“What is an Author?” Textuality and Intelligibility of a Someone – ENG 492: History of Literary Criticism and Theory

Doing Justice to David

Butler wants to do justice to someone; that someone is David Reimer. David’s story begins with XY chromosomes, is punctuated by multiple attempts by others to redefine his identity, a reclamation of agency and subjectivity, and ends with his suicide. Born into a male body, part of his penis was burned off by a botched prophylactic circumcision. Horrified by the outcome, the parents and doctors decided to remove the testes and rest of the penis but did not invert the genitals into a vagina. David became Brenda through hormones, socialization, psychotherapy and interrogation. Relentlessly confronted and interrogated about his/her identity, David expressed a dysphoria of gendered identity. His/her body, his/her toy preferences, what he/she wore as clothing was read and controlled by multiple forms of discourse because he/she was found unintelligible. David/Brenda’s gender was ambiguous and needed to be made intelligible to be understood. Without intelligibility he/she would never be “normal” and society and other people would reject him/her.

Intelligibility is complicated: It is the intersection of discourse—the nebulous, omnipresent interaction of knowledge—with normativity—the nebulous, omnipresent power that seeks to understand and control. Understanding necessitates intelligibility and the ability to be read. Something becomes “normal” through understanding and understanding is gained through discourse—all of these things are devices of power that are ultimately used to control and regulate. This regulation becomes the link between a text, as a body, and a person as a body; it is through David’s treatment that it becomes clear that textual or Human bodies are treated by discourse in similar ways. Both textual and physical bodies are treated as vessels for interpretation. The David Reimer that Butler discusses, as a person and a body, became a subject of discourse and is controlled and regulated in ways that are explicit, tangible and violent.  And through this system of regulation, he becomes an author, in Foucault’s slippery definition—he becomes a source of discourse. Butler builds onto Foucault to show the power that David, as an author, holds; she asserts his voice to broadcast his worth through discourse and reclaim an identity that is left at the peripherals of intelligibility.

Foucault asks “What is an Author?” but never entirely or satisfactorily answers the question. This is done with a purpose: to Foucault, the author is amorphous; “The function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society” (1481). The author, as a person, is secondary to the author as a function. The author, as person and subject, informs the greater discourse but is only one facet in the greater conversation that the discourse encapsulates. Discourse constantly refers back to the author as a source of knowledge; but Discourse is a mode of production and is always producing more knowledge beyond the author as well. Discourse is constantly contracting and expanding its knowledge; an author serves as a “means of classification” (1481) for this pulsating, nebulous discourse-knowledge formation. The author as a classification serves several purposes, it “can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others” but it also “establishes different forms of relationships among texts” (1481). So an author’s role in the discourse that they encapsulate is complicated, opaque and seemingly without end; the author’s role is never abandoned and their ability to inform is paramount.

David Reimer is an author through this definition: there’s a discourse that surrounds David, a discourse that he sometimes participated in but often did not. He/She was “Addressed time and time again by those who make use of every utterance that [David/]Brenda makes about [his/]her experience as evidence for or against a true gender” (Butler 70). Utterance becomes textual evidence through this process of discussion and gender-identity-formation that David engaged in. David was guided through a system of discourse by his utterances to become intelligible and understood. Discourse relies upon utterance to build understanding and to control identity. David’s experience represents the apparatuses involved in discourse, the myriad “psychologists, psychiatrists, legal and medical professionals” who were employed to “negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender…and one’s personhood” (58). Butler addresses that there is a connection and relation between “intelligibility and the human” (58). Through David, this system of discourse demonstrates its attempt to bring disparities of gendered identity and acceptability back into the known binary of male/female.

Butler focuses heavily on the word “Justice” and its connections to the word “intelligible” in her essay to show that what is done to bodies to make them intelligible is not always doing them justice. Butler interrogates “What social norms must be honored and expressed for ‘personhood’ to become allocated” to make a point that people are not born as fully-realized people; there is a permanent state of becoming (58). There is a process of perception and “how we do or do not recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body” informs the treatment of that body (58). The body itself is a signifying chain and is something to be read. The connection between text and body is made explicit through the necessity of texts and bodies’ intelligibility; they need to be understood. Bodies which are not understood within a norm are made to be understood.

The system of discourse is an apparatus of control: David’s subjection to this control is not intended to be violent; the discursive process only wants to make him human. While “[David/]Brenda was hardly happy, refused to adapt to many so-called girl behaviors, and was appalled by [one of his/her doctor’s] invasive and constant interrogations”, her development was reported (dubiously) as a success (61). The notion of success is an added complication if being human is the ability to be understood. David’s experience suggests that he understood that whatever was being imposed upon him was not what he understood himself to be. The process of gender-formation was a failure since his doctors, believed that David was not yet an intelligibly identified male or female. But this also illustrates the failure of a binary to represent what David believed himself to be. While Brenda “started living as a boy, named David, at age fourteen”, Butler says that his newly constructed phallus “enters David only ambivalently into the norm (60). Because a phallus is not a penis, it is a fleshy construction that fails to function as a penis “normally” should. In the same way, David as a “man” fails to function as a man should—but Butler is cautious to illustrate that this failure is not to be portrayed negatively.

Butler points to moments when David asserts his value, as a person, regardless of what gendered signifiers are attributed to his body and behavior to illustrate his ability to exist on the edges of what is intelligible. Butler stresses that a failure of a binary is not a failure of identity when she concludes, “he has already established that what will justify his worth will be the invocation of an ‘I’ which is not reducible to the compatibility of his anatomy with the norm” (72). His invocation of an ‘I’ establishes that he is intelligible to himself, and therefore intelligible to someone. He is someone who may not fully understand himself but he understands that he is a person who cannot be read solely by the signifiers that his body provide. He uses this confidence in his individual worth to combat the discourse that has controlled how others read his body. He may identify as male but he refuses to be read as a successful or unsuccessful male-bodied person; he is who he says he is. David’s voice was coerced into saying things that fit into a system of signification that may not have best represented how he felt or identified. But he was never actually asked who he was; instead he was always asked who he wanted to be.

Butler sticks to the “He/Him” pronoun throughout “Doing Justice to Someone” because that is David’s chosen gender identity—but this is shown to be especially complex. Butler doesn’t step back to discuss pronouns because it’s assumed that her readership already understands how intricate those interactions of gender, pronoun and identity are. Pronouns structure a major facet of intelligibility in the world of discourse and identity, if a pronoun does not fit to how a body is read by the outside world, it interrupts the signifying chain. “Them” is a gender neutral pronoun that may have more usefully shown a plurality of being and nuance of gender within David. But Butler uses “he” because David chooses “he”. And the interruption to the signifying chain that David causes with his identification as “he” is a key point to Butler’s essay because it complicates the reading of “David”. David is exerting agency and an expression of who he is through the use of “he”. He is also acknowledging that he is “holding out for something called ‘depth’ over and against the ‘shallowness’ of the doctors” and a society who claims that he’ll be ridiculed by others for his abnormal phallus (71-72). He cannot—he will not—be told who he is because of what is between his legs.

