Locker room confidential

Well, that was super fun.

The black, bleak, near-despair mood that dragged me toward the abyss last week is not a new thing for me.  In the past, these episodes were sporadic, and few enough and far-between enough that I could just live with them.  They were like pests, like annoying little mosquitoes that buzzed around every so often.  The bites were unpleasant, but the itching was only temporary.

Last week, however, was a whole 'nother thing.  It was darker and bleaker and lasted much longer than usual, until I thought that I'd fallen into a pit that would become my new home.  And then all of a sudden, it was over, and I'm pretty much myself again.

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So enough of that.

I can't vote for him, but now I quote him all the time.  I'm as appalled (though not surprised) as anyone about Donald Trump's now-infamous locker-room bus ride, but "move on (blank) like a bitch" has become my favorite new expression.  If there's a hamper full of dirty clothes, then I'm going to move on that laundry like a bitch.  If it's Monday morning and there's work piled up on my desk...well, you get the idea.  I can go all day.


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I just finished reading Domenica Ruta's With or Without You.  I love to read memoirs.  I'm not sure why, but other people's addictions or depression or suffering of any sort are riveting, even glamorous.  I couldn't write a memoir.  First of all, I'd lose interest in the subject no more than three paragraphs in; secondly, I just don't want to share so much of myself.  I like to think that this is because I don't want to hurt anyone, and I suppose that's partly true.  Really, though, I just don't have the nerve.  There are so many things that I just don't want to talk about, ever, and those are exactly the things that would make for interesting literary suffering.  I guess I'll stick to blogging.

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So, for example, if I were to write a memoir, I might want to include something that happened when I was ten. At that time, I lived with my family on a narrow one-sided street of brick rowhouses in Philadelphia.  One-sided, because the street was a cross street between two steep hills, and just below our street was a sheer drop to a parking lot on Terrace Street, a block away.  Our side of the street was separated from the drop to the parking lot by a high brick wall that ran almost the length of the other side of the street.  My aunts' and uncles' (yes, more than one aunt and uncle) house was the only house on that side of the street, at the end of the wall. The Polish Falcons (look it up) was at the other end of the brick wall.

One summer evening, I was at the Falcons' end of the street, hitting a tennis ball against the wall.  I was the only child in the neighborhood who liked tennis, and so I often played by myself, just lobbing the ball back and forth against the wall.  When a car would turn onto the street (a rare occurrence), I'd step on to the sidewalk to allow it to pass.  The driver of this particular car said "excuse me, Miss?" and when I turned around, he waved me toward him.  I was ten, and it wouldn't have occurred to me not to obey a grown-up's summons.  "Can you tell me where (a street, I think, but I can't remember.  I also can't remember what color or make the car was.  See?  I'd be terrible at memoir-writing) is?"

The man was naked from the waist down, and he began to masturbate as soon as he noticed my shocked reaction to the first adult penis I'd ever seen.  I looked away, and saw that my parents and my aunts and uncles were outside on the porch (theirs was the only house on the street that had a porch, and most of the neighborhood congregated there on nice summer nights), and all of them were looking down the street to see who I was talking to.  The man noticed them too; he threw the car into reverse and sped away, just as my parents and aunts and uncles started running down the street toward me.

I don't remember anyone asking me exactly what happened.  They all seemed to know.  They hustled me up the street to the house, and a few minutes later, a uniformed police officer was asking me what the man looked like, and what kind of shirt he was wearing, and what did I remember about his car.  No one asked me what he did or said; just as well, as I'd have been far too embarrassed to describe or repeat what I'd seen and heard.  I never saw the man again, and I never heard another word about it.

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Or, maybe I'd write about something else, much more frightening, that happened to me when I was 12.  I was walking home from somewhere (the library, maybe) with my sister, who was 11 at the time.  We heard running footsteps behind us, and although I heard running footsteps behind me and in front of me all the time, I was scared this time.  And rightly so, as it turned out.  A young man, or maybe just a teenage boy, grabbed me from behind, thrust his hand between my legs, and roughly fondled me.  "Hey," he whispered, licking my ear.  "Can I fuck you?"

