by Lena Dunham
A year later I have to change my screen name because a boy at school, a massive hairy boy with a face like a Picasso painting, sends me an email saying he’s going to rape me and cover me in barbecue sauce. He’s the only guy who likes me in that way, but I wish he wouldn’t. He mentions having a machete and attaches a photograph of a kitten that has been stuffed inside a bottle and left to die. My father is justifiably angry and calls my uncle, who is a lawyer and says the police need to be involved. For the first and last time, I am escorted home from school by the cops. When they go to his house, they find he has printed and saved all of our instant messages, pages and pages of them. One of the officers implies I shouldn’t have been so nice to him if I didn’t like him “that way.” I tell them I just felt sorry for him. They say I should be more careful in the future. I am ashamed.
My new screen name includes my real name and is only shared with select friends and family, but I transfer all my contacts, so I can always see who is logged on when. One day, in my here to chat bar, I see him: Pyro0001. The world goes fast, then slow again, the way it does sometimes when I get up to pee in the night and the whole house sounds like it’s saying Lena, Lena, Lena.
“Hey,” I type.
The name disappears.
I walk around for the rest of that day like I’ve seen a ghost. I type his full name into multiple search engines, looking for an obituary or some evidence that he existed. I mean, Juliana knew him. She met him. She heard his accent. He was real. He is dead. Fake people don’t die. Fake people don’t even exist.
Years later, I will give his last name to a character on my television show. A smoke signal, so that whoever wants to know can know: he was kind to me. He had things to say. There was a way in which I loved him. I did, I did, I did.
——
September 27, 2010
A.,1
Before I get back to writing I had to jot this down to you.2 Like, the last six times we’ve spoken it has ended with a series of long silences where I say something, then another thing to modify it, then I sort of apologize, then I sort of unapologize.3 That would be funny as a scene in an indie rom-com,4 funny the first few times it happens, but it doesn’t need to happen because I should just be able to get off the phone and say “enjoy your day, A., I’ll talk with you soon.” I’m obviously fishing for stuff and then explaining it away between silences.
I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)5 The dynamics of romantic relationships are obviously fascinating to us both, artistically and theoretically.6 Ditto sex. But it’s harder to incorporate into your actual working life in a way that’s comfortable.7
I obviously like you a lot. Not in a scary oppressive way8 and not in an “I just came looking at a picture of you” way (though I did do that)9 but in the way that I am going out of my way to make you a part of my life, or just to figure out what it could be. I was so ready to spend four months in Los Angeles really embracing this alien city of bad trees, letting my parents visit me and hiking and maybe dating some douche bag just for the story.10 A week before I met you I quipped to someone “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.”11 Jokes aren’t just jokes.12
It feels really good to check in with you, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of sharing certain kinds of concerns regularly.13 Because I’m here and you’re there it can’t happen totally organically, and because I’m me I have a hard time sitting with that. So that’s why I try to understand if I’ll see you when I come home, or if you think about me when you jerk off,14 or just how available you are to have your life futzed with a little bit.
The night of the party when we met, when you told me to meet you on the corner, I was really sure that I would go out there and you’d have tricked me and gone someplace else. And then you weren’t exactly where you said you’d be but you were nearby.15
OK,16
L17
p.s. If you don’t have anything to say back to this email it will be some kind of incredible poetic justice.18 Also, sorry this email is so unfunny.19
* * *
1 Addressing my beloved by a single initial seemed romantic, like the desperate and secretive correspondence of two married intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Lest the meddling postmaster discover our identities and reveal our affair to our vindictive spouses, we will communicate using a code. That code shall be: the first letter of our names.
2 “Jot” is a pretty casual word for the dissertation on emotional dysfunction that follows. Throughout the course of this relationship, I wrote A. epics that he would answer with either a single word (“cool,” “sure”) or a screed on a totally unrelated matter that was currently nagging him, like the impossibility of finding fashionable winter boots or the lack of modern-day Hemingways. I would comb these emails, searching desperately for a hint that they were truly for and about me, and come away knowing only that they had, in fact, been sent to my address.
3 Me: So…
[Beat.]
Me: Are you still there? I’m feeling kind of … I just wonder if perhaps when I say something you could say something because that is called…
[Beat.]
Me: A conversation.
4 Ironic references to rom-coms are a great way to show that you are NOT the kind of girl/woman who cares about romantic conventions. A. and I often disagreed about what to watch. His interests lay mostly with masculine classics from the 1980s, while I tended (and still tend) to want to watch films with female protagonists. Rather than admit that he didn’t want to waste two hours watching a woman’s interior life unfold, he would tell me these films “lack structure.” Structure was a constant topic. He built shelves, wrote scripts, and dressed for the cold weather with a rigor and discipline that, while initially intriguing, came to feel like living under a Communist regime. Rules, rules, rules: no mixing navy and black, no stacking books horizontally, pour your beverage into a twenty-ounce Mason jar, and make sure something big happens on this page.
