“Howard Jones?” I’d asked, incredulous. “I wish.”
No matter how many times I responded no, I hadn’t slept with him or him or him, or anyone for that matter, he continued to ask me. I either did not get it, or didn’t want to get it. A journal entry from that time validates both assumptions:
Ian came over yesterday. He’s so weird. He’s always asking if I’ve had sex with this person, this person, etc. I just wanna scream in his ear, Ian, you fuck
—
I’m a VIRGIN! That would shut him up for about five minutes
.
Ian wanted something from me I could not name and I wanted something from him that I could: a father. That’s all I wanted. I had always been drawn to older men. Since I was mini, I’d tried co-opting every grown man I came into contact with: our poor carpenter, a random babysitter, a few camp counselors, and, most recently, the acting teacher. In turn, the attention they paid me was driven by their needs, which were in opposition to mine, but that never prevented me from slipping under the open wing of a spare man. It took only a few months before I was rolled up in Ian’s.
I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I liked that he wanted anything at all, and people pleaser that I am, I was determined to give it to him, which meant becoming the person he assumed I was. Were I to fail, hit a false note, reveal myself as anything other than the dark, intense, fucked-up girl he was coaxing out of me, then I’d be the wrong type of girl for him and he wouldn’t want a thing from me at all. While I did have dark and intense feelings and struggled with real emotional issues, including an unfeminine reserve of anger, Ian was tugging at a part of me that already existed, but probably never would have developed had I not met him. And in his presence, I played the part of the brooding female James Dean, saying all the troubled things I knew he wanted me to say, as a dizzy-hot spray swept over every lie I told. I was in over my head and I did not know how to extract myself. I had no self yet, I was too young, so while I knew I wasn’t being me, I didn’t know how the person who was me acted. I simply knew she wasn’t this way. But I could not release Ian into the world so that he could find another fourteen-year-old girl to dote on. I did not want his focus on me to disappear, and I knew it would if I disappointed him by not being the fucked-up mess he desperately wanted to save. And that is when my lessons in acting truly began.
The truth is, I was fucked up. Genuinely and authentically troubled, but had I been given a bit more time to articulate the mess inside, I’m fairly certain I would have expressed it differently.
Without having someone for whom I was curating my inner life, I feel I would have found a more positive and productive way of expressing myself. My parents didn’t abuse me and yet I felt abused. I wasn’t adopted and yet I felt adopted. I knew I existed and yet I didn’t feel seen, and now someone not only saw me, but wanted to be my hero, and I had always wanted a hero. I had longed for such a thing my entire life and here he was, a handsome man nearing thirty waiting for someone like me to save.
One night after class, Caroline and Ian invited me upstairs to their apartment. It smelled like Irish Spring and toast. They offered me a soda, told me to relax on the couch, and then Ian pulled out a bag of pot and looked at me.
“I told you I’d come through for you,” he said, handing it to Caroline, who began to roll a joint. I panicked, looked at the clock, and pretended I had to get home.
“Like anyone will even notice you’re not home,” Ian said.
Right. Right. That. I had forgotten that my home life was one of utter neglect. That I could be gone for days and no one would notice. I had not kept track of every lie, of the labored-over poems and fake diary entries I left in places he could conveniently find. I had designed an entire mise-en-scène that wasn’t physically true in any apparent way. I had covered the gaping hole of truth with falsehoods and now I was falling through one.
I was trapped. Caroline lit the joint, and when she was done, passed it to Ian, and after he was done, he handed it to me. I took the joint and the requisite drag, but coughed hard on the exhale sending ripples of laughter through them, which sent a fire of fear up my entire being. Had I fucked it all up? I handed it back to Caroline and then motioned to the clock and the door again.
“Oh, please, you can smoke a little more,” Ian said, handing the joint back to me. I had no choice; I had to smoke more pot. After another hit, a sweat-inducing nausea began to rise, alerting me that something ominous was about to happen. Then I felt it, a tickle in my throat, which I tonsiled back, trying hard to trap it, but it couldn’t be squelched. Nothing was more embarrassing than allowing my actual truth to escape in front of these people. A cough, or god forbid a sneeze, anything suggesting bodily susceptibility, had to be blocked at the pass. Perhaps because I was playing a part and concealing my human self, I began to feel not human, as though I was as biologically different from my body as my persona was to my reality. I had such control over my performance, my nuanced expressions, and body language that a natural function, such as a cough, threatened to topple the entire empire. The only way to get beyond the moment was to move past the cough, and the only way to move past the cough was to cough, which I did, seemingly without end.
My hope was that the cough would scratch the tickle and send it away, but it did no such thing. If anything it seemed to thicken it, morph the tickle into an object, something lodged, like a bone or a seed had wedged itself into one of my tonsils. This something was not sliding down, would not pass, and through the coughing, my fear escalated that I was going to vomit, choke on my vomit, and die. The last thing I wanted to do was die in front of the two people I was trying to impress. Was I allergic to pot? Had smoking brought this on? Was coughing like this a secret symptom of someone who had never smoked pot before? Were they on to me now because I was unwittingly giving away my secret? I could not stop coughing. I was dying. I was doing the most embarrassing thing a human could do. Dying was a secret you tried to keep. At fourteen you don’t know enough about life to understand that dying is as ugly as living. I had presented myself to them as invincible and if I actually died now, they’d know that I’d been lying. I didn’t want to disappoint them, even after I was dead!
Caroline handed me a glass of water, which did not help and I knew I had to leave, to get out before the unseemly and weak process of dying began and I lost control over my bodily functions and vomited, peed, and diarrheaed right there on their freshly waxed and polished hardwood floors.
I felt the familiar loop begin: sweaty palms, tightening chest, the dizzy beginning of floating away. I had to get out of there and I managed to look at my watch and make an excuse I can’t remember, forcing myself away and out. On the street I could breathe a bit better, but a block or so later I was swept up again and there I went, into the city trash, head over pissed-on piles of paper and Styrofoam cups, throwing up my entire day. When I was finished, I turned and looked up to their building, worried I’d catch them watching me from behind their ninth-floor window, but they were not. I worried that they’d pass this garbage can and know that this was MY vomit. I walked home, but knew I was really stoned when the blocks became less and less familiar and I worried that I’d entered a part of the world that did not exist, that existed when you took the only wrong turn no one had yet taken, but of course I had taken it because that’s just the kind of luck I had. When it finally occurred to me to look at a street sign, I realized I’d been going the wrong way. I couldn’t manage to get anything right, not walking home stoned, not getting stoned.