged set, exactly, or even to be seen as one. Despite my awe at my sophisticated peers and what had been accessible to them, I also maintained my own streak of separateness and superiority. Money itself did not impress me, and in my view it could hamper the ability to accrue what did: the accretion of gritty experience and the recognition of unvarnished truths about what life was really like—probably tough, messy, twisted. Though my college friends might have been to Paris and hung out in Washington Square Park, they were low on street cred. Not only was I convinced that I had some, but I believed that I, more than many of them, was primed to get more.
PHILADELPHIA WAS ALL ABOUT street cred. Although some of the West Philly people had finished college, a greater number had slipped away from homes made tumultuous by drug or alcohol abuse, by enraged or disengaged or dogmatically Christian moms, or by lecherous stepdads. Most of them earned what money they did off the grid, making armor or low-budget gay porn, selling plasma, renting themselves out to medical studies, dumpster diving to reduce the need to buy things. A few of the girls worked as strippers or prostitutes, and just as I arrived more young women were taking up that beat, getting on the roster to dance at the Bounce Babe Lounge, a little dive in Center City that had a low barrier to entry. Newbies often worked the day shift, and in my first few weeks in Philly I adopted a routine that included making the rounds of restaurants accepting applications, stopping by the ice cream parlor where Reba was scooping cones for minimum wage, and then heading a few blocks north to have a drink at the Bounce Babe.
Reba’s brand new girlfriend Catanine, a butch dyke even younger than I who carried a staff, was a regular at the ice cream parlor and the Bounce Babe, too, but she and I didn’t hang. She never sat at either place, and never partook of the free scoops or beer; she stood at one end of the freezer case or by the wall close to the door at the club, hands resting together on her carved stick, keeping an eye out. There was a coolness between us: I was miffed that she’d horned in, and she’d made no conciliatory gesture. She and Reba had gotten together on my very first night in town, laser-beamed into each other’s eyes so deep that they must have teleported up the three flights of stairs into Reba’s bed; I sure didn’t see them leave from the front porch where a group of us had been sitting.
The woman whose room in the house I’d be subletting was not leaving until the next day, and the only place I had to sleep was on a mattress tucked in the rafters of the attic where Reba lived. Hours after the lovers disappeared, realizing that Reba was not coming back to escort me, I made my way up there, literally crawling on the floor to find my bed in a pitch black garret alive with sex sounds: the click of mucous membranes, the bedspring groan of bodies shifting, the paired and labored breathing. I finally slept, and when I woke, they were at it again, or still. I watched them. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. I recognized that waking in this attic to this sight was the type of vérite I’d craved, and I chalked up a tally, but the inevitability of loneliness settled into me. I would have to face this new environment alone.
I made my way to the kitchen, where I sat on a bench that ran along one side of the long table with my book in front of me, but with my eyes swiveling everywhere else. There was so much to see. Flyers for protests and political meetings and punk shoes were tacked on a bulletin board and layered on the refrigerator. Surfaces were crowded with stacks of paperbacks, cassette tapes with handmade covers, jelly jars filled with spices, dirty dishes, and canisters of bulk grains and legumes. And there was so much to smell. The parlor of the house acted as a bike room and erstwhile repair shop, and the stink of grease and tires permeated the whole first floor, laid just beneath the sweetening bananas in the hand-thrown bowl on the table, last night’s curry, this morning’s coffee, and the aroma of a warmed stovetop that was crusted and buckled like asphalt. I’d been in punk pads before—in Pittsburgh, in Philly, in State College—but this house was far richer, steeped deep in every countercultural trend of the last thirty years until it smelled of them all.
And the people! A constant flow in and out, they emanated exotic oils and their own B.O., and they were beautiful to me. Hair dread-locked or Manic Panicked or shaved off, clothes ripped and rejiggered and worn with élan, and among the male residents were a few who were men to my eyes, so clearly different from the student boys with whom I’d been cavorting—towering over them, for one, was there something in the bananas?—that it was hard to believe they shared a Y chromosome. At Oberlin, a school then known for the lax hygiene of its crunchy granolas, I was still on the grungy side of average, but here, I felt squeaky clean, a square, a completely uninteresting summering college student who could not possibly register on anyone’s radar.
On anyone’s radar, that is, except those looking for a potential sex partner. Which, okay, was the status of a not insignificant number. So while “the real me” felt invisible, another me felt on display, on the shelf at a market. And, to be fair, I had put myself there. If my advocate at this house had abandoned me, I was going to need another one, because, hey, this was where I wanted to be—absolutely, without a doubt. And while my belief that gaining the sexual interest of the right person was the shortest route to belonging might have been complicated by my declaration of a women’s studies minor earlier that year, it had not been supplanted. Especially when my best friend was busy fucking someone else and the guys were this hot.
“I’m Reba’s friend,” I’d offer when acknowledged. “I’m going to be renting Secil’s room.” I was alone, out on plank dangling over something new and unknown. I found I liked the feeling.
