Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

  I’m fucking nowhere

  right behind you

  Three

  MAY 1

  Haven’t written in a while. On purpose. Wasn’t going to. Been angry with myself since last week. More than angry. Despondent. A year of sobriety flushed down the shitter. Went back and read my drunk writing. Jesus Christ. Made me laugh but also broke my fucking heart. You can’t live like this, Pear. Jumping in and out of your own grave. Wasn’t planning on writing or gardening for a long time, as punishment. But today Bud came up before group and asked if I was okay. He actually asked ME that. I guess I looked like shit. I told him I was fine. Just, dealing. He said he’d like to try and go to the game this week with me if I still have a ticket for him. I do.

  MAY 1

  Left a message for that Donald guy. Called him back. I missed his thing, his vigil thing in Albany, but it’s polite to call someone back when they’ve reached out like that. Call it part of my New Life Resolutions.

  Magnolias maintained themselves nicely even while covered in my inebriated urine for the last week, which I only just discovered they’d been drenched in.

  MAY 3

  Pear’s New Life Resolutions

  No drinking under any circumstances. Consider AA if you have to.

  Go for a walk every day.

  Eat less meat.

  Call and check in with Mom more.

  Meditation?

  Get out bronze-age comics—Zap, Cerebus, etc. (connect with fun kid stuff)

  Go on a date. Maybe.

  Do 10 push-ups every morning.

  Fix the stuff broken while drunk: shed door, back patio window, recliner chair, back scratcher, left shoe.

  MAY 6

  What a game! Sox won in the bottom of the 9th. Tied up in the 8th with bases loaded every glorious second. Couldn’t have asked for a better first game for a Sox fan like Bud to see. We met at Island Creek Oyster Bar first as he mentioned he’s never had an oyster before and I told him I believed it was a Massachusetts state felony to enter Fenway a mollusk-less man. Watching someone eat an oyster for the first time is one of the best things you can ever witness. The kid covered it in every sauce they could possibly provide, then plucked it out of its juices, shook it off, put it on his plate, and CUT IT IN HALF WITH A FORK AND KNIFE. It was the best Goddamned thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Horrifying. Granted they were Pacific oysters the size of a shoe but Jesus a fork and a knife?? I am still laughing right now and it’s almost midnight. I showed him how to just suck the little fucker down, juices and all. Still he sorta nibbled at the edge of the shell and shook the thing toward his mouth. Also he asked for a side of tartar sauce. I interrupted that request immediately. That will get you killed around here, I said.

  After the game I drove back to Springfield and listened to Monty Python’s “Matching Tie and Handkerchief,” then the Who’s “Tommy” of course, then Costello’s “Pretty Words” over and over until I got to my exit, switched off the stereo, and just listened to the distant farts of an incoming thunderstorm.

  MAY 7

  Such a great week, then I get a call from Bobby from group who tells me I better go get the Dispatch, as in the Dispatch fucking national newspaper, so I do and there on the second fucking page is the headline “Details on a String of Violent Sexual Assaults Rocking the Northeast,” with a large picture of none other than Jamar Sands. These fucking kweef keepers. Putting a picture of THE VICTIM in the paper, like a prom portrait or an actor’s headshot. Blood is boiling right now. Someone leaked everything to them. Everything. They tell about the dead cat and the blood. The article talks about my case and Donald Ellis, who’s doing some radio interviews now in an effort to get the public more involved. They don’t give details on our cases but FULL details on Jamar’s. Full details on statements he gave to the police, including that he pissed himself when he saw all the blood. I know Myles didn’t do this. Myles would never do this.

  I phoned him up and blew a shotgun of words through his ear. He let me scream for 10 minutes. Who the fuck DID this, I ask. He says he’s as angry as me, that I should believe him, because this compromises the cases in many ways. They’re looking into whoever leaked the information. I say, do you know how fragile Jamar is? Do you have any idea what shape we’re in out here? When we hang up I feel such useless rage, such directionless blame. I call Bud but he doesn’t answer. I tell him to call me. He doesn’t fucking call. I don’t know what to do. I tell him to please show up to group tomorrow. No matter what. I tell him I’ll be there and I’ll buy every fucking Sunday Dispatch in the whole Goddamn state and I’ll burn them. I’ll burn them all.

