Luckily, my outlaw period ended early. During that same freshman year in Canada, I hitchhiked across the border with a boy who taped six capsules of speed to his arm. How glamorous his long arm seemed when he rolled down his shirtsleeve and donned the leather jacket into whose pocket he’d forgotten to put his student visa. This was a boy who occupied a beauty tier that was at least one tier above my own beauty tier, and I thought my being as daring as he was would eliminate our visual discrepancy.
What I discovered from sweating out two hours at the inspection booth was that Thrill in general had outgrown me — it had become too large to inhabit my body without wearing it out. Plus a terrible disease (a disease of the nerves!) eventually took over as my life’s master narrative. Though we were not strip-searched (allowed, instead, to return to the routine of our Monday-morning classes), I knew my life of crime was over.
Now that I’m feeble, I have the habit of revisiting it, if only through the lies that memory tells me as I sit here. From now on, I’ll not easily be offered the opportunity to be bad. Or maybe the problem is that now I am too easily offered — forced to partake in! — the outlaw rituals of my youth. Drugs: I have many, lined up in the cabinet. Slothfulness comes easy to me, in my stony daze (800 mg gabapentin/4 times a day). My life has become not just tame, it transpires now almost without event, save for the drama of an accelerated physical decline. This physical dilapidation only makes the outlaw more cherished, seeing as she is so improbable. How could I rob a bank? Could I make my getaway in my rusted minivan? Every once in a while, I’ll read in the paper about someone mounting this kind of doomed venture, and I can’t help rooting for that old coot — it never seems to be a her — rolling away from the bank in a wheelchair while the ink-pack hidden in the money explodes.
Finally, if I may cut back to the movie, we see how a bald statement of the myth becomes the very thing that jump-starts it, which happens early on, when Warren Beatty delivers his famous line to a dirt farmer who’s gone belly up: “We rob banks.” And so they have to go ahead and do this, to align the line with a life lived in accordance to its mythic promise.
The American female poets who’ve written The Famous Lines have lived lives equal to the great singularity of the lines, as if the autobiographical myth were a rocket booster for propelling the poet into history. The poet writes: My life had stood a loaded gun and becomes the recluse who will not let the doctor examine her when she is dying — he may only watch her pass back and forth across a doorway. Or she writes: I eat men like air and turns on the oven’s gas. (The art of losing isn’t hard to master also comes to mind, a line written by a poet impersonating a normal woman who rejected the grand autobiographical myth.)
As I sift both my brain and my Norton Anthology for such examples, I realize that we have not had enough years of female poets in this country to have a big stockpile of such lines yet. I mean the kind of lines that contain a tinge of infamy.
*This poem was made with the help of Kim Addonizio, Stephanie Brown, Denise Duhamel, Nancy Eimers, Amy Gerstler, Lisa Glatt, Lynda Hull, Dorianne Laux, Lisa Lewis, Suzanne Paola, Belle Waring, and Susan Yuzna. These poets share some similar subject matter though their syntax and diction, of course, vary.
Sick Fuck
I began this by asking Jim if he’d mind being included in something I was planning to write about sex.
“No one wants to read about sex,” he said.
“Everyone wants to read about sex!”
“Not about you having sex.”
Then I had to admit he had a point. Ungrammatical as his response was.
Not about me, okay, there is nothing singular about me, my contortions are conventional — except that the puppet strings of my nerves have grown corroded with scar tissue. From a subjective perspective, this feels much as it sounds: my legs feel like the antennae of a TV tuned to a channel where no signal is coming in, and the static fuzz is humming loud. They’ve also become spastic, lock-kneed at odd moments, my feet like those of Barbie, ready for the high-heeled shoe.
It is not an appealing picture. But if I am going to write about my sex life, you should get a good look, especially at the segue from my legs to waist, where my body starts getting strange. I have had a machine implanted on my belly: it delivers drugs to my spine via a tube. The tube runs under my skin, and I can’t feel it with my fingers except where it bends to enter one of the interstices of my vertebrae. The bend makes a spongy bubble in my back’s lumbar curve, and when I first discovered this rubbery spot I could not keep from poking it.
The machine is about the size of a tuna can. Before it was implanted, the surgeon showed me how it looked: gleaming and pseudoliquidly silver, like my high-school track team’s stopwatch. Its top side is flattened, which creates a point on either side of that flat spot where the metal feels to be just one cell-layer away from breaking through my skin. The surgeon whom even Jim calls Doctor Dreamboat (tall, handsome, flies plane, etc.) made a pocket under my skin and slipped the can into it like a large item zipped into a small coin purse, so that now it rests just forward of the wingbone on my right hip. A three inch scar runs above it, and because the incision did not close properly there is a dry purple lozenge of scar tissue at the center of the slice, where the incision puckers in, just above the place where the device’s arc is flattened.
When I volunteer to show off the machine, men in particular usually turn down the opportunity, though it’s a party trick in which I take some glee — if the body has to be defiled, one might as well spread the discomfort around a little. Only after the operation was I struck by the lightning bolt of sexual implications, having changed my frontal view forever. But this is how time iterates itself for everyone, I know, I know, by hacking us to bits — the breast removed, the kidney taken. This is the storyboard of the modern body. Or we are remodeled with added bits, with titanium under our skin or inside our arteries.
The pump and its scar fit exactly in the palm of my hand, with my thumb resting on the flattened spot. When I am trying to give an erotic purpose to my nakedness and do not have an appropriate piece of drapery, I leave my hand there like Napoleon with his wrist curled into a pocket.
Even though the disappearance of one’s young body is a tired lament, it is especially galling to me not only because of how I once worshipped at the temple of physical fitness, but also because of the extremity of my body’s being sacked. When I asked Jim the other day how he could stand making love to such a freak, he said: “That’s what eyelids are for.” (Of course, the word freak is somewhat confrontational, somewhat melodramatic in its assessment of the body, and in slang usage it also refers to a person who is willing to defy sexual convention. Which is another form of aggrandizement, this defiant persona used to fill a vacuum caused by the body’s losses.)
So we keep our eyes shut, though actually the dropped lid was always my preference — I never wanted to see the face that makes the cry that poet Louise Glück calls “the low, humiliating / premise of union.” Before her, Charles Baudelaire elaborated in prose, and at greater length, on the subject: