by Lindy West
Because maybe this time it’d be different! Maybe—just maybe—this time you’d get the most delicious and fulfilling sandwich the world had e’er known, and the sandwich guy would finally recognize the trenchant, incisive brilliance of your sandwich-ordering skills, and doo-doo would be abolished, and Joss Whedon would pop out of the meat freezer and hand you a trophy that said “BEST GUY” on it and option your sandwich story for the plot of the next Avengers movie, Captain Whatever: The Sandwich Soldier. (Full disclosure: I do not know what an Avenger is.)
That’s not what happens, though. That’s never what happens. Instead, I keep slogging through forty-nine iterations of “kill yourself, pig lady” per day in my Twitter mentions, because one time in 2013 Holly Robinson Peete replied to my joke about Carnation instant breakfast.* Cool cost/benefit analysis, brain.
Still, I TRY not to click. I try.
PLAN B: When the temptation is too strong, when Plan A falls in the commode, I turn to the second line of defense—the mock and block. I take screen grabs of the worst ones—the ones that wish for my death, the ones that invoke my family, the ones with a telling whiff of pathos—and then re-post them with a caption like “way to go, Einstein” or “goo goo ga ga baby man” or sometimes just a picture of some diaper rash cream. (As Dorothy Parker or someone like that probably once said, “Goo goo ga ga baby man is the soul of wit.”) My friends and I will toss the troll around for a while like a pod of orcas with a baby seal, and once I’ve wrung enough validation out of it, I block the troll and let it die alone. Maybe it’s cruel. I know that trolls are fundamentally sad people; I know that I’ve already defeated them in every substantive arena—by being smart, by being happy, by being successful, by being listened to, by being loved. Whatever. Maybe if Mr. “Kill Yourself You Fat Piece of Shit” didn’t want to get mocked, shredded, and discarded, he should be more careful about how he talks to whales.
PLAN C: Wine.
Overall, my three-pronged defense holds up… pretty well. I am… okay. I cope, day to day, and honestly, there is something seductive about being the kind of person who can just take it. Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity—the vestigial allure of a rugged individualism that I don’t even believe in.
No one wants to need defenses that strong. It always hurts, somewhere.
Besides, armor is heavy. My ability to weather online abuse is one of the great tragedies of my life.
You never get used to trolls. Of course, you are an adaptable thing—your skin thickens, your stomach settles, you learn to tune out the chatter, you cease self-Googling (mostly), but it’s always just a patch. A screen. A coat of paint. It’s plopping a houseplant over the dry rot. It’s emotional hypothermia: Your brain can trick itself into feeling warm, but the flesh is still freezing. Medically speaking, your foot’s still falling off. There’s a phenomenon called “paradoxical undressing,” common when a person dies of hypothermia, wherein they become so convinced they’re overheating that they peel off all their clothes and scatter them in the snow. They get colder, die faster. There’s something uncanny about a cold death; a still, indifferent warping of humanity.
I struggle to conceive of the “resilience” I’ve developed in my job as a good thing—this hardening inside me, this distance I’ve put between myself and the world, my determination to delude myself into normalcy. From the cockpit, it feels like much more of a loss than a triumph. It’s like the world’s most not-worth-it game show: Well, you’ve destroyed your capacity for unbridled happiness and human connection, but don’t worry—we’ve replaced it with this prison of anxiety and pathological inability to relax!
Yet, it seems like the more abuse I get, the more abuse I court—baring myself more extravagantly, professing opinions that I know will draw an onslaught—because, after all, if I’ve already adjusted my body temperature, why not face the blizzard so that other women don’t have to freeze?
Paradoxical undressing, I guess.
But it’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.
This is my reality now. Pretty much every day, at least one stranger seeks me out to call me a fat bitch (or some pithy variation thereof). Being harassed on the Internet is such a normal, common part of my life that I’m always surprised when other people find it surprising. You’re telling me you don’t have hundreds of men popping into your cubicle in the accounting department of your midsized, regional dry-goods distributor to inform you that—hmm—you’re too fat to rape, but perhaps they’ll saw you up with an electric knife? No? Just me, then. This is the barbarism—the eager abandonment of the social contract—that so many of us face simply for doing our jobs.
