There is a deeper, Strangelovian logic to such happy holocausts.
—MIKE DAVIS, ECOLOGY OF FEAR: LOS ANGELES AND THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER
Oh, Bride of Frankenstein, I say. I chuckle, then groan about the hideousness of what’s on the Oscars. A grandmother’s sack-skinned head medically scaffolded atop the lithe and taut body of a swimsuit model. Oh, Sophia Loren, what have you done? Raising my hand, I cover the top fifth of the TV, Wite-Outing her face. Blood pushes into my groin.
I have made love to Sophia Loren thousands of times in my dreams. My wife and Courtney glance up from the couch. Ariane grimaces like she’s got a bad taste in her mouth. They look at each other wordlessly, for a half second too long—it is official: I am King Asshole—before turning back to the TV. I sidestep out of the room, a magazine hiding my erection.
The day’s plates are stacked in the sink. On the other side of the wall, Sophia presents the Oscar. My wife and our friend begin talking about plastic surgery and the gendered unfairness of beauty ideals. Both women are dedicated feminists. Courtney is the author of a brilliant book called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection Is Harming Young Women. I stare out the window. Across the street the parking lot lights look like swans frozen in the air. I turn the lights off, close my eyes, and scrub the dishes by feel.
The film that’s winning all the awards is filled with played-out tropes: love and redemption and comeuppance. But it’s other. It’s vibrant. And it’s set in a different country, so it makes people feel doubly good. Who wants to be a millaneeer?!
Oatmeal and banana and polenta are caked on the bowls. My fingernails can’t grind the crust away. Listening to the women talk about the Oscars, I feel a familiar shame pulling at my insides. I laughed, but would I really care? So my Sophia is half-mummified. Put a paper bag over her head, and I’d fuck her. I stand back from the sink and fling the steel pad against the window.
Sophia Scicolone was born in Rome in September 1934. She was forty-three when I was born in 1978 in Iowa. I first saw The Pride and the Passion (1957) as a teenager. In the film, Sophia’s hair always seems to be tousled. The top of her tight shirt is open. Her lips pout. Her eyes are angry and sad and passionate. Fuck you, Frank Sinatra. Eat a dick, Cary Grant. That look meant that she wanted me. From that moment on, even through and past her femme fatale role in Grumpier Old Men, she was my sexual Mr. Potato Head: she looked any way I wanted her to. She didn’t have to touch me. It was better that way.
It was perfect.
But my breath had caught in my throat when she walked onto the Oscars stage. With each step she metamorphosed—left right swish, left right jiggle—changing from the fantasy of a broken thirteen-year-old to an exhibit in a museum of grotesqueries. And I felt like a monster was the most I deserved.
In the dark kitchen, I fondle each thing left on the counter. A pyramid of bowls. The detritus of chips and salsa. Sesame crackers and hummus. Half-finished glasses of Italian soda. I touch whatever’s left in them and bring my fingers to my lips.
Pile the years I’ve been a miscreant, the years I’ve mistreated women, on one side of a seesaw and the time I’ve known how to love fully on the other, and the sumo wrestler of my malice would have one end of the seesaw buried in the ground. At the opposite end the small boy of my love would be crying in the air.
I didn’t have sex without being inebriated until I was nineteen. I celebrated my twenty-first birthday at the University of Northern Iowa—hundreds of miles from my girlfriend—and somewhere in that night’s snippets of memory is a faceless woman in the bathroom of a bar. Sometime later that evening a bedroom door closes, vanishing all my partying friends, and a sixteen-year-old girl and I rip the clothes off each other. And still later, sometime after the fight in the street, after Jonny jumps off the balcony, that same girl and I wrestle into the bedroom again.
I’m positive I’ve done things in blackouts that in another life would have me waking in handcuffs. In a hotel bar, my first year of graduate school, I kissed a man, but refused another’s plea to give me a blow job. I’ve been tossed onto sidewalks in front of bars and looked up just as bouncers thwacked my own cane against my skull. I’ve been jumped in an alley because I groped someone’s girlfriend on the dance floor. As I woke in a pile of trash, a mask of blood on my face, my first thought was about what lie I was going to tell my girlfriend. To get sympathy. To get some love.
