Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  “I can’t leave you,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be without you,” I said.

  “Then don’t be.”

  But five minutes later I asked what was going to happen, and she said we were done, and I nodded. Still, we stayed in bed.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. I’d cried in front of her so many times over five months. At first I had been embarrassed, but then I realized she liked it, so I cried freely. I was shocked by my own propensity for tears. I didn’t know I had so many of them and they were so close to the surface. I would cry when she was hitting me and she wouldn’t stop. She would beat me until the tears were gone and I relaxed again and I came back to her. She said she wanted to provide a space for that little boy inside me. But now she didn’t want me to cry anymore, and I tried to put the tears back into wherever they came from.

  I knew I was making my own decision. There were things I could say to keep it going, and I wasn’t saying them.

  I reached into that tub next to the bed and grabbed a condom from a paper bag. I fucked her hard and fast and in a way unlike how I had ever fucked her before. She began to scream, and then her own tears came, drenching her face until she resembled a mermaid. This was our due. We were breaking up and we were entitled to this sex and we were going to have it. It was like fucking in a storm. I gripped the flesh of her thighs. I sniffed at her neck. “C’mon,” I said, and she screamed and shook. Then we rolled over and she was on top of me, with her fingers in my hair and one hand on my throat. We were still fucking. She pinched my nipple hard, she reached down between my legs. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to come.

  “I want to come,” I said.

  “OK,” she whispered.

  “I can’t come inside you.”

  She got off me. We were running out of time. I lay next to her and masturbated quickly and came into the rubber. She pulled the rubber off of me, tying a knot in one swift motion, pulling the end with her thumb and forefinger, striding across the room while I watched the naked triangle of her legs tapering into her ankles.

  She tried to call her husband. She didn’t want to meet him downtown, she wanted to meet him at home. But he had already left the bank.

  “I have to shower,” she said.

  “He’s your husband,” I told her. “You don’t need to shower for him. He’s seen you dirty before.”

  “I’m not showering for him,” she said.

  I followed her into the bathroom. My shower was small, with barely enough room for the two of us. We used the scented soap she bought me. This one was composed of dark-brown and white blocks and thin lines, and the bar separated into its parts while we were scrubbing.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “I can’t walk you to the train,” I told her. “I don’t want to break down at the station.”

  I got dressed while she dressed. I pulled on my jeans and an undershirt and a T-shirt. I laced up my gym shoes.

  “Why are you getting dressed if you’re not walking me to the train station?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  It was raining, and I offered her my umbrella. The umbrella cost six dollars. I considered giving her my necklace, but I knew she wouldn’t wear it. She turned down the umbrella. She was going to get wet. We moved toward the door of my room. She was wearing her long wool coat.

  “Don’t go,” I said suddenly. I didn’t even know where it came from, and my hand was in the pocket of her coat and her hand was along my neck and the back of my head. I could have turned into an animal, a dinosaur. I could have grown a giant tail and swung it and broken the windows and the table legs and smashed the bed to pieces.

  “Walk me out,” she said.

  I walked her downstairs, out the front to the entryway of the building. I lit her cigarette on the steps. We kept having one more kiss. She was going to be very late to meet her husband.

  —San Francisco, 2006

  Sometimes I Think About Suicide

  In early April, just as the snow is finally melting and the sun’s making an appearance in the gray sky, I feel a thought buzzing around in my head. I know what I’m about to do, and I marvel in disbelief at my own powerlessness. Then I smile and walk calmly toward the shadow.

  It’s not desire. It’s like a twitch that moves around my face: Once I’ve stopped wrinkling my nose, I realize I’m biting the inside of my cheek. After I get that under control, I can’t stop blinking and furrowing my eyebrows.

  If it’s the evening, I say I’ll quit in the morning. And in the morning I think, Since I’m not going to do it anymore, maybe I’ll do it one last time. Then I try to write, but the work isn’t going well. I wonder if I am still a writer, and if I’m not a writer, what am I?

  Anyway, the rent is paid, and nothing’s due for a while. Then I do that thing again that I’d supposedly just done for the last time. The day leaks away like air from a slowly deflating tire. Sitting at the window, I notice the sky has changed from gray to the color of a bruise. The phone rings, but I don’t answer it; they can always call back later. If you’re missing often enough, people don’t think of you as missing anymore.

  When my eyes drift to the digital clock at the corner of the computer screen, it’s two a.m. I’ve barely moved all day. Maybe tomorrow will be better. But tomorrow I’m back at it.

  …

  In Ukraine two tall, older girls force an awkward, smaller girl to drink from a puddle. In Taipei, on a dirt plot between giant buildings lit as if on fire, a group of men and women make a scared girl take off all her clothes. In Vietnam a girl delivers a devastating kick to another girl’s face. In China five women beat and strip another woman in the middle of a busy street.

  I first came across the videos while trying to find a sound effect for an autobiographical film I was writing and directing. The movie is about sexual abuse in state-run group homes like the ones I used to live in. I don’t remember the first video I found, but it led to another, and then another. Days passed. Then weeks.

