Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  5/27/08

  I’m the kind of idiot who’d have no identity without idiocy to condemn; overcontent with half-knowledge, deploring received knowledge so much she refuses knowledge wholesale. And I’m prone to pompous symbolic gestures. Like this project with Henrik.

  “I’m not a storyteller,” he says.

  To which I say, fine, just describe it to me like it’s a movie. What’s insane is he agreed. I took some of Will’s beers & we went out to the backyard terrace. We’re at the patio table in the fangy shade of a fern, beer bottles puckering their labels with sweat, clouds standing so clear against the blue overhead they look sliced out & taped on. Notebook on my lap. He asks where to start. I say from the beginning, everything.

  “Well. Start with a title card: Rome, 1985. You’re being born. No wait, first there’s a black-and-white montage—your dad’s a married English lit professor & he meets your mother, his student. They fall in love. There’s courtship, then scandal, then you. Now we’re in color. A plane or a boat leaves for America. Then another montage I guess. You’re standing, walking, sitting in Catholic school. Raising your hand to answer a question or something. God this is ridiculous.”

  (When he said “Catholic school” it was like a hypnotist’s trigger word: I saw my fiberboard desk, my pencil falling out of its groove whenever I opened the lid, all smelling like PB&J after we made sandwiches for the soup kitchen. Sister Stamm who tossed her ratty foam football at inattentive kids. Detention = JUG, for Judgment Under God. Joining handbell choir to be like the row of girls in black velvet dresses & elbow-length gloves—but they gave me the luggish two-handed G4 w/ the ugly plastic strap instead of the dainty lacquered handles, a rusty tongue that threw me off-tempo.)

  Keep going, I say.

  “We shift from warm soft focus to day-for-night. You’re 12 & your father sits you down. Ominous cello music, sound of your mom crying in the next room. He confesses he’s got a second family w/ some criminologist in Boston. You’ve denied that this whole episode gave you a daddy complex, but you don’t get a say over that.” (Tough to argue that w/ Henrik.) “Anyway. You and your mom move to Waterbury. Smash-cut to a mildewy basement apartment where you can hear the feet of mice etching around on the Styrofoam-panel ceilings.”

  (Mom really took her lumps then: first the divorce damning her Catholic soul, the novelty of breadwinning. We can’t live on an associate professor’s child support, so Mom takes a cashier job at a stationery store & my supervision is halved.)

  “Your new school sucks. I picture one of those supermax prison cafeterias, everything concrete and lined up in rows. On the one hand you’re skipping grades, but you’ve got no friends, & when puberty hits it’s blood in the water. Still wearing big oval glasses but also getting into mall fashion & trying on your mom’s perfume at home.”

  (Out came the spaghetti straps, scissored-out collars, ripped tights, one-inch pins. New opportunities mistaken for freedom.)

  “8th grade English class, split-screen: on one side, your teacher is adjusting something on the overhead projector, & on the other side, a boy one desk over sharks down your scoop-neck peasant shirt. He’s got his dick out too—maybe that can be a picture-in-picture.”

  (Whatever violation I felt was baffled by the novelty of being noticed—I thought it meant I wasn’t powerless. Not only had I forgotten I’d told this to Henrik; I’d forgotten the memory itself. So I do have amnesia, sort of.)

  “During lunch, that same guy lures you to the boys’ locker room, where his friend Jeremy is hiding—they whip their cocks out—”

  (& when he pushes me to a kneel Jeremy fucking alights it on my shoulder. Mute humiliation is read as consent. My male anatomical knowledge was restricted to a bathroom scrawl of a cock that looked like a tommy gun, and somehow I thought boys had three balls. Even back then, I insisted on pretending to know what I was doing, so I look at his junk & say, Where’s the third ball? Oh what a laff riot, found ourselves a dizzy one here, fellas. David says, w/ his cock bobbling at me: Do it like a cow, bitch. Every day I grieve for my million squandered retorts: I’m supposed to suck your cock like I’m milking a cow? Aren’t cows female? Am I a cow or am I a bitch—which is it? You don’t milk cows with your mouth, you shithead.