Through his identification of “I” and through his expression that he is an individual with self-worth, David reinserts himself as an author and an authority to be referred back to. Butler analyzes and uses David’s utterances to demonstrate that he is not only an object of discourse but is also an agent within discourse. He regains a sense of authority over how he is treated by others and is given the agency to reject the discourse at large that tries to tell him that he isn’t a fully-realized human being until he is perfectly gendered.

However, the author remains a problematic construction, it is still something nebulous. Butler offers an empowering and compassionate understanding of who David is. David’s insistence that he is an individual is validating and that validation is expounded upon by Butler. But Foucault complicates theauthor as a device when he says that “these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts” (1483). Utterances are only flashes and phantoms of an individual and any author’s textual body is only a “complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author” (1483). Through the need to make intelligible, readers appropriate and disregard aspects of the text which are deemed necessary and unnecessary to make their reading of an author understandable or purposeful. As readers, we impose our own individual identity onto textual bodies through “The comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice” (1483). And so, even Butler belies her discursive handling of texts by attempting to allow David to speak for himself and assert himself as a worthy individual. Underlying this is the reality that even David’s agency is a product of discourse, and Butler’s method is just one way to read a textual body. Butler’s reading is a reclamation of David’s voice, a counter-narrative but is still inescapably controlled by a larger discourse of identity and subjectivity. In an odd way, butler is still using David’s words to speak for him, manipulating them, and may be expressing something that David does not truly feel.

So what are we left with? The violence done to David by discursive forces was exerted in the name of knowledge and knowledge creation. David was put under the knife numerous times to become a source of knowledge for competing disciplines: those who sought to enforce gender as a social construction and those who sought to enforce gender as natural and inherent. At different times, he was used to show how gender can be built from hormones and behavioral reinforcement and when that failed, he was used to show that gender stems from biology and birth. Butler stepped away from the ruckus with a critique of the discourse itself and pointed to the hazard of the violence done to this body. She cautions that “if what those doctors believe were true, he would be a complete loser, and he implies that he is not a complete loser, that something in him is winning” (72).

Butler, like the other disciplines that she discusses, takes David’s life as a methodology to be applied towards other bodies. She insists that David’s voice in this matter is necessary, that he’s already an intelligible being, without a defined and stable gender. Butler claims that David understands that his identity is “Something [that] exceeds the norm, and he recognizes its unrecognizability” (72). But this is her construction of him as an author; he is being used to make a point. Her compassion stems from the same attempt to control the discourse that other disciplines used. Except, hers is not inherently violent, it does not try and provide a solution to a problem of unintelligibility; method is informed by Foucault’s assertion that “The subject should not be abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies” (1489). “Subject” to Foucault means a self-realized, introspective individual and David is certainly a subject. Butler takes David’s subjectivity and uses it to show that David is “Saying something more—he is cautioning us against the absolutism of distinction itself” (72). Both Foucault and Butler are intervening on the level of discourse to say that these individuals are not just textual bodies, comprised of their utterance. They are saying that these are also physical bodies: humans and people. These physical bodies have voices and utterances that enter a discourse; but the interpretive vessel is discourse itself, not the body.

David “is cautioning us against the absolutism of distinction itself, for his phallus does not constitute the entirety of his worth” (72). The Phallus is just one of many signifiers that structure David’s textual body but it is discourse that attempted to control that body; it is discourse that constructed that phallus; it is discourse that severed what was left of his penis and testes. The violence enacted upon David is real, and while his reasons for taking his own life are ambiguous, there’s compelling evidence that he internalized some of the violence onto himself. The amount of compassion and humanity within Butler’s argument; the empowerment and the value she embeds into David’s voice makes Butler’s reading incredibly compelling. So while her approach to textual bodies is still a method to channel knowledge out onto physical bodies, it disengages the violent aspects of power while still employing control over a discourse. Her reading is a dismantling of the discourse in order to try and mine the idea of how discourse learns to read textual bodies and employs the knowledge it creates to control other bodies.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Doing Justice to Someone.” Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Abington: Routledge, 2004. 57-74. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Leitch, Cain, Finke, Johnson, McGowan, Sharpley-Whitting, Williams. The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 1475-1490. Print.

“Gazing at the Cock’s Roost” Critical Essay – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

“Cock-a-doodle-doo”

It’s hard to say where I picked up the line “no one goes through the gate anymore; they just hop over the fence.” I attribute it to Seinfeld. But I’ve only watched two episodes of Seinfeld and I’ve never watched his standup. Google offers no evidence that anyone has ever said it. And since Google is my only resource to find authoritative advice, we’re taking it on faith that I didn’t just make it up. Regardless, it’s an awesome metaphor and it still captures a sentiment that I try to express to men as I help them select a new pair of underwear. Flies: the slit on men’s undergarments, dug into to pull a penis through and pee, are a thing of the past. And I defer to Seinfeld as the source of sage advice because people don’t trust me when I tell them that “eighty percent of men no longer use their fly.” I don’t always trust myself saying that either, it’s another canned one-liner that I’ve picked up and long since forgotten from where. That one, I’m pretty sure my boss told me. He probably yanked it out of trade magazine and is now misquoting it. And like a game of telephone, the source material has become muddled and unverifiable.

I work at a men’s underwear store, UnderU4Men and I’ve collected these sound bites and clips of artificial wisdom to be an effective sales person. I have a reputation to maintain and sales goals to keep. On any given day there’s almost always an older, modest man and his doting, cute, petite wife that come into the store. The store is marketed towards a “main street” customer; the target-demographic are those who spend the majority of money in retail: females.  Like so many women who have spent the majority of their adult lives buying themselves bras and panties at stores not unlike this one, the woman who’s just walked in is elated to be here. This man is not. My job is to bridge the gap between their disparate attitudes in the hopes that, through conversation, the wife’s excitement can meet the husband’s apprehension in the middle. The hope is that both parties can find a pair—or several pairs—of underwear that makes them both happy. Some couples are more willing to compromise; some husbands are happy to submit to the wife’s choices. Some men come into the store with a girthy list of specifications, based upon a pair of underwear they bought at Nordstrom Rack a decade ago that has become the paragon of men’s undergarments in their mind: they have to be unbranded, black, cotton, with no elastic, a wrapped waistband—not too thick—but also not too thin, with a fly and a low-rise on the waist. They’ll settle for no less, even if it means they’ll never find another pair of underwear to wear ever again.

