One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Page 11
Plenty of us are fighting for structural changes, but a firmer solution has more to do with correcting human behaviour in general. No one learns how to be mean at twenty-five. No one actually becomes a hardline racist in their thirties. These are beliefs and behaviours we inherit from our bloodlines, from the people who raised us, and the internet is just another way to put those beliefs to work.
The troubling part is not that there are people online who feel comfortable—vindicated and strong—in calling me a cum-bucket. What scares me is that those people go out into the world, holding these convictions secretly or otherwise, and exist around me physically. I see them at the bank and they go to my dentist and I might end up working with them. What they say to me online is the purest distillation of the rage they feel—statements that would get them fired or arrested in real life but get them a moderate fan base or begrudging attention online. Maybe they consider their online presence a separate existence, but we all know it’s the same person, no matter the platform.
We love to talk about the web as if it’s a limitless resource, like the only barriers we put on it are what the government will allow, what money will buy, what manpower can create. But all things built by humans descend into the same pitfalls: loathing, vitriol, malicious intent. All the things we build in order to communicate, to connect, to find people like us so we feel less alone, and to find people not like us at all so we learn how to adapt, end up turning against us. Avoiding human nature at its most pure and even at its worst is pointless. No one deserves your attention, but no one has earned your withdrawal.
“Who do you even talk to on Twitter?” Papa asked me after I told him I had rejoined. “Who could be so important there?” I thought about my family’s traditional Kashmiri last name, how any other Kashmiri can point us out in a phone book and know where we’re from. This has, literally, happened: when I was still living at home, a recent immigrant looked up our listed number, called us, and asked if he could come over to talk to my parents and get some help integrating. Mom made him fried vangan and Papa offered him chai and I was perplexed that my otherwise very private, very protective parents let a complete stranger stroll into their home just because he came from the same region they did. But they were trying to find connection, to talk to someone who understood them. I will likely have to tell you, here, that vangan is eggplant, but online, I can find someone in mere seconds who already knows that. Our worlds become a little smaller, we feel closer, we feel less alone.
Eventually, that interaction won’t merit abuse online. It won’t result in a skinhead sending me a message about how brown people smell like shit, or how we should be thanking white people for allowing us to live here. But that pendulum doesn’t swing if you detach, if you refuse to play entirely, if you leave the room and try to play by yourself.
Papa, after accepting that I returned to Twitter, abruptly stopped speaking to me when his feathers were re-ruffled by my decision, his go-to when he’s too overwhelmed to even be mad. I tweeted, “An amazing thing about brown parents is they can be mad at you, get over it, and a year later, decide they are not done being mad at you.” My mentions filled with responses, little hearts signifying that others agreed; “omg yes” wrote one woman I have met only once, three years ago. I and a few others talked about what fresh nonsense our parents were mad about this week. There was a family here, sisters and brothers I hadn’t met, nodding in unison, saying, “I know, it’s the worst.” Meanwhile, anyone who didn’t have parents like ours laughed at the story and got a small piece of our family history. Strangers on the internet ask about my dad all the time. They want to know if he’s still baking bread, if he’s still running every morning. A few of them want to know if he’s a terrorist. It’s not all good, but I like the reminders.
“I talk to my friends, Papa,” I told him later. “I use it for work and I talk to strangers.”
He huffed and resettled in his chair, shimmying the way he does when he’s angry because an answer doesn’t make sense to him. “Talking to strangers,” he said. “What could you possibly have to say to someone you’ve never met?”
Papa
Did she pay for the lunch?
Scaachi
why are you obsessed with whether people buy me lunch or not i am not destitute
Papa
If they do that means they hold you in high esteem ok omg
A Good Egg
“DID I TELL YOU,” I bellowed into the yawning chasm of existence, on the first day of a new month of a new year, of renewed body and refreshed mind, “THAT I AM DOING A CLEANSE?”
