Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  The stories about original sin, for example, were my favorite because the Garden of Eden sounded like a place where you not only lived in harmony with every cool animal ever, but you could also watch trees replenish fruit as you ate it and, I suspected, probably even breathe under water. Adam and Eve’s nakedness was presented as innocent and natural and beautiful, which—in my eight-year-old brain—made sense only if they were giant babies. When I’d prompt the teacher again and again to tell the story of Adam and Eve, she was delighted I’d taken such a shine to one of the more important stories of the Old Testament. What she didn’t realize was I thought it was about huge infants communicating with animals telepathically. This speaks to a lifelong problem of selective interpretation and stupidity, which has variously led me to believe that Lord of the Flies is about how fun it would be to not have parents and that Death in Venice proves everyone looks hot in a Breton shirt.

  It couldn’t last for long, of course, because at a certain point they were going to start expecting me to believe, though I had no intention of ingesting it seriously. That, in conjunction with my attention span glutted on television and video games, would lead my mind to wander. When storytime was over and we were expected to talk about the moral quality of what we’d heard, I kind of just checked out. The teacher soon noticed my glazed affect—a terrible confluence of unwillingness to participate and the permanent expression of witless fatuity I have on my face to this day—and began prompting me with statements like, “Ashley, did you have something you wanted to say?”

  The first few weeks, I got by on my enthusiasm for wanting to hear new stories and it was all people living inside whales and having leprosy. That enthusiasm began to dissolve as we veered into the endless lists of rules about what you could and couldn’t do and getting stoned to death for having sex while menstruating. Then I just sat in catechism class wondering what the Ninja Turtles were up to. Both the teacher and my grandmother noticed my engagement waning and, one month in, I was ID’d as a problem child. Fair enough.

  One day, while bored at the table, I absentmindedly exclaimed, “Oh my God, I’m missing [some cartoon].” I was given an hour-long time-out in a darkened room, seated at the intersection of two plain white walls, for taking the Lord’s name in vain. It was then I realized these fuckers were pretty hard-bitten and, if I ever wanted to get out of there and be home where I could watch TV for as long as I wanted and say swears, I was going to have to fight back.

  Luckily, if you want to freak Catholics out, the best way to do that is be a child discovering what sex is.

  —

  We’re still very early on in this book, so now’s probably a good time to break the fourth or third wall/go behind the curtain or green door and say all the stories in this book are true. Plenty of details, however, have been obscured. That’s for a single reason: to protect the friends, family and enemies who wish to remain anonymous and won’t be sold out, because I would lose my mind if they did it to me. If you’re the sort of person who gets outraged by things like this, then your extremely literal brain is going to keep you from enjoying this very book in addition to many other things in life, like blog posts with which you disagree. Still, it’s time to reiterate that nothing in here is made up. Not because I think lying is immoral—lying is fucking fun—but because I’m contractually obligated to write nonfiction.

  This is all a roundabout way of saying we’ve come to the first part of this book in which I’ve wanted to lie a little and say that as a young kid, I crafted a sophisticated multiphasic plan of attack against my horrible Catholic grandmother, but after much time at the gym and soul searching and whiskey, I couldn’t really come up with a compelling, funny series of offensives so I’ll just be straight with you: I drew dirty pictures.

  There was a time after each catechism class, the last part of the day and eventually the only hour I looked forward to, in which we were allowed to draw (“free draw”) the feelings and emotions inspired by that day’s lesson. If that sounds pretty progressive, it’s not because my grandmother and the teacher wanted us children to express ourselves artistically—no, with the exception of the Renaissance and shit like that, art is pretty much always the enemy of religion—but because you can only fill so many hours of the day with Bible stories.

  In fact, they couldn’t even do that, so most days began with several hours of stories from the Bible and accompanying discussion, then transitioned into this terrible pop Christianity appropriate for eight-year-olds. They were “nowadays stories,” which were basic Bible parables with an infusion of cool modern stuff like BMX bikes and sexy young rebels in polo shirts explaining to their stuffy old science teachers that evolution is a sham. Somehow, these two parts of the day (with a brief break for lunch) managed to take something like seven hours. If anything, the free drawing portion of the day was meant for working out frustrations. I had a lot of those.