I’m aware of the pull all the time: I should change careers; I should shut down my social media; maybe I can get a job in print somewhere; it’s just too exhausting. I hear the same refrains from my colleagues. Not only that, but those of us who are hardest hit often wind up writing about harassment itself. I never wanted Internet trolls to be my beat—I want to write feminist polemics, jokes about wizards, and love letters to John Goodman’s meaty, sexual forearms. I still want that.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get back to work.
Strong People Fighting Against the Elements
I never wanted to fight virtual trolls; I wanted to fight real ones. With a sword.
My fixation on the fantastical is not difficult to trace. When I was very small, my dad read out loud to me every night before bed. It was always fantasy: Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, Tolkien again. I remember him nodding off in the chair, his pace and pitch winding down like he was running out of batteries—Bifur, Bofur, Bommmmbuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr. To this day, if someone even mentions riding a barrel down the Celduin to Lake-town at the gates of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain (even if they’re just talking about spring break), I am incapacitated by nostalgia. I made him read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so many times that I could recite much of it from memory—I didn’t know what “air raids” were, but I knew that when they happened, you went on a permanent vacation to a country manse where a wizard let you use his inter-dimensional closet. I wonder if we can get “air raids” in Seattle, I thought.
Dad was a jazz pianist and an ad copywriter—an expressive baritone who was often employed as a kind of one-man, full-service jingle factory. By night, he worked in bars, sometimes seven nights a week, a lost breed of lounge entertainer who skipped dizzyingly from standards to Flanders and Swann to Lord Buckley and back again. Once in a while, I still meet Seattle old-timers who blush like teenagers. “I loved your dad. Used to go see him every night.”
My grandfather was a radio producer (The Burns and Allen Show, Lucky Strike Hit Parade), and in the 1940s, when he took a job at CBS, it was suggested that he change his name from the unwieldy and, perhaps, at the time, uncomfortably Austrian, “Rechenmacher” to the more radio-friendly “West.” So my dad became Paul West Jr., and now I am Lindy West. Sometimes people think “Lindy West” is a pseudonym. I guess they’re right.
Eighty years removed, my grandparents’ Old Hollywood existence seems impossibly glamorous. I imagine shimmering laughter and natty suits. Hats on heads, hats in hat boxes. Scotch in the winter, gin in the summer. Grandma Winnie sang with Meredith Willson’s orchestra, and when my dad was a little boy in the ’30s, she worked in movies (under her maiden name, Winnie Parker, and her stage name, Mona Lowe), dubbing the vocal parts for Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, and other leading ladies who, apparently, couldn’t sing. Dad had stories of going to Shirley Temple’s birthday party, of nearly fainting when his dad nonchalantly introduced him to his friend Lou Costello, of Gene Autry trying to give little Paul a pony to keep in their Glendale backyard.
They drank hard—“eating and drinking and carrying on,” as my dad would say. He once emailed me a little vignette he wrote in his creative writing night class:
“The living room is the part of the house I remember least, from the inside anyway. I remember it a little bett
er from the sidewalk in front, along Kenneth Road. I remember standing there looking at the bright gold harp that stood framed by the green brocade draperies—draperies I once hid behind when my mother and father were screaming drunk.
“I heard a dull ‘thunk,’ followed by a big crash, and when I peeked out from behind the drape, my father was lying on the living room floor, blood spurting from his big, already knobby nose. Mother and the other couple in the room, my uncle and his wife, were laughing hysterically when my grandmother came down the wide staircase. ‘Vas ist?’ she said—with stern, Viennese dignity. ‘An orange,’ my uncle giggled, ‘Winnie hit him in the nose with an orange!’ They were all helpless with laughter. ‘Be ashamed,’ Gramma said.”*
I never met any of those people. In fact, I’ve never met any family from my dad’s side at all. My grandfather had a heart attack and died unexpectedly in 1953 when he was just forty-four, two days before my dad’s high school graduation. There was some dispute about the burial, between the deeply Catholic Rechenmachers in southern Illinois, who wanted a Catholic funeral, and my dad’s lapsed Hollywood branch, who didn’t. Paul West Sr. ended up in a Catholic cemetery in Culver City, where lingering animus led to nobody visiting him for the next fifty-five years, until, on a whim, my sister and I tracked down the grave. We called Dad and told him where we were. “Golly,” he said, his voice rough.
