NIGHT TERRORS
Sex, Dating, Puberty, and Other Alarming Things
ASHLEY CARDIFF
GOTHAM BOOKS
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Copyright © 2013 by Ashley Cardiff
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Cardiff, Ashley.
Night terrors : sex, dating, puberty, and other alarming things /
Ashley Cardiff.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-101-62017-5
1. Cardiff, Ashley. 2. Cardiff, Ashley—Childhood and youth. 3. Adolescence—United States. 4. Teenagers—Sexual behavior—United States. 5. United States—Social life and customs—21st century. I. Title.
PS3603.A7348Z46 2013
306.73092—dc23
[B] 2012049013
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers: however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
To Ben
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
NIGHTMARES
HOW I GOT KICKED OUT OF CATECHISM
THE FIRST TIME I SAW PORN
MY FAMILY’S HOMEMADE SEX TAPES
FIRST LOVE
THE MAN WHO FORGED A DILDO IN HIS OWN IMAGE
THE TIME I ATTENDED AN ORGY
SEXUAL PREDATORS AND ME
FEAR OF PROMISCUITY
PARENTS
STRIPPERS
SEX AND GOD
GAY ANXIETY
SO YOU’VE CAUSED AN ABORTION
LIFE IS AN EVIL
PORN STAR PROBLEMS
HITTING ON GIRLS IN BARS
SEXUAL FANTASIES
SEX, LIES AND PUBIC HAIR
INFIDELITY
A FEW THINGS THAT ARE BAD ABOUT SEX
BREEDING
ONE TIME, I HAD SEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Portions of the following essays were previously published on The Gloss.
“The Man Who Forged a Dildo in His Own Image”
“So You’ve Caused an Abortion”
“Hitting on Girls in Bars”
“Breeding”
NIGHTMARES
Growing up, I used to have weird sexual fantasies about my dog. In retrospect, they were probably just weird sexual fantasies about peanut butter. As much as people hate to admit or even talk about, kids start developing sexually a long way before puberty. I don’t mean that they become sexually attractive or start cruising or anything, I mean that every now and again they get struck by some strange impulse. I remember watching Batman: The Animated Series at a very young age and experiencing an unsettling new sensation at Catwoman’s revealing outfit—something exciting in a place that never had much personality before. I used to wait for the show to come on and pray to God it would be a Catwoman episode, but it never worked because I don’t actually believe in God, so He probably saw right through that.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s uncomfortable to talk about but kids play doctor and try to look at each other’s junk all the time because kids are just tiny, crazy versions of people. They have all the same base impulses and pathological self-interest, but they’re really frank about it because they haven’t learned that you can’t rub your crotch on stuff whenever you want to. The civilized world has suppressed most of those base impulses in adults, but they’re all right there, inside every child.
When my cousin was six years old she used to disappear from family gatherings and stick a pencil in herself. Everyone else would be sitting around the table and then she’d come back brandishing it, inviting people to “smell [her] perfume” and all the family members would just look aside or stifle sobs. I don’t know if her sexual development was particularly odd or if she ever graduated to Sharpies or highlighters or something a little less junior varsity, but I’m not saying it’s not disturbing. I’m just saying it happens.
When I was a really little kid, I was madly in love with Luke Skywalker because he was so pure and good, like a Ken doll with a bowl cut. But right about age ten or so, I started thinking Han Solo was the more charming and interesting of the two. This is because Luke represents chastity and virtue while Han Solo represents cock. I mention this because I was still a few years off hitting puberty, but I somehow sensed that Han’s dangerous virility was more appealing.
Since I was a weird, friendless kid, I thought obsessively about these kinds of things as they happened. I still followed the impulses because I wasn’t quite sure what they were or where they came from, but I always felt extremely guilty about them. Once when I was about eight, I covered a whole stack of drawing paper in sketches of naked people. My mother found them and flipped out. She plucked up this one of a woman’s naked torso and demanded I tell her what it was. I think she was very afraid. I said the drawing was unfinished and hurriedly drew the face of a cartoon dog over it, the breasts being its gigantic bulging eyes, the nipples its pupils. My mom seemed to buy my story because she dropped the subject but she still wore a look of incredulity, the kind of incredulity that can only come from watching your eight-year-old frantically draw a dog’s face over a pair of tits. It’s likely she just didn’t want to believe I’d blown through three hundred sheets of paper on crudely imagined smut, but it’s possible I fooled her because I’m really talented and good at drawing. To this day, I’m not entirely sure how I did it, because that cartoon dog with its giant bulging tit-eyes looked genuinely surprised at something out of view, as if witness to the loss of my innocence in real time. Or impressed that a prepubescent experiment with adult sexuality can be set aside by the collision of improvisation and denial.