Sometimes, these same men can’t be bothered to shop for themselves, so they send their partners into the store with this impossible list of demands. And I am stuck fighting the demands of a straw man who can’t even be here to make these requests on their own. But sometimes, they are both here—like the couples mentioned earlier. We talk about what the guy likes; boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, trunks: how substantial the underwear’s coverage should be, how tight it fits, how long the legs are, if there’s any leg at all. I usually don’t mention jock straps or thongs but those are options too! Then there’s fabric: do they want to stick to cotton? There’s 100% cotton, there’s cotton/spandex blends, nylon/spandex blends, polyester/spandex blends. There’s the “natural fabrics”: merino wool, modal—made from beech wood trees, tencel—made from eucalyptus, bamboo—made from bamboo (no joke). All are splinter free! Or your money back.

All this is to say that we get to talking about a lot before we start to talk about anything specific. But inevitably, there’s a man that’s been shown a few of my personal recommendations and starts to realize that most of the underwear—regardless of the size fit and fabric— doesn’t have a fly. And panic sets in. “Where’s the pee hole?” “Where’s the slit thing?” “How am I supposed to piss while wearing this underwear?” There are many, many things that I’m willing to answer but for these questions, but I let Seinfeld respond for me, to keep things light-hearted. But most of the time, their reaction, still looks a lot like this: “So I just pull my pants and underwear down and show the entire restroom my ass?” Internally, my response is “sure, that’s one way to do it. I mean, I do it differently. I myself, jump over the fence without mooning anyone in the process. Just breathe, sir; I was able to figure it all out without hyperventilating and having an aneurysm ” “The missing fly won’t accidentally invite some scandalous gay cruiser to motorboat your exposed buttocks.” But I have to say all that more gently. Something like: “well you just pull down the front of the underwear and still use the fly on your jeans. You don’t have to pull your pants down”. I can’t help whatever latent sarcasm my voice carries as I speak in these moments. It seems unreal that this is such a foreign concept to some men. But then again, I’ve never really used the fly, it’s a complicated apparatus. I try to be understanding.

Since a long, long time ago, people have worn underwear. Men’s wear and what is fashionable has changed dramatically and differed radically within cultures, social standing and a lot more. However, throughout all of this, underwear seems a relative—but not universal—constant. Most dudes have worn underwear, smallclothes, loincloths or grape leaves, Matthew McConaughey and a few other commandoes excluded. But Digging up where the fly came from is a tricky bit of archeology and I think it would have diminishing returns. At the end of the day, what are you left with? Knowledge that flies were put into underwear after some Victorian had too much trouble with his codpiece? It would be a fun, grotesque bit of trivia to know, sure—even if it were actually true. But would finding that out make you feel more enlightened—or like a more interesting cocktail party guest? Maybe; but I make my living selling man-panties and tracing the fly’s inception sounds like a total bore to me. Because we kind of already know why they’re there: they make sense. They may not be a necessity for everyone but they’re useful. It’s this sensefulness and utility that I find most intriguing anyway.

Flies are nothing, if not utilitarian. They’re used to pee out of. They serve no other purpose. Well, there was the one German woman who asked me, worriedly and in broken English, where the hole for sex was. So, clearly there are creative ways to use a fly, as her and her husband discovered. “How is the cow supposed to get out of the barn without a door?” she probed. I think she meant “how does the cock get out of the roost?” But farm metaphors can be confusing in your second language. But let’s chew that cud for a moment: “how does the cow get out of the barn?” Not as easily as you’d think, even with a door.

A standard fly is anything but standard. They are all a vertical slit cut into the crotch of underwear but their similarities end there. On boxers, they are straight-forward: the slit is overlapped slightly by downy fabric on each end of the opening and usually has a little button in the middle, for closure—Georgia O’Keeffe, eat your heart out! But boxer-briefs, trunks and briefs have a more nuanced take on what a fly should be. Some have the button-enclosure, like boxers but many have a labyrinthine jumble of openings and layers of fabric to navigate. Sometimes, to remind myself why I don’t use flies, I try to use a fly. I waste seconds of my life digging at my crotch, trying to traverse the messy folds that house my penis. It’s frustrating! I was never taught how to use one but even if I had been, no two fly-mazes are made the same. Some only require a reach into-the-front and around-the-bend. Others require a reach into-the-front down-to-the-bottom and a pull-down-and-back up. Sometimes, the snake has a lot of grass to slither through. I feel inclined to give any man who routinely does these dick gymnastics a gold medal.

There are other options to aid in piloting the jet stream. One, more sensible option is the Swedish Fly; it’s cut into underwear horizontally, instead of vertically. It was Swedish military-issue in all underwear produced during WW1. Just a reach-down and a pull-out—like all Scandinavian ingenuity: it’s simple and requires no instructions. But it’s never really caught on; it’s never been typical. It’s a novelty. Why? My theory is kind of graphic but you’ve made it this far, so it’s safe to say you aren’t squeamish. When a man gets excited and his penis becomes erect, it doesn’t have a lot of places to go; an easily accessible opening provides the opportunity for some breathing room. There’s nowhere to go but up! It’s an armchair hypothesis, to be sure; but nonetheless, a compelling one.

So make no mistake, I understand why the fly exists. But it’s a bit of a non-issue for me. It’s there or it isn’t:  I still manage to pee either way. No skin off of my dick. It creates as many problems as it solves. And as far as a time-saving device goes: it fails. I want to comfort those few men who place so much value and importance on an extra piece of fabric, with a small hole cut into it. This 20% of men, who still politely use the gate and don’t hurdle over the fence, aren’t always easy to console. I want to explain that it’s really, not the end of the world. But when a man reacts so defensively to something that is so trivial, my cogs start turning. There’s an instability that’s fostered by a lack of fly in men’s underwear. There’s an even bigger instability caused by what flies are replaced with: enhancing pouches.

“Men’s underwear has switched from a logic of use to a logic of size” laments a writer from New York magazine, in an conversation that Judith/Jack Halberstam anecdotally refers to in one of her/his lectures. It’s just one of many points that Halberstam employs to illustrate the shifting trends and mores in men’s wear, men’s culture and the very concept of “Men.” As someone who’s fascinated by gender, gender roles and gender fluidity, I’m inclined to agree. The enhancing pouch ushers in a brave new world for men’s underwear. What does a “logic of size” provide in men’s underwear? It tinkers and screws with the idea of purposefulness in underwear. The purpose of underwear is now more complicated. It’s not only a buffer placed between your groin and pants but also, something to be desirable in; now it’s something to show off.

