The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  And I said: “Can’t we just watch a movie?”

  Neither of us moved—no breathing, even. Then he sat up, untangled his body from mine, and walked across the room to his clothes. I watched him disappear into his jeans, shirt, and shoes, then out the door, then gone for good. I could have said something. I could have explained myself, apologized, talked about fear and trust, but in the moment? Being awful was easier than being honest.

  Lightning

  As a birthday gift, or maybe a gag, some friends snuck into Christopher’s apartment while he was at work and covered everything with aluminum foil. It was a studio, not much space to cover but still: foil-wrapped clothes in foil-wrapped drawers. Foil-wrapped books on foil-wrapped shelves. Foil-wrapped individual aspirin inside the foil-wrapped aspirin bottle inside the foil-wrapped medicine cabinet over the foil-wrapped sink. It was my job to keep him away, and when we walked into the apartment, the doormat crunched. When we turned on the lights, we nearly went blind. When we fell back on his bed, it crackled beneath our bodies, papered us in silver and shredded as we flipped: me on top, him on top, me, him. Later, he peeled foil off the windows so we could watch lightning split the sky, the best show in springtime Chicago. We pulled the screens off, too, and stuck our feet in the rain. We fell asleep like that, two pairs of bare legs sticking out of a ninth floor window over Pratt Boulevard, half on the bed and half in the sky. It was perfect—magic, even.

  It was my last first time.

  When I look back at my sexual history—those singular still shots and picture postcards—so little of it involves the actual physical act. Rather the before and after—the buildup to and takeaway from. It’s me figuring out what I want and what I’m worth, a long line of cause and effect that started with spinning and ended in electricity.

  By morning, the room was a microwave, sun baking the foiled walls and cooking us from the outside in. But hey! Who gives a shit? We were in love. We drank cold coffee and unwrapped his apartment, book by book, dish by dish. It took days. We’d stop to sleep, to fuck, only putting on clothes to go to the 7-Eleven for ice and cereal and Gatorade. Every night, it stormed. So humid. So much sweat. So much sex. Even now, after everything that’s happened—moving to Prague, eloping on the beach, near foreclosure, living off an art website and writing books and our perfect little boy who, blink and you’ll miss it, just lost his first tooth—I can still remember how those first nights felt. I don’t mean the scene-building stuff of here is his shoulder, here is my knee, the walls were painted red, it was nighttime. No, I mean the gut punch and thrum of muscle memory: electric shock on skin, wet and sticky and sliding, teeth in my neck, thighs taut, tighter, squeezing, holding, wait—and waves, unfolding, unlocked, and open and free.

  This Essay Is Done

  It was raining the day of Megan’s funeral. I stood under my umbrella, looking at the tombstone with her name on it. megan stielstra in big letters. It was very sad that I was the only person who showed up. She didn’t have any family or friends that cared about her.

  * * *

  This is the beginning of a short story written by a college student and turned in to his creative writing professor—me. He had turned in other stories as well, about how I had died. Sometimes, a character with this student’s same name and physical appearance saved me from a violent perpetrator. Sometimes he was the violent perpetrator.

  “It’s fiction,” he said. “Isn’t that what this is? A fiction class?”

  One day I walked into the main office and found him trying to talk a work aide into giving him my home address.

  This happened fifteen years ago and this student is an anomaly among the brilliant, thoughtful writers I’ve been privileged to work with but man, I can’t cut him out of my head, especially as colleges across the country debate the issue of Campus Carry. As of this writing, nine states enforce laws allowing license holders to carry concealed weapons into college classrooms, and it looks like more are on the way; a January 2016 report from the Education Commission of the States in partnership with NASPA concludes that while “numerous states prohibit guns on campus, the architecture and momentum of new policy represents a shift in the opposite direction.”

  fact: Nine out of ten campus police oppose concealed weapons on campus.

  fact: Ninety-four percent of college faculty oppose concealed weapons on campus.

  fact: Ninety-five percent of college presidents oppose concealed weapons on campus.

  fact: Eighty percent of college students say they would not feel safe if guns were in their classrooms.

  question: Would you?