  We kids—mostly my cousins and a few poor neighbors—were pretty much left to our own devices during this hour, in which we sat at the kitchen table and illustrated our feelings about catechism while my grandmother and the teacher took a much-needed break to be embittered and hateful. After a few weeks I realized I could draw anything I wanted; the teacher never even looked at it before I stuffed it into the kitchen cabinet reserved expressly for this purpose. Which meant I could amass a portfolio. Of art.

  It started off pretty innocent and pretty literal, with Leviathan risen from rolling ocean waves, heaving its gargantuan body onto the sand and, one by one, mauling each rabbi that had the hubris to tell Job why God had forsaken him. I drew another of Leviathan belching rabbi parts amid buzzing flies. I really liked Job, so I drew some portraits of him in a loincloth with a sword and flowing hair that crowned his face full of leprosy and he stood over a pile of sexy harem girls with their tits out (the sexy harem girls also had leprosy, so he wouldn’t feel bad). I drew the giant babies Adam and Eve stomping out of the Garden of Eden and leaving a trail of broken animal bodies in their wake in an act of defiance I felt they deserved; God’s the one who put the tree in there in the first place.

  Soon I suspected that, if caught, the violence and suggestiveness weren’t going to get me kicked out of catechism the way I wanted, but would probably just earn me more time in the dark room, staring at the corner, which, for the developing neurotic, is a horrible punishment. Pretty swiftly I graduated to drawing pictures of Satan and the angel Gabriel swordfighting with their huge penises (or “peepees,” to employ the parlance of the age) but I’d only really seen little kid penises, so they looked like coconuts with fingers sticking out of them. In another, a victorious Satan looming over Gabriel and urinating on his broken body with great sexual menace. I drew the angels in Sodom having sex with Lot’s daughters, or what I imagined that would be, which really just amounted to drawing them pressed against each other because, at eight, I obviously had no concept of penetration. Perhaps my favorite was a drawing of Cain, naked and mowing down a field of wheat, slicing his brother Abel in half with lasers that issued from his nipples, because I thought lasers coming out of his mouth would be too weird.

  The day it all went down, though, I remember one drawing the best. Strangely, it was inspired by that afternoon’s modern-day story, which concerned a young fighter pilot who was handsome and gifted. One day, while flying, he accidentally did a flip in the air. He was so exhilarated by the trick that he did another. The high of doing these flips in his plane overtook him and he began to do more and more, until he lost control. And crashed. And died. It was about hubris, obviously, a popular subject for modern Christian allegories because all the stories in the Bible about being venal, ostentatious or consumptive are harder to sell nowadays. In retrospect, I often wonder why they didn’t just tell the story of Icarus, which is more effective and elegant. I suppose they didn’t because a regular guy flying a regular airplane is more interesting to children than ancient peoples crafting magnificent feathered wing co
ntraptions and flying into the goddamn sun. Or because it’s pagan, which is actually the reason.

  Anyway, that day’s drawing concerned our friend the pilot after he’d crash-landed. In my artistic expression, the plane lay broken and smoldering in a fetid swamp, our tragic protagonist consumed alive by piranha. I figured, if they were going to punish the poor guy just for having fun in his airplane, why not go the extra mile and really show his suffering? The offending portion of the image showed the pilot, lifeless in the waters, missing approximately half of himself as two piranha fought over his genitals. I remember, as I was drawing the teeth gnashing through flesh, thinking I may have actually gone too far. I’m in the Lord’s summer house, I thought, and I might actually get in trouble, in a spiritual way, for what I’m doing. In the subsequent moments of terror, I realized that catechism was working. Then I realized that if God existed he’d be the reason I was able to draw such great pictures, so I smiled to myself and shaded some bloody testicle parts floating in the bog.

