Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  I started to hate him after one or two interactions. My roommates, who were both from places that still found gayness very alien, reveled in his affectations. They’d praise his fabulousness, they’d have go-go dancing nights at the club, they’d cherish “girl talk” about red carpet gowns and handsome actors. All the while their friendship developed, I couldn’t help but find this behavior more entrenched in homophobia than just about anything I’d seen. They viewed him as nothing more than an over-the-top cliché and it flattered their egos to look past that and embrace him.

  This upset me. They didn’t treat this guy like a person; they treated him like a caricature of sexuality that tacitly represented their progressive benevolence. When I started staying in my room while he was over, they couldn’t accept that it was because I saw him as a histrionic, self-obsessed liar who participated in conversation only if it was about cock or lean protein. They didn’t believe that I disliked his constant, giggly groping. They thought I didn’t like him because he was gay. And I would probably be writing this now with at least a leg to stand on, but of course I eventually made a huge ass of myself.

  —

  We’ll call him Michael, even though he’d actually given himself an outlandish stage name (for his striptease act!) that he expected his friends to call him by. One night, a few friends and I were at the apartment playing a game called Centurion, in which everybody drank a shot of beer once a minute for one hundred minutes, because college is stupid. I was recently recovering from the first split with our Mormon friend and was never really a beer drinker, so I tried matching them (every five minutes) with gin. I don’t drink gin anymore.

  About forty minutes in, Michael showed up with one of the roommates who wasn’t participating and I figured I was drunk enough to tolerate him. I was wrong. Michael immediately launched into a terrible diatribe about a mutual female friend who—he suspected—had gained some weight and he didn’t understand why she figured she could still “get away with” short skirts. He called her “thunder thighs,” and said she needed to consume nothing but “celery and laxatives” for the forseeable future. The sober roommate giggled and giggled because wasn’t it funny how he was being such a bitch! But really, no, he was being hateful and misogynist and she permitted it because it was his shtick.

  After the game, by which time I’d become completely obliterated and deeply irritated, the sober roommate wanted to drive to an on-campus party. We all piled into the car, with Michael in the front seat and the four of us wasted Centurions in the back. After a few minutes, a terrible motion sickness began to sink in and all I could hear was Michael being a dick from the front seat. Because my brain was wrecked by alcohol, I said, “God this is so gay.”

  Everyone went kind of quiet.

  “No, I’m sorry. This is gay. Riding in the back of . . . the cars . . . when you’re this drunk is . . . for gay people.”

  I could see Michael’s shocked expression in the rearview as he met eyes with the driver and I was spurred to continue.

  “No, listen Michael, I respeck your lifestyle. I do. I respecked it. But this is fucking gay.”

  I think, at the time, I was so wasted that this was my idea of irony, insofar as I was trying to be a parody of a heterosexual in much the same way I thought he was a parody of mainstream gay culture. I guess I was trying to match him in cartoonish behavior that reduced my sexual orientation to a caricature as thinly drawn and stupidly conceived as his own: a patronizing, sanctimonious idiot who still used that language pejoratively.

  This is, of course, what I thought was happening and that I was being very clever. But it wasn’t what was actually happening. Regardless of what I thought or how impressed with my own meta-joke I was, my behavior was nothing more than a stupid confluence of my comfort with using “gay” as a put-down and feelings of paranoia that my roommates thought I disliked him on account of his sexuality. This was not the alcohol’s fault; obviously it was mine. For this, I do feel shame, that even as a bleeding heart I still managed to hurt him and use effectively homophobic language in doing so, against this person who not more than a year before had been hospitalized by people who didn’t appreciate his simpering affectations either. I regret the whole thing, whether or not he was a total asshole. The next thing I remember is vomiting in a trash can that I’d pulled into a bathroom stall (?) and the campus drunk questioning me through the door with comical apprehension, “Are you sure you’re okay?” and this was an eerie moment of clarity.