—
None of that really gets at what I mean better than the fact that, growing up, I used to have a weird recurring sexual nightmare about Prince. The Artist. The one who wrote and recorded “Pussy Control.” He also starred in Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon.
I don’t mean that I was some kind of disaffected urban baby like those little kids whose parents are writers or architects or cartographers and they wear miniature ascots and aren’t allowed to have gluten. It wasn’t like that at all; it’s not that Prince or some similar intangible presence would seep along my dreamscapes in which I’d be picking hot dog flowers with Turgenev and Billy Squier and then Thomas Aquinas would be like, “Where are my puddings? Who ate all my puddings?” and we’d laugh and lat
e eighties corporate rock would filter across the hot dog meadow and it would be extremely funny because Thomas Aquinas was a fat bitch.
This wasn’t the case because little kids don’t understand irony; their tiny brains are stupid. Children are annoying and crazy and half-evolved sexually and practically no one in the world becomes tolerable until at least twenty-four. Everybody knows this but there will always be people who lie about it, like the ones you meet in college who swear on their packs of additive-free cigarettes they’ve been listening to the Modern Lovers and Can and Wire since they were eleven. Believe me, they are all self-mythologizing assholes and if you see pictures of them in middle school, you’ll swiftly deduce they were exclusively concerned with WrestleMania and masturbating. Likewise, when I was a little kid, I didn’t know anything about irony. My only interests were in picking my nose and getting aroused to Batman (probably because it was so atmospheric). My recurring sexual nightmare about Prince was genuine.
It always began with me standing in the garage, alone. I’d be looking down the steep driveway from the house where I grew up in Northern California. I spent most of my time alone as a kid, so this wasn’t all that strange, but something would strike me and I’d stand and turn and gaze off a long way. Then I’d realize I could just make out faint strains of music in the distance. I would pause, disquieted there, and everything would become very still like the way it gets before earthquakes. Then I would hear cruel laughter as the music became louder and I would feel the urge to flee. The odor of evil carried even on that brisk Wine Country breeze.
The chase would begin in the way you fathom events as they unfold in dreams because pervasive dread informs you: suddenly, I would be on my tricycle, handlebar streamers flying. My pudgy, uneven little legs peddled urgently and I’d look over my shoulder to see nothing. Nothing. Still, my panic would mount. I could hear my heartbeat, hear the blood churn in my ears.
The perspective would shift and behind me he would rise: Prince, on a colossal tricycle of his own design, purple and garishly decorated, leading a parade float, his minions dancing and fornicating in the tissue blossoms. The sky would darken and he would be there—the Purple One!—rising larger and larger still, his ass cheeks naked and full each time he pedaled with heaving menace in his lace chaps. I did not understand the things he said or sang or why he gesticulated so feyly but I did understand he was coming for me.
My desperate peddling could not be enough and was never enough. The dream would end just as the giant tricycle and what it represented engulfed me. The vision would dissipate and I’d awaken, shaking, to the faint sound of his effervescent laughter. I was never sure what Nightmare Prince intended to do to me (specifically) but I knew that it would be erotic and strange and transgressive and I’m still unsure if any of this makes me racist. In this way, he was kind of a dark messenger from the realm of adulthood, intending to ferry away my innocence like some sort of silken Charon with his butt showing.
I am certain the dream postponed my adolescence a few months longer, thanks to the correlation between sex and horror. I didn’t realize that the Prince nightmare was really a nightmare about sex itself, that my kid brain had churned out an impressively lazy and no less bizarre metaphor, a flamboyant harbinger of puberty several years before it would take place. Not only does this indicate kids have sexual inclinations and awareness and curiosity before their bodies begin to reflect that, what’s more is kids can be terrorized by the idea of fucking before they have any idea what it is.
I had this nightmare six or seven times from about age seven until I hit the age when you start getting really into Prince and realize Sign ‘O’ the Times is a phenomenal album. I mention all this because I recently had a dream in which I had pretty graphic sex with Prince and it actually wasn’t weird. Well, I mean it was obviously weird once I woke up and thought about it, but while it was happening it seemed reasonable. I guess that’s what it means to be a grown-up.
HOW I GOT KICKED OUT OF CATECHISM
There are but a few glorious years of life when you are a sentient being but you genuinely do not know what sex is. On the cusp of that recognition, I dreamed of Prince because I instinctively knew to be afraid of sex in a deep, primitive way and Prince represented all that and more: not just what was appealing about sex but actually everything. Prince was an amalgam of man and woman and leather and lace, of breeding and orifices and incense, of sweat and perfume and paisley and butt. Once you could get to puberty, you’d refine those recognitions and be able to find them exhilarating, as is the case with learning to love Han Solo. But until then, sex is just this big purple Jungian k-hole and—also just like Prince—it’s horrifying.
