by M. E. Thomas
I had been climbing on moving vehicles since I was little. I would climb onto moving vehicles, climb around already moving vehicles, and even once tried climbing under a moving vehicle. I loved to ride in the backs of trucks, dangling off.
When I was ten years old, a family friend asked my older brother Jim and me to operate an eight-passenger, gas-powered golf cart to shuttle guests to and from a Halloween party hosted about a half mile away from the parking area. We were polite and safe when taking passengers up to the house but performed increasingly risky acts on the way back down. On one trip, I was attempting to climb along the roof from the back of the golf cart to the front. My brother wasn’t paying attention and when he didn’t see me, he assumed that he had left me back at the house. He made a sharp U-turn and I went flying off the roof, barrel-rolling for several seconds along the pavement. I lost consciousness and woke up on my back, red tail-lights rapidly coming my direction. My brother (still unaware of what had happened) was backing up as part of a three-point turn and I just missed being run over by rolling out of the way.
“Where’d you go?” my brother asked, surprised, when I climbed back into the cart.
“I don’t know. Nowhere,” I replied.
Driving my own motor vehicle wasn’t any less hazardous. One afternoon my mother introduced me to what would become, $1,200 later, my first car. The car was a beautiful disaster—a 1972 Pontiac “Luxury” LeMans, V-8 engine with dual mufflers coming out the back. The car was viscerally appealing, a sister of the GTO with a nearly identical body. It was the last year that the Pontiac maintained its curvy form, mimicking the musculature of the animals that cars of that era were frequently named after (Mustang, Charger, Cougar). The Pontiac’s dual round headlights stared back at you; its grill and bumper sneered. Its fenders were rusted out by the wheel wells and the only thing saving the roof from rust was the white vinyl top. The best feature in my mother’s eyes, though, was the Detroit steel. She believed that in an accident the other person would feel the hurt, not me. I proved this intuition to be accurate many times in my first few years with it.
The engine to my car was so simple that I did my own small repairs and tweaks. I wanted to understand how it worked. I wanted to control it, not the other way around. When the starter went out one year while I was at college, I enlisted my boyfriend to help me replace it where it was stalled in a friend’s apartment complex parking lot. I had no idea how to do it and neither did he, but I was always willing to try new things no matter how ill advised. Everything was going well until we began to disconnect the starter from the car before detaching the battery. Sparks started flying, catching the undercarriage on fire. We both quickly got out from under the car and I had to throw snow on the flames to put them out.
I got a lot of attention in that car, some of it lewd, but I never felt vulnerable in it—I always felt invincible. I learned how to handle its power, how to accelerate into turns, how to launch it off the line while drag-racing it with friends, and how to fishtail it in California rainstorms, which, due to their rarity, made roads especially slick from accumulated gas and oil.
I loved the confidence and power I felt with that car, because it was such a contrast to the dissonance of being female, teenage, and powerless. My brothers were closer to my daredevil personality than my sisters, with their mild games of dolls and house. They would go off to their church Boy Scout groups and shoot arrows and skulk around the woods with knives, and my equivalent Mormon female activities were cross-stitching homilies for pillowcases, baking snickerdoodles, and anything that involved the use of a glue gun. In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon.
When I was in my tween years, men started telling me how much I looked like my mother. I correctly interpreted that to mean that I had started to become an object of sexual desire. By the time I was ten, I had already developed full plump breasts and my hips had the contours of a Greek vase. Men openly leered, their aggression palpable. The adult women in the world treated me like I was a slut, even though I had no idea why. And so my new body was primarily a liability at first. If I wasn’t careful, it functioned like a suicide bomb, with collateral damage in the form of judgment from women and harassment from men.
I understand that all teenage girls experience some variation of this awkward transition between child and sex object. Even so, I think in a lot of ways it’s much worse for someone like me—a budding sociopath. All I wanted was power and control. If I were a boy, I thought, I would be big and muscled. I would cut an imposing presence. I was always athletic, always aggressive for a girl. Even in male-dominated physical activities like mosh pits, I held my own through sheer antagonism. But I was also five foot three and 125 pounds. I wanted fear and respect but what I typically ended up with were unwanted advances from inebriated guys twice my size. I did not look like a predator, I looked like an attractive target for unsolicited and aggressive forms of attention. I was a strong, tough girl, but men were generally stronger and tougher. I was extraordinarily smart and conniving, but it was oftentimes not enough to vanquish the authority of adults half as smart and not nearly as conniving as me. It’s not that I did not feel female so much as I did not feel as weak as I looked.
I have never identified very much with my gender, or at least, I have been extraordinarily ambivalent. But a lot of girls go through similar phases of rejection of and rebellion from gender stereotypes. When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood. These chalk lines circumscribe the manner in which you interact with the world, are the source of the implicit “for a girl” that seems to trail every compliment (“tough, for a girl”). You want to wave your arms around as hard as you can to wipe them away and scatter them to dust, but the chalk lines just follow you around, always keeping you inside that constant three inches of space. I felt that the label of girl was too limiting to contain my own grandiose conception of myself, and so I mostly ignored it.