Which was good. Because did Reba and Catanine never have to pee? Did they never have to eat?
“I’m still waiting for Reba to come down,” I said to one of the very tall men the second time he came through the kitchen and raised his heavy eyebrows at me.
“She’s leaving you sitting here a long time.” His eyes traveled down and up before locking on mine. I felt condescended to, and shamed, and seen. My nipples and clitoris buzzed.
“Yep.”
“I’m going into Center City to check out a festival later. If she isn’t down by then, you can come if you want.”
Here we go here we go here we go, I thought. But I tried to act blasé.
CARL LOOKED LIKE a young Marlon Brando, stretched thinner but with shoulders as wide in his black leather jacket and a temperament as broody, and he was worldly wise at the ripe old age of twenty-four to my just-turned twenty, taller than I was by almost a foot. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had been released a couple months previous, and Chuck D’s insistence and the steady squeal of “Don’t Believe the Hype” unfurled from cars into the street that afternoon as it would the whole hot summer, rattling mufflers and internal organs before receding again from the ears of pedestrians, the thump-thump-thump the last to be heard, the lyrics still ringing in my head—“but some they never had it”—until another pair of chromed hubcaps would appear and externalize the track again. It was a long walk to the festival, which had something to do with Africa, or Black Pride, and when we got there the scent of sandalwood incense was heavy in the air.
When we’d exhausted what the fair had to offer us—spectacle, mostly, the feeling of being other together—we went to a bar where we drank round after round of Colt 45, which Carl paid for. I ran out of my Camel Lights and switched to his Reds. Somewhere along the way he dropped his cool and became chatty, explaining the mechanics of the house to me in all their gossipy glory. He laid out the tension between the more dedicated political anarchists and the anarchically libertine, told me the histories of recent residents and their replacements, detailed whose yearnings for whom had been kindled, returned, rebuffed in storylines involving twists of sexual orientation and both principled and not-quite-so non-monogamy. I raked it all in as if I were studying for a high-stakes final while I gulped my beer and batted my eyes at him.
“Are you an anarchist?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. Anarchism wasn’t en vogue at Oberlin. I could tell that the house members who were part of Wooden Shoe bookstore collective didn’t have too much to do with the circled A of the Sex Pistols, but that was about it. “Are you?”
He paused thoughtfully. “I’m a Situationist.”
“What’s that?”
“You never read Guy Debord at that fancy college?” We’d already established that he knew about Oberlin. A woman on the scene, an elegant junkie from money who’d never stopped slumming, had gone there, too, for a while.
“No.”
“I’ll loan it to you. After you read it, then we’ll talk. Are you a feminist?”
“Yes.”
He gave a rueful grin. I congratulated myself on the right answer, true and sexy.
IT’S AMAZING HOW FAST identities shift and gel at that tender age. Six months earlier, Reba had been renting a room from a yuppie graphic designer in Center City. I had come to visit over winter term to intern at the feminist paper, and we’d tiptoed around the city she was still finding her way in, trying to slip into cool clubs or bars, then standing at the edges of them. It’d only been a year since I’d simultaneously discovered vibrators and Kathy Acker, two things that seemed absolutely essential to my notion of myself as I sat twisting next to Carl on the barstool that day.
Reba had sent the vibrator to me in New Mexico, where I was spending the summer. It was a huge, Caucasian penis model powered by D batteries that she’d picked up at a corner porno store. Acker’s novel Don Quixote I had special ordered at a Santa Fe bookshop, a waitressing job finally providing me with the money to pay for it after I’d been carrying around a review of it for months. I expected the book to be a revelation, and it was. Reading it, I felt discovery and recognition even when I couldn’t understand what Acker was saying. Unfamiliar with the original Don Quixote, I couldn’t use it as a template, but Acker’s protagonist was made a knight by receiving an abortion, I understood that much. I sensed some truth about armor and pure resolve arising from violence and shame, and the way this inevitably led to sexing with multitudes, with people of every age and gender variation and also dogs. YES! I wrote in the margin. The book’s exuberance and lack of plot stimulated and exhausted me and often sent me back to bed, where I’d probably just come from anyway, since I spent a lot of time there with the vibrator. Sometimes I combined activities, and used the vibrator while reading. Each orgasm grew up from my toes.
I TROTTED OUT Acker’s name now, the coolest one I knew. Carl hadn’t read her, but he knew of her, he approved. He’d heard she was a Burroughs disciple.
“No she wasn’t! That’s not true!” I cried out. I had no idea, really, but I couldn’t allow the fierce knight Kathy Acker to be slotted as the little sister of the guy who’d shot his wife in the head. Burroughs’s punk godfather status and his renowned act of misogyny created the kind of uncomfortable dissonance in my head that make me argue with any boy listening. But at that point in the day, in the drinking, in the opening bars of our relationship, my stridency floated right past Carl.
“Have you ever been in love, Zoe?” His chin was on his fist, his eyelids at half-mast, his eyes on mine but slightly unfocused.
