Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  With that, my eldest female cousins went back into the house, back to their mashed potato making and mimosa drinking, giggling to themselves about the absurdity of it all. There I was, standing in the driveway in the shadow of Stacy’s SUV, my shirt smelling like the gutter of a soda fountain where a deep-sea fisherman had drowned.

  —

  In retrospect, it was a pretty formative experience. After the anger subsided and the hangover set in, I realized there’s not a whole lot of truly immoral shit that can occur between two consenting adults. I also learned that there’s no excuse not to creatively label your sex tapes. Maybe sad faces with tear drops? Or skulls and bones? I will remember these lessons whenever I recall the sight of Frank’s wife, forever straining to hold herself there and wheezing dick with her eyes half open.

  I guess my extreme reluctance to participate in a filmed sex act is informed purely by this scarring experience and maybe a little vanity, so when I tried to say all that other stuff about neurosis, it wasn’t really true. Sorry for being a liar.

  FIRST LOVE

  I didn’t really have a first love, but from a very young age it’s beaten into you that first love is some touchstone you’ll remember forever and never fully recover from and always look back on fondly. Only people who enjoyed having sex as teenagers can possibly feel this way. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way; if people didn’t want to fuck teenagers, there wouldn’t be laws against it.

  Most teenage sex is by design fumbling, awkward, messy, misguided, and extremely unlikely to result in female orgasm. A lot of straight girls spend a few years having sex with teenage boys, convincing themselves they’re enjoying it and sifting through a mental Rolodex of sex advice from horrible magazines in an attempt to feel involved. If they’re lucky, they’ll go to college and meet some guy who’s into having a “sexual dialogue” and reading ancient Chinese books about technique and, although that sounds insufferable, he’s actually instrumental developmentally. If they’re really, really lucky, they’ll move on and find someone they just like having sex with. Guys, on the other hand, keep sticking themselves inside of things and they either get better or they don’t. What I’m saying is that very few people actually have good sex as teenagers, but that doesn’t stop nostalgia from working its insidious revisionism and sweetening it all.

  Most people do, however, have that one moment where they first look on a peer and find that peer extremely interesting. More interesting than others. It usually comes out of nowhere and time stops and everything is lush and slow and there’s string accompaniment.

  I was in fourth grade. Because the California public school system is kind of a free-for-all and everyone’s just figuring it out as they go along, we had one weekly meeting of music class. It began with all this noble ambition: trying to teach everyone an instrument, to read sheet music, to listen intelligently to St. Matthew’s Passion. Within a few weeks they just gave up and the extent of “music class” was sitting in a circle and singing along to currently charting singles with a still-warm printout of the lyrics, which is probably a metaphor for public education if you’d like to pause and reflect for a moment.

  I had a crush on a fifth grader named Derrick. He was impossibly beautiful in the way that only people younger than a fifth-grade boy are allowed to find impossibly beautiful: a basketball player, tan and athletic with a huge smile and bottomless dimples. I haven’t seen him since middle school, so he kind of lives forever in my memory as being like this.

  One day in class—I was in a multi-age program thanks to progressivism—our teacher had brought in “I Swear” by All-4-One. I’m trying not to embed too much transient pop culture ephemera into any story I tell because I genuinely desire immortality, but if you’ve never heard this song I suggest you go and find it. You’re in for a treat.

  There we were, sitting in a circle under the whiteboard, printout in our hands. How this was supposed to educate or enrich us in any capacity, I cannot say. During the song’s crescendo, our eyes met. Rather than look away, he seemed to look more intensely at me and I swear (HA!) he was singing to me and we were the only people in the room and all I could hear was the honey sweet harmony of this second-string Boyz II Men and then the sax came in and I thought he loved me back.

  Later that day, I went to sit alone by a ditch. I spent most of my recesses there in elementary school. I was on the second-to-last rung of the social ladder; the only person below me was a Lithuanian exchange student with a distracting face mole. Because children are horrible, I took every opportunity to assert my station over her. I say this for two reasons: (1) I was stupid because I probably could have made friends with her and elementary school might have been a little less crushing for me and (2) it has a happy ending because when puberty hit she grew into the mole and got absurdly hot.