  MAY 7

  Just got off the phone with Donald. I commended him on everything he’s been doing publicly. I could never do those things. I could make jokes about doing those things but I could never actually do them.

  On the phone he asked me if I’d read the Dispatch story on Bud. Is a duck’s dick damp, Donald, of course I have, everyone’s fucking read it, it’s the Dispatch. He asked me how I was feeling. Honestly, no one has ever asked me that. Not the police. Not the doctors. No one at group. Not Coral. No one. So I didn’t really know how to respond. What do you mean how am I feeling, I ask. Are you feeling okay, he says. Is there anything I can do for you? The questions caught me off guard. I told him I was fine but thanks. Mostly I’m just worried about the kid. I can’t get ahold of the kid. He’ll surface, Donald says to me. He’ll surface and he’ll come find you. Because that’s all we have, he says. We have each other. No one else knows what we’ve been through besides us.

  You sure you’re good, he says. Yeah I’m good, I say. We hang up the phone.

  I cry harder than I’ve ever cried in my entire life. I cry until I evaporate.

  Four

  HI, GOOD MORNING. GOOD TO SEE YOU ALL TODAY. ESPECIALLY my pal Jamar, who saw his first Sox game last week! Pretty great game, too.

  “Jamar, you don’t know this, but I’ve been calling you ‘Bud’ for some time now, behind your back. A nickname of sorts. ‘Bud’ as in the bud of a moonflower, which only blooms at night. You and me, Bud, we only grow in the dark now, don’t we, brother? So thank you for coming today. I want to share a story that’s, ya know, not easy to share. I’ve never told it to anyone, so, bear with me.

  “Couple of months ago, I talked to you guys about trees for a second. How a man had to have an understanding with one if he wanted to take his own life by hanging himself from that tree. So, last year, there was this tree. A tree in the woods behind my house—a maple—that was very special to me and everyone in town. If you live in or anywhere near Springfield, you’ve seen her or heard of her. A long time ago she was nicknamed Maggie, short for Magnificent. Maggie was very old, much older than the other maples around there, for some reason. Really a well-loved and well-lived specimen. The prior owners of my house told me they’d buried three dogs beneath her over two generations. And my neighbor Mrs. Beckett scattered her mother’s ashes around her. Maggie stood out among the other trees, like she had her own force field or something. Ya know, it’s a strange thing to find a maple like that, surrounded by a dense population of other maples but with a fifty-foot diameter of ground space surrounding her, like she was her own island. Like a bull’s-eye. It gave her the sole glow of the moon at night, and a spotlight of sun all day.

  “The most spectacular thing about Maggie was how the other trees treated her. They didn’t grow straight up to the sky like most trees, no. They grew at an angle. They grew toward her. All of them, slanted in her direction. I’m not being poetic or nothin’, this is real—a guy made a postcard out of a photo he took of that very image. You can buy it at Dougie’s Drugstore. Imagine that: a large circle of trees all tilting in toward one bigger tree in the middle of them. In the fall, when all the other leaves turn gold and red and brown, Maggie’s would turn pure white. From green to just . . . white. Not silver—not like a cream color, man—but white white, like a hotel towel. Once I saw a strong wind blow throug
h her, and only her, while all the other trees just stood still and watched. She had her own atmosphere, man. She was her own fucking world.

  “I was home one night putting notes together for a gig in Philly when the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. No one was there, so I stepped out onto my porch, and something was bagged over my head. I was knocked out cold. It happened like that. In a split second. One minute you’re trying to work out the logic for a meta fart joke, the next you’re waking up tied to your own radiator. I couldn’t see anything other than the print of the fabric covering my face, some blurred blue, which smelled like . . . perfume. Girls’ perfume. I’ll never, ever forget that fucking smell. Ever. I could hear the person going through drawers in my bedroom. I tried to talk to them. I asked them what they wanted. I told them I have no money, nothing they’d want. I told them I was a comic for a living, for Christ’s sakes, I had nothing they’d want, believe me. They came into the room and I felt . . . their tongue run down every fucking notch of my spine, like from the base of my skull all the way down . . . just, all the way down, man. That’s what I thought it was—a tongue. All slimy and stiff and just disgusting.

