The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race

by Sara Barron

  Harry took a breath.

  “Wow,” he said. “That felt so good.”

  “It sounded good,” I said. “You know, like, cathartic.”

  I was not the only one who thought so. Harry made his feelings known, and it was like something electric was let loose in the room. You could feel, not judgment—not the sense that anyone had been offended—but rather: a desire creeping out. Other students wanting their catharsis.

  One more week went by and this unearthed, universal desire shifted the meaning of the phrase. “This might be controversial” changed from a means by which you softened your critique to a means by which you set yourself up for the truly controversial. We were in the fifth week of class when I clocked the marked transition. Someone had said, “This might be controversial, but when I meet an anorexic, I want to punch her in the face,” and someone else had said, “This might be controversial, but I saw a thing on the news the other day about a family with ten kids, where one of the kids had drowned in a river. And there the parents were sobbing and yammering on about how there should’ve been a fence up to prevent river access in the first place, and I was like, ‘You still have nine more kids. You fuck with the planet when you fuck like that. And so the planet fucked with you.’ ” And then someone said, “This might be controversial, but I went down on a black man recently, and his pubic hair smelled African to me. Does that make sense?”

  There was a pause as the class considered this last one, and that’s when I made my observation. I said, “Wow! This Might Be Controversial is spreading among us like wildfire!” And Sven had shouted, “No, Instructor! Not ‘spreading among us like wildfire.’ That is so cliché! Let us say instead, ‘It is spreading among us like … flames upon the gasoline-soaked peyos of a Jew!’ ”

  “Oh! I have another,” Miriam piped in. “This might be controversial, but Israelis are so rude. Whew! I never met a one who is polite!”

  This is how it went, with just one rule in place: You couldn’t say something you didn’t believe.

  This proved not to be a problem.

  “This might be controversial,” started Dave.

  Dave was a twenty-five-year-old Caucasian. He had a waist-length set of dreadlocks, wealthy parents, and a virtual allergy to any and all critiques of his own writing. He was of the opinion that any and all edits to his work affected the “integrity” of said work.

  “Integrity” was Dave’s word, not mine.

  Dave continued, “But, well, I don’t think bestiality’s that gross. I mean, I get it, how it’s hot, you know? Just, like, getting off without having to return the favor.”

  Harry nodded in acceptance. Not agreement, but acceptance.

  “Yes, well,” he said, “this might be controversial, but the number of photos you post to Facebook is directly proportional to how big a dick you are in life. Upwards of once a day, you are a dick. There’s no two ways about it.”

  Was this most of us? It was.

  We nodded in agreement.

  ONE DAY, SVEN arrived to class looking atypically upset.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Miriam.

  “I have something controversial to say,” said Sven, “and it is very bad. I am very ashamed by my very private feelings.”

  “Don’t be,” said Dave. “I pretty much confessed I want a blowjob from a dog.”

  Sven nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You were very open on that day. Well, okay. Here I go: This might be controversial, but the politician John Edwards? I do not blame him for his cheating. His wife is very homely.”

  “Not ‘is,’ ” said Miriam. “ ‘Was.’ Elizabeth Edwards has died.”

  “Miriam! Chill!” shouted Dave. “Sven’s just being controversial. Don’t make him feel bad! He knows it’s bad! Just look how sad he looks!”

  Sven did indeed look sad. His shoulders were slumped, his bottom lip protruding.

  “I’m sorry, Sven,” said Miriam. “I don’t mean to be cruel. We all have our … things, I guess. For what it’s worth, this might be controversial, but I only go to male doctors. I have a problem trusting women.”

  Sven smiled. “You must hate yourself for this,” he said.

  “I do,” she said. “It’s very hard.”

  There were others in the class—a Paul, a Brian, a Lisa, a Lauren—and each one of them, like Miriam and Sven, had their own painful realizations. Statements that prompted not relief so much as the glorious pain of self-loathing:

  “This might be controversial, but I wish divorce upon most of my friends.”