There is an interesting moment in between, though, the activity of transition. If loving Luke Skywalker is perfect childhood innocence, then being afraid of Prince is what happens before you understand sex but you know it’s there (last, you hit puberty, fall for Han Solo and never look back). For the moment, we’re interested in that middle area, the process of learning to comprehend sex: the time when you don’t know what it is, you know it’s bad and you’re obsessed with it.
About all you know is that it has to do with your privates. Problem is, you’re a little kid. As far as you’re concerned, your asshole and your genitals are exactly the same. As a teenager, I once babysat an extremely intelligent eight-year-old boy who would come out of the bathroom and announce, “I just had sex.” He hadn’t, of course; he’d urinated. But it was about this age that he began to know that rustling in those organs was somehow provocative, despite having no literal understanding of the sex act. Though I guess he very well could have been having sex. It’s not like I was a good babysitter.
Like many girls, I quickly grasped the concept that the asshole and genitals are different opera boxes in the same theater. This didn’t accelerate my understanding of sex any, though, because my rapidly evanescing search became impeded by an equally stupid association: I was right about it having to do with genitals and I knew it was very bad, so I concluded that sex was about suffering. This developmental tangent led to my getting kicked out of catechism at age eight. If you ever asked me what irony is and had a few minutes, I’d probably tell you the following story. Afterward I’d admit I don’t really understand irony as a concept and am reluctant to use the word in casual conversation.
Despite our fancy heart of Wine Country location, my family was middle class. When I was a very little kid, my father delivered mail and my mom managed an orthodontist’s office, answering phones and overseeing appointments. I have three half-siblings, but they were all old enough to have moved out. This left my parents in a bit of a bind for cheap daycare. Luckily, my father’s parents were absolutely fucking crazy Catholic nightmare people.
My father didn’t like his parents—and rightly so, because they were horrible. My grandfather was a brutish, abusive, alcoholic monster and my grandmother was a vain, ruthless, brittle harpy. I don’t really want to blame them for their hateful comportment; apparently they met at some kind of USO show where my grandfather was a sailor and my grandmother was a good-time gal. She got pregnant; he left the state; she followed him halfway across the country. When she showed up at his doorstep, his racist Irish family flipped out that he’d knocked up an Italian Jew and ostracized them both until they moved back to San Francisco. I guess that means I have pluck in my genes. Pluck and resentment.
As a child, I disliked them immensely. The only thing I disliked more than them was their house: two stories of dust-suffocated Christian iconography, packed so densely into every space that if you were to be blindfolded, set at random in any room and spun three times, then removed the blindfold, there, in front of you, would be some reminder of Christ’s suffering. There were remarkably gruesome crucifixes in every room, year-round nativities, baskets of half-made rosaries, a television that seemed to only flicker with muted images of Charlton Heston as Moses, stations of the cross lining every ceiling and a
multitude of statues, each one more frightening than the last. The one I despised most was of Mary, right at the front door, a kind of gory warning to abandon all hope ye whose parents cannot afford decent daycare. She was about three feet in height and wearing a sky-blue cloak, palms prayered, eyes closed in an expression of blank piousness, and then—grotesquely—a bloated serpent weaving about her bare feet, forked tongue testing the curve of her toes. Last of all, the entire house smelled lushly sour from the residents’ decades of mutual antipathy. It was the most frightening environment imaginable for a little kid who had excitingly theatric sexual nightmares.
My parents weren’t religious at all, bless them. There was never, ever any concept of God in my house, so I passed through those crucial developmental years unencumbered by visions of a heaven full with birthday presents and candy. This is why I’m neither religious nor an atheist.
I mention all of this because as much as my father had a strained relationship with his own parents, they did offer an alluringly free alternative to daycare: catechism class. Yes, my grandparents were dead set on indoctrinating the Cardiff children and their equally strapped-for-cash neighbors by providing daycare at the low, low price of feeling vaguely guilty about orgasms for the rest of their lives. They brought some church lady to do the teaching, while my grandfather worked and my grandmother kept an all-seeing eye on us from the kitchen. So, although I barely knew my grandparents and didn’t know what Jesus was, around age eight my parents started dropping me off at a fetid murder house for seven straight hours of Bible learning.
At first, it wasn’t so bad, because the Bible is frequently great. If you cut out all the lineage tables and nonsense and barbarism and passages that contradict each other, you’re left with dozens of beautiful, incomparably elegant stories, one of my favorite books, and about a hundred pages. Even better, the stories are insane, so they’re fascinating to little kids (who are also insane). I just latched on to all the wrong things. This, you’ll find, is a recurring theme.
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