Male anxiety is as tricky as any anxiety of privilege can be. Men’s desirability has never been so phallic and penis-centric. Men’s desirability has traditionally been a displacement of the penis onto other things like fully-throttled cars; throbbing wads of cash; big, hard careers. Men’s ability to objectify, to collect objects, and surround themselves with objects dictated and enhanced their attractiveness. All of this says, “hey look at my large, aching, impressive endowment; I’m a person you desire.” Clearly, there are exceptions—no one disputes that. But it’s been compellingly argued by uncountable sources that male allure was shaped by almost everything but the penis and its size. A certain majority of men don’t mind talking about their assumedly large members, with boastful bravado. Other men remain more modest. However, make no mistake, penis size has been one facet of many in the calculus of male desirability. It’s just never been so explicit and pronounced as it is today with the enhancing pouch.

To clarify, not all pouches on men’s underwear today are “enhancing” in such obvious ways. Some are designed for comfort, some are designed for support, some are for sports-performance. By-and-large, if there’s a pouch, there’s not a fly. So it’s a muddled dichotomy but a dichotomy nonetheless. But a pouch is a pouch and regardless of function, they do set out and package the male genitals in very overt ways. Some just say “pouch front underwear” on their boxes. Others have more ostentatious names like “Trophy Shelf,” “Trophy Boy,” “Almost Naked,” “WonderJock,” “Show-It Technology,” “Saxx,” “Shock Jock” and the list goes on. The “Almost Naked” is the highest selling pair of underwear in our company, the bamboo soft fabric is one selling point but the hang-free pouch is another. “It’s supposed to feel like you’re not wearing anything” I tell customers, as if they couldn’t figure that out on their own.

That idea that it feels like it’s not there is appealing to men. They want to feel free and unbridled; to let it all hang out. They also might not want to think about what underwear they’re wearing throughout the day. Comfort is still king in men’s wear. But the “Almost Naked” also foregrounds the penis; it’s front-and-center in the apparatus. I think it looks unflattering; all the schlongs that I’ve seen in this pouch have looked somewhat like a cross between a fruit basket and a bird’s beak, regardless of how big the banana is. But I also can’t argue with the success of a pair of underpants that outsells anything else in the store three-to-one. I tell people that “it’s something to look at once it’s in there.” So, I’m not lying.

Other pouches just bring it all to the front but don’t make such a spectacle of it. I prefer these the most. I feel sexy in them, I feel desirable. I also feel comfortable. They enhance without being obscene or vulgar about it. I have my own reservations about making such a phallocentric declaration. I’m as susceptible as any other man to the anxiety of desirability. Making the penis a pronounced object of desire, subordinate to the logic of size, fosters a lot of insecurity. And insecurity shatters the confidence that has formulated male sexuality for a long time. Women are used to push-up bras, make-up, manicured body hair, things used to enhance the sex-appeal of their bodies for men. If all are subject to the gaze and the gaze is male, how do men feel when their penis is so naked and exposed to it? The penis becomes an object desired by other men. Not only the phallus, an abstraction buttressed by wealth and objects, but the penis itself. Men form their aspiration to be better, more desirable men through the size of one another’s penis in this new world of underwear. And it’s kind of queer, even if they’re wearing the underwear for women. And that’s why I think that The NY Magazine Reporters observation—that there’s a change from a “logic of use to a logic of size”—is so compelling. It’s a fundamental shift in masculinity and a shifting of the male gaze. Underwear is devoid of the comforting, supple folds of the fly and replaced with pouches that broadcast their penis size. With this, come new ideas of what is sexy and how to make a man wanted by others.

Some men—like the occasional customer I talk to—are angry, defensive, seething and scared. Some, like the reporter Halberstam talks to, are simply confused. Men now navigate a world which seems outwardly codified and purposeful; a world that was once somewhat easier to navigate and exist within as a male-bodied man. But it’s getting more complicated; maybe a lot less complicated. Maybe it’s just foreign, unusual, and slightly queerer. The reporter’s sentiment isn’t fear or annoyance or retaliation. Like him, most men today approach it quizzically and perplexedly. But some don’t, some get upset and defensive. Some cling onto every last scrap of fabric that their disintegrating security blanket of masculinity has—including the fly.

“Bushwhacking” Personal Essay – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

Need I say more?

Bushwhackers Saloon, this new world that queerly orbits me, is an institution in the town I come from. My hometown’s very own cowboy bar—it’s the most magical place in Tualatin, Oregon: a Disney-land-in-magnitude simulacrum of an old-west style saloon. The sign that greets you as you approach the bar is a languorous, wrought-iron silhouette of a cowboy tilting onto the sign post—a metal Marlboro man in a Stetson ten-gallon and spurred alligator boots. I consider this man an old friend; when I was a child, he used to offer a passing greeting as my dad drove me to McDonald’s for our weekly balanced breakfasts. On the sign: “Bushwhackers” is cursively scrawled over my friend’s head, the “U” is a horseshoe and there’s a lasso flying over the flouncy type face. I’d like to say that we’re not in Kansas anymore but damnit, it sure feels like it.

I research my destination before arriving. I need additional context. I discover what Bushwhackers has in-store: They’re closed on Sundays—I assume because you should be at church, it is god’s day for chrissakes! They serve a Prime Rib dinner on Fridays. Like any red-blooded establishment, Monday’s are reserved for Football. On all other nights, they open their staggeringly large dance floor—which the rest of the bar satellites. Each night hosts multiple, varying styles of loosely choreographed dancing on the floor. On Tuesdays, the dance floor is reserved for the waltz, foxtrot and various other slow dances. With that said, I think Tuesdays are a night for geriatrics, couples and those who are single and self-loathe. Thursdays, where I find myself now, are for rotating styles of line dancing.

I drive past my friend—The Steel Marlboro Man and I’m rejected by a car lot that’s already at-capacity by 9:00PM. I end up parked three lots away from the bar, in front of a Mexican cantina and a Sherwin Williams—out with the other marginals. The paint store is closed; the cantina is not drawing nearly as much of a crowd as the cowboy bar down the street. I smoke a cigarette and walk towards with my old pal. I stop under the sign to examine him up close; I intimately caress the curvature of his meticulously, masculine frame and his furrowed iron brow. I’ve grown into myself since we last saw one another, does he notice? With a passing grope, I take another drag and the slow burning butt lights my path with the promise of eventual, cancerous death. I approach this log-cabin, made of varnished pine, a Montanan ranch chalet comfortably nestled in the middle of suburban sprawl with an curious sense of apprehension.