  “This might be controversial, but you can’t be truly raped if you find the guy attractive.”

  “This might be controversial, but I hated The Wire.”

  “This might be controversial, but I hate Breaking Bad.”

  “This might be controversial, but I think women who change their names after marriage are morons. I judge every single one. Not to their faces, of course. To their faces, I’m all like, ‘To each his own. It’s all about a woman’s right to choose!’ But in my heart, I’m all like, ‘C’mon, woman! PLEASE! Just grow a fucking backbone!’ ”

  THE WRITING CLASS was ten weeks long, and as we inched toward the end, I, too, made hard admissions:

  This might be controversial, but I’m attracted to Rick Santorum.

  This might be controversial, but I don’t like Malcom Gladwell.

  This might be controversial, but if you’re living on public assistance, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a pet.

  When we reached our tenth and final week, something unprecedented happened: We didn’t play This Might Be Controversial. We’d reached a saturation point the week before. Dan had said, “This might be controversial, but I think a gay man is more likely than a straight man to be a pedophile,” and Harry responded, “But that’s not controversial, even. I mean, it’s wrong. Just … wrong. It’s objectively untrue.”

  Things were uncomfortable now in a way they hadn’t been since I’d barreled in and called myself professor. Tension replaced camaraderie, and we lost the will to speak on controversial subjects. More to the point, we didn’t need to speak on controversial subjects, and the reason was more shocking than all things controversial said thus far:

  For the first and only time, my students cared about my lecture.

  The final topic was The Business of Writing, and when I announced it, when I said, “Okay, everyone. Let’s talk about how to make money,” I clocked unprecedented interest. Suddenly, the students scribbled in their notebooks. Suddenly, their hands flew up with questions: Will I get published? How often? How much money will I make?

  “Everyone! Calm yourselves! Please!” I shouted back.

  If there was something sad in our loss of camaraderie, it was made up for now, in the pride that I felt. For here I was at the end of the experience, achieving what I’d hoped for at the start: My students were excited and engaged. My students had questions, and I, their teacher, finally had some answers.

  “You might get published,” I said, “but only online. And you won’t make any money.”

  “Any money?”

  “Well, no: You might make some money, but not the kind that does you any good.”

  The students sat for a moment, considering my knowledge. Considering my truth.

  “Is that why you pack a homemade tuna sandwich every week?”

  “Yes, Lauren! Good!”

  “Is that why your clothes are always stained? Because it’s too expensive to dry-clean them?”

  “Spot on, Paul! Also good!”

  My students, it seemed, had done a lot of growing in the weeks we’d been together. Maybe not in terms of effective writing methods, but certainly in terms of how to read people and judge character.

  “Wow,” I said. “You guys have learned so much.”

  I saw them eyeing one another. Harry shook his head and raised his hand.

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that might be controversial.”

  19

 
Daddy’s Girl Should Wear a Diaper (A Tale in Twenty-Five Parts)

  1. INTRODUCTION

  I’ve only ever enjoyed one athletic activity, and that’s biking. I like the lack of skill and study required for adequate performance. It’s like photography that way: The training you need is immeasurably less than what’s required for other artistic endeavors, and it is why, when seeking a creative outlet, grown adults get into photography in lieu of, say, ballet—the nature of it is couched in enough subjectivity to make the study of the craft look less embarrassing. Whereas if a layperson did a pirouette, you could definitively say, “Wow. That looked pathetic”; if he/she started taking photos, things wouldn’t be so clear. It’d be another photo of another landscape. And still you’d say, “Wow! That’s so gorgeous! You’ve got such a great eye!”

  Biking is to athletics as photography is to creativity.

  As such, I knew it was the sport for me.

  2. GOOD TIMES

  I learned to ride a bike when I was six years old. Between the ages of six and thirty I rode many different bikes through many different landscapes. I therefore looked adept when I did so, comfortable with various accessorizing movements like French-rolling my pant leg and/or making a belt of my kryptonite lock.