  Yet all I did was comply. I’d never even kissed anyone. It’s nauseatingly warm, I wonder how it’s warmer than the inside of my mouth when they’re both body temperature, & my soft palate flexes, I gag up a big dopey glorp, more laughing. The bell rings & I bolt, wondering how I’ll apologize to them later! Then word gets out that I lured them into the locker room. So I become the school slut. That cornerstone sexual inversion—male conquest vs. female shame—reminds me of that X graph from Honors English with the ascending line labeled MACBETH & the descending line LADY MACBETH: unsexed woman is lethal, whereas the more sexed, the more unmann’d in folly . . .)

  “About a year later your mother gets involved with your orthodontist—”

  (Scotty—widower, 56, swollen knuckles, potbelly, old-guy soul patch. I tried to let them have their volupté in private but Scotty wrangled me into every mall outing & community theater night, prohibited reading at the dinner table. He was the Man who provided Structure. Which made it hilarious when after five months of playing Ward Cleaver he started “accidentally” walking in on me while I was showering & eventually came into my room & tried to convince me, in the same tone he used when putting spacers between my molars, to let him take my virginity because his “medical training” would make the experience safe & comfortable. Mom brought her Catholic A-game when I told her about it, denying it outright. Two horny bad apples in a row? Impossible. She made me apologize to Scotty for bearing false witness. Scotty forgave me, and they kept on, tho remarriage was a Luke 16:18 no-no. He never outright forced himself on me, but he still got off on clothes-shaming me, making me scrub the shower and toilet, fondling my foot while he put silver nitrate on my toe wart.

  I remember one health class where we submitted anonymous questions in a box; at the beginning of the next class the male teacher says, “I’m disappointed. Half these questions were about being molested. You guys need to take this more seriously.” I read somewhere that sexual trauma can distort or suppress memory. Is there, then, an epidemic of female amnesia? Of perpetrators who deny, and victims who forget? No, I haven’t forgotten.)

  “—which is when you start dating Gavin what’s-his-name.” (Mosier.) “You really want me to go on?”

  (This was the Reign of Gavin. I had no friends to warn me about him, & it never struck me that a held-back 19-y.o. senior who dated a skipped-ahead 13-y.o. freshman might not be in excellent standing with his peers. We took Algebra II together, & it was two weeks of peeks across the classroom before he came to my locker door. I remember staring at his flaky red nostrils while he went through his repertoire of put-downs and pickups. “Do you think I’m hot? Be brutally honest.” I couldn’t see the binary trap then: either he’s hot or I’m brutal.

  Finally here was the intimidator I wanted: a guy who convinced me I had to prove myself to him. Nothing outwardly impressive about him—spiked hair, puggy eyes, pepperoni acne, a chin like a Barbie doll’s ass. He wore fingerless wool gloves & a ball-chain necklace w/ a knit jacket that signaled toughness only insofar as he was underdressed for winter. Sometimes he wore eyeliner & nail polish & a feather boa, not to genderfuck, just to disrupt things in a way that authorities couldn’t prohibit, & when he got into the inevitable fistfights, he’d get beaten worse on purpose, knowing it’d help his case in the principal’s office, though he was always careful to land a jab on his opponent’s throat.

  Sometimes I like to pretend Gavin taught me how to be deadly prey, but no, he only convinced me that perversity was sophistication, and submission was initiation; that we were the only ones smart & fucked up enough to understand that. The usual teen bricolage of contempt & template identity: parallel cuts on my thighs, IM convos about suicide & atheism, calling other people “normies,”
reading Burroughs, Bataille, Poppy Z. Brite. I think I knew I was faking it—or am I just retrojecting this awareness into myself? The plain fact that he drove a car & could buy cigarettes made it easy to forgive him when he threatened to cut off his pinkie finger if I didn’t break curfew to make out with him. Or when he made me help feed his 7-foot boa constrictor, which slept in a tiny vivarium with its scored flab pressed against the glass, & I held it while he fed it frozen rats that he thawed in his microwave.

  You could call this “abuse”—but I hate that word & how it predestinates every choice & feeling. Far more interesting is the ensuing lifetime of disabuse. The disillusionment you crave as innocence curdles to shame. His mom once called me to thank me for being a good influence on him.

