Any Man
Page 4
Alexandra Hughes: Status for biocomplex nutritionals?
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JAMAR SANDS: lol
JAMAR SANDS: Like, how can I explain it to her
JEN SANDS: Don’t even try. I mean, she has BLACK CHILDREN and she still says “Mama-san”
JAMAR SANDS: Please don’t remind me of that dinner at P.F. Chang’s
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Sammy Sosa, you fucking assholes. Sammy. Fucking. Sosa. I dare someone to disagree with me. Come on. Bring it.
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Kettlebells with the SandsMan! Best way to Saturday it up.
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Now THAT’S how a strict press should look. Good form, homie. See you next Sat.
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Shit! It’s MawMaw’s bday today and I totally forgot. Sending her flowers. Will put from both of us.
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MawMaw—Happy ninety-first birthday. You’ve inspired us our whole lives. I hope you get to eat an entire quiche today and make Mr. Torres cry again during gin rummy, you ruthless poker face! Love you. Your bugs, Jamar and Jen
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MAUDE: Looking for a strong mind to haunt.
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May 8th, 2016
Dear Mr. Ellis,
My name is Marsha Broscov, and I’m a producer of The Melissa Hope Show on BCN (P2+ = 2.1 million viewers). As you may know, Melissa is a legal commentator with the #1 current affairs talk show in the country. We think you are absolutely riveting and have been following your story since your assault a few months ago. We are such big fans! We’d love to bring you on the show to discuss your activism and your thoughts on your attacker.
We’d love to have you on Melissa’s show this Friday at 7 p.m. We would provide a car service to and from your residence, a hotel, and hair and makeup at the studio. Let us know your thoughts and looking forward!
Best,
Marsha
May 9th, 2016
Hi Marsha,
Thank you for reaching out. I haven’t really done anything of this measure before and I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable going on a talk show at this time. I don’t know. It’s still hard for me to speak about it. I’d need to discuss it with my wife. I really don’t want to go into the details of what happened that night, that’s the main thing for me. I’d rather discuss the culture surrounding sexual assault and how few men report being sexually assaulted, but also how few women are actually believed. That’s what I’d rather talk about. Let me know wh
at you think.
Also, hair and makeup wouldn’t be necessary. Do guys normally do that?
Thanks,
Donald
P.S. Out of curiosity, how did you get my email address?
May 9th, 2016
Great to hear back from you, Donald!
Why don’t we just go ahead and confirm your participation, and you can always pull out if you need to. (Hehe, no pun intended!) I find with these sorts of things, it’s always better to get it on the books, then decide. We will of course understand if you change your mind!
Yes, we can absolutely discuss the broader theme of society’s role in rape culture and the issues facing men and women today.
Would this Friday, May 13th, work for your scheduled appearance? We can send a car at 2 p.m. for pick up. May I have your address to schedule the car service?
Regarding your email address, we called your daughter’s school and someone there gave it to us. Hope that’s okay!
Best,
Marsha
III
One
HAPPY DAY AFTER OPENING DAY, MY FELLOW BASEBALL PERVERTS! Sorry, inappropriate introduction for group therapy, I know. Hello, my name is Pear. O’Sullivan. From Massachusetts, proud home of racists and Red Sox. I’ve been coming here to Albany Crisis Center for a while now, as most of you know. Hard to get an old shitf-lower like me to come talk in a room full of—Jesus, what the hell are you guys again, supermodels for the oil rig industry? I’ve never seen such a bunch of handsome, tan lumberjacks. Anyway, yeah. Here I am. I see there are a few new folks here today—hey, guys—so I’ll sort of reintroduce myself, but I won’t recount the whole thing of it, why I’m here or whatever, again. You’ve got my name, but here’s a little about me. I’m a sixty-four-year-old man who’s spent his life rejecting any iota of income to pursue a long and insufferable life of regional stand-up comedy. That’s a direct quote from my ex-wife. My third one. I was born in New Mexico and moved to Boston when I was twenty-five. Not for comedy but for a girl. Then I had my heart broken. Not by the girl. By comedy. For various reasons I found myself near here, in Springfield, Mass., which is maybe the worst place for a stand-up to live, but that’s how my fucking cards fell. Plus I’m a pussy for the fall foliage. A soft doodle and so forth.
“Ya know . . . the way I see it, what happened to me—why I’m here—I see it as a beautifully executed joke, half a century too late. Knock knock. Who’s there? A lady. A lady who? A lady who rapes! You know the rest. I can’t believe I was given a lifetime’s worth of material at the end of my lifetime. I mean, seriously, why couldn’t she’ve attacked me before I hit sixty, before I got carcinoma of the goiter and a full closet full of shit-stained boxers? Back when I had stamina and good stage presence? Back before I could get senior-citizen discounts at Yankee Candle? She really could’ve made me a star if she’d taken a second and thought about doing all of this forty years ago, man. Rapists these days: no consideration for the little guy!
“. . . Okay, okay, easy on the jokes, Pear, I know, I know. Share your truth, Pear. Speak from the heart, Pear. I know. Listen . . . I started coming to ACC back in August of last year, a few months after my assault. By a woman. A woman they’re calling Maude. I gotta laugh when I say that, because it’s funny, ya know? It’s so awful it’s funny. It’s nuts! When I first started coming here eight months ago, I didn’t talk much. I didn’t talk at all. I’d always known I had a life’s worth of bad luck: Raised by a shitty father. Divorced three times, none of which I wanted. A savings account that resembled a relationship between Wells Fargo and Ike Turner. But to be here in my sixties, resting on the very few laurels I’ve earned in my old age, and have this happen to me? I mean, Jesus. Jesus. Gotta laugh.