From what little research I’ve done and have inferred from years of growing up near it, I imagine Bushwhackers has a dirt floor, men in ten-gallon hats and overalls, women with pigtails and affected accents; everyone will be wearing cowboy boots. My conjectures stem largely from ignorance but also from my Grandmother’s 60^th birthday barn party years ago. From what I recall, this world-building moment of my youth was held in an actual barn, painted red, with a straw floor. There was a lot of billy Ray Cyrus played that evening. My Grandma lives in Sandy, Oregon. It’s a town adjacent to Boring, Oregon; it’s a town that my mom likes to say is a great place to be from. I imagine that Bushwhackers is not unlike my Grandmother’s barn party in Sandy. But, unlike my Grandmother’s barn party, I bet that somewhere inside this pine bungalow, there’s a mechanical bull where drunk women in daisy dukes scream orgasmically as they’re tossed from side to side, gripping their bronco’s flanks until they’re sharply dismounted. My assumptions aren’t entirely incorrect. There’s no bull.

The bouncer’s slouched over a stool, a large mid-twenty-something, in a windbreaker jacket. My eyes flutter up and down him, resting quickly on places that make me feel guilty before reconvening with his face again. I’m still not sure if this is a place for people like me, if Bushwhackers allows longing, desirous glances between men; I haven’t made up my mind. But I can only be myself. I can’t help that he’s handsome, rough-around-the edges and muscular. He looks at me quizzically as I fumble for my driver’s license. I get it, I’m over dressed, it’s ladies night, I’m a guy—don’t judge me. That’s all I ask. I think I’ve dressed accordingly but really, my outfit borders between a mocking parody and a genuine attempt to blend in: I wear a denim work shirt, with elbow patches and metal buttons; dark, tight jeans and a small, presumably innocuous bolo tie. I don’t own cowboy boots, but I’m still in heels—men’s dress heels, but heels nonetheless: they’re called suede bucks and they’re honey brown. They complement my dark jeans well. I’m wearing the red, puffy, members-only jacket I just bought myself for Christmas. I’m an inverted drag queen, I imagine. I’m the spitting-image of blue collar masculinity, one member of the village people. As I step inside, doubt greets me, another old friend of mine. And the effectiveness of my costume’s camouflage is shattered.  Confidence is everything. These people can smell fear. I quickly realize that the bolo tie, in particular, is an anachronistic flamboyance that disallows me to pass as anything other than what I am. I’m a big fake, a sheep in wolves clothing.

But, I’ve arrived. I find myself inside of Bushwhackers. I was instigated by a friend’s invitation over the phone. Hilary and I have known each other since we were five. She graduated two years ago from Santa Clara and like most of my peers, she graduated on-schedule. Proud-we-are-of-all-of-them-for-not-being-fuck-ups-like-me. She works for the local Jesuit parish during the week and takes night classes to prep for the MCATS—she jokes that she converted to Catholicism as an act of rebellion against her protestant parents. She’s sweet, good-natured, charmingly neurotic, blonde, slender, and awkward; she has always been there for me, and like any good catholic—old or new—Hilary likes to drink, party, and attends to guilt later. It’s Thursday, and according to her, that means that it’s “ladies’ night”. Thursday means that there’s free dancing lessons that start at seven, no cover, and there’s discounted drinks for those who are vaginally endowed. Hilary makes sure to clarify that men can, of course, participate in dance lessons despite the evening’s designation. Which is such a relief! Except that I work and can’t make the 7:00 dance lessons anyway. So that’s a wash.

She invites me because she knows I’ll like it here; she likes it here. We are not all that different. We’re comfortable with one another; we played on my family’s three-and-a-half acres together as children. She knows that I grew up near horses, playing in wet dirt and sharp grass. She knows what very few people know: I’ve not always been so cosmopolitan.

Even so, line dancing is something that I haven’t done since my Grandmother’s 60^th barnyard birthday bash. From what I piece together from these memories, line dancing is a style of dance that—as you might imagine—is done in lines. That’s about all I have, for the moment. But once inside, I’m able to unpack that a bit more: line dancing can appear to an outside observer to be like a sort of synchronized swimming outside of a pool, without water and with infinitely more yee-hawing. It’s innocent and outwardly inoffensive and this makes it somewhat of an anomaly in today’s bump-and-grind culture. It, by virtue, orients people in relation to one another without consideration of gender—I find this necessary to mention because its gender neutrality stems from a sort of traditionalism and while I find it noble, the effect is still a rigidly gendered, sexual display. I see boys opportunistically placing themselves next to girls, jockeying for attention, puffing their chests out and swinging in for light kisses.
I can’t actually see the dance floor as I walk into the bar—it’s that crowded. I can’t see anything but amber waves, purple mountains, and fruited plains of people. My synapses explode and instincts kick into over drive, there are so many people, too many sets of eyes, lots of glances. Is there anyone like me? Where are my friends? They may as well be dead, they’re buried alive in this crowd; a Texas funeral—how fitting. The music is cacophonous, the crowd is thick, there’s a wall of shoulders in every direction and I’m left with only two solutions: fight or flight. I can turn around and run back to where I came from or throw a punch. I settle for whiskey.

I sincerely like whiskey. I’d order it regardless; cowboy bar or not. So the buxom bartenders’ blank, dismissive stare seems unfair as the words “Pendleton on the rocks, please” dribble out of my mouth. My back’s been seductively arched over the bar for ages, waiting to get some libational attention. I’ve waited and waited and I’m finally allowed order a drink and I can’t be happy with a pint of beer, or a well whiskey-ginger—all good options that I normally order!—no, I absolutely have to get haughty about it tonight. I hear you, bar-wench, I’m a smug shit in a bolo tie who just ordered whiskey that’s made by a bougie wool mill but I’m at Bushwhackers and I didn’t burst into flame: it’s a cause for celebration! And there are Pendleton signs everywhere—the advertising worked, I’m convinced I needed it, so why judge? Why shoot me any dismissive glares? I’m taking this all much too personally. I’m happy, let’s all be happy together.

As I turn, to join the gyrating masses and find my friends, I’m stopped by an imposing figure in front of me. I stare at his firm, pectorals peak through an unbuttoned plaid shirt and I melt for a moment. Then I look up. Shit, it’s Brian. Brian’s grown, six years ago he was just as tall but much more gangly. Through catching up with my friends, I’ve found out that he’s also just returned from a tour of service in Afghanistan. We have never been friends. We have never not been friends. I mocked his speech impediment with my friends and he assumed I was a faggot and treated me accordingly. He no longer has a speech impediment but I remain what I am. He never bullied me—no one ever bullied me in high school—but he wasn’t interested in being my friend either (and I wasn’t interested in being his). It was never personal and I actually know very little about him. And yet, here he is and I’ve never wanted to know him more than I do now.