  I liked the ditch because sometimes it was a creek and you could race paper boats by yourself, but I favored it mostly because it was a low-traffic area, which meant less scrutiny. That day, some kids were nearby having a conversation about Derrick. I crept behind the handball court to get a little closer and learned Derrick had struck up a relationship with fellow fifth grader Tabitha, a willowy, thick-haired beauty who sang and did theater and wasn’t afraid of being looked at and had developed really, really early.

  I was destroyed. It all made sense. Obviously Derrick had no feelings for me. The moment had been a fluke, skewed by the song’s outlandish sentimentality. I crept back to social obscurity and didn’t talk to anyone or have any friends and got bullied like everyone else. I carried this little wound in my chest for two more years.

  —

  In sixth grade, our school took a weekend-long field trip to a campground a few hours north. We stayed in bunk beds in gender-specific dorms and hiked and played capture the flag, and I wore a T-shirt over my bathing suit. The final night was the “big dance” and I won’t patronize you by building it up any more than that.

  Middle school—grades six through eight—was, in certain ways, actually more forgiving than elementary school. The kids were arguably meaner, but that wasn’t going to change. The good thing, though, was the boys were starting to become interested in sex and nothing equalizes the middle school playing field like hormones. Social hierarchy was no longer exclusively determined by having the right clothes and liking the right pop culture placemakers; it was also about whether or not boys thought you were pretty. I did a little better here, owing to a growth spurt and a summer replacing meals with orange juice.

  The night of the final dance, I hung along the side of the dance floor, eating snack mix and watching the kids who weren’t as terrified of their peers. There are plenty of wallflowers and social outcasts at this age so I don’t write this under the impression I was special, just alienated. Then I noticed Derrick was on the sidelines, too.

  For some strange reason, I was compelled to approach him. It was probably fascination with the enormous disruption of social order that distracted my characteristic anxiety. I kind of danced up to him to make it look casual and tried to feel out whether or not I’d be welcome. Derrick, to his credit, was always a pretty nice kid and smiled.

  “What’s up?” I said, because that was how you greeted people.

  “Not much. What’s up with you?”

  “I don’t really like dancing,” I said. I had also never been asked.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of stupid,” he said.

  “It’s totally stupid!” I said. We agreed!

  There was a long, uncomfortable beat of silence, and I remembered that I didn’t know how to talk to people. He was probably wondering if I would go away or not.

  “So, you sad to go home?” I asked.

  “Yeah. My parents are pretty lame.”

  “Mine, too!”

  “School’s been pretty lame, too. Tabitha and I broke up last week.”

  “Oh. That’s terrible.” Exclamation points fired of
f inside me.

  “We’ve been together since, like, fifth grade. It’s been kind of on and off. She just wants more time to do plays, you know? She doesn’t have time for a real relationship.”

  “Yeah, I know what it’s like.”

  “Having a girlfriend is like having a job or something.”

  “Totally.”

  Whichever hopelessly uncool teacher was saddled with the task of deejaying this event came over the speakers to say the next song would be the last. In a remarkable but true twist of fate, it was “I Swear” by All-4-One.

  My heart skipped. There’s no way he remembered, of course, Derrick had probably flashed that smile at a million girls to a million different pop songs in his day. But it inspired me. “Hey . . .” I started.

  “Do you have someone for the last dance?” he asked.

  I tried not to show that every fiber of my being sang with joy. “No.”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  He led me out onto the dance floor and I thrilled at holding his hand. We took a place under the gentle spin of the disco ball and for a moment I felt that everyone was watching. At first I was mechanical and uncomfortable but then I fell into my own skin and his hands slipped around my lower back and I knew the next step would be putting my head on his shoulder. Just as I leaned in, I remembered what it was like to look him in the eyes from across our singing circle two years ago and I felt this was the culmination of something that had been gone in me since. Everything was going to be set right and then . . .

