Have you ever felt important and stupid at once, kind of like when you realize you can order something for lunch that costs more than most people in the world make in a month? And you go ahead and order that foie gras special, and it makes you feel terrific? It makes you feel utterly powerful for a moment.
Then you feel just as humiliated and pathetic as ever.
Or:
I have such different selves. . One day I’m a gentle boy who only wants to set the place settings for dinner, one day a smarmy academic fighting hard to impress the grossest higher-ups. . Some days I’m a feminist mom who’s really angry about sexism, others a misogynist who just wants to fuck every woman she meets.
Gemma wrotewith great courage about all kinds of unacceptable emotions, the kind most of us edit out of conversation. So I dropped acid under this ethereal purple sky in Lithuania with Sevia, we were sitting on the side of a mountain, and I wished so hard that I didn’t have children. . I wished that for about two and a half hours. . Sevia looked a little like Charlize Theron, she was the Slovenian prostitutes’ union leader? We ate roasted potatoes and looked at wildflowers. Then I went back to the hotel.
Or she said how great it was to beat people bloody in karate, which I had stopped practicing some years ago. Thank god there are rules. . The fabulous thing about karate is you can beat the shit out of people without the risk that you’ll turn them into nothing, butcher’s meat, you can pound them and still leave them alive and basically OK except they need a couple of gauze pads and a shot of coffee.
Me, I had been writing about unacceptable emotions for twelve years, my entire writing life. I had been known for it, in fact. But I had not been having them. Vindictiveness, insane vagina, envy, wanting to be smashed like an automobile on a heap—
I hadn’t felt them in my body. After I’d left home, there was a point at which I had felt some baby anger at my mother, but I’d started therapy around then and Edna had chopped up the animal inside me that she and her Radical Psychiatry comrades called the “pig.”
One of the many reasons I no longer had anything to lose was that I had left the Village Voice.
Reader, I was worse at office politics than an obsequious but untrained gorilla, and I thought my only path to greater achievement lay straight through a slavish devotion to Richard. I brought my mentor the best bananas to be had for money, every day. I thought that they, along with my writing skills, would be enough—an effective case of sympathetic magic. (If I bring him bananas, I will eventually get bananas!) No use wondering why I was his only protégé, or why no one else ever challenged me for that position.
I disdained relationships with everyone else, including the editor in chief. Well, not that I disdained talking to the editor exactly, but I was scared of him and I wanted to stay in my proper place: I thought the Voice was a feudal system and I should relate only to the lord right above me.
Like most slaves, when I finally got some access to the mighty, I made a terrible botch of it.
I had been asked out to lunch by the publisher! This fortuitous event occurred because I had written a Voice article criticizing the Voice for hosting a speech by the anti-abortion Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey. (At the Voice, rebellion was sometimes rewarded, which made it a rather confusing place to work.)
I’d also finally made myself talk to the editor in chief, putting on my best clothes for him and picking the nits out of my hair.
I got the editor in chief, Jon Larsen, to agree that I would be the next person appointed to the position of staff writer, my greatest desire. Unfortunately, Jon himself soon resigned. But not to worry—I and another feminist writer wrote a terrific position paper calling on the owners to appoint the feminist editor Karen Durbin to take his place.
Amazingly, they did appoint her, reader! (Well, she had already been a candidate.)
In the course of the transition I had my scheduled lunch with the ever-youthful publisher, a handsome undead shapeshifter named David Schneiderman, and Schneiderman agreed that he would ask Karen to consider making me a staff writer.
But babydoll, trusting a golem—myself—with delicate office negotiations is like expecting a donkey to sell your exquisite foods at the Union Square Greenmarket, or an ant, however committed, to develop the blueprints for your business complex in Bahrain.