  “I need a second, guys.

  “Give me a second here.

  “They never found any saliva on my back, or anywhere else, for that matter. That’s because it wasn’t her tongue. It was a broom handle. My own broom, covered in my own God damn lube. I know you know what I’m about to say, but I need to say it out loud anyway, okay? I need to say it out loud because no one here knows it. She sodomized me with that handle, over and over, as I screamed for help. It’s a pain . . . it’s a cellular pain now, okay? It’s not a memory, it lives in me like a heart. And I will never forget this, all right? I will never forget the sound of her laughing as I screamed for her to stop. My eyes focused in on the only thing they could see: the pattern of tiny cartoon-drawn trees with smiley faces on them and birds flying around.

  “It was days before they told me it was a dress she’d tied around my face.

  “A fucking dress with a print of little birds and happy trees.

  “And the sound . . . that laugh . . . like sped-up thunder. . . . like a whistle in reverse . . . shrill. Like a choir of a thousand fucking mothers. Undeniably female. Undeniably.

  “My buddy found me there in my living room, blindfolded, with a dress wrapped around my face and a broomstick still up my ass—Christ, can you imagine what kind of crazy shit he must’ve thought I was into?—he called the cops immediately. They came and took me to the hospital. I was made to stand in a room and undress on a sterile sheet, in case any fibers or things fell off my body or my clothes. I had to stand there, naked, while they went over every inch of me with their latex gloves on, as if I was a specimen. I was humiliated. I had to lean over and let them take samples from inside me. I had to . . . I had to be examined. I had to let them stick their fingers into the place that was so fucking sore . . . that had just been . . . Listen. This sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? This doesn’t sound real, does it? I know. I wasn’t allowed to take a shower before they did any of this. I had to stand there with her SMELL still ON ME. They had charts and wrote down everything possible about my horrible body and its condition. They had to do x-rays to make sure nothing was damaged on the inside.

  “I was working on a joke about a fart-joke expert and then I was in a hospital getting an x-ray of my rectal lining.

  “I came back into my house the next day a changed man. I found it exactly the way I’d left it the day before. My journal still laid out on the table, untouched. The paint scratched off the radiator where I tried to claw through.

  “Tell me how a man’s supposed to live after something like that?

  “Tell me?

  “Maggie and her majesty had a different effect on me after that. The sight of her brought no joy. I’d leave group here, all jokes and smiles ’n’ shit, head home, drink a liter of Wild Turkey, and walk out into the woods to see her. All she reminded me of was those happy fucking trees on that dress. I started to go see Maggie every night while drunk and piss on her.

  “‘You know what I would’ve done to that bitch, if I could’ve?’ I’d say to Maggie. ‘I would’ve broken every inch of her. I would’ve cut off all her hair and made her choke on it. I would’ve ripped her apart from her ribs with my bare fucking hands. I would’ve . . . I would’ve raped her worse.’

  “Maggie never said anything back to me. Gave me no sign she was listening or cared. I reminded her that it was a member of her own family that had violated me—that broomstick. In my drunk, traumatized mind, she was somehow complicit.

  “One night after visiting her, I went home and got my garden hose out of the shed. Remember how I told you I’d only thought about it? I lied. I climbed Maggie and tied the hose from her lowest branch, which was still ten feet off the ground, easy. I tied all the right knots and dropped my sorry ass from her limb. I was ready to die.

  “Not three seconds in, the branch broke and I hit the ground, gasping for air. Christ, I was thankful, but also confused. That’s a big fucking branch I chose, steady enough for me to stand on the fucking thing and it didn’t even bend, so why did it just break off completely like that? Had Maggie done it on purpose? I stared up at her giant elbows and I swear she was staring down at me with pity. I couldn’t cry. I was too fucking angry to cry. Why’d she interfere?