Before Hamhock and I left for our trip to Thailand and Vietnam, I knew that my body would be taking a beating because I have no self-control. We were going to a part of the world where beers cost a few bucks and you can still smoke indoors, so I figured I’d give my liver a head start by avoiding alcohol for the month of January. Dry January, they call it, an attempt to start the year off right, to cure your body of what you did over the winter holidays, to be a better person. This, of all years, will be the year you are not walking acid reflux, where you take care of yourself, where you will floss. I was only asking four weeks of sobriety for and from myself, just thirty-one days, though I’d never gone that long without a glass of wine since I started drinking. My trip would be self-indulgent enough, complete with what the locals call a Bucket of Joy: ice, Red Bull, Sprite, and rum or whisky. It’s a death wish served in a frosty pail, and I was going to drink all of them.
Before I would get there, however, I’d drain my body of its toxins, eat right, go to the gym, and drink plenty of water. I’d talk about yoga. (I wouldn’t, like, go to yoga, but I’d talk about it. If I’ve learned anything from white women, it’s that the best kind of yoga is the kind you talk about fucking constantly.)
It’s not that I drink a lot. I rarely drink during the week, and my weekend drinking generally consists of juuuust enough wine to make me forget about the three times I’ve accidentally sent my boss a furious and deeply intimate Facebook message intended for Hamhock. But I like alcohol because it induces a kind of stupor I can control, one that comes in gentle waves, that I can keep at bay with water and disco fries or make harsher with amber-coloured liquor. Booze has, probably, played a bigger part in my life than I ever intended. (Though what is a “normal” amount of alcohol for someone with a baseline level of childhood trauma? Is it worse if I rim a Tom Collins with crushed Children’s Tylenol? LET ME LIVE.) My birthdays get increasingly foggy thanks to pinot over dinner; good news is celebrated with off-brand champagne. (“You can’t call it champagne if it’s not from Champagne,” Hamhock says as I try to saw his head off with a broken bottle.) Every important relationship I’ve had has been formed over a beer. Hamhock and I met at a kegger hosted by his friend in a dimly lit backyard. I went with my best friend, and while Hamhock failed to persuade me to do a keg stand, my buddy did it twice while I held his glasses. I poured him into a cab at two in the morning as he purred a pitiful, “You’re a good egg.” Alcohol is the great equalizer. Alcohol makes you brave. Alcohol makes you beautiful. Alcohol makes you fall in love.
I didn’t grow up in a home with much alcohol consumption. Mom gets loaded from one or two glasses of very tart white wine, and Papa will have a Scotch merely, I think, because he likes saying, “Gimme two fingers!” while holding up his index and pinky, five inches apart. (Then he laughs, which is your cue to also laugh.) He becomes gregarious for an hour and then calls it a night. I didn’t drink much in high school either, missing that phase where everyone discovers how sexy and touchable they are when they nurse four ounces of warm raspberry Sour Puss in a red party cup. I went to one house party at seventeen, a month after graduation, drank two Smirnoff Ices, and wondered where everyone’s parents were.
When I moved to Toronto for university, I was still two years younger than the legal drinking age. I didn’t move into a
residence but, rather, into a Best Western hotel where five floors were converted into student housing. The beds had been taken out and two small plastic cots were installed, with a flimsy plastic barrier between them to offer some semblance of privacy from the stranger sleeping four feet from your head. My roommate was a Chinese exchange student who told me, repeatedly, her name was Alice, but she carried around books and paperwork with the name Mia scrawled on them. (Alice/Mia vanished without notice after the first semester, leaving behind only a pair of broken flip-flops.) The rest of the building otherwise still functioned as a hotel, so while tourists checked in to this crumbling, unkempt building sandwiched between what was then the city’s oldest gay bathhouse and a private middle school filled with teens who owned Amexes, a few hundred seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds were getting fucked up. We attempted to break into the pool (which was off limits), and tried to pry our eleventh-floor windows open to throw pennies at pedestrians.
That Best Western was where I learned how to drink. In high school, I was too paranoid my parents would show up and force their fingers down my throat to make me vomit the puddles of beer I choked down. But here, here I could be fun without threat of retribution. And I was learning that I needed to be fun if I was going to get anyone to talk to me.