Karen Durbin, though a feminist, had no desire whatever to make me a staff writer. But when she informed me of this fact, grinning broadly and chain-smoking into my face, I was foolish enough to bring up what I thought was Schneiderman’s “promise” to me. Reader, golems are so bad at human relations—especially ones involving power—that I did not realize that Karen was not going to appoint me staff writer when she didn’t want to, and that David Schneiderman was not going to twist her arm.
She grinned even more when she told me at our subsequent meeting—after she had investigated the matter with David—that David had only promised to tell Karen that I “wanted to be staff writer.”
Karen Durbin, in her early 60s, had a satyr’s smile as she blew her smoke in my face and sneered across the table at me, checking out my hips. “I see that you didn’t write quite enough articles in the past six months to entitle you to keep your health insurance as of next month.”
This was an utter surprise to me, and I wept.
“But don’t worry, out of the goodness of my heart I’ll let you keep on the health insurance rolls this one time. Hey, I have a great suggestion for you,” Karen added. “Susan Brownmiller”—the famous feminist who had penned Men, Women, and Rape — —“once wrote for the Voice. You might have a brighter career outside this paper, too!”
I had been writing for the Voice for almost eight years by that point, and was the paper’s best-known queer voice, and the most I had ever gotten paid there was $14,000 a year plus health insurance.
As for Richard the sea-monster, he had suddenly begun doubting my veracity the previous spring, after seven years of being my mentor. The cause was an article about Gay Men’s Health Crisis’s attempt to crush a union drive. It was just like all my other articles in the Voice, indeed, like all the articles that had ever been in the Voice, reader—opinionated. I was furious that GMHC was trying to squash its union and that it claimed union workers would provide bad health care. But after my column was published, Richard’s friends in the management suite of GMHC called him to complain about me.
“They say they made all these really good arguments against the union and you wouldn’t quote them,” Richard said.
I had quoted GMHC’s leaders, but I guess I hadn’t included the quotes they wanted. I’d reported what I considered the most telling ones, like “Members of 1199 might decide to make a decision that’s not in the best interests of people with AIDS.”
Richard no longer trusted me from then on. But I continued, deep down to my golem’s clay-colored toes, to trust him. He instituted a new policy of making me call back the people on every article I wrote after that, to check my quotes with them. After seven years, it was humiliating.
After Karen suggested that I might have more fun outside the Voice, every other Voice staffer I spoke to offered me their condolences, as it were—about Richard. “He didn’t go to bat for you. He never does.”
I defended Richard. “He’s just a middle manager!” At the time, Richard was the executive editor of the paper. “He doesn’t have the power.”
The other writers and editors said, “He does.”
Richard and I had spent hours inside his long, dark, tunnelly, smelly office lair talking about our parents, sex with waterbugs, and what it was like to be members of a fearsome inhuman minority. Sea-monsters smell a little like reptiles, reader, and golems—what do golems smell like? Like rotten eggs, all the rabbis had warned me, but I had never smelled myself and I wondered inside, faintly, if I might actually might smell a bit more appealing, like jasmine.
I didn’t really mind Richard’s smell, because I loved my teacher, reader. In my mind I somet
imes thought of him as my “master,” as in the one who shapes and fathers the apprentice. We’d probably spent twenty hours a week together working intensely, deep inside his lair, for the past eight years. It was airless down there, and I would sometimes feel a little high. I would wash Richard’s scales with warm sea water as we edited and wrote and talked gay liberation strategy. He liked to share his most curious and unusual sexual fantasies with me, and occasionally wanted to hear my own (I was far happier sharing mine than hearing his). He discussed his relationship with his boyfriend, his daily mental and physical health, but was not interested in the equivalents from me. I would try not to stare at his crotch but, reader, my poor eyes were always drawn there, as if it were the heaviest magnet for power in creation. He was, as I have said, the most dominant personage I have ever met.