  * * *

  At the University of Texas at Austin, students are fighting their recently enacted Campus Carry legislation with dildos (#cocksnotglocks). The short version is this: dildos are considered “obscene” and prohibited from campus so students are tying them to their backpacks by the dozens and showing up en masse at what student organizer Jessica Jin calls—wait for it—strap-ins.

  I did a little digging.

  It’s always been easy to buy or sell a gun in Texas, but up until 2008? You couldn’t buy or sell a dildo. And while there are no limits to the number of guns one may own, up until 2003 it was a felony to own more than six dildos. I found this information on my new favorite website—dumblaws.com—and confirmed it through: Texas Penal Code, Chapter 43, Public Indecency, Subchapter B, Obscenity. And since we’re already in crazy town, here are other things that were illegal at some point or other: In my home state of Michigan, you couldn’t swear in front of women or children. In my adopted city of Chicago, you can’t have fuzzy dice or air fresheners hanging from your rearview mirror. In California, women couldn’t drive while wearing a housecoat. In Alabama, you couldn’t carry an ice-cream cone in your back pocket. In Cottage Grove, Minnesota, residents of even-numbered addresses could not water their plants on odd-numbered days excluding the thirty-first day where it applies.

  But unregulated firearms?

  Hey, have at it!

  * * *

  Over ten thousand people signed up via Facebook for the first University of Texas strap-in held at the same time that Campus Carry went into effect on August 1, 2016, which, in a stunningly offensive fuck you to basic human decency, is fifty years to the day that engineering student Charles Whitman climbed a three-hundred-foot tower in the center of the UT campus and opened fire from above, killing fourteen and injuring countless others. He used a .30 caliber carbine, a 6mm bolt-action Remington, a .35 caliber pump rifle, a 9mm Luger, a Smith & Wesson M19, a sawed-off semiautomatic shotgun, and seven hundred rounds of ammunition—all of which were purchased legally.*

  It goes on.

  On and on and on.

  Whatever you believe about the Second Amendment, it contains the words “well” and “regulated,” and in the last thirty years of mass shootings, licensed, legal, supposedly regulated guns are the norm, including the one used in 1993 by Stephen Leith in my hometown.

  * * *

  Remember: My father is an Alaskan, and a gun owner. He’s also a Vietnam vet. He and my uncles and my cousins are lifelong hunters. I grew up in this life. Spare me the NRA horseshit that an AR-15 is used to hunt.

  * * *

  Recently, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas withdrew from his position teaching economics to classes of nearly five hundred. “The risk that a disgruntled student might bring a gun into the classroom and start shooting at me has been substantially enhanced,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “I cannot believe I’m the only faculty member who is disturbed by this.”

  He’s not.

  If Campus Carry becomes law in Illinois, I’m out, too.

  I can’t teach wondering who has a gun.

  Question: Could you learn?

  * * *

  I want this essay to strap a dildo to its backpack. I want this essay to give those UT students a high five.

  They’re trying. I want this essay to try.

  I want this essay to listen to
its uncles and cousins about what they think common-sense gun legislation looks like. I want this essay to listen to why students and faculty might want to bring a gun into a classroom, to recognize those fears and come up with solutions that don’t include weapons. I want this essay to sit on the floor of the House of Representatives behind Congressman John Lewis, protesting congressional inaction on gun-control legislation. I want this essay to put a spotlight on Mothers Against Senseless Killings and Assata’s Daughters and the #LetUsBreathe Collective at Freedom Square and so many other community-based organizations led by black women working nonstop without resources or recognition to end violence in Chicago. I want this essay to go online right now and look up the names of its state representatives and see if they’ve taken money from the NRA and, if so, I want this essay to vote them the hell out of office.

  This essay is done feeling helpless.