  There are two types of videos I watch: fighting and humiliation. The fight videos are mostly on YouTube, but YouTube deletes the most extreme, as well as any that show nudity. The most vicious beatings are reposted on the dark web, which can’t be searched with a conventional browser, but they’re as easy to find as a twenty-four-hour bodega in Manhattan. Those are the sites that host videos of beheadings, car crashes, suicides, murders, rapes.

  I’ve had four major depressions in my life, the first when I was thirteen, then when I was twenty-four, then again when I was thirty-eight, and now this one, at forty-two. It’s scary to think they might be coming closer together, like contractions.

  In one video, a woman in Poland catches a friend sleeping with her husband. She slaps the mistress’s cheek and forces her to remove her clothes. The mistress begs for mercy. Some unseen person laughs behind the camera. The wife begins cutting the mistress’s hair. When it’s too short to cut anymore, the wife shaves the woman’s head with electric clippers, occasionally swinging her open hand into the mistress’s pretty face. Then she kicks the woman in the side of the head and the lower back. The mistress is dragged naked from the room, and the video cuts to her in the back of a car, wrapped in blankets, head unevenly shaved, eyes swollen and dark. The video was probably taken with a phone, a single shot except for that one cut near the end. The video is low quality and eight minutes long.

  If I told my therapist about my fascination with this particular video, he might point out that when I was a teen, my father beat me and shaved my head twice, and each time I subsequently tried to kill myself. The second attempt put me in the hospital and left those scars on my left wrist. I barely look at them anymore.

  At first I felt something erotic, watching the violence. My mind seemed to go dark as three women attacked a girl’s mother and beat her to the ground while the girl watched. Soon it ceased being erotic; it was just dead time, like falling asleep during a staring contest.

  I told
a friend about the videos. As I was talking, I started to feel nauseous. She tried to remind me I hadn’t actually hurt anyone. People watch boxing and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, she said. People watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saw II. And it wasn’t like I was downloading child porn.

  I hate it when someone tries to help me see myself in a better light but I know in my heart they’re wrong. I wondered: Was I manipulating her? Was there anything at all she could have said to help me make sense of what was happening?

  I tried to explain the different types of videos: maximum damage versus maximum shame.

  “Which do you like more?” she asked.

  “Humiliation,” I said, without needing to think about it.

  I’d probably watched at least a thousand videos. Was I upset because of what I was watching, or because of my inability to stop watching it? Did I resent being a moth, or did I resent the flame for drawing me to it?

  My friend and I were seated in a courtyard behind a café, and there was a tree arcing toward us, its bark a foamy white mess, the backs of its leaves black as ink. This place has rotted, I thought. Then I went home and searched for more videos. I didn’t want to do that, but I did it.

  Sometimes when I watched guys fighting in the videos, I could actually feel one of them getting hit. But I was not especially drawn to watching boys fight, even though I could relate.

  One spring, when I was twelve or so, I saw one boy get another boy down on the asphalt outside the Quick Stop and kick him for what seemed like twenty minutes.

  When I was thirteen, I was beaten by a police officer.

  My friend Paul was beaten outside of our school, his arms held at his sides as two kids took swings at his face.

  I once smacked a boy named Patrick so hard, he fell on his back.

  Like many cowards, I’m drawn to confrontation. I stood up to some threats but backed down from others. I was bullied, but I was also a bully. Once, my roommate in the group home stood over my bed, daring me to move. Jay chased me down California Avenue in the middle of the night until I retreated into a vestibule, and he broke the glass window in the door. Ogie stole my drug money. Tom stole my drugs and kicked me down the stairs.

  When I was twenty, I punched an Englishman outside a live sex show in Amsterdam. When I was twenty-two, I grabbed someone by the throat and threw him to the floor in a Florida nightclub, twice. The second time, he got up and punched me in the eye. Afterward I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, covered in blood.

  When I was younger, the violence in my life seemed normal. As I got older, it didn’t seem normal anymore because I was hanging out with a different crowd. My new friends hadn’t gotten into fights or been beaten and humiliated by a parent. People told me I’d had an awful childhood.

  My ex-girlfriend Toni flew in from Colorado to visit me in Brooklyn for two days. Toni and I were supposed to go to a fetish party at a dungeon in Manhattan, but she wasn’t feeling well. I had to go into the city anyway for a friend’s birthday, so I went without her.

  At the birthday party I met a civil-rights attorney who wore faux leather pants and told me about the inner workings of the immigration department. I told her about the fetish party I was going to later. I said I was going to dress up in a negligee with nude stockings and pink heels. The stockings had stars on them.

  “Let me see,” she said, and I pulled them from my backpack and showed her under the table.

  The attorney and a friend of hers followed me upstairs to watch me change into my outfit. “Lift the negligee,” she said. “Spin around.” She spanked me a few times, not very hard, and then the three of us sat and talked. I felt embarrassed and vulnerable but also really comfortable.

  I arrived at the fetish party in my slip and heels, bringing coffee and a sandwich for a dominatrix I know. Like my ex, she was visiting from out of town. We hung out for a while, but she had a client who wanted a strap-on session, so she disappeared into a back room with her coffee and sandwich and dildo harness.