  Someone tapped my shoulder. Not a gentle tap, but an insistent, aggressive, fingernail-forward kind of tap. I raised my head from Derrick’s shoulder.

  It was Tabitha. She wore an expression that seemed equal parts bridled fury and smug stillness. She looked at me and said, “Can I cut in?” like it was a perfectly reasonable request.

  I backed away instinctively because girls at this age are terrifying and I looked at Derrick for some indication of what to do. He seemed uncertain, apologetic and delighted all at once. He shrugged, but in a compassionate way, and took her back into his arms.

  I wandered off the dance floor alone and took a spot next to a kid named Daniel, who had been removed from the floor for groping. I looked at my shoes because I could not bear the sight of Derrick and Tabitha taking that last, infinitely significant dance to All-4-One. Daniel asked if I wanted to dance and for a moment I wondered if maybe I should just be more realistic about my station. I looked at him forlornly.

  He added, “. . . But only if you’re not wearing a bra.”

  —

  Puberty is awful. Everything is confusing, painful and imbued with meaning. Others’ opinions are of paramount importance and friendships can be established and obliterated in the span of a few hours. I took my status as a social pariah and parlayed it into ambition to be better, to show everyone that I wasn’t worthless. Someday, I said to myself, none of these people will matter because I’m going to write the great American novel. I’m going to write serious literary fiction and win awards and people are going to care about my opinions and I’ll be validated. Then I learned that when life hands you lemons, make dick jokes.

  I don’t look back on Derrick as my first love so much as the first flare of hormones that scrambled my brain and made me feel terrible feelings I could not control. Though I am strangely protective of the song if I hear it in a gym or candle store and those feelings still unfold as it plays.

  Also, in high school, I went to a production of Hair, which happened to feature Tabitha. By that age I’d collected a few friends, and one of them was in it, so I sat in the front row to show support. During the big opening number, before Tabitha was to belt “When the moooooooooon . . . ,” she came out on stage and all these terrible memories flooded back. Going to performances like these gives me intense anxiety and I’m overtaken by a bizarre compulsion to interrupt them (to this day), so I was already volatile. Just as she opened her mouth, I threw a box of Thin Mints and hit her on the forehead, subsequently ruining the opening number.

  I don’t know why I did this. I don’t like Thin Mints. I don’t even know how I got them. Though this led to a forcible ejection from the auditorium, it was not the most unpleasant forcible ejection I have experienced and I still feel there should be no hard feelings, Tabitha, as long as Derrick and I can have our song.

  THE MAN WHO FORGED A DILDO IN HIS OWN IMAGE

  One of the worst people I’ve ever known was a young man who managed a small coffee shop in my hometown. We’ll call him Coffee Thomas. He was the sort of person who, in conversation, even if you kept an invisible one-foot ring of space around you at all times, made you feel as though you were being molested. I guess that’s insensitive to people who’ve actually been molested, so let’s say it was almost like being molested. He was the sort of person concerned only with sex, much in the way that fraternity brothers and married academics tend to be, but Coffee Thomas did it with an air of sanctimony that only a privileged well-educated Northern Californian can impart. Sex is better, apparently, when you wake up with an agenda.

  He was about average height, let’s say five-foot-ten, very bony and pale. He had dark brown eyes and very thick eyelashes—even attractively thick eyelashes—but you couldn’t really appreciate anything on the top half of his face because it was always in competition with this smug, awful, self-impressed, shit-eating grin that never went away. Below the chin, his legs looked like bleached toothpicks that had been rolled around in brittle black hair for a while, which I know because he wore shorts, which is enough to question whether or not you should take any man seriously.

  In this small town where I grew up in Northern California, Coffee Thomas’s place of business was home to the only decent cup of coffee inside the city limits. Good coffee was important to me when I was a teenager because my identity was wholly subsumed by a desire for people to think I was an “intellectual,” and my dull, primitive grasp of adult sophistication ended at “smart people take coffee very seriously, and thus so do I.” Because of my vanity, I had no choice but to interact with Coffee Thomas.