5 This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.
6 Although he worked a job that involved heavy lifting and hard labor, his true passion was writing fiction, and after much cajoling on my part he gave me one of his stories to read. It was the twenty-page account of a young man very much like himself trying, and failing, to seduce an Asian girl who worked at J. Crew in Soho. Although the prose was unusual and funny, the story sat with me like a bad meal. It took me about twenty-four hours to realize the issue: that I could feel, in nearly every sentence, an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined nor explained. It was the same feeling I had experienced after my initial read of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in eighth grade: I love this book, but I don’t want to meet this man. But, in this case, it was: This story is okay and its author has already come in me.
7 The first week we met, I slept at his house every night. Time stopped in his bedroom, which was windowless and overly warm. Each day we took a new step together: flossed our teeth, shared a bagel, fell asleep without having sex. He admitted to having an upset stomach. By the time I emerged from his home on Friday morning, we had essentially performed the first year of a relationship in five days. I got on the plane to Los Angeles, unsure of when we’d see each other again. I was pretty sure I’d seen him cry a little bit when he dropped me at the subway.
8 Perhaps, yes, in that way.
9 As an experiment. It was similar to looking at an empty vase or staring out a window.
10 On this trip, my first as a working woman, I was renting a house in the hills above Hollywood. It had been pitched to me as “ch
ic” and “within walking distance of chic things” but was small and damp, windowless on three sides, and had the boxy nondescript façade of a meth lab. Sandwiched between the homes of a failed TV writer with a set of pit bulls and a queer-theory professor who wore a bolo tie and collected Murano glass, I decided that the amount of fear I felt alone in this house was directly proportional to all I would learn from living there. And so I stayed, for five months, calling it growth. One night I put on a nightgown, stepped onto the porch, looked up at the moon, and said, “Who am I?”
11 I remember being so impressed with this turn of phrase that I carefully clocked who I had already shared it with and who I could still try it out on.
13 Paraphrasing Freud.
13 I wanted a boyfriend. Any boyfriend. This boyfriend, this angry little Steve McQueen face, fit my self-image nicely, but let’s face it, he was in the right place at the right time. About a month into the relationship, it started to dawn on me that spending time with him gave me an empty, fluish feeling, that he hated all my song choices, and sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him. I spent an entire three-hour car ride crying behind my sunglasses like my thirty-year marriage was ending. “I don’t know what else I can try,” I wept. “I can’t do this anymore.” “Can’t or won’t,” he hollered like Stanley Kowalski, backing angrily into his least favorite parking spot and jerking the gear into park. Upstairs I paced, cried; he cried, too; and when I told him we could try again, he turned on his PlayStation, content.
14 At one point I asked him this, and he responded with a trademark silence. I attempted to engage in a “sext” session, starting off with “I want to fuck you above the covers.” This seemed like something Anaïs Nin might request. No, she would say. Leave the covers off. He responded with texts that read “I want to fuck you with the air conditioner on” and “I want to fuck you after I set my alarm clock for 8:45 A.M.” I closed my eyes and tried to inhabit the full sensuality of his words: the cool recycled air on my neck, the knowledge that the alarm would sound just a bit before nine. It took about eleven of these texts for me to realize he was doing some kind of Dadaist performance art at my expense.
15 I desperately wanted this to be a metaphor for the ways love stretches us, changes us, but never betrays us.
16 See? I’m just a chill girl writing a chill-ass email, bro.
17 At Christmas we had to end it for real this time. After all, he said he was incapable of love and only seeking satisfaction. I, on the other hand, was passionate and fully alive, electricity in every limb, a tree growing in Brooklyn. I headed to his apartment the moment he returned from his parents’ house, determined to make it easy, to cut the cord on his home turf. His landlord, Kathy, tended to sit on the front stoop. An elderly woman with a mighty tattoo of a panther on her wide, fatty shoulder, she and her Yorkshire terriers kept watch over the neighborhood. But tonight Kathy was absent. Instead, a shrine of candles and flowers crowded the path to the door. Upstairs, he told me that he thought one of Kathy’s dogs had probably died. We called her to see if everything was okay, but Kathy’s daughter answered—Kathy had slipped in the shower. It may have been her heart. They weren’t sure yet. The wake was tonight. So, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and I made our way across Brooklyn to the funeral home, where we paid our respects to Kathy’s gray, powdered body, stiff in a red velour sweatsuit, a pack of menthols tucked into the front pocket. Later, on A.’s couch, we held hands while he wondered whether she’d felt pain and whether his rent would go up. I clutched his hand, ready: “I love you, you know.” He nodded solemnly: “I know.”
18 Five minutes after I pressed send on this email, he called me. “Wait, what?”
“What did you think of it?” I asked. “Do you disagree with anything I said? I mean, if you do just say so.”
“I stopped reading after you said the thing about jerking off.”