  Biking has been the singular activity throughout my life that has allowed me to look arguably authentically cool.

  As with anything, however, there are factors that can undermine this singular authentic coolness. For example:

  1. I look awful in a helmet. I look, ironically, like I should not be let out of doors.

  2. When riding a bike, I awaken what my therapist calls my “active imagination.” This, in turn, makes it hard for me to focus on the road.

  The former issue poses the bigger threat to my hair, while the latter issue poses the bigger threat to my body and brain. When I should be zoning in, I’m zoning out. When I should be clocking traffic patterns, I’m imagining instead the development of a voice-box replacement surgery to grant me a stronger singing voice. I’ll be speeding alongside a yellow cab, but I’ll be thinking about how much I’d love to sing—really sing—“Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

  Imagining oneself as Barbra Streisand is dangerous behavior for a woman on a bike. Nonetheless, the worst I suffered at the hand of my own distractibility was a lightly bruised ego. I’d been flying down the Queensboro Bridge after having been dumped by a guy who flipped lamb shanks for a living. I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone and had started singing Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary” aloud to reassure myself about myself:

  I am extraordinary / if you’d only get to know me

  And then a stranger rode past me. And heard me.

  Singing Liz Phair to myself about myself was a raw and private moment, and I would’ve preferred to keep it that way.

  So. That all had been the worst thing. Until the time I rode full-speed into a car.

  3. THE RAIN ON MY PARADE

  It was late spring of my thirtieth year. I had to commute from my apartment in Bushwick to this book club I was in that took place in Park Slope. We’d read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and I had struggled with it to the point of having no idea what had happened. I had planned to spend the book club meeting alternately going, “Good point. Wow. Right. Yes,” and then hiding in the bathroom for five-minute stints at a time.

  I put on my helmet and rode to the meeting. I made it halfway there without incident. But then, there was … incident. Or rather, an incident. I made the mistake of riding the wrong way down a one-way street. I barreled through a stop sign, and there, like a screeching one-ton bullet, was a livery cab. It came to a halt, but not before my body crashed against it with the force, I was later told, of someone hitting the ground after falling off a two-story building.

  In the second before the crash, when I knew it would happen but could no longer try to avoid it, I remember thinking, This’ll hurt. But in a funny way! I thought it’d be like Lara Flynn Boyle in Wayne’s World, when she crashes her bike over the hood of that car. It looks violent, yes, but Lara Flynn Boyle is fine. She’s fine! She’s up and she’s primping in no time.

  Sadly, the same could not be said for me.

  I stayed conscious only so that I might land on my back, on my bike. The pain was too severe to lift my head, so I strained my eye sockets instead. And that’s when I noticed my ankle. It was flopped over like a dog’s ear. A right angle had formed between my foot and my leg.

  Imagine the most breathless you have ever been from exercise. I was that breathless, but from pain. It was so intense, I shot past any of the beginner reactions—grumbling, swearing—past any of the intermediate reactions—yelling, crying—to a place of being so instantly, thoroughly consumed, I was struggling to breathe. Someone called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. While en route, I called my mom. The EMT had found my phone, called the number, and held the phone against my ear. It was in this fashion that my mother and I could review the progression of events. Then it was mostly:

  “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

  “I need you to breathe.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Yes. You can. Were you wearing a helmet?”

  “Yes!”

  “And are you bleeding? Are you losing any blood?”

  Weirdly, I was not. I had demolished large parts of myself without getting so much as a scratch on me. The fact of this calmed my mother down, but only until she thought to consider whether or not I might be bleeding internally. Then it was all, “Are you bleeding internally? SARA: ARE. YOU. BLEEDING. INTERNALLY?”

  My mother asked this repeatedly, and with an increase in volume every time. Eventually, she got so loud that the EMT could hear my mother through the phone. The EMT then took the phone. She told my mother, “We don’t know yet. What? Yes. Tests. Yes. Bye.”