  Our parents knew each other to some degree, enough to be pleased that we were close enough in age to talk to each other and be friends. I’m fairly certain that parents in small towns are pleased by things like this because there is nothing else. In small towns like mine, there are effectively two restaurants and television. That’s all. Naturally, one relishes trivialities like, “Hey, that thing we made a few years ago is approximately the same age as the Johnsons’ thing and now they’re talking to each other. Isn’t that amazing?” It’s not, but you take what you can get.

  I started getting to know Coffee Thomas when I was fourteen and he was eighteen. Then he was still a virgin and quite gawky and unattractive, but had that special breed of ego you get from being encouraged too much. Even at eighteen years old, ostrichlike and a virgin—virtually the most suffocating powerlessness a human being can experience—Coffee Thomas was still a total dick. He spent most of our limited conversations bragging about how he could “hack” my GeoCities account if he wanted and somehow aggressively alter my crude, pathetic, weird little webpage that no one but me knew about. I’d think nothing of his threats, buy my coffees and return home to gild Yoda Grrrl’s Totally Awesome Star Wars webpage with more excellent MIDIs.

  Something changed in Coffee Thomas right about the age he started having sex. I don’t know the exact circumstances of this first dark, uncertain encounter in some bedroom far away. My guess is that a girl who felt equally powerless in life came to buy coffee one day and pitied him when she observed his leafing through Gravity’s Rainbow, which he alluded to constantly in conversation despite never making it past the first ten pages. I know this for a fact because he would tell me things about the book and its greatness strictly in terms of what you could glean from its jacket. For example, he’d say, “It’s a tremendous novel. It has somethin
g like a hundred and twenty central characters” but he couldn’t really name any or tell you much about what they did. Anyway, I’m betting some teenage girl wanted to lose her own virginity and decided he was sexually nonthreatening enough to make it happen in a way that wouldn’t scar her permanently. In the scenario I have crafted in my brain, there follow a few minutes of vociferous reaming and exactly one orgasm.

  In the small, liberal enclave in Northern California where I grew up, you meet a lot of self-satisfied, unconsciously elitist liberals (like myself) who somehow support the town’s astounding number of glass blowers, hemp boutiques and crystal shops. Coffee Thomas, being a shitty by-product of his New Agey environs, discovered “lovemaking” and, almost overnight, he was convinced that sex owed him because he was advancing it so swiftly.

  Tangentially, the use of the word “lovemaking” is a terrific example of things horrible people say. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk about sex in slang or shorthand of any kind without being insufferable. All euphemisms for sex, with the exception of “having sex” or “fucking,” are unacceptable. That includes “lovemaking,” “doing it” and/or “the deed,” “humping,” “bumping uglies,” “banging” and so on. All are horrible. This rule extends to body parts. “Breasts” is acceptable; “boobies,” “cans,” “funbags” and “sweater puppies” are not. “Penis” is acceptable, as well as “cock,” but “shlong,” “wang,” “trouser snake,” “member,” “pecker,” “piss weasel,” “yogurt slinger” and/or “custard launcher,” “johnson,” “third leg,” “babymaker,” “sweetbreads” and “pink oboe” are not. Further still, do not describe things of which you approve as “sexy.” Do not describe yourself or others as “horny” under any circumstances, as it is quite possibly the most awful word in the English language. Do not try to dress up the sex act as something that isn’t completely filthy and perverse by calling it “lovemaking,” and do not try to detract from its greatness by referring to it as “action.” Every single one of these terms is “fundamentally sad.” Honestly, the entire lexicon of sex and sexuality is deplorable and we’d really all do well to never talk about sex ever because all the words for it are ignoble. Please do not point out the irony of my proposing such a thing as the author of a collection of essays about sex. This heart isn’t made of stone.