You could tell that my dad never fully recovered from that loss (and it wasn’t his last). My sister and I called him “sad dad”—underneath the exuberance there was a towering melancholy. I sometimes told people my dad reminded me of Robin Williams, and they would assume I meant the drive to entertain, the old showbiz patter. But it was really that ever-present Pig-Pen cloud of kind-eyed sadness.
My dad had four wives; my mom was the last. I think about how much faith it must have taken to keep going—to insist, over and over again, “No! I really think it’s going to work this time!” Plenty of people are irretrievably jaded after one divorce, let alone three. My dad went for it four times, and the last one stuck. You could frame that as irresponsibility or womanizing or a fear of being alone, but to me it was a distillation of his unsinkable optimism. He always saw the best in everyone—I imagine, likewise, he stood at the beginning of every romance and saw it unspooling in front of him like a grand adventure, all fun and no pain. “Oh boy!” I can hear him saying each time. “Isn’t she just terrific?” The idea that a relationship is a “failure” simply because it ends is a pessimist’s construct anyway. Dad loved lots of people, and then found the one he loved the best.
It made sense that he was so drawn to magic and escapism, just like me. His life was beautiful and marked with loss; maybe not more than anyone else’s, but when you only expect the best, heartbreak is a constant.
My mom, by contrast, never liked fantasy. When I was little, this made as much sense to me as not liking gravity, or Gordon from Sesame Street. “I just like things that are true,” she’d say. “Strong people fighting against the elements.” I grilled her so often on why she wasn’t obsessed with dragons LIKE A NORMAL PERSON that it became kind of a catchphrase in our house—strong people fighting against the elements.
That made sense too. My mom’s parents came from Norway: Grandma Clara first, the eldest of ten, when she was a little girl and the family homesteaded in North Dakota. We visited the old dirt farm once during a family reunion: just a hole and the remnants of the foundation and some dead grass and the big, red sun. In summer the North Dakotan prairie is flat and brown. In winter, flat and white. “The elements,” I imagine, had a seat at the table like family.
When the Depression hit and my great-grandparents just couldn’t feed so many mouths, they shipped eighteen-year-old Clara back to Norway to raise two of her little sisters on her own. While Grandpa Rechenmacher’s early death shaped my dad’s life like a tide, absent mothers tugged on my mom’s side. My great-aunt Eleanor, one of the little girls sent off to the old country, requested that “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” be played at her funeral, and it was.
Clara met and married my grandfather, Ole, who grew up on a farm called Gunnersveen, just down the lake. His father died in the flu pandemic of 1918, when Ole was nine. “The boys didn’t have much of a childhood,” my mom told me once, when she emailed to scold me about washing my hands during the 2009 swine flu scare (subject line: “GERMS!”*). In 1945, during the Nazi occupation, Grandpa Ole and his brother were among twelve resistance fighters who skied out into the dark hills to retrieve packages parachuted by an Allied spy plane—bundles of weapons, radio equipment, provisions. Strong people, elements, blah blah blah, the whole thing.
Ole and Clara married and moved to Seattle and raised seven children; my mom, Ingrid, was number six. Clara kept house—canning fruit, sewing the family’s clothes, a pot of coffee perpetually perking for anyone who dropped by—and Grandpa Ole was a carpenter, never quite mastering English because, privately, he always just wanted to go home. They took in strays; sometimes as many as thirteen people lived in that three-bedroom, one-bath house; the kids shared beds and bathwater. “My trick was to help my mother in the kitchen,” my mom always says when someone compliments her cooking. “It was hard to get one-on-one time otherwise, she was so busy.” (Maybe that’s why my mom stopped at one child herself.) She speaks of the cramped chaos with pride. Her ability to get by is part of her identity.