I'd heard that word before, but not used as a verb.  After a minute (probably less), he shoved me away and ran off, almost as fast as he'd grabbed me in the first place. Maybe he hadn't noticed my sister at first, and then all of a sudden realized that he couldn't stop her from running for help while he raped me.  Or maybe he hadn't planned to rape me at all; maybe he just liked to scare little girls.  My sister and I ran home.  I didn't cry, and she didn't ask me if I was OK.  Not because she didn't care, but because neither of us were prepared to accept that what had just happened to me, and what she had just seen and heard, was actually real.  We never told anyone about it, and we have never spoken about it.

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Or maybe I'd write about the time when someone actually did rape me.  In the middle of the night.  In my own apartment, where I'd been asleep at 3 in the morning, but then a man whom I'd never seen before was sitting on top of me, and one of his dirty hands was covering my mouth, and the other one was holding a knife that he'd taken out of my kitchen drawer against my throat, and then I wasn't asleep anymore.  This time, I had to tell lots of people what happened, in detail and at considerable length.  The man was arrested two days later.  He confessed, and so I didn't have to testify at a trial.  I went to his sentencing hearing and watched the bailiffs take him away in shackles to serve his 25-year prison sentence.  He has about 6 more years to go.  Time flies.

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These things all happened, but long ago.  If I were to tell about them now, how would people react?  Would my timing be considered suspicious?  Would people ask me why I'm coming out of the woodwork now, all of a sudden, after all this time?  Or would these stories only be suspect if the man who exposed himself to a child, or the one who grabbed a young girl and molested her on the street, or the one who violently raped a woman in the middle of the night, were later to become famous?  Would I be a victim still, or just another opportunist, another delusional woman seeking attention at the expense of a powerful man?

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I wonder sometimes if the depressive episodes (I wish I could find some memoir-like way to make them evocative or even funny) have anything to do with the sexual assaults.  Who knows?  I think that genetics are just as much to blame.  Meanwhile, I'll still joke about Donald Trump, but I believe every single one of the women who say that he touched them or grabbed them or kissed them when they didn't want to be kissed.  And absent a brilliant write-in idea, I'll probably end up reluctantly voting for Hillary Clinton, but I also believe all of the women who say that Bill Clinton raped them, or molested them, or harassed them.  They don't have to explain why they're telling their stories now, after all this time.  They don't need a reason.  If something happened to you, you can talk about it or not.  You can keep it to yourself if you want to. You can call the cops; or you can write about it in a beautiful, moving, hilarious memoir; or you can tell one friend and make her swear not to tell anyone; or you can call up CNN and get a fucking camera crew in your living room.  You can do any or all of that the next day, or a week later, or 18 years and some odd months later.

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It's Sunday night, and the usual post-dinner clean-up awaits.  I'm about to move on that kitchen like a bitch.

If you can't say anything nice, then get a blog

I can't do anything now.  I can't write, I can't think, I can't sleep.  Those are comma splices, and I just don't care.  What am I supposed to do, replace them with semicolons?  Add conjunctions?  No.  You're smart people, all three of you who read this drivel.  You'll figure out what I mean; and you'll know, of course, that I know that a comma splice is bad, because I just called myself out.  

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I have to cook dinner soon.  It feels like I just cleaned up from lunch.  I'll reread this post.  Maybe it will prompt an attitude adjustment.  

Didn't work.  I still don't want to cook.  I don't even want to eat. 

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This is temporary, right?  It always passes.  Today, it doesn't feel like it's going to pass. 

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I have a house full of people, just when I need a house full of no people, so that I can have five minutes of silence and privacy, so that I can just cry and get the hell over this.  Sometimes it's nice to have the house where all of the kids gather.  Today is not one of those days.  

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Well, that was a ray of sunshine, wasn't it?  Stop by again; I can tell you all about my second bout with PPD.  At least my punctuation is improving.