vizard: in depreciatory use: a face or countenance suggestive of a mask
For example: “Addicts and cannibals wear vizards, mingling among the living, unrecognized, until it’s too late.”
I sit at a Formica table in Luby’s Cafeteria, a glass of ice water before me. I wonder how many calories are contained in each opaque cube. Maybe more than in clear water. I stir it with a spoon. Maybe the ice will melt quicker even in the frigid air-conditioning, freezing my skin—the epidermis, the dermis, the hypodermis—in another hot Atlanta summer.
Paul, with a plate of roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, and string beans, sits across from me. I try to avoid looking at his dinner. The scents from the chafing dishes in the self-serve line—which must be, I’m convinced, upwards of five miles long—seem to slip down my throat as if I’m swallowing the cafeteria whole. Melted sugar. Fried fat. Overcooked vegetables. Undercooked meat. I imagine blood seeping over the rim of carving boards and trailing across the linoleum floor like evidence at a murder scene.
I’ve never met Paul before. He’s interviewing me for my first 12-Step group of Sex Addicts Anonymous. To be admitted into the private inner sanctum of recovery, I must be deemed a safe (enough) person.
I want to be accepted; I want to be rejected.
To prove I am safe, that I will not attempt to seduce men who attend the meetings, I wear short-short denims, threads dangling from the hacked-off hems. I wear a too-tight tank top. Earlier, dressing, I believed these careless clothes to be asexual. How could such raggedy garments be misconstrued as seductive regardless of shortness or tightness? These aren’t, after all, the shimmery glimmery clothes I wear to meet men in bars.
More of my skin shows than not. Especially in the fluorescent glare of Luby’s. As if my body lies on a slab awaiting an autopsy. Nothing, however, would be found in my pristine stomach. Nothing would be found inside me at all.
I’ve lost so much weight my wedding ring slips up and down over my knuckle.
Paul wears a pressed shirt and khakis. He carves his beef into huge chunks and stabs it with his fork. Or that’s what it looks like. Maybe, in reality, he’s only cutting food into normal-sized bites. Still. Meat slides between his lips. His teeth are stained malarial yellow. From tobacco? Coffee? Tea? I wonder, if I licked them, would the stain get better or worse?
“When was the last time you acted out?” Paul asks. He already told me he hasn’t had compulsive or emotionally unhealthy sex for over four years.
“Four weeks,” I lie.
Last night.
He chews slowly. He watches me, unblinking. I know he knows I’m lying. I glance at the water now afraid even to drink. With one glass I’ll feel bloated. Paul won’t think I’m sexy with a distended stomach. I’ve been living on carrot strips and potato chips. The chips don’t contain preservatives. Which must mean they have fewer calories. Food with less of anything in it is better than food with actual content. With food: less is more. With sex: more is less.
Earlier, as we pushed our trays along the serving line, mine remained empty. Paul asked why I wasn’t hungry. I told him I’d already eaten. I used the word “already” loosely, open to interpretation, since I haven’t eaten a full, regular meal in weeks. I don’t know how to convey that if I refrain from eating or drinking, my body will evaporate. This is my own personal First Step. No body = no sex with dangerous men = no addiction.
Or no body = no disease. No body part to become infected, emotionally and/or physically. This, to me, is a reasonable plan for recovery. I don’t consider starvation. Or, ironically, death.
“So you have an eating disorder, too.” Paul nods at my water.
Busted.
“Most addicts are cross-addicted,” he adds.
At the thought I’ll have to attend two 12-Step groups, not just one, a tremor ripples my abdomen. I would rather hike the Gobi desert barefoot in a hair-blouse than attend two groups.
Or am I the desert? My heart feels dry, empty, desolate. I don’t even know where the Gobi is. I want to ask Paul but, given the context, that might not make a good impression. Maybe he’ll think I’m addicted to deserts.
I shake my head. I’m too exhausted even to lie about eating/not eating. He tells me that having an addictive personality is like that Three Stooges routine where one of the Stooges pushes in one dresser drawer only to have another drawer pop out. Meaning: You get one addiction under control and another surfaces.
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. I want to explain to Paul that an addict is more like the Milwaukee serial killer than the Three Stooges. I don’t. I’m enough in my right mind to know that my obsession with Dahmer is not a constructive topic of conversation.
But isn’t cannibalism the ultimate eating disorder? If so, compared to Dahmer—and those heads he stored in freezers—mine is surely small potatoes, nothing to fret about. I don’t consider that my own body is consuming itself.