My mother is aggressively competent. She was an RN for forty years—yes, she will look at your infected toe—and her rigid expectations about the Correct Way to Do Things border on disordered (motto: “If you clean your bathroom every day, you never have to clean your bathroom”). When she and my dad fell in love, he was playing the piano in bars every night, living off credit cards, occasionally accepting gin and tonics as currency, and had decorated his apartment entirely in zebra-themed bric-a-brac—due, no doubt, to some passing, impetuous whim. (“Hey, zebras are trick!”) By the time I was born, a few years later, they were financially stable, he had a day job at an ad agency, and the zebra merch was limited to one vase, two paintings, a set of directors’ chairs, and a life-sized F. A. O. Schwarz stuffed zebra named Simon. You know, a reasonable amount.
He wrote a song for my mom called “I Like You So Much Better (Than Anyone I’ve Ever Loved Before)”—“Time was I took a lot of chances/on passions and romances/but you’re the one who helped me get my feet back on the floor/That’s why I like you so much better/than anyone I’ve ever loved before.”
Dad was the entertainer, but I’m funny because of my mom. She has a nurse’s ease with gallows humor, sarcastic and dry; she taught me to cope with pain by chopping it up into bits small enough to laugh at. (My dad would go full Swamps of Sadness when anything went wrong. If the printer ran out of toner, he couldn’t speak above a whisper for days.) When I was little, a neighbor opened a small temping agency called Multitask and, in an early stab at guerrilla marketing, purchased a vanity plate that read, “MLTITSK.” Around the house, my mom called him “M. L. Titsky.” Later, just “Mr. Titsky.” Empirically, that’s a great riff.
Once, at a block party, she forgot that Mr. Titsky wasn’t actually his name, and introduced him as such to a new neighbor. Mr. Titsky, it turned out, was not a comedy connoisseur.
My dad took care of unbridled enthusiasm and unconditional encouragement—everything was “Killer!” “WowEE!” “You can be anything you want to be!”—while my mom’s role was, “Not today,” “Hmmm,” and “Not if you don’t learn how to balance a checkbook.”* In fact, she recently told me that part of her parenting philosophy was to make sure I knew I couldn’t be anything.
“Well, you can’t,” she said. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”
If my dad supported us with words, head in the clouds, my mom supported us with structure, roots in the ground. That degree of harmonious opposition has to fulfill some cosmic archetype. (Not that my mom would allow such arcane silliness to be discussed in her house.)
&nb
sp; Between those far-flung poles—escapism vs. realism, glamour vs. austerity, wild hope vs. Nordic practicality—I grew.
People say to me all the time, “I couldn’t do what you do; I couldn’t cope with trolls,” but it’s just part of my job. I bet they could if they had to.
Once in a while, though, I wonder: Is it more than that? Did I somehow stumble into a job—one that didn’t even exist when I was born in 1982—for which I am supremely, preternaturally suited? I do fight monsters, just like I always dreamed, even if they are creeps in basements who hate women instead of necromancers in skull-towers who hate lady knights. Without my mom, would I have the grit to keep going? Without my dad, would I have the idealism to bother?
The Day I Didn’t Fit
One time, I flew first class on an airplane, because when I checked in they offered me a fifty-dollar upgrade, and when you are a fat person with fifty dollars and somebody offers you a 21-inch recliner instead of a 17-inch trash compacter, you say YES. It was a new world up there, in front of that little magic curtain, among the lordlings. I was seated next to a businessman in leather shoes that cost more than my car, and behind a man who kept angrily attempting to sell a boat over the phone even after they told us to stop making phone calls.
The first rule of first class, apparently, is that there are no rules. (The second rule is don’t let the poor people use the rich people bathroom.)
I wondered if my fellow first-classers—all virility and spreadsheets—could discern that I was a fraud, that I could only afford the upgrade because my job covered the rest of my ticket. I may have betrayed myself when the flight attendant asked if I’d like a “special drink” before takeoff and I yelled, “A SPECIAL DRINK?” and then ordered three. Why just have coffee like some row-26 peasant when you could have coffee, ginger ale, and a mimosa!? This, as I’d been assured by the airline industry, was the life.