I spent countless nights anguishing over whether or not to get top surgery, about whether I’d be willing to carry bright red scars right on the front of my body for the rest of my life in order to have the chest I wanted. A few months after my surgery, someone on Twitter offhandedly mentioned that they look like two Twizzlers. They were exactly right—that’s just what they looked like. And I knew in that moment that I really always had known what bathos was, that it was terribly simple, but that I’d always been so afraid of finding out I was too stupid to understand.
The dog who sits on this chest is very dreadful; his eyes are as big as a tower, but do not mind him. I’ve got an apron that defeats him.
INTERLUDE XVII Dirtbag Sappho
A HYMN TO APHRODITE
Look, Aphrodite, man. Look. You know who your father is,
and you’ve got hobbies, which puts you two up on me.
Yes? Yes. So going out of your way
to break my spirit with adversity,
given our respective circumstances,
seems heavy-handed for a goddess known for subtlety.
Come on, man. Just: Come on.
Leave your father’s gorgeous house,
take your father’s stylish car (if ever before
you took a single one of my calls without
screening it, take this one, please)
come down in wings and darkness
and get here in time. Smile,
if you can find the energy,
or the time to wipe one over your deathless mouth.
(It’s one thing to tell a god to smile but where I can’t command
I will ask:
with all that you’ve got to smile about, why refuse?)
But go ahead and ask me: What’s
the matter now, Sappho, why
this round of calls, what’s the new
pain lodged in my ghoulish heart?
Fine, fine, “What’s her name this time, girl-chick,
whose kiosk in the mall did you hang around at for too long
after her shift got over, before her ride got there?
I’ll have her car
idling in your driveway
before she has time to pray to other gods.”
A dick move, if you ask me,
bragging like that.
Look, just get here, okay? Because (1) I gave you
my only set of spare keys years ago, (2) you know
I’d do the same for you if you needed anything,
so just fulfill what needs fulfilling and don’t
drag out my emptiness
(3)
just be a fucking friend, like you said
you’d be. Okay?
FRAGMENT 31
Oh, fuck, man, fuck me, fuck fuck.—
Some guys get to sit across the room from you
and listen to the sound your mouth makes
(jesus don’t say things like that),
I just mean: you laugh sometimes, and it sends
my heart on worldwide tour. It’s all chest cavity panic.
I mean the minute I catch eyes of you there’s no
thought left in me,
gag me, fuck me up—: look, I’ll confirm all this
low-grade fever, this skin-ruining crush is pure damage
Status: Knees week, mom’s spaghetti—
you know the rest,
and I’m bitch-sweating yikes, and the shakes
are coming on quick, no letting up, it’s all over
for me, I’m fourteen seconds south of dying,
I’m fully offline;
but this piece-of-shit me isn’t going anywhere, Hiiiiii—
FRAGMENT 145
IMPORTANT ROCKS DO NOT MOVE
FRAGMENT 156
I like her purse.
It’s well-ordered and free of sand,
and she’s not stingy with a spray of perfume,
but that girl’s dumb as hell.
FRAGMENT 22
She wore a full-on dress once. Oh my God,
you remember the eclipse on Cyprus?
It was like that. A national event.
That dress was an emergency.
FRAGMENT 90
It’s no good, I quit,
Mother or whomever else is concerned, I
officially resign from
weaving, and all other work.
You can
blame God, if you want,
just let me lie here on the tile
God sent me an assassin
the day he showed me
that boy’s face. Have you seen it?
Who can weave, at a time like this?
SAPPHO AT 16
Everybody says their girlfriend is hot.
Armies of girlfriends, some on horses, some not,
bobbing just outside of port on the Girlfriend Ships,
Whatever; everyone has to say it, but they can’t all be right.
Take Helen (please!), whom “all Greece hates”
hot like burning, and so knows from fine,
what did it take to get her to leave,
a top-ten husband (universally agreed-upon
as one of the best, even from people who normally
can’t grind out one nice thing to say about a man),
shut up her house,
throw her kid out the window,
turn her parents out in the streets
(which, incidentally, any one of us would do
at the prospect of a thorough dicking at the hands
of a face like that. If faces can be said to have hands, which
they can’t)
That sort of dick-longing is adaptable,
maneuverable,
and aerodynamic. It reminds me
of the last girl I dated.
How to put this? I’ve seen my girl’s face and your man’s.
I’d sooner watch the turn of her steps
or the side of her face than your whole boyfriend,
who on his best day looks like Kashi cereal.
CHAPTER 19 Dante Runs into Beatrice in Paradise
When I was fourteen I had the following items temporarily confiscated at a Christian extreme sports summer camp: Time magazine, Seventeen magazine, and Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. (I don’t remember much about the extreme sports; I know it was billed as a sort of zip-lining, belaying, rock-scrambling center, but mostly I just played tennis and politely avoided signing a virginity pledge.) I don’t suppose I really believed I would have time to read all of them in a four-week session, but I wanted very much to be seen reading them by my fellow Christian extreme sports campers. Instead the Dante books were whisked away to the infirmary and bound together with masking tape that I had to gingerly peel off myself at the end of summer.