  The place was packed. I wandered around and saw my friend Hito, another dominatrix. Her date was a little guy dressed like Robin Hood. She ordered me to stand up straight. Her nails were filed into points, like claws. She pressed one nail underneath my chin as if it were a knife and dug another into my chest until I thought she might break the skin.

  “I’m with someone now, and I don’t want you to cause any trouble,” she said in my ear.

  What kind of trouble would I cause? I thought. But of course she was right. I was more than capable of starting trouble.

  When I got home, Toni was sitting on the floor near the door, right next to the computer, where I spent most of my time. I wanted to tell her about the videos, but to do that would have implied that I had some control over watching them.

  She was wrapped in a blanket and shivering quietly, like a bird, her long black hair spilling over her shoulders. She wasn’t going to sleep in the bed with me, she said. She seemed to want to be as far away from me as possible. I wondered what happened to us.

  A friend once told me you can never trust someone’s account of their own failed relationship. It’s like when two objects in space pass each other: you can’t tell which one is moving and which one is standing still.

  The next night I was supposed to meet Hito at a club on the Lower East Side. I wore a peach-colored slip, with my toenails painted to match, nude pantyhose with colorful squares printed on them, and the pink heels. But it wasn’t like the previous night’s fetish party. This was a goth party, and everyone was young and wearing black clothes and fishnets and eyeliner, including the boys. There were face tattoos and face piercings. The music was very loud. And of course Hito didn’t show. I’d expected as much, which might have been why I was there: hoping to be humiliated and disappointed when she stood me up.

  So this is what it’s come to, I thought. I’m the old guy at the goth club, alone in a pink dress.

  Standing there, watching all the young goths, I thought about writers I knew who’d once seemed to be on a similar career trajectory as mine but were now more successful than I was. Some were writing television shows. One had written a children’s book and gotten rich. Another had two kids and a husband and a small but comfortable house in Portland, Oregon. I felt the smooth stockings against my legs and thought: My peers are becoming more normal; I’m just getting weirder.

  I was moving further and further away from everyone else. Quite often recently I had thought about suicide—not seriously, but in a way that made me feel as if my time was limited.

  A young woman approached me. “You look like a sissy slut,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, but my voice was so quiet and the music was so loud that I don’t think she heard me.

  She had an Afro and wore a corset and something like a black swimsuit. Her name was Leila. She pulled me to the bar and made me buy her a drink. Then I knelt and cleaned her boots with my tongue, and she hit me with a belt and tore my stockings and reached between my legs and squeezed hard. Later I laid my head in her lap.

  It turned out she was one of the dancers in the show. We exchanged numbers, and I watched her climb onstage to perform. In my six-inch heels, I could see over everybody else. She was a good dancer but she was drunk. I was a good dancer too, but I wasn’t really dressed for it in those shoes.

  I stood in my torn stockings. I smiled at people occasionally, my slip stuck to my back by some sticky liquid I’d picked up rolling around on the bar floor.

  This is my problem, I thought. I belong here.

  My job involved writing, but the minute I pulled up to the computer, I’d click on a video instead, and in that way weeks would pass. It was like some science-fiction movie where you go into a chamber and close your eyes and open them a month later.

  I’d sold the movie rights to one of my books, and I had enough money to live on for the next two years—maybe a little less. Most of my writer friends taught, which kept them anchored to the world. They also had hus
bands and wives and kids. Even houses. I might be unfairly characterizing them. Everyone’s life is filled with strange hidden cabinets and unopened closets. Still, I was forty-two years old. (I’m forty-four as I finally finish this.) My friends, for the most part, were grown-ups.

  Sometimes I would start writing in the morning, and it would go OK for a couple of hours. I’d take a pill for my mood and another to help me concentrate. Then the pills would wear off. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, so even if I got something down on the page, it didn’t amount to much.

  Often in the middle of the day, or occasionally closer to six, I’d start crying. I’d lie in bed and feel the water pooling in my eyes and then sliding down the sides of my face. The last time this had happened was about four years earlier: I’d cried every day for two months. I’d sought help then, and one of the doctors evaluating me had suggested I check myself into the hospital. “I can’t go to the hospital,” I said. “I have to go to Detroit.” I had just gotten a magazine assignment, and I needed the money.

  That crying spell had eventually passed, but this time it felt different. I didn’t think I was going to come out of it. And anyway, come out of it into what?

  At first I thought the most violent videos were all from Eastern Europe and South America, but really people are terrible all over. Like in Philadelphia, where a woman knocks a pregnant woman unconscious, screaming, “You’re going to die today, bitch!” and continues to kick her in the head until she’s pulled away. Or where one girl takes another into the bathroom at knifepoint and pees on her.

  A gang invades a girl’s house while her parents are away. A drunk woman crawls along the floor, but no one will let her leave. A scared high-school girl, naked and surrounded in the locker-room shower, proceeds to hit herself in the face while everyone laughs. It’s like she’s saying, There’s nothing you can do to me that’s worse than what I’ll do to myself. But even the viewer can see it isn’t true. The worst is always yet to come.