“I stopped going onstage, man. I stopped doing a lotta things I loved for a while. Like keeping a journal. Something I’ve done since I was a kid. How I store all my jokes and thoughts ’n’ crap like that. I only started writing again about a month ago. But I stopped for a long time. Also gardening. I used to do that daily, man. Daily. Don’t much anymore. Good thing I have a lot of succulents. They’re the only things that survived the past months of me sitting in an Adirondack in my backyard, holding a gardening hose in my hand and fantasizing about swinging my neck eternal from the nearest birch. Tree, whatever, you know what I mean. Lucky for me, or those trees, I couldn’t find one of them I’d want to put through that. My death, I mean. I believe a man’s gotta have an understanding with the tree he’s going to hang himself from. I do. A relationship. It’s one thing to hang yourself from a piece of metal in the garage, or ceiling plaster, but a living fucking tree? They’re sacred. Sacred. They’re the longest-living organisms on Earth. They can live off air alone. They can’t die from old age, only diseases and lightning ’n’ shit. I mean, they fucking talk to each other! Like, willow trees, man. They warn each other about bacteria with this shit called phenols. It’s true! They heal people just by being looked at. That’s a fact. That’s why they’re planted outside hospitals so sick people can look at ’em. Trees are powerful, man, trees are just powerful. So you can’t just climb up there and tie your neck from one and call it a Wednesday. No. A man’s gotta have an understanding with that tree, if he’s going to do that.
“OKAY, LISTEN, MY TIME’S ALMOST UP. THANKS FOR LISTENING TO ME today. I guess I want to say . . . I want to say to the new guys here, look, it’s okay to process your shit however you want to. It’s your shit. It’s no one else’s shit. As long as you’re not hurting someone else. Your hell is yours and you get to decide, okay? You get to decide when you’re ready. It’s important that I say this, though: It’s not your fault, whatever happened to you. It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now. When we become aware, we become responsible. Also, Pamela from registration makes the best Goddamn waffles I’ve ever had and she sets up a waffle table over there after group every week. Live a little.”
Two
APRIL 3, 2017
Today there were some new guys that came to group. Three of them. One of them’s got a face I’d know anywhere. Jamar. Jamar with the bronze circles swallowing his eyes. Jamar with the skin he hasn’t washed in weeks and the black hair painted on his scalp. Jamar with the backward baseball cap that sits on a head no longer connected to its rail-thin body, a body that looks like it’s been starved for months. My little brother in shame. In anger. He’s like me, like the bud of a moonflower. Poor fucking moonflower bud. I didn’t even have to hear his last name to know who he is. My abused successor. The kid I read about from Albany. The kid who was attacked back in January. I know there’s not many options for support groups in these regions, especially just for guys, so it’s not surprising he’d end up here, alongside me, broken and life-fucked. It’s strange to know I share this story with someone else. That I share her ghost with another man. That I’ll be in the same room, weekly, with him. To know he knows what I know. Her small, cold, heavy hands. The smell of her skin, like pewter and rotting potting soil. Awful. The feeling of her long, hair dragging like a rake. The sound of her crawling toward me. Not on all fours but all four hundreds, like a stampede of millipedes. Like a multi-animal.
APRIL 4
Idea for sketch: Men who high-five but have shrunken hands enlarged fingers? Both?
Joke idea: Flatulent high heels for girl clowns (Remember woman in parking lot at Walmart)
Call Jim back, set up set at the Sour Milk for Dec
An app to find the best apps? stupid
APRIL 5
I had a dream I was onstage and I opened with a joke about a measles outbreak at a strip club. I kept telling the joke over and over again. Same joke. Same exact words and punch. Each time I’d change inflection, add sounds, change emphasis on certain words, but always the exact same words in the joke. Audience laughed every single time, the same way. Was pissing me off. Wanted them to get that the joke was that I was telling the same joke too many times, not the joke itself, which is fucking dumb. Hat-on-a
-hat-type deal. They didn’t get. Was stuck in loop. Was tired of saying the joke. Started to break down. They found this even funnier. Joke on me.
APRIL 6
Called Whirloch today. Haven’t spoken in four months. Since I flipped out and hung up on him. Shot the messenger as it were. He didn’t deserve all that. I’m sure he’s used to it though, in cases where they can’t find suspects. I like Myles, I do. He’s got an Elmer Fudd quality about him. He’s even got a funny little hat like Fudd. And he’s a little fatty, like me. I don’t hate the guy. I hate the inefficient fucksacks at the DA and Myles’s superiors. I blame THEM for letting more of these attacks happen. For fucking up evidence or whatever lazy work’s been going on. It’s been more than a fucking YEAR and, so far, three of us have been assaulted and they’ve gotten NOWHERE. Nothing! Anyway, I called. Told him Jamar’s been coming to ACC. Jamar the poor little flower bud.
I also just wanted to get an update on the investigation. He said it’s good to hear from me. There’s still very little to go on but they’re doing everything they can. Can’t discuss Bud’s case with me either, other than to say they are tracking down some IP info. I say what’s IP info and he says it’s a way for them to see where she chatted with him from. Like a license plate for a computer. Maybe that will give them some more leads. “More leads.” Seems crazy to me, considering her fucking body was all over mine and probably Bud’s too. They did find one hair though. One extremely long white hair. Six feet long. No matches though, so that was that. She’s been jumping from city to city, no pattern. I ask if there’s anything I can do and he says not really, which I know is the truth but it still lights up my anxiety like a black guy at David Duke’s birthday party. How can they not find this fucking monster? This pigmentless cunt? No eyewitnesses. No fingerprints. He asks me to watch out for Bud and maybe try to get him to talk more. I tell him I’ll try.