  He also kept a drawer full of smutty letters & cybersex printouts he solicited from other girls like me, & he made me read them aloud to him. Nothing sadder than an 8th-grader trying to front like a slut: “Hi cutie. Ummm guess what I’m doing? I’m fingering myself! Are u getting excited, if u know what I mean. I hope u r haha.” He had me reply to them; so, w/ straight-capped Ts & sharp-angled Ws, I was his smut amanuensis, & he was the psychopomp rowing me into adulthood, claiming my firsts as his toll. First kiss, first handjob, first swallow. He pierced my ears and gave me that goddamn barcode stickpoke.

  & my first drink, when he took me to the lake w/ Ryan & Odie during the early springtime when the nights are still winter. I felt translucent & secondary around them, & to loosen me up Gavin gave me a vodka w/ a sugar-free grapefruit mixer called Fruité. I said I was getting tipsy, figuring if I acted drunk then I’d be drunk—I exploded out of my clothes & sprinted to the lake, cannonballed into the big freezing plane of ink. When my lungs could move again I splashed around shouting I’M SO WASTED! while thinking Jesus christ I am so sober, I’m about to drown just to impress these jags. The next thing I remember is Gavin shaking me awake in his bed at six A.M. I couldn’t even speak & I threw up twice. He’d drugged me. He dove in after me because he knew I’d drown. He tried convincing me I’d blacked out and I was just hungover. “Almost lost you, Jesus, gotta get you back home.”

  “Rape,” from “rapere,” to seize. Better than “abuse” but not much. I think the Latin is “stuprum,” giving us both “stupid” & “stupor.” There’s the word. I wasn’t there to witness it. But we both knew it.

  My whole life became this tape loop, OK OK jeez fine whatever. The first time Gavin parked us in the middle of an empty meadow & said he wouldn’t drive back until I’d gotten him off twice, I didn’t say no, because I assumed he’d probably say no to my no & there was definitely no saying no to that. Consent made everything less complicated. I figured he’d been leading off third so long I might as well wave him home myself; he’s already taken my virginity so what does it matter; better him than Scotty; & who was I to withhold something my boyfriend wanted. I’d even worked myself into that delusion where sex = maturity = agency, when really it’s just capitulating to stupid men’s wants.

  This worked up until the night he hectored me into spit-lubed anal—I said no, it happened anyway, & I thought: yes, that counts. Afterward he smoked a cigarette, too stupid to understand the insanity of a postcoital smoke after raping someone.)

  “You’re failing classes. You realize that getting rid of Gavin will take more than aloofness. So you devise your perfect revenge: everyone punished, without even knowing it’s punishment. You tell Gavin that Scotty raped you.”

  (He gives me too much credit. There wasn’t much planning, I just saw an opportunity to tell him something “fucked up,” don’t even remember the particular night. I draw out the silence to savor its excellent pregnancy, brush back my hair, & tell him Scotty raped me. I could’ve phrased it differently, but he got the point.)

  “What makes this so quintessentially Lindaic is that you told this to your actual rapist. I used to think it was pure perversity, but now I see the design: it gave him an opportunity to expiate his guilt, since confiding in him implied that he didn’t rape you, & now he could redeem himself without apology. You made him swear not to do anything, guaranteeing that he would.

  “Three nights later, a ski-masked goon swings a crowbar at Scotty’s head in your driveway. While Scotty’s down, the goon empties a pillowcase & out falls a huge coil onto Scotty’s chest. A boa constrictor. Screaming & wrestling. Scotty gets a fractured skull.

  “The giant pink bow on the whole thing is when you fink out Gavin w/ an anonymous police tip. Gavin implodes at the first ratcheting of handcuffs, confesses immediately, & w/ his one phone call he calls you. When he asks you to feed his snake, not knowing Animal Control’s already put it down, you hang up. Scotty presses charges & leaves your mom. Ta-da! Two men down, guilt-free. Another skipped grade, perfect SAT scores, a year of college courses, & you’re high-stepping off to Stanford.”

  The sun is already behind the tall backyard fence, so the fern’s shadow’s gone. The SF weather is doing what it always does at sunset, instantly plummeting sixty degrees. I forgot how much I’d exaggerated my own life to Henrik—the official record is oral apocrypha, a boring pomo narrative ending in me. But having someone disassemble your life & show you to yourself, what a luxury.

  Final irony: wrote as fast as I could but couldn’t get Henrik’s verbatim verbatim. Only what I remember.