  Nick Anderson, “If you want to carry a gun on campus, these states say yes,” Washington Post, January 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/01/27/if-you-want-to-carry-a-gun-on-campus-these-states-say-yes/?utm_term=.f2fc364615c9

  James H. Price, Amy Thompson, Jagdish Khubchandani, Joseph Dake, Erica Payton, and Karen Teeple, “University Presidents’ Perceptions and Practice Regarding the Carrying of Concealed Handguns on College Campuses,” Journal of American College Health, Vol. 62, Issue 7, 2014.

  Larry Buchanan, Josh Keller, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Daniel Victor, “How They Got Their Guns,” New York Times, June 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/03/us/how-mass-shooters-got-their-guns.html

  Tom McKay, “This Is How Chicago Gets Flooded With Illegal Guns,” Mic, November 3, 2015, https://mic.com/articles/127842/this-is-how-chicago-gets-flooded-with-illegal-guns#.8cKjwwj75

  Heather Dockray, “Igor Volsky shames politicians who send ‘prayers’ and accept NRA contributions,” Mashable, June 13, 2016, http://mashable.com/2016/06/13/igor-volsky-politicians-donations-nra/#2uyBUU4CXmq2

  thirty, or Come Here Fear

  20

  New city, new neighborhood, new apartment: a three-bedroom in the Ukrainian Village at Ashland and Augusta. We’d been there a couple of months when we came home to find our front door lifted off its hinges and leaning in the outside hallway, our rooms stripped near bare.

  20

  New city, new neighborhood, new apartment: a two-bedroom in Wicker Park, the first floor of a three-story crumbling Victorian. It had a fireplace, stained glass windows, and in 1995 cost $650 a month split three ways. (In 2016, that’s probably tripled, if not quadrupled.) It was around the corner from Quimby’s back when it was on Damen, and Myopic Books was on Division, and Earwax on Milwaukee rented art house films upstairs. I logged nights at Urbis Orbis, drinking too much coffee and reading Anaïs Nin. After I got a fake ID, I went to Double Door and wished I was a rock star. I went to Rainbo, which felt like my very own secret and was the first place I tasted whiskey. I went to Innertown Pub and watched my roommate Laura play pool (the boys were so pissed; she kicked all their asses). Everyone was artsy and grungy and broke as hell, working and going to school, working and making art, working to keep their rehearsal space or their studio in the Flatiron, working tons of jobs, everyone from working families, families fighting for their homes as the neighborhood changed and changed and changed. When the Starbucks moved in at the intersection of Milwaukee, Damen, and North—people will tell you it’s called Six Corners, but trust me, it’s the Crotch—somebody kept throwing bricks through the windows. They’d get taped up, then replaced, then bricked again because: Capitalism! And Corporatization! And Don’t gentrify our neighborhood! even though the neighborhood was already gentrifying, was already gentrified, and at twenty I was too young and too dumb to understand that I was part of the problem.

  But before all that, Jeff walked me home. He was my neighbor, kitty-corner across the park. We had a late-night screenwriting class together in the South Loop and afterward, we’d take the Blue Line home to Damen. He was tall, blond, small-town midwestern like me, but had just returned from living in Spain. He spoke Spanish fluently, his c’s like th’s. He introduced me to Garcia Lorca, Pedro Almodovar, and musicians that set me on fire: Heroes del Silencio, Alejandro Sanz, and Rosana.

  Later, he’d read my nervous starts at stories and ask questions that gave me ideas.

  Later, we’d spend afternoons at the Esquire or the Landmark watching wonderful independent films about horribly depressing people and awful blockbusters about aliens or vampires or white men in tuxedos.

  Later, he’d tell me what he really thought about the guys I dated: Your boyfriend looks like a troll doll, you know, with the hair? Wasn’t that your boyfriend passed out on the floor at Swank Frank? Your boyfriend’s Vonnegut tattoo is like totally original.

  Later we’d hold hands helpless watching the movie Amélie at the Music Box Theatre while the United States dropped bombs on Iraq, stuck in our fear and hope and privilege.