Before turning twenty-six, I cheated on every woman I was with.
And all those years, I hated myself the morning after. I spent my sober hours manic, afraid and teeming with rage.
In the dim room where I was repeatedly molested, there was a knife on the bed.
As I write this today, my hands tremble. My chest feels filled with wasps.
In 2006 almost seventy-eight thousand children were reported traumatized. According to Darkness to Light, an organization dedicated to “confronting child sexual abuse with courage,” one in six boys is sexually abused before turning eighteen. These boys are more prone to sickness, posttraumatic stress disorder, and depression; are 70 to 80 percent more likely to be addicts and/or boozers; and often have suicidal thoughts and/or attempt suicide. These boys are more likely to violently victimize others. When the sexually abused boy reaches adulthood, he is more likely to become a perpetrator of felony assault, domestic violence, and a litany of other crimes.
When I was a boy, my urge to hurt myself seemed inexplicable. Lightning spiderwebbing down from a blue sky. Caresses were not pleasurable. They were painful, unnerving. But in my all-American world, you had to be tough. You had to soldier on grimly even if the land you walked was flecked with your own blood.
So what was the mal-American boy who yearned to be the all-American boy to do?
I was violent. And though fucking further barbwired my insides, I tried to get as much ass as I could. For years the only way to go on was by erasing myself. To drag myself forward I filled my bleary nights with as much flesh as possible.
In his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Peter A. Levine writes that “learning to work with the felt sense may be challenging. Part of the dynamic of trauma is that it cuts us off from our internal experience as a way of protecting our organisms from sensations and emotions that could be overwhelming.”
In my struggles to recalibrate my “felt sense”—what, without thinking, I know through what my body feels—I’ve cut and punched myself. I’ve lifted weights, starved myself. Imagined my own death and, for years, wanted violence to orbit around me.
I had to get fucked up to feel something.
Anything at all.
When the pendulum swung to the other side of my new “felt sense,” TV commercials made me weep. Feverish, I’d lie in bed. All day. Sleepless, all night. Bus rides gave me panic attacks. I’d stare at the cobwebbed ceiling of my apartment, paralyzed, depressed, because it was all too much. I could feel every single word I heard. Every heartbeat around me. Branches snapping and singing birds. Blades of grass whispering.
Flushed, I half listen to what’s happening in the living room. I think about how much I love my beautiful wife. But I’m shivering. My reaction to Sophia is rooted in a part of me that most days I pretend is gone. The part of me that is torn and shaken, rattled and scarred. It is the thing locked in the attic. It is one of my multitudes. The worry that one day I’ll punch someone I love or find myself on To Catch a Predator.
For a decade, when I squinted, I’d see them both. The sumo wrestler. The little boy. Frozen in the blur of my eyelashes.
No matter what antidepressants I’m on, no matter how many times a week I get my head shrunk, I’m not sure that the fear and darkness will ever recede. Not fully.
But a few years ago that still life behind my eyes, boy trapped in the air by pain and anger, slowly began to change. The little boy slid down the seesaw and began walking toward the giant man. He wrapped his frail arms around the enormous belly.
It is unquenchable, this love.
Done with the dishes, the Oscars blaring on, I flick through songs on my iPod. What has been done to me, what I’ve done, will never not have happened—it will never go away. It is an extra rib, a heart valve always about to fail. Here, where I love the dark joy that bubbles in me when I listen to 50 Cent’s “Heat.” “It’s a fact, homie—you go against me you’re fucked.”
“Going outside,” I singsong to the women in the living room. “Filling the feeders. Love you.”
I jump down the back steps, spilling birdseed over the walkway. The night sky throbs. Filled with beacons and warning lights and high-power tension lines. Day or night, it’s always there. The stars are razor edged tonight. Sharpened by the torque inside me. Done pouring sunflower seeds into the plastic tubes, I crumple the bag and toss it on the porch. Through the picture window I watch the women on the couch, laughing and talking about Beyoncé’s song, Penélope’s kiss.
The gas station lights blink off down the street. A teenager sprints through the parking lot, pushing and pushing and pushing a shopping cart until he’s going so fast his hair pulls back from his head like a black flame. He shouts, then hops on the clattering cart as it sails into the flickering shadows.