  JUST WHEN CORY had forgotten about meeting with Roland, he emailed her an offer: if she’d allocate one of Recreate’s vendor slots to PBR and include them on the event banners, they’d foot $3K of concessions and decorations, plus fifty cases of PBR, and Roland would provide support. That was all—no plugging or shilling, and Roland would handle the paperwork.

  Cory agreed, and soon Roland was saving her life daily, as he took point on vendor booking, secured a license for public drinking in a cordoned zone, and tutored Cory in strategic planning and creative management. One Saturday afternoon they had a chalk session in his massive loft apartment on Capp Street, conducting SWOT analyses and Six Thinking Hats brainstorming. Identifying pain points in vendor registration. Calculating earnings subject to unrelated business income tax. Ensuring against inurement. He made Cory articulate her value proposition as he plinked pizzicato on a Les Paul. “What experience are you offering to the citizens of San Francisco?”

  “Activism. San Francisco is progressive.”

  “Activism’s not an experience,” said Roland, chugging into a Johnny Marr riff. “Strap on the cheddar goggles. Your target audience is young and hip and likes parties. Remember, you’re not competing with charities, you’re competing with Pride Weekend.”

  “Ulgh. Panem et circenses.”

  “Hey, it’s your project. I’m just giving advice, not tryna front.”

  Cory squirmed under the mentorship of a hot guy who always knew what he was doing. Because admiration was a feeling easy to mistake for both inspiration and attraction, that evening she attempted what she’d lacked the energy to do for several months. Lying on the bedroll next to her desk at the office, she slid her hand between practical cotton and crinkly bush and swirled her fingerpads around as if trying to efface an ink spot. As usual she toggled between her fantasies, each delimited by plausibility: tourists cruising for loose Americans, experienced older dykes, homely celebrities.

  Something felt stiff and not-right, a faint purling itch. She felt a cobbling of hard bumps leading as far inward as she would dare to explore, interspersed by slick ouchy patches. She kept afloat on denial for a few minutes until she turned on her bedside lamp to straddle and squint at her mirror. Continents of rashes throve across her whole situation. Her body was protesting itself, staging an immune-system intifada to tear down the system, seize the means of reproduction, agitate. An STI? Literally impossible. Cory indulged in online self-diagnosis: Had she engaged in sex with multiple partners? No. Intravenous drugs? No. Foreign travel? No . . . and she resented her answers. It would’ve been nice to earn an STI, but hers was an immaculate infection.

  She spent a minu
te envisioning cervical cancers and condylomas, working out anagrams: A RECORD LESION, COARSE RED LOIN. There was no one she could call. Linda, maybe—Linda would make someone pay for this. But she was probably out partying, freebasing between three-ways. Cory often felt like Linda’s Dorian Gray portrait, absorbing her ugly excesses.

  Giving up, she dialed her phone. Barr answered. His deep voice, grainier than usual, rattled the phone’s plastic diaphragm. Cory had the uncanny sense that the phone was her dad. “Cordy. It’s late.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Is Mom around? It’s sort of urgent.”

  “Your mother is away on business.”

  “Again?”

  “Not again. Still.”

  Cory’s mom was a talk-circuit epidemiologist who tended to minimize feminist issues like the pay gap because she made three-quarters of a buttload, never attributing successes to the civil liberties that enabled them. She went on long medical missions—tsunami relief in Indonesia, AIDS education in sub-Saharan Africa. It was good work. In truth, her mother should’ve remained childless. “Your voice sounds weird, Dad.”

  “I hope you didn’t wake me up for no reason,” Barr said.

  Cory covered her eyes to avoid seeing the words leaving her mouth. “I’ve got a female rash.”

  “I see. Allergies? Prickly heat? Have you been wearing breathable panties?”

  “Ew, yes.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  A shudder of awkwardness tripped down her sternum like a xylophone mallet. “It’s like, clusters of red bumps. Not an STI.”

  “Cranberry juice might—”

  “Wrong tract.”

  “I see. See, I wish you’d taken my health insurance coverage. For now try Vagisil—the cream, not the foam.” How did he know about the cream and the foam? “When I’m at Dr. Heiselman’s tomorrow I’ll ask for Valtrex samples.”

  “Dad, it’s not an STI.” Why was she fighting him? Clearly this was for his sake. “I mean, like, sure, send it if you want.”