On the morning of New Year’s Day, we had sex one last time. I didn’t fully emerge from sleep as he pushed himself against my backside. We were visiting my friends, adult friends, out of the city, and I could hear their children, awake since 6:00 A.M., sliding in socks on the hardwood floor and asking for things. I want children, I thought, as he fucked me silently. My own children, someday. Then: I wonder if people fucked near me when I was a child. I shuddered at the thought. Before we could get back on the road, another guest rear-ended his car, and the fender fell off. Back in the city, I kissed him goodbye, then texted him a few minutes later “don’t come over later, or ever.” We do what we can.
19 I would argue this email is funny, just not in the manner it was intended.
There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
—JOAN DIDION, “On Self-Respect”1
I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.
—ANDY WARHOL
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN ATTRACTED to jerks. They range from sassy weirdos who are ultimately pretty good guys to sociopathic sex addicts, but the common denominator is a bad attitude upon first meeting and a desire to teach me a lesson.
Fellows: If you are rude to me in a health-food store? I will be intrigued by you. If you ignore me in group conversation? I’ll take note of that, too. I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him. As I passed the quarter-century mark of being alive and entered into a relationship with a truly kind person, all this changed. I now consider myself in jerk recovery, so being around any of the aforementioned behaviors isn’t yet safe for me.
My attraction to jerks started early. I spent my preadolescent summers in a cottage by a lake, curled on a ratty couch in my mom’s mind the gap t-shirt, watching movies like Now and Then and The Man in the Moon. If I took anything away from these tales of young desire, it was that if a guy really liked you he would spray you with a water gun and call you nicknames like the Blob. If he shoved you off your bike and your knees bled, it probably meant he was going to kiss you by a reservoir soon enough.
My earliest memory of sexual arousal is watching Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak in Bad News Bears. He wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle before the legal age, smoked, and treated his elders with a kind of disrespect I had never seen executed by any of the boys at Quaker school. Moreover, he ogled adult women like a Hefner acolyte. Later, I was drawn to images of angry attraction, I-want-you-despite-myself type stuff, the kind of thing that Jane Eyre and Rochester were up to. You know the way Holly Hunter looks at William Hurt in Broadcast News, like she hates everything he stands for? That was dreamy. Even 9½ Weeks made some terrible kind of sense. All of this is natural enough—who doesn’t thrill at a little push-pull, a bit of athletic conversation—but I’m the first to admit I’ve often taken it too far.
It’s common wisdom that having a good dad tends to mean you’ll pick a good man, and I have pretty much the nicest dad in the world. I don’t mean nice in a neutered “yes, dear” way. I mean nice in that he has always respected my essential nature and offered me an expert mix of space and support. He’s a firm but benevolent leader. He talks to adults like they’re juvenile delinquents and to kids like they’re adults. I’ve often tried to write a character based on him, but it’s such a challenge to distill his essence. I wasn’t always easy, and neither was he—after all, artists like to hole themselves up in their studios for days and pitch fits about bad lighting—but the careful, reliable attention of this man has been integral to my sense of security. To this day, the truest feeling of joy I have ever known is the door opening at a friend’s house to reveal my father—in his tweed overcoat—there to rescue me from a bad play date.
Once, when I was five, I was at an art opening talking to a fabulous drunken British lady. It was considerably past my bedtime, and the whole scene was starting to bum me out. I stood next to my friend Zoe, who, at only four, was an embarrassingly juvenile companion. The British lady, trying to make conversation, asked Zoe and me what our parents did if we were “bad girls.”
“When I’m bad, I get a time-out,” Zoe said.
“When I’m bad,” I announced, “my father sticks a fork in my vagina.”
This is hard to share without alarm bells sounding. We’re taught to listen to little girls, particularly when they say things about being sodomized with cutlery. Also my father makes sexually explicit artwork so he’s probably already on the FBI’s fork-in-vagina radar. It’s a testament to his good nature that, after the British lady repeated my “hilarious” story to a group of adults, he simply scooped me up and said, “I think it’s someone’s bedtime.”
It’s hard to grasp what my intent was here—we’re talking about a child who was fond of pretending a ghost was touching her nonbreasts against her will—but I guess the moral of this story is that my dad’s really nice, yet I’ve always had an imagination that could grasp, maybe even appreciate, the punitive.
There is a theory not often discussed—perhaps because I’m the inventor of the theory—that if your father is incredibly kind, you will seek an opposite relationship as an act of rebellion.
Nothing about my history would imply that I’d dig jerks. I went to my first Women’s Action Coalition meeting at age three. We, the daughters of downtown rabble-rousers, sat in a back room, coloring in line drawings of Susan B. Anthony while our mothers plotted their next demonstration. I understood that feminism was a worthy concept long before I was aware of being female, listening to my mother and her friends discuss the challenges of navigating the male-dominated art world. My feminist indoctrination continued at forward-thinking private schools where gender inequality was as much a topic of study as algebra, at all-girls camp in Maine, and as I looked through my grandmother’s wartime photo albums (“Nurses did the real work,” she always said). And underscoring it all was my father’s insistence that my sister and I were the prettiest, smartest, and baddest bitches in Gotham town, no matter how many times we pissed ourselves or cut our own bangs with blunt kitchen scissors.