I spent the rest of the summer after camp making my way through the Purgatorio and sorting through everything I’d heard at camp. The difference between a broadly centrist evangelical home environment in suburban Chicago and fundamentalist-flexible evangelical summer camp in rural Missouri is significant; this had been my first real encounter with young-earth creationism and Christian complementarianism, and I’d come away puzzled and contemplative. A very earnest Bible teacher with a Ned Flanders mustache had drawn a diagram of the antediluvian earth to explain how an atmospheric canopy might have enabled Methuselah to reach 969 years and that the likeliest inspiration for my desire to become a pastor someday was the devil seeking to overturn male headship. He was also very kind to me. It seemed fairly reasonable that he was incorrect both about the canopy and the nature of female leadership, but his authority seemed both plausible and well-intended, so I dutifully turned the possibilities over in my mind for a few weeks before deciding against them.
* * *
One gets the sense, in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio, that Dante wishes very badly to include his guide Virgil among the ranks of the blessed rather than in Limbo, where the shades of great spirits are “only so far punishe
d that without hope we live on in desire.” The air there is alive with the sound of constant, eternal sighing, and Dante’s heart is “seized in great grief” to think of all the worthy souls who dwell there (Inf. Canto IV). At the end of Purgatorio, Virgil is quietly swapped out for Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, after leading Dante through the final wall of fire at the end of the Terrace of Lust, where the soon-to-be-redeemed transmit quick, careful greetings like ants tapping antennae together to avoid the kind of lingering touch that dawdles into sin. The lustful are divided into two groups that hustle swiftly around the terrace, each calling out homo- and heterosexual examples of carnality like rival sports fans: “Sodom and Gomorrah!” “Pasiphaë!”
Th’ escorting spirits turn’d with gentle looks
Toward me, and the Mantuan spake: “My son,
Here torment thou mayst feel, but canst not death.
Remember thee, remember thee, if I
Safe e’en on Geryon brought thee: now I come
More near to God, wilt thou not trust me now?
Of this be sure: though in its womb that flame
A thousand years contain’d thee, from thy head
No hair should perish. If thou doubt my truth,
Approach, and with thy hands thy vesture’s hem
Stretch forth, and for thyself confirm belief.
Lay now all fear, O lay all fear aside.
Turn hither, and come onward undismay’d.”
I still, though conscience urg’d’ no step advanc’d.
When still he saw me fix’d and obstinate,
Somewhat disturb’d he cried: “Mark now, my son,
From Beatrice thou art by this wall
Divided.” As at Thisbe’s name the eye
Of Pyramus was open’d (when life ebb’d
Fast from his veins), and took one parting glance,
While vermeil dyed the mulberry; thus I turn’d
To my sage guide, relenting, when I heard
The name, that springs forever in my breast.
He shook his forehead; and, “How long,” he said,
“Linger we now?” then smil’d, as one would smile
Upon a child, that eyes the fruit and yields.
Into the fire before me then he walk’d;
And Statius, who erewhile no little space
Had parted us, he pray’d to come behind.
I would have cast me into molten glass
To cool me, when I enter’d; so intense
Rag’d the conflagrant mass. The sire belov’d,
To comfort me, as he proceeded, still
Of Beatrice talk’d. “Her eyes,” saith he,
“E’en now I seem to view.” From the other side
A voice, that sang, did guide us, and the voice
Following, with heedful ear, we issued forth,
There where the path led upward.
—Inferno Canto XXVII
Another river, another pair of guide and guided, another traveler convinced his journey is ending in destruction just before emerging safely on the other side. Virgil, unlike Hopeful, can stir no higher than the Earthly Paradise, and cannot comment on matters celestial; Dante must exchange a man he has never met for a woman he saw twice before she died. They pass together through the fire, and Virgil offers Dante both “crown and mitre, sovereign o’er thyself.” At the top of Mount Purgatory Dante is dazzled by a succession of women—Leah, Rachel, Matilda, the seven heavenly Virtues, Jerome’s elders, the epistles and a griffin—and finally Beatrice, heading the processional. The sight of the woman he loves sweeping grandly down the aisle sends Dante into a panic: He has climbed out of Hell, scaled Purgatory, knocks on the gate of Heaven only to come down with cold feet. It’s at this point that he turns to Virgil for, oddly, maternal comfort: “towards Virgil I turn’d me to leftward, panting, like a babe/That flees for refuge to his mother’s breast.” But there is no Virgil to offer comfort nor even say goodbye to:
But Virgil had bereav’d us of himself,
Virgil, my best-lov’d father; Virgil, he
To whom I gave me up for safety: nor,
All, our prime mother lost, avail’d to save
My undew’d cheeks from blur of soiling tears.