There were obviously good things about my gender. My mother was largely passive with my father, but if she ever wanted something, all it took was a simple touch, a half promise of physical pleasure, to get him to do almost anything she wanted. In those hundreds of times when men told me my mother was beautiful, I eventually saw not just objectification but the power of dearly hoped-for pleasures. I have sometimes heard men lament that women have all of the power because they are the ones who say yes or no to sex. But I wasn’t yet ready to deploy that kind of power. In my high school years, while other girls were learning about and experimenting with their sexuality, I was largely asexual. I didn’t understand then that sex could be something that could give me pleasure. And I didn’t understand it as a way of connecting to people, and therefore gaining a form of power over them. I didn’t know that sex was a means to love, and that people will do anything for love.
I did, however, use my gender to great effect with many of my disgusting, perverted teachers. One of them I hated in particular. My high school English teacher had given me a failing grade on one of my assignments because my mother had turned it in for me on a day I’d been away at a softball tournament or drum competition. He ridiculed me in front of the class for having my “mommy bring it,” trying to make an example of me. This teacher was old and vindictively petty. I never liked him. I had seen him ruthlessly attack other students in my class, so I never gave him any reason to target me. Still, there was something about my silent defiance that must have gotten under his skin, because he finally made up something plausible to attack me on.
“Thomas! You may have noticed that you received an F. I didn’t even look at your paper, so next time you can save your mommy some time and either come in and turn in your work yourself or don’t bother turning it in at all.” I was in
stantly angry, but it quickly chilled.
“Screw you, fat man,” I calmly retorted, and minutes later was waiting my turn in the principal’s office.
From that time on we’d engaged in a low-grade power struggle. I wanted to take him down, and since he had such a bad reputation, the easiest way was just to create a paper trail of his inappropriate behavior. I started taking detailed notes of things he said and did in class that were even remotely questionable. I made friends with girls in my class, planting in their heads the total inappropriateness of even some of his more innocuous behavior. He wasn’t that bad a guy, really. He was just old and a bit of a natural chauvinist in the way that men born before 1950 typically are. When we would take quizzes, he would project them up on the board and have everyone move forward, ostensibly so people in the back could see better. He always had the first row move their seats all the way up to touch his desk, and in that row just happened to be a girl who frequently wore the revealing spandex of a dancer. I started a rumor that he had us move like this to get a better view of her ample cleavage. It was a very plausible story, particularly with the way his face frequently contorted into what looked like a leer. It may have actually been true. In any case, it made good gossip and was accepted as truth shortly after it got started.
That rumor itself was not enough. Nor was it enough when I finally goaded him into making a lewd and demeaning comment about my breasts. The class was talking about a recent music department production.
“How did you like my solo?” I sneered after listening to him go on about everyone else in the class.
“Thomas! You have no class! Up there onstage, flopping all around, letting it all hang out. Not like these other girls,” he said, gesturing to the dancer in front of him. I think he was trying to turn the class against me, but unfortunately for him I had gotten to them first. He didn’t hurt my feelings; he had finally, unequivocally, overstepped the student-teacher boundary in front of witnesses.
After class I asked the dancer if she felt uncomfortable about his thinly veiled harassment. I was the picture of worried concern. She was touched by my sincerity. Yes, she had heard the rumor I started about her and this teacher (unaware that I was the one who started it). Yes, it did bother her. I was the sympathetic ear. She confessed all of her discomfort and I not only listened, I validated and fed the flame of her distress.
I used his behavior that day to paint him as out of control. I needed her to be afraid of him. I needed her to be one of the other voices raised in condemnation against him. I told her that we had to stop him before it got any worse. I told her that I was thinking of filing an official complaint against him for sexual harassment and asked if she would be willing to verify my story if necessary. I made it seem as if her participation would probably not be necessary, based on numerous contingencies, so she agreed. She would soon find out that she would be my star witness.
When I got home I told my mother about what had happened in class—strictly the facts, nothing about our power struggle or my preparations to get him fired. I told her about how “violated” I felt and about how I was not the only girl toward whom he had behaved in this way. I knew my mother felt bad about all of the times growing up that she had failed me, so she’d be inclined to help here. I told her I had found out that you make sexual harassment claims against teachers directly with the school district. Would she like to come with me to the district office the next morning to start the paperwork? My father was completely opposed to the idea, which I think made it all the more appealing to my mother.