Last night I picked up a man in a bar and went to the Thunderbird Motel. I barely remember the man’s face. I barely remember the sex. Men, sex . . . all have become indistinguishable. I stared at the motel ceiling, flecks of red paint mixed with white. Like sprinkles on vanilla ice cream. Or blood. I think the man hit me. Did he hit me? It must have been a mistake, or part of the sex. I awoke this morning, back in my bed at home, with a bruised smudge under my left eye. A souvenir. A memento. Having a great time! Wish you were here! I covered it with makeup. Only a lavender tint is visible. If Paul notices, he doesn’t say. And my husband—husband #2—thank my Higher Power, is away on a research project for the summer.
I’m meeting Paul only because my therapist suggested (okay, insisted) I attend a 12-Step group. He won’t see me individually if I continue to show up at his office “drunk” after acting out with a man—or hungover on men, sex, starvation—my personal drugs of choice. My therapist warned me I’m not emotionally strong enough—no addict is strong enough—to achieve sexual sobriety without the power of the group.
After Paul finishes eating, we head to the parking lot. Heat rises from asphalt while late-afternoon sunlight presses down on my head. My body is too frail to withstand the onslaught of weather. Any kind of weather. The inside of my un-air-conditioned VW bug steams. I roll down the windows and crank the engine.
I follow Paul’s bright red Chevy toward the 12-Step meeting. I want to lose him in traffic. I don’t want to lose him. If I lose him, I’ll really only lose myself. Besides I have no place else to go. Or so the single healthy cell in my brain tells me. At any rate, the red of Paul’s car is subtle as an ambulance’s flashing lights. Fitting: I am, after all, my own one-woman emergency.
A couple of dozen people crowd into a hospital’s activities room. I’m so thin, slim as a shadow, that I hide behind Paul as we enter. No one will see me. I find a seat in the back. Again the air-conditioning is too cold. Again I shiver. I should have brought a sweater, but I don’t want to appear bulky as if I have actual meat on my bones. Even goosebumps on my bare arms swell the outline of my emaciated body.
Worse: Across the room, on a table, is a massive chocolate cake. “Congratulations Tom! 5 Years Sober” is written in neon-pink icing. I’m guessing if I ate the entire cake I’d consume 1,463,705 calories. Conservatively.
I also imagine if I eat a tiny piece, if I even lick a clean plastic fork, my stomach will convulse. The mere scent of sugar makes me dizzy, my muscles tight. I wonder what Jeffrey Dahmer ate for dessert. Is one body part sweeter than others?
Paul stands to read the 12 Steps. I hear the words but don’t know how they apply to me. Instead, I imagine unbuttoning his shirt. In reality I’m not the least attracted to him, to say nothing of the fact that if I proposition him I’ll be thrown out of the meeting. But how else to see a man? Are men actually human? Actually people? Or merely objects?
I glance at the rough, industrial-strength carpeting. I imagine Paul and me having rough, industrial-strength sex.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to admit anything. I have the right to remain silent.
Jeffrey Dahmer is a power greater than myself. I think about how many people he seduced, kidnapped, drugged, killed, grilled, steamed, fried, poached, broiled, fileted, baked, boiled, ate. I imagine how many body parts he froze to be defrosted later for midnight snacks.
At home my own freezer is empty. One sack of carrots wilts in the vegetable bin, and two bags of preservative-free potato chips stuff the cupboard.
My name is Tommy, and I’m a sex addict . . .
Hi, Tommy!
My name is Cheryl, and I’m a sex addict . . .
Hi, Cheryl!
The urgency or desperation of all the people in the room coalesces, no, coagulates. Although no one pays me any attention, still, it feels as if arms grab at me as if I’m an extra in the movie Night of the Living Dead. Or maybe it seems as if everyone here is after my soul, more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I want to tell them: All you’ll find is an empty wound. A misplaced heart.
Or, to quote Bride of Frankenstein: “This heart’s no good. I must have another.”
Dear Jeffrey Dahmer,
Who wounded you: your mom? Dad? Relative? I can relate, believe me. My dad was his own special breed of familial cannibal, a predator who preyed on his own daughter, even though that seems like a million years ago. Or maybe it feels like yesterday. Anyway, I know where you’re coming from: Do unto others, right? And because of the darkness in my father, of course I was attracted to the darkness of boardwalks, didn’t know how to take care of myself, was drawn to the confusion of love/sex with Dr. Blue Convertible. To say nothing of The Poet. So this is where we end up, right? I just wish you’d attended a 12-Step group before you were arrested.
My name is Jeffrey, and I’m a cannibal.
Hi, Jeffrey!
Oh, well, it’s all just blood over the damned at this point, so to speak, whether we speak or not.
You May Already Be a Winner!
Last month I had a vision: I knew, with 100 percent certainty, absolutely, without a doubt, that the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol van would stop at my house on June 30. Balloons! Flowers! Champagne! A big cardboard check for ten million dollars! I’d filled out the contact card with my name and address, so they’d easily find me. On the card was my own personal entry number. I did everything right. Played by the rules for once.
