There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then reestablished it, and she told me the full story, a story that could make your heart catch fire and the world freeze over.
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop.
Sitting at that desk to write this, I went to the online photography archive of the city that my public library maintains, hoping to recall a little of what the old neighborhood looked like. The fourth photograph for the street I lived on was from June 18, 1958, of a house a block and a half away, and it bore this caption: “Curious passersby peer down an alley, alongside 438 Lyon Street, where the body of Dana Lewis, 22, nude except for a black bra, was found today. Police, after a preliminary examination, said bruises on the victim’s throat indicated that she might have been garroted by a length of rope.” It’s clear her death is a spectacle for the newspaper as well, which describes her in titillating terms, while the passersby are described as curious rather than distressed by the sight of a corpse.
She was also known as Connie Sublette, and it turns out her death got a lot of attention in the papers at the time. Mostly, the accounts blamed her for it, because she was a sexually active young bohemian who drank. SEAMAN DESCRIBES CASUAL SLAYING, said one headline, with the tag PLAYGIRL VICTIM. SLAYING CLOSES SORDID LIFE OF PLAYGIRL said another, in which sordid seems to mean that she had sex, adventures, and sorrows, and playgirl means she deserved it. Her age is given as twenty or twenty-four. Dana Lewis or Connie Sublette’s ex-husband was said to have lived at 426 Lyon, where she went seeking comfort with him after her boyfriend, a musician, fell to his death at a party.
Al Sublette wasn’t home or didn’t answer, so she wept on his front steps until the landlord told her to go away. A sailor, by his own account, offered to get her a taxi and killed her instead. The newspapers seem to have taken his word that the killing was an accident and that while devastated by loss she had agreed to have sex with him in an alley. BEATNIK GIRL SLAIN BY SAILOR LOOKING FOR LOVE said one headline, as though strangling someone to death was an ordinary part of looking for love. “She had stars in her eyes and wanted to go all the time,” said her ex-husband. Allen Ginsberg, who had taken photographs of Al but not of Connie Sublette, noted her death without comment in a letter to Jack Kerouac on June 26, 1958. She was known, but hardly mourned.
I didn’t know what had happened at 438 Lyon Street, but I did know that the poet and memoirist Maya Angelou had lived not far to the northeast during her adolescence, not long after the end of the five years of muteness that was her response to being raped repeatedly at age eight. And I knew about the apartment a few blocks in the other direction from my own, at 1827 Golden Gate Avenue, into which nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was brought in a thirty-gallon garbage can after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small delusional would-be revolutionary group, in early 1974. She was, she testified, kept blindfolded and bound for weeks in a closet in this location and a previous one and raped by two of her kidnappers. These two stories found their way into the news. But most never did or they were small items on the back pages.
Some I witnessed. Once late at night, out the window of my apartment, I saw a man with a huge knife in one hand cornering a woman in the doorway of the liquor store across the street. When a police car drifted up silently and the officers surprised the knife wielder, he slid the weapon away along the sidewalk and claimed as its steel clattered on concrete, “It’s okay. She’s my girlfriend.”
The writer Bill deBuys began a book with the sentence “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” And then he begins with the pine desk at which he’s writing and travels from a description of the grain and color of the wood to trees and forests and keeps going into love, loss, epiphanies of place. It’s a lovely journey. I can imagine many forests into which I’d rather go from my own desk, which was made of trees that must have been cut down before my grandmothers were born, than into the violence against my gender.
But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice—that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently—to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.
Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind.
The problems were embedded in the society and maybe the world in which I found myself, and the work to survive it was also work to understand it and eventually work to transform it for everyone, not for myself alone. There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it.
2
It felt ubiquitous then. It still does. You could be harmed a little—by insults and threats that reminded you you were not safe and free and endowed with certain inalienable rights—or more by a rape, or more by a rape-kidnapping-torture-imprisonment-mutilation, more yet by murder, and the possibility of death always hung over the other aggressions. You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.
The former Marine David J. Morris, author of a book on post-traumatic stress disorder, notes that the disorder is far more common and far more rarely addressed among rape survivors than combat veterans. He wrote me, “The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.”
In war the people who try to kill you are usually on the other side. In femicide, they’re husbands, boyfriends, friends, friends of friends, guys on the street, guys at work, guys at the party or in the dorm, and, the week I write this, the guy who called a Lyft and stabbed the pregnant driver to death and the guy who went into a bank and shot five women and the guy who shot the young woman who took him in when his parents kicked him out, to name a few examples of the carnage that made it into the news. Morris calls PTSD “living at the whim of your worst memories.” But he also suggests that war, as an atmosphere in which you live in fear of attack, mangling, annihilation, and in which people around you suffer those afflictions, can traumatize you even if you are physically untouched, and the fears can follow you long after what gave rise to them. Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?