“Dante, weep not, that Virgil leaves thee: nay,
Weep thou not yet: behooves thee feel the edge
Of other sword, and thou shalt weep for that.”
—Inferno Canto XXX
Don’t cry for him—I’ll give you something to cry about. To put it another way: Do not cry when you lose the things you love that kept you from God, cry over the things you love that keep you from God. The man with the Ned Flanders mustache was wrong about me, but not because I was not a woman. (For that matter, I’m not a pastor, either.) To say As a woman, approach God thusly or As a man, do not approach God in such-and-such a manner, but in thus-and-so a manner is to put the cart before the horse. Dante approaches Paradise “return’d from the most holy wave, regenerate / If ’en as new plants renew’d with foliage new/Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars,” purged of sinful memories by the river Lethe and restored to memories of virtue by the river Eunoe.
In The Music Man, the mayor’s wife, Eulalie, teaches dance to the leading ladies of the town and can periodically be heard in the background instructing them in a voice that is somehow both unusually deep and delivered in falsetto: “Lovely, ladies, lovely and turn. Take the body with you!” I found that line unutterably hilarious, and often repeat it to myself whenever I’m in a rush to get out the door: “Taaaaake the body with you.” If ultimately the goal is “neither to marry nor be given in marriage, like the angels” (Matt. 22:30), then it may be that the body, and the rules governing the body, and the standards and strictures appertaining to the body, must needs be checked at the gate between the earthly and the celestial, but something must be resurrected, and until then, you’ve got to take the body with you. It may be, after all, that the body is only confiscated and bound with masking tape before being returned from the infirmary, and if you can’t undo the marks left on the cover it’s still legible once you open to the front page.
INTERLUDE XVIII How I Intend to Comport Myself When I Have Abs Someday
When I have abs someday, no one will ever know about it, just a little secret between me and my torso. Unless they find out by accident, like if I happen to be reaching for something above my head in front of a couple of people—maybe I’m reaching for a jar of lentils for a dear friend who can’t reach it but I can, because they’re five foot five and I’m five foot seven and three-quarters inches tall, and I’m the sort of friend who will happily grab a jar of lentils for a dear friend as we prepare a wholesome, simple meal together—and my shirt rides up, and accidentally now a couple of (just a couple, not all of them, I have lots of friends) my casual friends (not my closest friends) see that I have abs, and it’s sort of a moment—not a big one, but definitely a few of them say under their breath, “Did you know that he even had abs?” and “I never would have guessed that he had abs, because he’s so engrossed in his work and really laid-back about body stuff” and “Wow, abs,” and then I’d have gotten whatever I was reaching for (lentils, or another equally filling pulse or legume), and the moment would sort of pass without remark. Probably no one would say anything out loud, because it would be obvious to them I don’t make a big deal out of having abs, so nobody wants to be the one to make a big deal out of it.
But they’ll talk about it among themselves, like maybe when I leave the room to go to the bathroom or, more likely, to check on some bread that I decided to bake last-minute for our wholesome, simple, lentil-based meal, because I make bread often enough that I have a pretty quick recipe memorized (I’m not fussy about bread making, it’s really pretty intuitive for me at this point) and they might even text a friend or two to say, “Did you know that he had abs?”
“I had no idea!” that friend or two might respond. “But you know, now that you mention it, I can totally se
e it.”
And that’ll be the end of the conversation, probably, because they respect my privacy, but it’ll certainly add a new dimension to what my friends think of me, and they’ll be particularly struck by the realization because usually when people get abs you hear about it right away. Just not with me, because having abs doesn’t define me as a person, even though I have abs now.
“Do you think he … knows that he has abs?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Of course he knows!!!” But they’ll wonder. Maybe I haven’t noticed!!! I don’t dress like I know that I have abs, which isn’t to say that I’m a sloppy dresser, just that I don’t dress in a very show-offy way. I don’t dress in a studiously non–show-offy way, either, of course—I’m not one of those guys with abs who goes out of his way to really drive the point home that he doesn’t have to put effort into his appearance. It’s kind of hard to describe, actually, but basically I just manage to fall into this sweet spot, sartorially speaking, where I’m neither trying too hard nor trying too hard to look like I’m not trying too hard. Which is a really nice change of pace for a guy with abs.
When I have abs someday, the photo roll on my phone will be mostly full of sunsets and interesting-looking floral arrangements put together by some designers I know, maybe with a few shots of some of (not all, I have lots) my friends in candid moments. I’ll also call my grandmother a lot, and cut out recipes I think she’ll like from the newspaper and mail them to her, because I keep a few rolls of Forever stamps and a stack of envelopes in my odds-and-ends drawer so I’m always ready to send her something. My living arrangement is kind of characterized by casual anticipation of my own needs and the needs of others, which means that things tend to run pretty smoothly with minimal effort—kind of like my abs.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 18