When you’re a girl, you learn pretty fast that boys will like you if you can drink. Not if you will drink, but if you can drink like the boys and hold it together. Girls don’t get to be sloppy, they don’t get to boot ’n rally. They have to be buzzed, perpetually, while still keeping up, playing beer pong, taking shots, being fuckable, being fun. The first adult I ever had a crush on—five years older than me, with skin so white I wanted to ruin it with crayons—once told me, “You can really drink for a girl.” It was a badge of honour. Later, he amended it: “I’ve never seen a brown girl drink like you can.” He was impressed. I was impressive. I was fun. And I felt brave. Drinking does that, makes you feel like you can crush the world under your heel, or possibly seduce it into submission.
But girls don’t actually get to drink like boys because boys do things to girls when they drink. When I was a teenager, the world told me that a girl is responsible for her own body if she’s raped or assaulted when she’s drunk: that’s her fault, it’s on her to not get so drunk she stops being fun and starts being a liability. My parents always told me drinking was risky, that it opened up the recesses of a man’s brain and made him primal and territorial. Of course that’s bad, we were told, but it’s up to you to keep yourself safe. For the first few weeks at the hotel, when I was invited to different parties in different dorm rooms, when older students offered to buy drinks for me, I attended reluctantly, in bulky clothes and with unbrushed hair. I refused to let anyone touch my drink, no one could open a beer for me, no one was allowed to offer me a cup, even an empty one—I’d bring my own. I was learning how to be fun, sure, but the threat loomed: one of the guys here can take it away from you in a heartbeat, and it’ll be your fault.
—
I missed university orientation when I moved, so I started classes knowing no one except a vegan girl in my program who also happened to live down the hall from me. (She would not be a friend. I and a few boys in the dorm borrowed a dormmate’s bearskin rug, draped it over ourselves, and stormed into her room to scare her.)
But within the first few weeks, I met Jeff, a rowdy boy a year older than me who wore old T-shirts unironically and looked like he could lift a car over his head. I hated him immediately: he was loud and self-confident and in the middle of the day—sober, I figured—he was fun, and that just seemed unfair. He was from Canada’s farmland, a verified country bro who, had he gone to my high school, would have been polite but unfeeling towards me. Jeff came with another boy, a narrow-faced, skinny-legged seventeen-year-old named Matt Braga. I hated him more than I hated Jeff: he was weaselly and had saucer-eyeballs that bulged when he caught you in a mistake, and if you asked him a question, he’d lean back in his chair and fold his arms and say, “Aaaaaahhhhhmmmm,” before answering. He looked like a baby so I called him Baby Braga. He didn’t like it, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t like him.
These two were the worst, but Jeff threw the best parties and Baby Braga was always there. Jeff lived in the residence on campus, where floor after floor was unsupervised hedonism, where Red Bull sponsored a party in one of the common rooms and underage teens drank freely. Jeff invited me to a party on his floor the first time we hung out after class. I didn’t trust him, this tall, beast-like man who drank too easily and had too much fun for comfort. “Baby Braga’s coming too,” he assured me. “And you can bring whoever you want. Come on.” I agreed, passed out on his floor early the next morning, and woke up briefly when he carried me to his bed. He slept in another room. In the morning, he brought me orange juice.
“See?” he said. “I knew you’d have fun.”
I nodded and rubbed my eyes. “I think we have to be friends now.”
He adjusted his hat and pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear. “That’s usually how it works.”