No purchase necessary.
I was convinced, nevertheless, magazine purchases would increase my chances. I randomly selected colorful stickers of magazine covers, licked the glue on the backs (how many calories?), and stuck them on entry slips: Newsweek, Prevention, U. S. News and World Report, Allure.
I was allured by the caption “You Won”! I ignored the small type below claiming “if you return your entry form and it displays the winning number.” If. I refused to consider any ifs, ands, or buts. I believed I would win the sweepstakes as completely and compulsively as I believed that sex with dangerous men equals love . . . as fervently as I believed that ice water is a well-balanced meal.
How difficult to distinguish the difference between sex and love. Win or lose. What’s real. What’s fake.
I waited by the door all day on June 30 watching for the Prize Patrol.
In the end whatever prize you win, is you.
I feel faint. Just the sight of the cake is emetic. I bend over, palms on either side of my face. I will not speak. I will not say my name is . . . What is the name of this person hunching into herself?
Maybe, however, a moral inventory would reveal I am not an addict. Maybe my obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer is completely normal. Maybe I will still win the sweepstakes.
Cheryl is saying she had sex with three men last night. She feels like a slut. A whore. She wears a tan linen skirt and a white frilly blouse. She looks as if she just took her kids to school. She looks as if she just returned home from the grocery store. She doesn’t look like a sex addict. No one here does.
Well, maybe I do.
Dear Jeffrey Dahmer,
You don’t know me. But I want to tell you all about . . .
Dear Jeffrey Dahmer,
I saw a photo of you in your orange jumpsuit. Orange is not a good color for you. Once I saw a picture of you when you were a little boy. You wore a blue shirt. Do you remember it? I wonder what happened to it. What happened to you? At what point in your life did someone leave you behind? Is this about abandonment? For you? For me?
We must be ready to have our defects removed like a diseased organ, an appendix, say, or a heart.
Instead of shortcomings maybe I suffer from a version of locked-in syndrome—which makes people uncommunicative while in their own bodies—mutely looking out. They aren’t able to speak or express themselves.
I feel as if the real “me” is locked inside an addict. How can I say my name is . . . when I can’t speak? Or when I no longer know my real name? Or I know it, but it no longer describes me. I am no longer me. My body or my soul has been snatched. Or devoured.
Dear Jeffrey Dahmer,
Do you feel as if the real you is locked inside the body of a cannibal? Did you first gnaw on yourself like an appetizer then, famished, set the table with plates, knives, forks before starting on others for the entrée?
Last month I made a list of Jeffrey Dahmer’s 17 victims. I copied names on a yellow legal pad. I considered each person’s body parts: chewed, hacked, frozen, sealed in containers of brine. How long did it take him to polish off an arm, a leg, a kidney, a lung?
I once tried to list all the men with whom I had sex. My Lucky Number 17 was a guy who wore bifocals. I wondered if he saw two of me until he removed them and placed them on the nightstand. Is there a sober me? Or only an addict me? I had an irrational desire to smash his glasses, although I didn’t.
I glance around the room. All these strangers. I don’t know anyone. No one knows me. It’s impossible to know anyone. Ever. It’s impossible to know me. Yet these people want me to confess my darkest secrets, a darkness that freezes my spine. Safer to have sex with men who don’t want to know me. Kissing lips that feel skinless. Pressed hard against a mattress by an anonymous body. Stumbling out of motel rooms feeling more weightless than when I entered.
To whom or what should I make amends:
To all the motel rooms I abandoned. To all the canned goods I never bought or bought and let expire. I’m sorry about my cat’s empty food bowl. Sorry for the dead plant in its macramé hanger. Sorry for my smudged makeup that at the beginning of the evening—before the bar, before the motel—looked so pretty. I’m sorry about underwear abandoned in sheets in men’s apartments. Ditto for all the lost buttons. Apologies to each sock that lost, due to my own negligence, its mate. I’m sorry I’d rather flirt with the man behind the meat counter in the grocery store than eat beef sliced off cows that I might have passed in a pasture two days ago. I’m really, really sorry about the cows—what happens to them—whether I flirt with the butcher or not.
Dear Jeffrey Dahmer,
I regret I didn’t meet you before you were arrested. I imagine you wandering those midnight Milwaukee streets. You pause at a stop sign spying a young man. Could I have stopped you? Could you have stopped me? Power is in the group, after all.
Or maybe nothing, no one, could have saved you.
Sure, you were abandoned one way or another as a child. But what about your victims? You ate them because you were afraid they’d leave you. Paradoxically, they did—because you ate them.
And you abandoned yourself.