  The next day, when I woke up at four p.m., my roommates were sitting in a quiet circle in the living room, waiting for me. They confronted me about the night before and I lied and said I didn’t remember a word of it. They were furious because Michael had said he wasn’t coming over anymore because of my homophobia and I think—somewhere deep down—even they realized he was overreacting. But they were still going to punish me for it. One of the roommates never really forgave me for the whole thing and tensions ran pretty high for the rest of the year. That roommate eventually moved in with Michael. He ended up owing her a few months’ rent and skipping town. She never saw him again but apparently never admitted she thought he was a bad person, because that was inconsistent with her ideas about herself.

  —

  I learned a valuable lesson about using those words. But before I say a little more about that, I want to add that I’ve heard a lot of arguments for why everyone should be able to say a word like “faggot.” One is a backlash to political sensitivity frequently made by stand-up comedians; on a really obvious level, sometimes the best way to mock a genuinely stupid mindset—like that belonging to a bigot—is to mimic their reasoning and expose its absurdity, and in so doing we employ words like “faggot,” “homo,” and so on. I once heard a high school football player call another a “gay homo queer fag,” which you just can’t make up and shouldn’t die in obscurity because it’s perfect.

  I’ve heard a lot of people justify using “faggot” by insisting it doesn’t mean “one who is attracted to those of the same gender,” that instead “faggot” actually means asexual and pathetic and feeble, that a “fag” is just someone who’s a whiny bitch. A twerp. Which is uncomfortably dubious because this definition is the same as our old primitive misconceptions about gay men, that one’s sexuality has something to do with one’s manliness (which itself assumes that manliness is somehow an important quality). I’ve never quite been persuaded by people who claim that “gay” or “fag” are acceptable pejoratives because they just mean weak and helpless and asexual. Then again, as the old saying goes, “All babies are faggots until they fuck something.”

  I see no justification for using a word like “fag” to mean pathetic because individual pursuit and knowledge of what one wants—especially in the face of judgment from others—is practically heroic. I am lucky to be of an orientation not oppressed by bigots and simpletons, but I have an abiding admiration for people resolute enough to know what they want, or to try to find out. I had a friend in college who was a straight man; one night, he took up a gay friend’s offer of a blowjob just to see if he was into men. In other words, he took a heuristic approach to his sexuality. He then explained what had happened to a keg party full of men not an hour after. Though all the other guys made fun of him ruthlessly, I was in awe. I thought he was the Niels Bohr of getting blown by a dude.

  After the incident in the car, I felt the responsible thing would be to expunge those words from my vocabulary. They weren’t necessary. It wasn’t about my “right” to use them, even in attempts at satire; it was about not being a shitty person. I never wanted to be thought of as homophobic, strange though the idea was. I didn’t even want to be thought of as cruel.

  —

  Lucky for me, though, I landed in the best loophole imaginable when I started dating a man who used to fuck men. Not just fuck them, mind you, but also have meaningful long-term relationships with them. This was a non-issue for us bec
ause (sorry for being an asshole) I actually do believe sexuality is a spectrum; I just happen to fall in a very boring place on it. He falls in the middle. One thing that attracted me most to him was his lack of fear of other people and his upbringing and his Midwestern peers while trying to figure out what he wanted. I tend to go for men who’d probably benefit from a little sporting exploration; he’s the only one who actually followed through and ironed out who he was.

  Moreover, I can say “faggot” forever. Forever. It’s like how people in interracial relationships can say mind-blowingly racist things to each other to get rises out of people but no one can ever accuse them of being actually racist because they’re in love and they hold hands and have a joint savings account and fuck each other a lot. Much in this way, I can’t be a bigot because I’m with a man who’s been in love with men. Which would make me a pretty incompetent bigot, if I was one. I’ll have to stop immediately if we ever break up, but I’m holding out that we’ll stay together and have lots of self-impressed little babies. And, once they’re old enough, we’ll be able to joke in ways that their peers with boring hetero parents could never imagine: I’ll do all kinds of hilarious impressions like “mommy learning to toss a salad properly” and “mommy trying to put her hands in daddy’s asshole like his ex-boyfriend used to,” and then I’ll make all these exaggerated expressions of confusion and I’ll shrug and sigh and it’ll be like a Charlie Chaplin movie (but we’ll say “fag” sometimes).