Jeff poured strong drinks and never asked for my money. Merely by existing, he seemed to encapsulate what you were supposed to do in university: he was flippant and dedicated to little more than partying and getting to know girls and creating an elite social circle of Cool People who did Cool Things. We either sat in the back of the class and sneered at everyone else, because we were effortlessly smart so we didn’t have to listen, or sat in the front of the class, to prove we knew everything already. We were where the party was, for once meaning I wasn’t chasing a party or searching for the right place to be: we were the place to be. Baby Braga, too, got wrapped up in how much your life changes when you’re given permission to be young and selfish. People texted us, for once, asking where we were and if they could come. Braga was erudite, hardly a risk-taker, a little shy and plenty anxious. I was too, but with Jeff, we got to be whatever we wanted. I didn’t watch my drinks anymore, or worry about other men, because Jeff did it for me. We went to a nightmare bar off campus called Dance Cave where girls barfed in plastic cups on the floor and Braga’s glasses slipped off his face and were stomped by moving feet. Jeff and I spent weeks trying to teach Baby Braga how to smoke a cigarette without looking like he was fellating a corn dog. (We never succeeded.) We got to be versions of ourselves that somehow existed in a parallel universe where we were fun.
It took Braga and me far longer to become friends than it took either of us to fall in love with Jeff—but how could you resist Jeff? He was intoxicating, so comfortable shirking responsibility and making you feel like it was the most important thing in the world that you came to this party, like there would never be another one. Baby Braga and I, rather, found each other through beer and Canadian Club after a few months. At yet another party at Jeff’s, we wound up alone in a bedroom and fell backwards on the bed, laughing at something I can’t remember. The lights were dim and our eyes locked, so this was where we were supposed to kiss and ruin everything. Instead, we started laughing maniacally, tears welling up, his voice getting raspy from screaming. “Come on, idiot,” I said, pulling him up by the forearm and leading him back into the kitchen to find some plastic cups for an unnecessary drinking game. (Who needs a game to drink?)
I liked hanging out with Jeff and Baby Braga, partly because spending time with boys was once verboten. Any brown girl can tell you that if you come home with a male friend, your father will kick you out of the house, give you the silent treatment for an indeterminate period of time, or try to hex you in public. Your mother, meanwhile, will weep in the attic. (This is true even if you do not have an attic.) The three of us walked around campus together, went to bars together, had hungover brunches together, a team in perfect synergy where the most important things were each other and then, also, having a good time. We locked arms and marched into the world and we loved each other.
We were invincible thanks to the poisonous combination of youth and l
oneliness and the drinks that tethered us together. And we really did love drinking, particularly since it allowed us to press a kind of reset button, gave us some psychic break from our lives before starting over in earnest. We could make everything blur together, get ourselves low enough, and tomorrow could be something new entirely. And we figured this would last forever, the three of us, regardless of how our lives would shift. “Everyone’s the worst!” we’d chant, toasting our pint glasses to solidify our bond and rejecting everyone else.
After nights like these, Baby Braga and I would call each other and recount the night before. Jeff, often, was still asleep.
“What happened to Jenna?” I’d ask him.
“She hit her head on the edge of the stove in the kitchen. She was bleeding really badly,” he’d tell me. “I think she went to the hospital.”
We laughed because she was surely okay so it was still fun. It was fun that Jeff wouldn’t wake up until two in the afternoon and then he’d text us, “Brunch?” and we’d laugh because, oh, Jeff, you doofus, it’s two in the afternoon, and you missed all your classes! Later that night, we’d meet up with him and he’d already have two drinks in his system and he’d pick me up and spin me around. He and Baby Braga would sing karaoke sans karaoke machine. He gave me a key to the apartment he shared with four other people (a two-floor rental with two decks, a cavernous kitchen, and a whisper of a bathroom) who were all fun like Jeff, so I came and went as I pleased. One morning I was sitting in the kitchen trying to clean the mess from the night before and Jeff walked in with crate after crate of home-brewed wine. It tasted like toilet juice and it didn’t even last a week.
Another night, Jeff climbed onto the roof of that apartment, jumping from building to building, screaming into the darkness. It was one in the morning and we kept yelling back at him, “You’re going to get arrested!” but we were laughing because this moron never got in trouble. Jeff could have ten drinks and run a marathon, in the dark, sleep-deprived, on rooftops in east downtown. When he finally came back, he pretended to chase me and I pretended to be afraid.