It was Sienna’s flask.
Nemesis
ANGER IS FUNNY.
It sits snarling in you your whole life just waiting for perfect ironic moments to emerge. Wanna know why I got a Ph.D. in literature? Because in the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Oregon Chang Rae Lee told me my story was “trite.” I had infiltrated the writing workshops as a grad student in literature because I couldn’t stop wanting to write stories after the Kesey thingee. When Chang Rae Lee told me my story and its sentiments were trite, know what I thought? I thought I wish I’d meet you in a dark Eugene alley out the back door of a bar so I could punch your smug face in you little prick.
I’m not saying I’m proud of that. I’m just saying that if the things we really thought showed up on paper we’d all be … way busted.
All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn’t know how to own her own intellect and blames it on men. I knew how to make a sentence hum. But my Kesey credentials didn’t get me very far, I hate to say. Pretty much everyone at U of O who wasn’t in that wild wonderful “class” hated everyone who was, and thus belittled the crap out of us. Punks. Plus our “novel” was a piece of crap so I simply had no literary currency. The story that had drawn such condescending mouth poo from Chang Rae Lee was from the point of view of Caddy from The Sound and the Fury. One of the last things I said to Kesey was how I wanted to write that story — probably every young woman who reads it wants to — so I did, and that’s what I brought into the MFA workshop. And that’s what Chang Rae Lee called “trite.”
As I made my way through literary history as a graduate literature duck I also wrote a story from the point of view of Dora. Joan of Arc. Emma Bovary. Hester Prynne. Helen of Troy. Sade’s mistress. Medusa. Eve. And the statue of liberty. Notice a motif?
In my story, Caddy is in the present. She lives next door to a tard neighbor boyman. Because she is sexually insatiable, and because he both scares her with his too white skin and his too big for his body head and his giant pants bulge and the sounds that come out of him instead of language and his pure physical brute force, she goes over to his house one day and takes her clothes off in front of him.
He bellows that Benjy bellow.
Then he attacks her and fucks her and nearly crushes her.
She loves it. She laughs until she cries and an ambulance comes.
Trite.
So after fantasizing about the dark alley and stomping around and cursing all things Chang Rae Lee that day, I decided to get a Ph.D.
Fuck all y’all “writers.” Woo Hoo.
I took a break from creative writing workshops — though I have to tell you — I positively HAUNTED the halls of the creative writing department. I don’t know why. I’d just find myself there, looking at bulletin boards, seeing what readings were coming up, grabbing random fliers from the office nerds. Twice I walked by a gorgeous tall guy with a ponytail who looked seriously like Marlon Brando but I didn’t talk to him. Writing student.
Sometimes the choices we make come from jealous lame petty places. But they are as real as it gets.
I entered the Ph.D. program. I went on to gloriously immerse myself in Derrida and Lacan and Kristeva and Foucault. In Homi K. Bhabha and Ed Said and Gayatri bad ass Chakravorty Spivak. In Dickinson and Whitman and Plath and Sexton and Adrienne you want some of this Rich and Ai and Eliot and PoundBeckettStoppardDurasFaulknerWoolfJoyce (though he kinda always made me want to piss on his grave) SyngeCortazarBorgesMarquezClariceL’InspecteurHenryMillerAnaissexatiousNinDerekWalcottBertoltBrechtPynchonSilko WintersonDjunaBarnesOscarWildeGertrudethemanSteinFlannerymotherfuckingO’ConnorRichardWrightBaldwinToniMorrisonRayCarverJohnCheeverMaxineHongKingstonSapphireDennisCooperKathyyoumakemefeellikemyskinisbeingsheeredoffAcker — cascades of authors kicking Chang Rae Lee’s scrawny little ass. Take that.
Yeah. Up until he won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1995 and it was his book I was assigned to read. I can’t tell you how great that felt. But what nagged at me no matter how far into the literary intellectual pool I ventured, no matter how well I swam its waters, was the story I had yet to write. Itching my fingers like fire.
Two terms later, I tried again. Graduate fiction writing workshop. This time the story I brought in wasn’t about voiceless women characters from literary history. This time the story was about my life. About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments — how I understood my entire life. In the language — image and fragment and non-linear lyric passages — that seemed most precise. The story I brought in was called “The Chronology of Water.”
Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language.
Chang Rae? Sorry I thought those things. Thanks for pissing me off all those years ago. Beautiful random nemesis.
Love Grenade II
WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere.
I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think or feel anything but MMMMM good.
Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy — hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely there titties. More like M&M S. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn’t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between classes and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we’d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we’d drive back and go to class. Or I would. Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred sex and club dancing.
So when Hannah captured me and my best friend Claire in the hall after our 18th- Century Women Writers seminar by grabbing our wrists and pulling us toward the wall, I already knew it would be something sly. She smiled her sly Hannah smile and whispered, “Wanna go to the coast? I got us a room.”
Claire blinked so blankly her eyes looked like a doll’s, and I think I coughed academically. But I have to admit it. My crotch went messy pretty much that instant.
Listen, you probably think you wouldn’t, but I’m telling you, if Hannah said get in my truck we’re going to the coast, raising her little trickster eyebrow and putting her hand right underneath your breast and against your first couple of ribs, going, I dare you, you’d go.
Women go the See Vue Inn because of the themed rooms. The Secret Garden Suite (private garden). The Crow’s Nest (nautical). The Salish (Native American). Princess and the Pea (weirdly medieval). Mountain Shores (rustica). Far Out West (cowgirl). The Cottage (you get the “house” to yourself).
We had The Cottage.
The little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits — Hannah’s M&M S and Claire’s glorious pendulous globes, smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought — filled with toys.