In addition to giving me my first adult work, Richard had enlisted me as his soldier in various internecine battles at the Voice. Against gay men who wanted to be independent of him (he would helpfully tell me whenever these writers said mean things about me, all surprisingly behind my back). Against the straight men of the “hard news” section, whom he found profoundly threatening. He claimed they were campaigning to restrict the Voice’s coverage to political and economic news and keep all “soft” cultural, feminist and queer writing out of the paper forever. I was terrified by his claims, and joined a cabal with him against the newsmen.
I’d told Richard often that I considered him like a father to me. (He was so much better than my real father, who sadly had never taught me anything.) Richard seemed uncomfortable with my filial feelings for him. Perhaps not unrelated, he had always told me he had no power whatsoever at the Voice (just as, come to think of it, my father had no power in our family).
I need to say a word or two here, sweet reader, about my veracity at the alternative newspaper of record. I already told you that I came there with no dedication to the truth whatsoever, in fact trained by my mother to be a liar. There may even be some sentences in this book that are not strictly accurate in the plainest sense of the word, viz. the creation of golems and so forth. But reader, this is not a work of journalism, not unalloyed journalism at least; it is a hybrid creature, just like me. At the Voice in my first days I reported one thing I had only heard about from witnesses, not observed directly (I did not know the standards yet for journalistic truth). Worse, I mistakenly said that one source was on the record when he actually wasn't (the guy forgave me, eventually). Everything else, as far as I can remember, was quite true, first because I came to understand this was required, and then because I actually changed, sweet one, from working there. Richard himself, the forthright young fact-checkers, our lawyers, and my own conscience, which had developed so slowly in my golem brain, over time made me want to write the truth. Indeed, I developed a burning desire to communicate what was really going on, which I have never lost.
It was Richard who’d never believed that he had any power whatsoever, no matter how high he ascended at the Voice. It was he who stayed awake nights worrying about his straight male rivals threatening him from below, who told me himself that he had no authority even when he had attained the No. 2 slot at the paper. I knew I had authority and wanted to speak the truth to my own power for a change— and so I decided to do as Karen hinted and leave her Village Voice, and write a book, and thus begin my first attempt at breaking out of this golem body.
So, reader,
Pain is bursting in my arms and flowering in my shoulder blades. . It’s so alive in my wrists I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of it. . I can’t sit in any kind of chair, soft or hard. . I go from a soft one to a hard one so I can exchange one kind of pain for another.
I don’t understand. . The faintest touch on the shoulder is intense now, like a touch from a god. I have always wanted fire now I feel it.
When it first happens I don’t know what it means. I have been going to a ditsy trio of physical therapists for some minor wrist pain for months, but I’ve had Repetitive Strain Injury in a mild form before and I know it’s very, very easy to correct.
One day it suddenly hurts much more.
“Tsk,” I mock-reprove Gemma in a whisper, when she’s slapped my hands because they are inadvertently covering my vagina, which she’s commanded me to touch. “My hands are sensitive." So she just hits my labia instead.
Gemma and I are just romantic friends at first. “I fall in love every six months,” she writes me, “if by falling in love you mean it always makes me happy when I see them, and it makes me want to get naked.” In my innocence, I fail to grasp that she actually does get naked with these people. I think she’s just being admirably open about the longings people feel even in long-term, monogamous relationships.
I think Gemma and I each have a powerful platonic crush on the other. (They are so beautiful, my platonic crushes, and can go on for so long. )
So Gemma starts to drop hints, but cautiously: “Ann and I give each other weekends off sometimes. Ann uses hers to meditate.”
The one with the weekend off doesn’t have to tend to the kids, or to her partner either.
I don’t get it.
But the changes have already begun inside me. It’s not Gemma’s doing, exactly, but I am wet with new movement, sticky with electricity. I’ve begun to notice things about myself that I never wanted to see before. Among them: that I am still a virgin in my most tender places, where it counts. There is a scared girl guarding my deepest self, standing at the gates with a knife and a bike helmet. Because of her ceaseless efforts, after sex over a period of twenty-one years, with twenty-eight women and two men, I have somehow remained untouched. I’ve been hermetic, boarded up. I remember when I lost my actual hymen—and the beautiful state I was in right before.