I gave my statement and enlisted a small cadre of loyalists to paint him in as bad a light as they could. He was supervised for several weeks. There was always someone else with him whenever he was on campus, I noticed with delight. Officially he received a “strike,” an official censure; unofficially I believe he was forced into early retirement and had to give up his position as head of the English department, which to me was success. I was never one to be greedy or get caught up in the “principle of the thing.” I wasn’t trying to get him fired to protect future generations of vulnerable young girls. I was trying to get him fired to show him that he was vulnerable, and to me, a helpless little girl.
Still, it was a good lesson in the limits of the formal justice system, one that I would face again shortly in law school. This was not the only time I tangled with a teacher, but no matter what I did and to whom I reported them, none were ever fired or even removed from their positions. And while I gained the satisfaction of causing them pain, I garnered a reputation for making trouble. Maybe I lied, cheated, and bullied in order to achieve their destruction, but it was nonetheless true that they were bad teachers who should not have been allowed around kids. One teacher was an idiot who favored the popular kids over the unpopular ones, ignoring their talent in order to bask in the social acceptance that he never received when he was a student in high school himself. Another was sexually obsessed with his students and paid special lascivious attention to the ones with large breasts (including me) and low self-esteem (not including me). I wasn’t doing a public service in trying to ruin them. I just couldn’t stand that such unfit people could have authority over me. And that was the double injustice of being a young sociopath and a girl, too.
Chapter 5
I’M A CHILD OF GOD
I was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I attended church from infancy with my family, and I continue to be a practicing Mormon. Some people will find this hypocritical or will assume that my religious community will shun me if I am discovered to be a sociopath. They cannot fathom how I can negotiate my faith being who I am. But these people misunderstand the essential nature of Mormon beliefs, which is that we are all sons and daughters of a loving God who only wants our eternal progression and happiness. Mormons believe that everyone has the potential to be godlike, to be a creator of worlds. (This makes the LDS church a sociopath’s dream; it’s a belief that’s well suited to my own megalomaniacal sense of divine destiny.) I believe that “everyone” includes me. And because every being is capable of salvation, I can only conclude that my actions are what matter—not my emotional deficits, not my ruthless thoughts, and not my nefarious motivations. My own adherence to the standards of the church, despite their frequent conflict with my nature, is proof that the teachings of the gospel are for everyone—every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. I like the idea that there is a creator of all things, including sociopaths. I like having a check on my behavior, a reason for being a good sociopath. And I like the reward for good behavior—the feeling of elation and otherworldliness inherent in prayer, song, and religious devotion.
The church is especially well suited to me, because its rules and standards are very explicit. Throughout my childhood, I was able to make up for my inability to intuit social norms by following the church’s clear set of expectations and guidelines—from detailed lessons on chastity to small pamphlets with handy bullet-pointed rules about what to wear, whom and how to date, what not to watch or listen to, and how much money to give to the church. I liked that these things were written down. I don’t mean to imply that the Mormon church was actually okay with whatever I did as long as I didn’t drink Coke, was abstinent, and tithed. I’m sure the church meant these things merely as guidelines and not as safe-harbor provisions, but having them stated so explicitly helped me to blend in with everyone else.
I was watching television recently, one of these mystery dramas in which the main story arc over the entire season involves people trying to figure out who killed the main character. After many episodes of intrigue and bad behavior, one of the characters remarks in exasperation, “I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s evil and who’s just naughty.” Is there a distinction between being naughty and being evil? Who deserves mercy, and who is beyond hope?
I never felt like I was evil. I was taught in church that I am a child of God. I also read the Old Testament. There is a story in Kings where God has forty-two child
ren dismembered by she-bears for insulting the prophet Elisha. It was not much of a stretch to believe that that God was my father.
And who doesn’t have flaws? When it counts, most of us think we are basically good people. In Dan Ariely’s book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, he describes how the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was the victim of rampant embezzlement, mainly by elderly volunteers manning an unsecured cash drawer. Interestingly, there wasn’t one person who was stealing tons, but many people stole just a little. Everybody cheats, and if you stay within the realm of what everybody does then you can (apparently) maintain the good image you have of yourself.
In our discussions on religion, my summer intern office mate who diagnosed me would argue that the Christian concept of sin is a state of being, not certain actions. We are all “sinners” and, simultaneously, we are all “saved.” She thinks that evil, “if it has any meaning at all, means more than just ‘I did this right today and I did that wrong today.’ ” According to her, evil doesn’t lie in whether you drink caffeine or whether you do the right number of rosaries. It’s different in quality from the notion of “transgressions.”
Perhaps that is true, and perhaps that is why in the age of “reformed” religion, where the emphasis is more on “saved” than “sinners,” none of those volunteering seniors saw their minor pilfering as evidence of their own inherently evil nature. Where those boundaries lie between being good, being good enough, and being bad is not clear. If modern Lady Justice is blind, it appears it is a selective blindness that is willing to overlook “normal” transgressions that normal people participate in and to readily condemn “abnormal” transgressions that people like me may be predisposed to commit.