He’s seen things now—I really have no idea what— that I can’t even imagine. I’ve heard of Afghanistan, but without autocorrect, I wouldn’t know how to spell it. I know people have gone to war there, I know people die and things explode and yet I don’t actually know if Brian’s life was ever imminently in-danger. For all I know, he may have had a desk job. I don’t know what he’s been through. It’s all so abstract and foreign and mired in uncountable presuppositions. But he’s here in front of me and we’re talking and I want to be held, securely embraced by his experiences. I want to feel his truth deep inside of me. I want to entwine myself to him, to sympathize and help him forget. I want to bring him to completion so that I can know what completion feels like. I want to use my mouth and fellate my apology for all of the wrongs in his life. I want to tell him all of this. In him, I see something I worry I do not have and I want to know what it’s like. But I know rejection; I know what it’s like to go out-of-bounds, to ask another man for affection who doesn’t desire me. I know that by opening myself up, by bearing my heart, I’m naked. I know the sting of stigma and I cower in fear of it.

And we just end up talking about me. In the moment, I’m unable to find the words to ask about him. I don’t want to intrude or infer. I don’t want to open old wounds that he may or may not have. Desire to know, desire to fuck, desire for his strength, and patriotism weigh heavily on me and as the conversation wanes, I still desire so many things left unfulfilled. We part ways, the brief intimacy concludes and I feel the waste of potential burrow deep into me.

It’s time for another drink. And then the disembodied voice of God bellows over the speakers “all rise for the national anthem”. Quietly, everyone rises from their seats, puts their drinks down, ceases their interactions with one-another and all turn to the flag proudly perched in a corner, next to the deer’s head trophy mounted onto the wall. Everyone else acts as if their movement were mandated by god; they rotate in a fluid, unflinching unison towards the national drapery. My head swerves left, then right, my eyes dart around—frenzied—I search for a kindred spirit, someone who is as confused as I am. The crowd comprises one, unified face of rejection. Francis Scott Key’s ballad begins its blaring broadcast—it’s an instrumental version, the words are absent but we all know them anyway. I feel penetrated by the progression of aggrandizing brass, woodwind and strings; each bone in my body is slowly tickled like a piano key, my intestines curdle as they are massaged uncomfortably. My thighs, buttocks, torso are caressed without my consent by melodic nationalism. All at once it feels vulgar, profane and satisfying. I stand—titillated and confused.

The incongruity of where I am and what is happening foregrounds itself. I am in a bar and the national anthem is playing. No one else blinks an eye, I receive no winks, smirks or hints of camaraderie; these are the real Americans I’ve heard of, and sometimes fear. They drive exaggerated four-by-fours with raised-beds the height of basketball players, they are god-fearing and corn-fed. I believe that they love America; and therefore, they must hate me. Their glossy eyes are misted with tears of affection and affinity for this beautiful quilt of stars and stripes. I awkwardly place my hand over my heart. I haven’t been required to pay credence to the star spangled banner in long time—it’s been years. I fear that if I blithely roll my eyes and sit down, as I usually would, I’ll be outed and exposed as a phony.

I desperately want someone else to feel complicit with me. My eyes twitch as they grope the room for any other matched mark of doubt or apprehension—all I see are faces, my feet, stern glances, feet again, my friend’s faces, my feet, the menagerie of taxidermied trophies, myself. It feels sacrilegious to think about myself right now. I feel like a blasphemy and blasphemer, both Subject and Object. I know that all the other eyes are fixated on Betsy Ross’ most famous sewing project but I can’t help but feel like the room’s gaze is interrogating me.

Which is why, as the ballad fades and music transitions back into its tangy, twangy, achy, breaky routine and I glance longingly around the bar, I feel my stomach lurch and sink into the floor. In unison, people dance and laugh and buy pitchers and discuss one another’s lives. I feel like they care about all of this a lot more than I do and think about it a lot less; it all comes naturally. I pause at the bar for a drink. The woman in front of me squints over her shoulder, looking me up-and-down; she sizes me up with a wrinkled smirk. With an ambiguous tone, she asks if I’m in line. Maybe she thinks she’s in my way, maybe she’s just curious. I reply that I am. “That’s funny, the line starts back there” with an outstretched finger and a coiled, venomous hiss. My face recoils in disgust and my shoulders slump pathetically in defeat. I march off, unable to defend myself or bite back. Fair enough, bitch. I’m thrown off and sensitive, I feel especially vulnerable. Somehow she knew, and bit.

I slither back into the crowd, ducking under broad shoulders, dodging protruding breasts and tip-toeing around other’s steel-toes. I inaudibly mumble a few squeaky “excuse-mes” throughout my exploration of the bar that surrounds the dance floor. At last, I find my cohort. I’m greeted with hugs and smiles and approval; for a moment, I know who I am again. We catch up on the minutia of one another’s lives and the varying degrees of success we’ve found since we last saw one another. Finally, the conversation falters for a moment and we all look around for something to talk about. It occurs to me that Bushwhackers may as well be my high-school reunion; besides Brian, I didn’t notice the abundance of my old classmates dotting the crowd as I snaked my way over to my friends. But they’re everywhere. We begin to name names, waving gaily as we acknowledge each new person we see.

And then, with a twirl, I’m pulled onto the dance floor by Hilary. She’s a seasoned expert and has been to every “ladies’ night” for the past few months. She’s my line dancing guru, assuring me with a coy smile that I can join the harmonic choreography like everyone else. “Just mimic and if you can’t figure it out, fake it. No one will notice” she teases. She might just have summed up my entire life. I glance at Hilary as she grins flirtatiously with the boy next to her. She’s already pointed him out as a potential suitor, he’s here every Thursday too, and he’s interested. I rejoin the music, I’m dancing like a fly on the wall, unremarked upon. Rhythmically, I observe and repeat. I jump up, hit the floor and once planted in a low-squat; I quickly spin my arms in a circle, like egg beaters. I stride into the next paces. One step forward and two steps back. I’m catching onto the maneuvering and I’m slowly preforming better and better. It feels good to blend in and get lost in rhythm. It feels great. My smile is matched across the dance floor, we move with a euphoric ecstasy. Each dance is repetitive and monotonous but exhilarating and unflinchingly fun. I make it three songs before I start to overheat and I have to shed my jacket; I peel it off me, it’s reluctant to be cast away.