  Later, I’d read the final draft of his first novel before he turned it in to Simon and Schuster, knowing the years of blood/sweat/tears that went into those pages.

  Later, my boyfriend and I would move in with him when we came back from Prague, broke and culture shocked with nowhere else to go.

  Later, I’d type for him as his broken hands healed from a car accident.

  Later, he’d hold my newborn son while I locked myself in the bathroom and pretended everything was fine, and later—a lifetime later—he’d read this and cry.

  But before any of that happened, he was the first boy I ever asked out.

  I was so scared. What do we do if they say no? How do we even keep living?

  “I’d love to have dinner with you!” he said. “You know I’m gay, right?”

  20

  I took a class on structural parody with the writer Patricia Ann McNair. It’s where I learned how to break down a text, and I’ve returned to those lessons again and again in my professional life: the art that I make, the work that pays the rent, and the rare magic moments when those two things collide. One of the stories we dug into was Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” now one of my favorites, but then—

  “i hate this,” I said in class.

  Patty is infinitely patient but takes zero shit. “Why?” she asked.

  I went off, ending with the typically exasperated: “It doesn’t make sense!”

  Patty nodded. She set her book on the floor. Then she leaned forward and said the single most important thing I heard in college, if not ever: “You don’t get to hate something just because you don’t understand it.”

  She let the words sink in.

  Let the words sink in.

  Then she picked her book off the floor and tossed it in my lap: Kafka’s The Complete Stories. “Read it again,” she said.

  Every week, I stayed after class and we talked about that story: craft, historical context, its relevance to the current cultural dialogue. Every time I read it I noticed something different. “Great,” Patty would say. “Read it again.”

  On the last day of class, she asked me to stay after one more time. “Listen,” she said. She set her book on the floor. Then she leaned forward and said the second most important thing I heard in college: “Have you ever thought about teaching?”

  20

  The first time I gave a reading, I shook like hell. There were twenty-plus other writing students at this open mic, a very safe and encouraging environment, and I had a great story about a cocaine addict who worked in a pizza parlor and mixed up his coke with the flour and all his customers came back night after night. I got up to the podium with my two double-spaced pages and made it halfway through the first sentence before I started to shake. Like, hard. The papers rattled. I set them down and gripped both sides of the podium to steady myself, but I was still shaking so the whole podium shook—it was banging into the ground—but still, I kept going. I put both hands behind my back and grasped the elbow of the opposite arm. The shaking
didn’t stop, but at least it wasn’t as noticeable? Maybe? I have the kind of pale (read: translucent) skin that gets blotchy when I’m embarrassed (or excited or pissed or crying or drinking or making out or thinking or breathing), so I was super red. It was obvious and horrible and, in retrospect, one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. Where would any of us be if we hadn’t started somewhere?

  20

  I read somewhere that there’s enough power in the female orgasm to light an entire city block. That can be a little scary the first time.

  20

  During the 1995–96 NBA season, I waited tables in an Italian restaurant on Van Buren not far from the United Center. That year, the Bulls beat the Miami Heat. They beat the New York Knicks. They beat the Orlando Magic and the Seattle SuperSonics and before every winning game, every step closer to the second three-peat and securing their position as one of the top ten teams in NBA history—people ate.

  One night, I went into the kitchen and the chef was cutting up a goat, its carcass spread across the workstation. I don’t remember how it got started, but somebody bet me a hundred bucks to swallow the eyeballs. I wasn’t grossed out by dead things. They’d been in the garage my entire life. Plus, I needed the cash. That weekend I did acid and couldn’t shake the idea of eyes in my stomach. Maybe they were tracking my whereabouts for government operatives. Maybe they’d grow into something terrifying that would burst out of my body like in the Alien movies. I don’t remember who I was with that night, but whoever she was, I sobbed in her lap about my love for Sigourney Weaver.

  21

  A guy took me home to his meet his parents; cross-country drive, family wedding, whole nine yards. I was terrified. What if they didn’t like me?