I was 15, and wanted the sacred to come all the way inside me.
It never did. The girl has always been too vigilant.
I tell Gemma how virginal I feel. How innocent inside. And finally, after all these years, how open.
You have the most beautiful way of exposing your life, she writes in email. I love how vulnerable you make yourself.
We go to the movies once I’ve realized, after weeks of hints so broad they do not get past even me, that Gemma wants me, and once I have decided—an extraordinary act of will—that I want her, too. Choosing to have sex with someone is a decision I have almost never made in my life. I’ve just gone with almost everyone who wanted me, before this.
So we go see the kiddie movie James and the Giant Peach. I flirt with Gemma by getting truly afraid in the scary parts.
But in the cheapo Ukrainian restaurant afterwards, she puts her leg against me crudely. I am, in some inchoate way, profoundly disappointed. I expected—I dunno, something that was more about being attracted to me personally. Her leg up against me makes me feel like an interchangeable female, someone groped by an old man in a movie house.
I’m also not really sure I want to date a married woman, even one who has an outside-partners clause. Sonny and Lisa, friends who’ve survived my post-Edna purge, are skeptical. But then, they’re friends from Al-Anon, and pretty tight-ass and moralistic in the Al-Anon tradition. I utterly enjoy being skeptical about Gemma right along with them, but by the end of the week I want her again. Maybe the mere fact that I can be critical of her confirms me in the rippling power that I feel. It’s part of this gorgeous sense I have that I can actually do what I want.
(Edna hates adultery and would be furious if she saw me.)
People say that they can actually feel life surging in their blood, and it is true, I feel it surging in mine! I’ve never thought I could do what I wanted until now. Yet I finally understand I’m going to have this power for the rest of my life.
I invite Gemma over, our first visit in private. I play her the song that reminds me of her, “Temptation Waits” by Garbage. “I’ll tell you something, I am a wolf but I like to wear sheep’s clothing," a woman sings to us slowly. Her voice is the sexiest voice I’ve ever hea
rd (like red honey, this one). She continues: “I am a bonfire. I am a vampire.” Gemma has already told me that all her life, she’s identified with vampires. I’ve told her I have always identified with their victims. Surprisingly, our curious, mutual fantasy doesn’t give me pause. I just love that she is a vampire.
By the time the singer gets to the last line (“When I’m not sure what I’m looking for. /When I’m not sure who I am,”)—we’ve started touching. But—it is boring! Her limbs are golden; our ruddy genitals are unveiled. Both of us have flesh that is taut. But so what? It feels like we are cold, plastic sex devices each of us has found in a motel, wrapped in cellophane—a convenience, for business travelers. We are polite as we quickly move against each other, like carpoolers.
“So this is sex for the sake of sex,” I think in a dull voice. “It’s empty.”
But in a week something else happens. Hearken, reader: I am built small and cannot take very much in the vagina. Either that or I just haven’t been fucked enough. Gemma discovers these specs—when I ask her to put even less inside me than she already has—and she smiles suddenly, dangerously. “Then I’m not going to give you anything there at all.”
She is refusing to come inside me with even the small amount I want, she means.
I’m surprised. She starts to touch me only lightly as a butterfly edges on the lip of a gladiolus, a minimalism of touch. An almost unhearable tune. I’m confused, on edge, what am I supposed to do now? A half-shudder from somewhere. Do I have a prayer of liking this?
It is not nice, and then it is irritating. Then it starts almost to scare me. It’s not enough, yet it’s too much. That’s the problem—it turns me on too much. So that I end up needing, depending on her to come inside. “Please fuck me,” I say and she doesn’t. “Please, I really want you to." The tip of her index finger is, maddeningly, on the right side of my labia. It lifts off just barely. An edge of her thumb is lazy on the left side of my clit. My voice starts to get hoarse and childlike, I say “please” again.
Growing Up Golem Page 11