  “I went back to my house in a drunken rage and into the shed out back. Got my chain saw. Drank some more. Went back and stared her down. I screamed at her to stop looking at me. When she wouldn’t, I took the saw to her gut. Even in that state, I could feel the entire forest open its thousands of eyes and gasp. Maggie’s leaves fell over me as she trembled, like hands trying to pull me away.

  “I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AT HER FOOT. I’D BLACKED OUT right there, the chain saw still stuck in her like a rose in a bullfighter’s mouth. I’d only managed to get about halfway through her, that’s how big she was. That’s how pathetic I was. I threw up immediately. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I still can’t. I wedged the blade out from between her sapwood, and she creaked in pain. Her blood ran down the side of her trunk. I touched its sugared ooze. I wanted to kill myself all over again. I wanted to put her out of her misery and finish the job, then run to her falling side and let her crush me to death.

  “I’d read somewhere you can dress a tree’s wounds just like a human’s so I ran home, my head fucking pounding, and grabbed everything I had: hydrogen peroxide, manure compost, a bag of fireplace ashes, and Saran Wrap. I made a kind of makeshift bandage, first cleaning and disinfecting her wound, then packing it with a pastelike mixture of ash and manure. Then I wrapped it up in cellophane.

  “That day, I quit drinking. I checked on her daily for weeks. Every day, she looked weaker. I took the cellophane off to let the wound breathe. Bugs attacked it. A couple times, the rain completely washed the dressing out from between her and I had to start all over again. She never fully bloomed over the end of the summer. Her bark grew a strange color and began to dry. I’d take a chair out there and sit next to her and rub oils on her, tell her I was sorry for what I’d done.

  “One morning I woke up to a strong wind outside. I had to close all the windows and tie down the tarp over my gardening supplies. I was in the kitchen when I heard a roaring sharp snap come from deep in the woods. A family of deer came tearing through the yard, and my windows rattled. A few seconds later, the entire house shook. It sounded like a shuttle reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. I knew . . . I knew, right then, Maggie was gone.

  “I ran out to find her long body lying in the arms of several trees standing around her. They didn’t let her touch the ground. What I’d done . . . What I’d done was murder. Her fresh, fully exposed stump was spitting up sap like some kinda weak fountain. Mrs. Beckett had also heard the sound and came running. When she saw Maggie down, she dropped to her knees and started screaming.

  “I’m telling you this story because everyone w
ho loved Maggie and cared for her believed it was the gusts that took her life that day. But it was me. I took her life. I took her life because I thought my life was taken from me. Because I was drunk. Because I was angry. A stupid fucking angry Neanderthal. A weakling. A chicken-shit. I’ve never admitted I was the one who felled her. Maggie the Magnificent Maple Tree. But I’m admitting it now. Her body still hangs there, suspended in midair in the arms of her family.

  “How can you go on living when you’re now being lived in? When you’ve been invaded? How can you tell a joke and enjoy laughter without hearing the one laugh that owns every root in you now? How can you accept air into your lungs from the very perennials whose life you’ve taken? How can you forgive the person . . . the woman who raped you, who has no face to forgive, who has no intention to understand, who is nowhere forever and everywhere inside you for eternity? How can you forgive yourself? How can you enjoy the trees and not plead continuous fucking guilt to them? How can you end your own suffering, without ending completely? How can you accept touch? Or walk through your life, a lived wound, forever avoiding some terrible, inevitable wind.”

  May 15th, 2016

  Ms. Broscov,

  I felt compelled to write you after appearing on Friday’s segment, as I was extremely upset about what happened. You promised me we would not go over the details of my assault but would instead discuss the broader topic of the culture that surrounds what happened to me. Do you know how it feels to be asked on live television about whether my attacker “grunted” during the assault? Or to insinuate I somehow might’ve asked for this because I was having drinks at a bar without my wife after work? You might say that’s not what Melissa Hope was insinuating, but don’t insult my intelligence. And to ask me such deeply personal questions like that, on air, about my children? You promised me you wouldn’t do that. And now I’m back where I started, reliving the whole experience. It’s all fucked up again. It has taken every bit of strength I have to even get to the point where I could talk about this publicly.