Once outside of it, my embedded instinct is to mock the absurdity of the entire spectacle. I’ve only just left the dance floor but old, comfortable habits die hard. This is all very silly. But, as I watch the scene unfold and the players play, I see elegance in consensus. I see earnestness and community. Mocking the sincerity of this experience feels prurient and profane. It would be something done for shock value and not much else. And more than that, there’s an authenticity here that makes me long and pine. I feel an uncomfortable touch of belonging in a place that I so desperately don’t want to fit into. I can’t escape my past or the disparate communities I belong to, but none of them are entirely comfortable for me. The problem then must not be with them. The problem then must be with me.

Malice: A Memoir Essay – WR 457: Personal Essay Writing

I transferred to a brand-new elementary school at the beginning of third grade. What I remember before Deer Creek Elementary is fragmented at best, memories only flash before me—moments on the soccer field, a boy with a cute haircut, almost getting hit by a fire truck while flying down a hill on my big wheel. And Bobby, but I’m not ready to address him just yet.  In my baggy sweatpants and fluffy sweatshirts, that I wore because they were soft and comfortable, I awkwardly but effectively made new friends. At the beginning of the year, I asked out my first girlfriend; Katelin, or Callie, or Cassie, a forgotten name but still beautiful. We would pile musty woodchips into elaborate fortresses under the jungle gym. We were king and queen; titles we bestowed upon ourselves to legitimize what was, for all intents and purposes, just an excuse to spend time with one another. We’d make declarations of everlasting love and devotion to one-another, broadcasting our royal edicts to the gathered minions of Deer Creek Elementary while they chased each other around the playground. Together we’d leave recess with splinters stinging our palms, reveling in the mildewed, cedar-fleck castles we’d created, mortared with our sweat and determination. Pining for marriage and a kingdom; we’d toil to build our walls as high as possible with a hope that today would be the day that they stood for eternity. We’d always return to find our stronghold leveled and elatedly begin reconstruction. The janitorial staff laid siege to my bark-chip empire every afternoon but we persevered, intent upon our world-building.

But even royal marriages end and my bastion’s demise came in the fourth grade. Kaetlin, Cassie, Callie, moved away—to another realm far, far away. With my new classmates, I too, had new subjects and a new domain. I had the opportunity to build new citadels and create new empires. But I was a social climber stuck in a caste-system. In this social reincarnation, I was no longer royalty, just another peon. Something in another life—maybe arrogance—had put me on the lowest rung. I lacked my queen at recess but I built anyway. But no one wanted to play my games anymore. Instead of building things under the twisted metal superstructures with me, everyone wanted to play above me. My benevolent smiles and regal gestures were met with ridicule and distaste. My proclamations and fumbles for attention were met by turned shoulders or confused stares. I was always alone on the swing set; the chairs next to me were still shivering and freshly abandoned. I’d try and join-in and play tag, only to be the kid that no one even bothered to chase—I could run endlessly and too fast.  I was no fun to be around. I was distasteful; something upon me marked my pariah status.

I examined myself, begging the universe to tell me what had changed. I slowly began to see that my kingly robes were more akin to a peasant’s burlap drab, covered in wood, dirt and the moldy splinters of my earthen forts. My homeliness begot distaste; my sweat pants and shirts no longer comforted me, they only offered an opportunity for ridicule. I abandoned my old garb en masse. The only sweatshirts I’d now wear had to have GAP tattooed across them, something recognizable and accepted. I begged my parents to buy me the itchy denim jeans and scratchy chinos that I had scorned for near a decade. And the bark chips were left sitting, dispersed and unmolested on the playground where they always were.

The three acres I lived on, the untamed childhood I’d blossomed within no longer appealed to me. All that was out there was birch trees and rich clay, fields of vibrant wildflowers, vegetable gardens and crawdad traps, garter snakes and lady bugs, apple trees and an unfinished tree house. I came to realize the pungent, unpleasant smells that permeated the outdoors. Our neighbor’s horses were knee-deep in their own feces, their dung ripened in the wet, warm summers and clung to the inside of your nostrils. There were always clouds of flies and yellow jackets swarming your summer picnic on the back lawn. These newly discovered malodors and fetid, overripe flavors sat in my mouth. The tall grass began to slash at my knees and my feet would blister with overuse. The soft, ant-rotted logs that I used to split open and watch explode with little blacks bodies no longer seemed fascinating; those logs now burst like putrid, gangrenous wounds—a pestilence that I ran home to hide from. And so, safely inside, I would retreat into the basement and build my kingdoms out of plastic Lego blocks. I’d construct colossal spaceships and wage war in the twilight of refracted sunshine through the wet, dark windows. Dirt and wood wouldn’t heal my pain and feelings of rejection. I had nicer clothes now and had to keep clean and tidy, like royalty should. So I’d spend all my afternoons down there—hidden away—building solitary, sterile-plastic realms.

But let’s not say that “everything” started here.

One day, earlier on, before I had delusions of grandeur, on the car ride home from Montessori school, my mom queried, how my day was. Like mothers do. I crooned the expected “fine” and we chat about her day while I remain mostly mute. Once home, I descend into my bedroom lair. I leap over my Lego spaceships frozen in an epic melee; I fly past my Star Wars figurines perched menacingly upon my bookshelf and I dive into the mountain of stuffed animals piled onto my trundle bed. Tearing off my clothes, my tiny, naked body is covered in the downy embrace of Rabbits, Orcas and Bears as I burrow deep into security. The soft fleece is relieving; it doesn’t yet carry the discomfort and ostracizing of the fourth grade. But no, everything was not “fine” today, mom. Can’t you just know that?

What I haven’t told her is that an ominous shadow has been cast over me in pre-school; his name is Bobby. He torments me in my early, formative years. I’m supposed to be discovering my inner, individual potential and instead, I spend my time on the playground cowering in fear. Enough is enough. And I finally milk the courage out of myself to complain to my mom about him.

During this time, my mother is an explosion of dyed-black hair and Janet Reno glasses. She wears big, floral dresses with exaggerated shoulder pads. She’s tough and sinewy but is undeniably the most motherly person I know. And always has been. She grew up poor, in the middle of five siblings, the median between older brothers and younger sisters on a farm in rural Sandy, Oregon. And while her brothers threw burs in her hair, tortured her relentlessly, she latched onto their company throughout her childhood. Her brothers were her best friends despite the times like the day they tricked her into the bottom of a pit where they left her for an entire summer’s afternoon. Sunburnt and scrappy, she learned to keep up and fight back.