  My work was done when I figured it wasn’t going to get much darker than fish eating a man’s genitals. I stood up, retrieved the rest of my portfolio from the cabinet, slid my newest creation in and waited. When my grandmother and the teacher returned to the kitchen, I stood up again, walked between them and, in what must have been preposterously exaggerated slapstick, dropped the portfolio on the kitchen floor. Months of explicit, disturbing, disgusting visions spilled all over. My grandmother and the teacher knelt down to help me pick them up.

  —

  I did, in fact, get the corner that day and sat there alone under one dust-caked station of the cross, waiting for my parents to come get me. I distracted myself by thinking about catching up on all the cartoons I’d missed over the past few months. I heard my dad pull up outside and ring the doorbell, but then it was a long time before anyone came and got me.

  The car ride home was mostly silent and, to this day, I’m not sure what my grandmother told my father. The only thing said I can remember was at one point I declared into silence, “Dad, I don’t want to see Grandma anymore.”

  My dad said, “Why’s that, Ash?”

  I said, “I don’t like her.”

  My father nodded and I didn’t see her again until she was on her deathbed (where she still sucked).

  It may sound kind of disturbing that my recalcitrance took the form of graphically depicted sexual violence, but it’s not as though I was off in a field torturing cats and making necklaces out of their bones. I was behaving in a way to get a specific response and using images I faintly understood to be provocative, though not why. By eight years old, children know that sex is a thing and that it exists; they just don’t know the particulars. Laser nipples and piranhas eating genitals are actually quite consistent with how many children engage with the concept of sexuality. I even have to be somewhat impressed with myself that, at age eight, I managed to use sex as a psychological weapon, which puts me pretty far ahead of the curve as girls go.

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW PORN

  People often say that the modern world or this culture and that industry are “saturated with sex.” I’m inclined to believe this isn’t true because it wasn’t long ago that women were regularly married off at twelve. That’s a culture saturated with sex, when it’s acceptable to fuck children.

  Despite what they said about suggestively wholesome teen pop singers and hot shorts marketed to little girls, my generation wasn’t saturated with sex. We were tormented by it. Sex haunted our steps like a distant noise of flesh slapping against flesh or an ouroboros that penetrates itself over your shoulder while you are little and trying to fingerpaint. That is, until I crossed the threshold and sex was no longer an ineffable thing. The fastest, most brutal and heartless way of passing from the stage of not knowing to the next is to witness sex, which is to say, discover pornography. A ruinous passing it was.

  It happened on my ninth birthday. I was a friendless kid, as I’ve mentioned, thanks in part to my debilitating social anxiety, weird affectations and general physical discomfort. Those, in turn, were exacerbated by being about a foot taller than every other kid my age and also by my mother relentlessly pressuring me about the importance of popularity. Luckily, at nine years old, many of a child’s social habits are still determined by parents so, even though I didn’t have any friends, my birthday would roll around and six or seven little girls my age would materialize.

  Unfortunately, the established social hierarchies of the blacktop didn’t just go away because you were shuttled over to someone’s house. Basically, my ninth birthday slumber party involved all the things I hated about the school day: girls my age ignoring me, ridiculing me, avoiding me, talking about me like I wasn’t there, and doing cool shit they sloughed off as soon as I expressed approval or interest.

  Leading the pack was Sarah Gill, not necessarily one of the popular girls at school (there isn’t really a quantifiable measure of popularity until breasts develop) but one of the cool ones. She was really pretty and blond and wore low-slung pants and the boys would let her and her alone play kickball or basketball with them. As soon as Sarah Gill got dropped off at my house, she looked around the room, sized up the competition, and immediately established herself as the leader. Pretty soon, they were all playing MASH with each other and talking about school politics and I just sat off a ways, feeling a mixture of grief at being alienated in my own home and gratefulness at being included even tangentially.