  SO YOU’VE CAUSED AN ABORTION

  The manner in which I first encountered abortion was, strangely, the same way most adolescent boys discover porn: late at night on the Internet. I was about twelve and had been introduced to a website over Thanksgiving dinner, by one of the older female cousins not scandalized by the sex tape I found. My family, as you’ve probably deduced, is fond of black humor and my cousin had a particularly morbid proclivity. She told me about all the grotesque images you’d find on this website, then produced a laptop and showed me a few. The one that stuck out was a man who’d died in his bathtub while the water was running really hot and it roiled around his corpse for a few days, resulting in what can only accurately be described as man soup. Unless stew is technically more accurate? Whichever one is meat-based.

  Enthused by this trove of objectionable things suddenly available to me, I went home that night and started down the rabbit hole of primitive Internet perversity. Websites full of bodies, generally dead by some gruesome misfortune, led to websites of violent urban legends and ghost stories and animal abuse hoaxes (like putting kittens in different shaped glasses to grow funnily shaped kittens) and dead baby jokes and so on. That first night, I was hunched over my computer very late, unable to resist all the appalling descriptions, clicking them and trying to assess the gore of a half-loaded image through cracked fingers.

  One such option claimed to show “the victims of abortion,” and, not knowing what that was, I clicked through. The initial text I don’t recall very well; it might have been a parody of religious right rhetoric or it might have been blatantly irreverent, I can’t remember. What I do remember, however, was (1) discovering what an abortion was and (2) the visual component.

  I had stumbled on an endless column of abortion aftermath. Gleaming trays of red medical waste speckled with identifiably human parts: half-formed eyeballs, hands, feet, lobes of head and sprouting ears. Some abortions are performed on clusters of cells; others on little beings. These were the kind you recognized.

  Here’s the thing, though: you can’t really gauge the size of an aborted fetus just by eyeballing it; you need something set beside it. Thanks to the site’s morally bankrupt hosts, the increment of measurement was . . . a SpaghettiO. Someone had digitally added stacked circles of the popular canned ring pasta on top of images of expelled fetuses for scale. What made this even more impressively ghastly was that—when digitally added on top of an image of an aborted fetus—SpaghettiOs kind of blend.

  Soon after, I became a teenager and my ignorant teenage brain eagerly sought any argument that made the noises of intellectual activity. I, embarrassingly, spent a lot of conversations about reproductive rights saying that I supported abortion on a case by case basis and that “women who use abortions as birth control” are monstrous, immoral sluts. I was sixteen.

  This contrarian narcissism eventually took the shape of indifference: I didn’t think much about abortion because I wasn’t the “kind” of person who’d get one. This common but no less stupid assumption wasn’t terribly hard to understand: I’d never needed one and none of my friends ever talked about having one. As a person who had always been neurotic to the point of obsession about safe sex, I genuinely believed abortion was the dominion of the less responsible, the unsympathetic. What’s impressive is that I managed to believe such a thing for so long.

  This is especially impressive considering I went to college at a pretty busy time for sexual politics: people were feeling less and less ashamed of what they wanted and more empowered to get it. By which I really mean, yes, there is organic lubricant; yes, there are manifold cock ring options for you if you’re allergic to rubber; absolutely there is body chocolate without preservatives. If you’d like to buy a vibrator, there is a store on Main Street that’s as futuristically soulless as an Asian fusion restaurant and, if you want, you can even get one with a little twirling dolphin on it and I don’t know who likes dolphins that much but those people are apparently out there in droves. Further, no matter how strange and dark and off you think you are, there is already an active online community for your strange dark offness, if not extensive communities writing erotica specifically focused on it. I’d wager we’re maybe a year off the availability of small-batch edible underwear.