So, while I found my mom’s suggestion—that the Montessori school deal with the Bobby problem or she’d “teach her son how to land a punch”—unsurprising and even motherly, the look of abject horror upon my teacher’s faces suggested that this woman was wild and tempestuous.  She may have been the HR manager for a major insurance firm now—trained in conflict management—but her past was inescapable. And she was a loose cannon when her son was threatened. She was the matriarch intent upon teaching her son how to fight fire with fire because that’s how she knew how to do it. Life, as she remembered it, was hard. She wasn’t about to let her son learn to be a victim.

But that isn’t quite all of it. My teachers were also concerned because Bobby, they said, had left Montessori school months ago. I had been complaining about a phantom menace who had been absent in my life for a while. To this day, I have no idea what he did to me or why I feared him so much. Something about him was malevolent and unrelenting. He followed me months after he no longer had a physical presence. He was a shadow on the wall without a figure to cast it. I could have made it all up. I could have made him up. He could have been a bully but he could just be another kid like me and maybe, I simply didn’t like him. This evasion made my mother deem it unnecessary to teach me how to swing a left-hook and we all moved on with our lives, onto better things. It’s a moment in time that we can look back on and laugh and tease over dinner. But without any doubt, he was the first memory of pain I have.

After Bobby, my mom had very few pearls of wisdom, outside of self-defense, on how to cope with and understand pain. Maybe most of my childhood pain was trivial. Once, I woke up in a cold-sweat, with a searing fever and begged to stay home from school. She looked at me with a flash of compassion and then gruffly told me to “take an Advil and get over it”. She let me know that I was being silly and that if I had a fever, I needed to take medicine before I decided to try and get out of school.

She had only one piece of advice about fitting in and even that was a defensive strategy: do not, for any reason, make fun of Sean. Sean was a boy who lived down the street, his father was a weird dude who rode his motorized scooter up-and-down the road we lived on, at all hours of the day. Sean’s dad was a software developer and his mom was a mental health professional. Together, the expectation would be that they formed a normal, nuclear suburban family—and outwardly, they did. Except that Sean was crazy, he had anger issues and an inability to understand and relate socially with others; I remember him as the rabid dog chained in the corner that everyone enjoyed throwing pebbles at until he snarled and lunged. My mom’s advice, to be just friendly enough to leave him well enough alone, stemmed from one guiding principle: If Sean brought a gun to school, which seemed possible to her, then I would be spared from his wrathful carnage. I’d stand by, removed from the taunting, name-calling and verbal abuse. I’d watch Sean be provoked and smile inwardly as he pounced onto the backs of his attackers and dug his teeth into the small of their necks. They weren’t as shrewd as I was.

By seventh grade, I’d found myself in every rung of the social hierarchy. It felt like schizophrenia when every word I said, everything I liked, every last gesture I made, was open for interpretation and judgment. I was Zeus perched upon Olympus in the morning and then Icarus plummeting from heaven by lunch, having flown too close to the comforting warmth of unconditional love. One day, to one person, Star Wars was cool and the fact that I devoured books, trivia and data surrounding this universe thrilled; while other days, it only bored or nauseated. I played soccer: soccer was cool, no wait, actually it’s gay. And gay is bad. What was a safe choice of music to listen to? My friends would routinely abandon me; I’d make a few only to have them decide that I was too much of a liability, too uncool, too attention starved. I crawled deep into the cavities of my mind, analyzing, correlating and inferring. I couldn’t decide who I was since any concrete foundation only invited demolition.

Opportunities to climb the social caste came and went, sometimes, they’d provide the mobility I craved and other times, they were dead-ends. From within this constant state of flux, someone emerged as the paragon of pain that I could inflict upon another person. Her name was Lindsey. Lanky and Amazonian, she towered above me with sad eyes and scraggly, blonde hair. She would whisper behind my back, letting her friends and others know that she liked my awkward demeanor and dyed-blonde blonde hair that I parted down the middle. She’d glance longingly or approach me after class for a quick, casual conversation. And I didn’t know what I thought of her until money entered the equation, a pittance: five dollars—but still green. Nicole, another girl is slowly flapping Abraham Lincoln’s mocking scowl in my face. She’s offered this sum for me to ask Lindsey to be my girlfriend. Money did strange things to my twelve-year-old self and so did a hunger for acceptance. Together, these two destructive desires—for money and for approval—coalesced into a torrent and I now wanted to ask Lindsey out. When I asked Lindsey the question, I never said that I was interested. I don’t remember what I said; something like “hey I heard you like me; do you want to be my girlfriend?” This could be complete bullshit; I could have picked out that scene in my head from a TV show. It seems like such a vapid thing to do and I can’t really imagine myself saying it—even at age twelve. And yet, I know that I asked her out—know that I said something—I know because so much pain surrounds that stupid, mindless, heartbreaking action. I wince when I think about it; it was such random, unbridled cruelty. But I also know that in the moment, it felt orgasmic.

I had a harem of girlfriends that I rotated through in middle school. I was only paid to date one of them. I use “girlfriends” as a loose descriptor since it was more like a close friendship. But we were in middle school and close friendships didn’t make sense between boys and girls unless we codified it into something permissible. And thus, girlfriend became a very real term—and with it, the expectations of the designation. Odd as it was, my string of girlfirends and I never kissed. Certain things still seemed taboo and I now say that it was because they were all my beards, masking my homosexual desire—even if such feelings were left undissected until after high school. The “love” that my girlfriends and I shared, if we can even call it that, was a gross misinterpretation of the word. But certain things that seem so silly in retrospect are very real and important as a burgeoning adolescent. Which is why, when Nicole exposed my subterfuge, Lindsey’s eyes welled with tears. I was outplayed by a cleverer social puppet-master, a pawn for Nicole to maneuver and strike out with. I was left to mop the blood off of the chessboard. The joy of the kill was snatched away from me, victory was firmly in Nicole’s hands. I was the one that Lindsey called for weeks, crying. She kept telling me I was terrible and thoughtless and that she wanted to harm herself because I was such a malcontent.

And it’s all true; I was stupid and blithely wicked. Complicit in a greater plan or not, I played my part with a smug sense of glee—I knew what I did would hurt. I just didn’t know it would hurt that bad. I’d forgotten the moral of my mother’s lessons on Sean:  actions have consequences; pain ripens and fosters anger, resentment and hatred. I had to pick my targets more discerningly; random acts of pain against the vulnerable were reckless. Tyrants torture the small folk and trod upon the weak; I don’t want to wear that crown. And so, I turn my efforts onto those I see wearing armor; even the smallest fissure provides the opportunity to dagger and twist. As they lay bleeding, I step into their place. But even my armor has cracks to be exploited by those more cunning and opportunistic. I will never be king again. But malice remains intoxicating.