  By the time we were all huddled in sleeping bags in the living room, waiting for my parents to go to bed, Sarah’s aggressive assertion of authority over me had become almost theatrical. It turned out she had brought a Discman and some CDs (I guess because she figured she’d need a backup if things got really boring) (I’m still astonished by how cool this nine-year-old was) so there she sat in her sleeping bag talking about this band the Beatles and this album Sgt. Pepper’s. Her favorite song was called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and she was giddily sharing the headphones, ear beside ear, with every other girl in attendance but myself. I’d say I wanted to listen and she’d say, “You probably wouldn’t like it,” and then whoever was her current partner would express outlandish approval—“That’s probably the best song ever made”—and Sarah would nod and offer some profound insight: “You know it’s about drinking alcohol, right?”

  Even at the time I couldn’t really begrudge Sarah for snubbing me this way because kids, whether nine or fifteen, can craft social humiliation out of toothpaste if it’s all they have. I was effectively used to this kind of thing. Lucky for me, it was easy to seize social cachet as a nine-year-old: just as my parents went to bed, they handed me a bowl of popcorn and the remote. Sarah’s Discman saw a rapid devaluation of the social currency it had only moments ago. I’d become the sheriff of this town.

  Predictably, it was great. It was also the last time I was ever the coolest person in the room.

  —

  We started off the night with a pay-per-view movie that I don’t remember. At this point I should say we had a black box acquired through some distant family member, so when I say “pay-per-view” I mean not paying per view. I mean stealing views. The black box unscrambled every channel, even the super premium ones that would show movies all day long and then after about one a.m. become adult channels. I had never stayed up late enough and unsupervised enough to really know what an “adult” channel was; I had just once or twice experienced the moment they switched over, when one movie ended and suddenly the sets and lighting of the next seemed suspiciously lower in production value. It was at this point some nearby adult, a parent or older sibling, would audibly gasp “Oh!” and change the channel, confirming the switch-over represented something abundantly interesting.

  There I was, popcorn bowl and remote in hand, dictating what we watched, and all the girls were vying to sit next to me. I knew it was an empty victory but it was still pretty thrilling to feel like people
wanted my attention. Naturally, Sarah Gill shoved her way right to the center of the circle and parked herself beside me, because if she couldn’t be the alpha female, she was going to be second in command.

  “We should watch [whatever movie from the stack my parents had rented for us]. That’d be really cool. Have you seen that movie, Ashley? It’s really cool.”

  “Yeah, I totally have,” I said and I assume I was lying, “It’s pretty cool, but I’d totally watch it again in case the rest of you haven’t seen it.”

  “Cool,” said Sarah.

  I left the channel on pay-per-view and summoned one of the other girls to go get said movie from the stack on the counter. Let’s say it was Free Willy, which would be eerily appropriate, if it weren’t so asinine. We watched the movie and it must have been about one thirty when the credits rolled. Banter was exchanged about how cool this or that was, how “fine” such and such lead was, what we enjoyed from the soundtrack, and so on. At this point, I was probably feeling as good as a nine-year-old could feel without getting a pony. Not only was I staying awake really late, but I had this whole group of peers actually lobbying for my attention because I, for the first time ever, was in control of what we as a social system were doing.

  Then it all went to shit.

  I hit Stop on the remote and wriggled out of my sleeping bag to fetch the video. We were immediately transported back to the television, to the black box still at channel 99. The set was a quaint Christmas scene, with a sleigh in the background, a full red sack bulging with (presumably) toys, a pine tree decorated seasonally, and a completely disgusting, tattoo-clotted dirtbag pounding out an equally repulsive giant-titted siren, bent over the front of the ornate red sleigh. Neither member of the couple involved was dressed as a Christmas character. I am unsure if she was supposed to be Mrs. Claus or a “naughty” girl, just as I’m unsure if he was supposed to be Santa or an elf or a reindeer. Both of them were naked but for her Lucite heels. The only thing Christmas-themed about the central characters was located between her tan, sinewy thighs: she had a clitoris piercing, from which swung a classic cherry-red Christmas tree ornament, the kind you see families lovingly hooking to branches in holiday coffee commercials, and it swung from his balls to her belly like some shining pendulum of forsaken childhood. Also, it was March.