  This world of increasing sexual liberation still runs up against the old thing: the shame and the confusion and the tragic lack of education. Sometimes they collide. One consequence of this is that once someone blamed me for an abortion they got.

  —

  My college had two campuses on different sides of the country and intercampus transfer was encouraged; I decided to do two years in New Mexico and then spent the next two in Maryland. Early in my junior year, I was thus in Maryland, sitting at a wrought-iron table under the hum of cicadas in dense humidity as the first big campus-wide party of the year took place (it occurred on both campuses, like most of the major parties). I’d always hated the party in question: it was an opulent, vulgar excuse for everyone to dress up in costume and act really, really college. The conceit was that the freshmen wore virginal whites and the sophomores, juniors and seniors wore black (the administration wore a blind eye). The party was about “seducing and corrupting” the poor freshmen and their whites enabled predatory upperclassmen to do so. Weirdly, if there’s one thing I learned from my four years in private liberal arts education, it’s that people love drinking in funny outfits. It never occurs to anyone they’re going to be paying off debts for untold years just so they can enjoy four brief ones as an alcoholic in costume.

  I was having a cigarette outside on the quad—at one of the tables blanketed in condoms by the decoration committee—when some people I knew came along and sat down. We had been there for about twenty minutes when we noticed two white-clad kids on a stone bench beneath a magnolia tree, kissing hungrily. We watched them for a little while because the outsized physicality and showmanship of their lust was hilarious. They appeared to have met at most a few hours before, likely less, and were obviously about to make some terrible decisions together. We, at the average age of twenty, sat there smug in our wisdom.

  One of the kids with me was a guy named Sandeep, who’d nicknamed me Axl Rose on account of my messy shag haircut. While watching the two freshmen grope and slobber on each other, Sandeep decided to take advantage of my look. He began by announcing I wasn’t actually as cool as Axl Rose, which of course caught my attention.

  “Axl Rose,” he said, “would walk over to those two fresh
men and hand them a condom.”

  Now sober, I can say with complete certainty that Axl Rose would not.

  He went on about how Axl Rose was so rock ’n’ roll and would totally go over and interrupt their lusftul motions for his own entertainment. As I have no social skills and struggle to make friends, I became immediately embarrassed and admitted I would never be as cool as Axl Rose and it would be great if they all stopped looking at me immediately.

  Another kid, a rich WASP from Manhattan who drove an Aston Martin, chimed in that he’d pay twenty bucks to see it.

  Sandeep thought for a minute and added Axl Rose would be so brash as to sit down on the male freshman’s lap and hand him the condom that way.

  The WASP added: “Forty dollars.”

  Sandeep—rumored to have paid his way through college by online poker playing and a bit of a betting man—raised the stakes: in order to be as cool as Axl Rose and make sixty dollars off of this, I’d need to walk over to the underclassmen, sit down on the guy’s lap, hand him a condom and whisper in his ear, “Seal the deal.” He swiped up a random condom from the pile on the table and held it out expectantly.

  —

  Let me tell you about my financial situation in college: I spent most weekday nights studying and most weekend afternoons working at an outdoor apparel store so I could afford groceries (I eventually moved on to waiting tables). I still have no idea why I was hired at a store that traded in ski and sailing jackets; in my initial interview I was asked to list my favorite outdoor activities, and through a mixture of interview anxiety, misguided irreverence and possibly Asperger’s, I said, “Smoking.” The man who hired me must have taken it as a joke because soon I was peddling sailing shoes and fleeces to barrel-chested power boaters with hundred-thousand-dollar watches. This way, I scrounged together enough to afford cans of tuna, microwaveable soups and tea, while the rest went to paying for a cab to the nearest grocery store, a twenty-minute drive away. This potential sixty-dollar windfall represented unspeakable opulence: cheeses, mixed nuts, grocery store sushi, beef jerky, dried fruit, bell peppers! To provide a more succinct portrait of how broke I was then, right around that time I saw a man walking down the street eating two Twix bars side by side out of the wrapper—as if they were one candy bar—and I thought it was the truest expression of luxury I had ever seen.