  4. DIAGNOSIS

  As it turned out, there was no internal bleeding. There were, however, bruised kidneys, an anterior dislocated shoulder, and a shattered right ankle. The bruised kidneys would heal themselves. The dislocated shoulder would take one surgery to fix. The shattered ankle would take another two.

  The first of these two would take place my second day in the hospital, and would involve an orthopedic surgeon attaching to my lower leg a series of large metal poles that pierced through my skin and into my broken bones for the purpose of stabilizing my leg. The surgeon would then wait for the swelling to go down. When finally it did, I’d have the second operation. It would take place one week after the first, and would involve two foot-long incisions made along either side of my right calf: from just above my ankle, to just below my knee. They, the incisions, would facilitate the installation of four five-inch titanium plates, and twenty-four half-inch titanium screws.

  5. SNAP, BITCH. CRACKLE POP.

  After arriving at the hospital, someone or other shot me up with a large quantity of morphine. The pain did not abate, however, and this is really saying something when you consider my aforementioned susceptibility to all manner of alcohol and drugs. A large quantity of morphine should have left me unconscious until it was fun to be conscious again. But my pain was too assertive for all that. A saucy RuPaul, she was. All like, “Snap, bitch. Mama’s here … to stay.”

  I would like to tell you that I stared her down or argued even the littlest bit, but I did not. I just looked at her, helpless.

  You’re too much, I thought.

  Death is preferable.

  I mean it.

  Let me die.

  I was both worried and surprised by this instinct to capitulate. By the marked absence of a fighting spirit. I was so quickly willing to check out forever, if it meant no more pain for now, and the fact of this bodes poorly, I think, for my apocalypse survival. Fantasies of natural childbirth went straight out the window, and speaking of windows, I had this vision of myself hanging off a ledge, and thought, I just know that I’d let go. My arm would cramp up, I’d be like, “Nope. I can’t take it,” and that would be that.

  I shared thi
s revelation with my friend Maggie. She was the first person who came to meet me at the hospital. After several hours and the eventual implementation of a more effective drug cocktail, I lay more calmly in a gurney. Maggie sat beside me in a folding chair.

  “Let me tell you something dark,” I said. “When I was in it, I wanted to die.”

  Maggie, in response, made the point that my wanting to die might be the byproduct of my knowing that I wouldn’t die; a sort of perverse luxury, if you will, that came part and parcel with knowing instinctively I’d live.

  “In other words, maybe try not to be scared of the feeling. Maybe try to be, I don’t know, appreciative, I guess, for having experienced a dark emotion from a safe, if painful, place.”

  “The word ‘appreciate’ is hard for me right now.”

  “I know. Of course, I know. What I mean to say is just that it’s a little less dark to have wanted to die if, in point of fact, you wanted to die because you knew you wouldn’t.”

  6. SKEDGE

  Maggie had arrived at the hospital a mere twenty minutes after I’d arrived; I’d called her from the ambulance after I’d called my mom. She had come to stay with me until my parents could come to stay with me themselves. She stayed through the night, into the next morning. Then she left for work.

  My parents, for their part, booked the next available flight from Chicago to New York.

  Maggie and my parents doing as they did required generosity and effort. I knew this, and appreciated it.

  Nonetheless, I’d been left with a ten-hour gap between visits. Over the course of those ten hours, I’d have to occupy myself.

  7. HOME, STERILE HOME

  I did so in my newly assigned hospital bedroom. The pain was more manageable by this stage, but still too intense to be ignored. So I didn’t sleep, really. I watched the nurses come and go. I practiced the art of self-pity, and regret. I watched a lot of TV. A television set hung above my new little hospital bed, and thank God, too, since without it I would surely have figured out a way to drown myself in the toilet in the bedroom. I watched The Golden Girls, Legally Blonde, Legally Blonde 2, Law & Order, In Her Shoes, The Silence of the Lambs, and, for the first time, a horse race. I learned to use a bedpan.