“Yes,” I said, relieved that my sword wasn’t needed to defend Kathy Acker’s honor and that I could slip back into being a courted girl who prided herself on using honesty as a method of flirtation. “I have.” I gave a heavy sigh as if love’s ravages wearied me, and then I looked up from my beer with a knowing smirk.
I’d met my guitar-playing boyfriend my freshmen year, and he’d been my first real lover, the first person with whom I both figuratively and literally slept on any kind of regular basis. It wasn’t long before we were practically symbiotic, informing each other’s speech patterns and thesis sentences and food choices, growing what appears now in the few photos that exist to be a single mop of unruly hair and engaging in passionate deconstruction of our every utterance, especially on the subjects of power, gender, genius, sex. Although we’d had a rocky road the last couple months of school, under the pressure of his graduating and the future’s uncertainty, he was coming to Philadelphia in a couple weeks to live for the summer because I was there, a fact that was dissolving in my mind like a sugar cube dropped into beer. I let my answer stand unelaborated upon, an implied past tense. Walking back to West Philly in a haze of Colt 45 and chemistry, I was already gone. I had gnawed off that important relationship and left it behind in the bar as if it were a limb in the maws of a trap.
CARL AND I didn’t sleep together that night or the next night. I don’t remember how many days later it was that I made my way to his room. I don’t remember his invitation, or how I got there, or if I had officially broken up with my boyfriend yet or not. But I can almost smell the chemical firing from my brain being blown. He lived on the third floor in what had once been a kitchen. Against one wall remained a sink and some cheap cabinets, and against another a few plastic milk crates held albums. A mannequin wearing a gas mask stood guard in one corner. There was no other furniture. We sat on opposite sides of the mattress on the floor for a brief, loaded exchange of sentences, and then he crawled toward me slowly, his large face coming first, pointy-chinned like a cat, thick lips protruding. It was the last moment of calm.
He was less like Marlon Brando in bed and more like the Transexual Transvestite from Transylvania. He was hypermasculine and campily feminine. He was huge and graceful and sure and louche. He had swiveling hips and a massive finger span and no shame. He was not afraid of any part of me and not afraid of hurting me or displeasing me. He was greedy, but also baldly fascinated by my avidity and receptivity. The strokes of his dick unloosed in me every pornographic cliché I’d imbibed in my near decade-long exploration of smut prose: I’m impaled, I thought ecstatically. He’s in me up to my throat! As each worn phrase exploded through my consciousness I felt like I was meeting truth, being made real. When he came I clutched at what I thought was the end before discovering his first orgasm was like my own, less a satisfaction than an antagonism, just a vista on the way to the top of the mountain—grandeur, yes, ahhhh, have a drink—but then back to got-to-get-there, got-to-get there, higher, more. It was a sweltering night and the sheet soon pulled off and the texture of the worn mattress was pilly and disgusting. Our fingernails filled with the black of each other’s dead skin. Sweat slicked our bodies. Even hours into it, his penis thwacked back toward his stomach when I let it go. His moves had been impressive, but then we went to a place beyond moves. We were not so much communing as erupting.
At one point, we lay apart, backs propped against the wall, legs splayed, touching just at our hooked ankles, both twitching, in a fevered trance. I was brought back to myself by the arrhythmic shaking of the mattress; I saw he was jerking himself off, the streetlight coming in and laying blue on our bodies. I watched him. So this is what we were going to do now, I thought. I touched myself too, but my fingers didn’t feel good in the raw folds, and he was oblivious to me. Without his interest I became confused. I took a breath and rolled toward him, straddled high on his thigh and moved my mouth towards his head.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I whispered. Our skin was sticky, and it hurt as it pulled at each shift of weight. “Tell me what you want me to do.” I had never said this to anyone before.
Carl returned back to the room. He smiled at me with surprise, a condescending kindness. He didn’t tell me anything, but he kissed me deeply. He put his hands on my hip bones and pressed while he set me back, which made me feel tiny and invincible. My blood rose again.
We had sex until my body was battered. Until my pussy was so swollen the only thing to make it feel better was to get it wet all over again, until a single finger in me felt as huge as a giant cock, until uncertainty was obliterated. He staggered off to work the next morning after a single hour of sleep. After a few more, I wobbled down to see Reba at work.
“I thought you two might get together,” she said to me calmly, perhaps even coolly. She coaxed a ball of ice cream from the vat and then glided down the counter to give the customer their cone and take their money.
There might have been a recent history of perceived betrayals that each of us was retaliating against that summer, the confused pain of separation that is part of youth and love and growth. Was she leaving me behind as she became more big-city punk rock? Was I snubbing her in favor of snooty college intellectuals? Maybe a little of both. We were both horny girls who had a fierce attachment that we’d never explored physically. Between Reba’s sexual enlightenment and my own and our need to differentiate, the main times she and I talked privately during that fervid June and July were the few occasions when she got off work early and, having an hour to kill before Cantanine came to get her, accompanied me to the Bounce Babe Lounge.