Legions of women were being killed in movies, in songs, in novels, and in the world, and each death was a little wound, a little weight, a little message that it could have been me. I once encountered a Buddhist saint who had worn tokens devotees gave him; they loaded him up, tiny token by tiny token until he was dragging hundreds of pounds of clinking griefs. We wore those horror stories as a secret weight, a set of shackles, that dragged along everywhere we went. Their clanging forever said, “It could have been you.” During this time, I gave away the only television I ever owned, my maternal grandmother’s little black-and-white model from her nursing home, not long after an evening when I turned the dial and found that a young woman was being murdered on each channel. It could have been me.
I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over, women and girls were attacked not for what they’d done but because they were at hand when a man wished to—to punish is the word that comes to mind, though for what might linger as a question. Not for who but for what they were. We were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness. In the arts, the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying, so despite the insistence by politicians and news media that the violent crimes were the acts of outliers, the desire was enshrined in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, in so many horror movies, so many other films and novels and then video games and graphic novels where a murder in lurid detail or a dead female body was a standard plot device and an aesthetic object. Her annihilation was his realization. For the intended audience, it was apparently erotic, because in life women kept getting murdered in the course of sex crimes, and the fear of assault, of rape, was also a fear of violent death.
Which was a reminder that I was, we were, not the intended audience for so much art, including the stuff lauded as masterpieces and upheld as canonical. Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful young white women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands. They protected what was theirs to protect or destroy, and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he’d failed to protect, or his revenge against other men, and sometimes he destroyed her himself, and the story was still about him.*
She was dead even before she was a corpse; she was a surface, a satellite, an accessory. In comics, the violent death of a woman as a plot device in a story focused on a man was so common that women coined a term for it, fridging, after the 1999 website Women in Refrigerators documenting the plethora of gruesome endings for female characters. In the video gaming world, young women who criticized the misogyny in video games were for years harassed with doxing and death and rape threats. Some, after grisly and detailed threats of harm, had to leave their homes and take extraordinary security precautions; that is, they had to disappear. Protecting women from online surveillance, threats, and harassment became an avocation for feminist cybersecurity experts.
As I write, there are new TV serials about the horrific torture-murder-dismemberment of women. One flirts around the periphery of the torture-death of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947 that was given the unduly elegant name “Black Dahlia murder”; the other is about the 1970s serial torturer, rapist, and murderer Ted Bundy, played by a handsome young star. It’s far from the first movie about Bundy, and the L.A. murder of Short has begotten a small publishing industry unto itself. When Givenchy came out with a Dahlia Noir perfume, advertised with the slogan “the fatal flower,” I wondered if it meant that women should aspire to smell like a mutilated corpse. But even the old ballads were full of rapes and murders and grievous bodily harm, as were pop songs from Johnny Cash to the Rolling Stones to Eminem.
Feminists of an earlier era insisted that rape is about power, not erotic pleasure, though there are men for whom their own power or a woman’s powerlessness is the most erotic thing imaginable. For some women too, so we learn that our helplessness and peril is erotic, and accept or reject or struggle with the sense of self and stories that come with them. Jacqueline Rose wrote in 2018, “Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power—which is true—but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.”
* * *
Though each incident I experienced was treated as somehow isolated and deviant, there were countless incidents, and they were of the status quo, not against or outside it. Talking about it made people uncomfortable, and mostly they responded by telling me what I was doing wrong. Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing, or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free.
It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering. So it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted.
I was faced with either surrendering my freedom in advance or risking losing it in the worst ways imaginable. One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances t
hat hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. Out of this unbearable predicament come the rebels who choose failure and risk and the prisoners who choose compliance.
There was a feminist movement in full swing in the 1980s, with much to say about violence against women, even the Take Back the Night marches against it, but it was not within reach for me at the time. I was too young, too immersed in cultures out of keeping with that culture of what seemed like mostly older women, and they spoke a language I hadn’t yet learned. They were at a distance I would slowly traverse, after all this violence would make a solitary feminist of me. I wrote about violence against women in a cover story for a punk magazine in 1985, in art criticism and essays in the 1990s, in a chapter of my history of walking in 2000 detailing all the obstacles women face in walking out in the world.
There’s a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you. I’ve been that person with firsthand experiences sometimes, but something of that was what I felt about violence against women in general.
Back then when it was so personal, I was told to move to someplace more affluent (though some of my most malevolent harassment occurred in such places), to get a car, to spend money I didn’t have on taxis, to cut my hair, dress as a man or attach myself to a man, to never go anywhere alone, get a gun, learn martial arts, to adapt to this reality, which was treated as something as natural or inevitable as the weather. But it wasn’t weather; it wasn’t nature; it wasn’t inevitable and immutable. It was culture, it was particular people and a system that gave them latitude, looked the other way, eroticized, excused, ignored, dismissed, and trivialized. Changing that culture and those conditions seemed to be the only adequate response. It still does.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 4