Have I abandoned myself? I thought my parents, my sister, the white stallion in the West Indies, my piano, the Poet, the doctor in the blue convertible—all of them—abandoned me. And maybe they did. But now I’ve lost myself, my true self, to this addiction . . . addiction, a form of suicide, another diagnosis for death.
Jeff, as we make amends to others, do we also make amends to ourselves?
A woman with curly hair touches my shoulder. A warm finger against cold skin. I’m surprised I feel it. I’m scared I feel it. It means I’m still alive. She tells me her name. I immediately forget it. She says she’d like to be my sponsor. She hands me a paper plate with a slice of cake.
At first, convinced I really am suffering from locked-in syndrome, I only blink my eyes. As her warm finger continues to press my shoulder, I’m able to shake my head. No, I don’t want a sponsor. No, I don’t want cake. No, I don’t want . . .
“The first time is tough,” she says. She sits beside me. “My first meeting I left here and had sex in, like, twenty minutes.”
I nod my head.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “The worst thing is to feel you’re going through this all alone.” She forks a tiny piece of cake and holds it toward me. “Eat something,” she says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Okay, Jeffrey Dahmer is not exactly god but also not exactly human. He pushed addiction to the nth degree and beyond. He stalked straight out of Normal, left it behind, and entered his own State of Being with his own merciless theology.
He no longer cared.
He never made amends.
He left bones in attics and clumps of hair in basements. It didn’t/doesn’t matter to him. Nothing mattered or matters. Jeffrey Dahmer: How did you arrive at a place of being where you ate someone’s heart for dinner and murdered again simply for a second helping?
“Nothing,” I say, scared I may have said Dahmer’s name out loud. Not a good First or Eleventh Step to recovery, I suspect.
I walk out of the room, out of the hospital. I stand in the parking lot. The heat of day still steams from asphalt. I could return to the meeting. I could get sober. And I will. But not now. Not yet. I wonder how many times, if ever, Jeffrey Dahmer said that to himself.
I sit on the bumper of my VW. The metal beneath my legs warms my air-conditioned skin. If I drive to Milwaukee, would I be allowed into the jail to see Jeffrey Dahmer? I could bring him a hamburger. If I fed him a bite, slipped it between his lips, scented with my skin, would he swallow it? Would he eat just the hamburger and leave my fingertips intact?
My forefinger feels sticky from a smudge of cake icing. I want to wipe it on my shorts. I want to taste it. I want to do both. I’m afraid to move. I am paralyzed as if any decision, thought, action will be wrong. If I return to the 12-Step meeting, I could get the phone number of the curly-haired woman who wants to be my sponsor. I could drive to a bar and pick up a man. I could bring him to the Thunderbird Motel, its neon sign, a tomahawk, chopping night to shreds. I could drive home.
I press the icing against my mouth. My stomach rumbles with desire.
Of course I won’t visit Jeffrey Dahmer in jail. He is, after all, only, merely, another obsession or distraction in order for me to ignore more pressing issues: ironically, the reasons I fear death, as well as the state of my life.
The aftereffects, like a sonic boom, of the man under the boardwalk.
That I gave birth to something inhuman. Un-human. Too.
Dahmer once said he was a serial killer because he had to keep repeating the pattern. The act of seducing, killing, eating was never as satisfying or perfect as the fantasy of the act in his head.
He never found what he was looking for.
Jeff . . .
My actual encounters of acting out with men are never as perfect as the fantasy images, either. That’s why I, too, am a serial seducer. More: I keep thinking, hoping, I’ll find love (life) in the Thunderbird Motel even though I never do.
Jeffrey, I know where you’re coming from, believe me.
So little separates us. A heart here. A kidney there. A liver in the oven. But, one way or another, none of those men we seduce survive long enough for true love to nourish us.
Are our wounds, all the abandonments, so deep they—or we—are comatose? Emotionally, physically, spiritually.
Cars stream along Cobb Parkway, headlights, taillights, sweeping into a world of the living. For now I’m free in the night. A warm drizzle dampens the street. I get in my car. I turn on the windshield wipers. I follow the taillights of the car ahead of me, mindlessly, as if it’s my Higher Power. It will lead me to Heaven or maybe to a home where I don’t live.
The wipers slash back and forth.
I lose my way in the city. I’m on an unknown street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Most of the houses are dark. If I ring someone’s doorbell would they let me in or would they lock their doors and windows, dial 911, after one fleeting glance at this emaciated monster?
But no I’m not, after all, the Bride of Dahmer.
At the end of the day—or more likely the night—I understand the difference between fantasy and reality, obsession and normal thought. I know I have only this one heart. Tomorrow or the next day or the following day at the latest, I will return to the 12-Step group. I will offer up my irreplaceable, no-good heart for repair.