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leewhitaker · 1 year

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Victims

I remember being about nineteen years old in the waiting room at the Stanford medical facility for eating disorders. I had come straight from a lecture, and I was by myself. I had my earbuds in. I was finding the next song, which always took awhile, but what I heard instead was a couple of older male voices, for whatever reason:

“Oh, hey,” one of them said.

“Hey. I thought that was you.”

“Yeah. So, how’re things?”

The men sat across the aisle from each other adjacently, and turned their heads to speak. You got the sense they couldn’t remember each other’s names, nor how they had met, yet both sat their with their ear-budded, detached daughters, trying to make conversation.

“Things have been good, yeah... She plays soccer right?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s on the Cheetahs, right?”

“Right, yeah...”

“It’s been a good season for them.”

“It has been, it has been.”

Then I noticed the kind of salient, prolonged silence you’d expect a waiting room to occupy. The men nodded at each other, chewing their cheeks. As though they’d simultaneously remembered the plaque above the door, and the department. As though their comradery existed solely upon their individual failures as parents.

“Well,” the first one laughed.

“Well,” the other agreed. “It’s a coincidence, running into you here.”

“Yeah, life’s funny. Glad we could catch up... I hope things are well with everything though.”

“Oh yeah, of course. Good to see you, man.”

But what they were really saying was: We’re here. We’re both here.

It angered me then so I buoyed away immediately, but seven years later it just breaks my heart. One of these men wore a buzzcut. The other wore tortoiseshell glasses, and a button down to hide the square pudge that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone apart from the owner who was trying to prove it wrong.

The receptionist called my name. I held onto that moment as a forty-five second case study, though, as I sat upon the loud paper of the examination table. They were the subjects, those two men. They were the victims I resonated with the most somehow. Their daughters were younger than me, though I couldn’t tell you a distinguishing characteristic about either of them. They should have been better on the soccer team, I thought. They should’ve been more memorable.

Before I knew it, the doctor was knocking on the door and poking her head in, and it was my world again.

#writing

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leewhitaker · 1 year

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Glitter tits at it again!

Short hair to Super Bowl charcuterie pipeline

#SECSI and with a fresh chop and a new man #has my twin flame ever looked so hot?

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leewhitaker · 1 year

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She had an attitude about her. This demeanor that told you at the end of the day, when it really came down to it, she couldn’t love someone completely if they were ugly to her. Not the ugly where you can tell it’s just that the person hasn’t got money, or that kind of free time—ugly that explains itself. Her exes did not seem to amass the most colorful palette the way that her personal and professional cohort reflected, for example. She judges the shape of the nose that smells when sizing up a lover, the way she never would do with a friend.

#revised version of something I wrote in my journal on october 10th 2020 #about someone I met in college who would later become my best friend actually... but was always unlucky in love lol #writing

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leewhitaker · 1 year

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From Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse, illustrated by Barbara Lavallee

#Barbara Lavallee #art

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leewhitaker · 1 year

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The Snowglobe

My snowglobe of New York City shattered on the floor while I was busy losing my virginity. The light was dim, but I knew exactly where it stood on my desk, so I had a vague sense of where it landed on my floor. The noise was such a startling interruption that the boy and I exchanged a look, and for a moment I could tell we were both considering taking a brief respite from using our bodies as callow, nervous instruments of passion to clean up the damp shards.

As I laid there, a series of moments from my life vividly began to flash before me in still frames, the way slides switch in an old View-Master: I saw the pale ceramic tableau of Manhattan as I sat at that desk with my chin propped up on my fist, procrastinating my summer reading and pretending that those buildings were the whole world. I saw the flurry of sparkles as I rolled the clear glass ball around and around above my head, leaning back in my chair, observing the distorted shapes of my bedroom through it like a looking glass the first time I smoked pot. I saw the tiny currents in the water, and the broken bubbles I could make at the top of the dome if I shook it hard enough. I saw it on my desk as I left that very morning, undisturbed, and I remember thinking I ought to move it away from the edge.

The boy didn’t stop of his own volition above me and I did not tell him to. “Sorry,” he breathed, but the word was labored, and broken up by the rhythm of his body.

And I was already so disoriented by the loud noise and the fact that I hadn’t eaten that day, that the prospect of a man apologizing for something—the prospect that a man could have the emotional tact, or self awareness, or even the instinct to feel guilt at all during sex—bewildered me even further. At the time, I didn’t have the language necessary to parse this feeling, but I know now, unequivocally, that that’s what it was. I opened my mouth to speak, but my voice was suddenly absent.

“Do you want me to stop?” he went on, pulling my legs up to his shoulders.

For reasons that still remain beyond my comprehension, I nearly slipped into genuine, unironic laughter at the invisible question pinned to the air between us: Would it matter if I did?

He continued to fuck me for a long, long time before I finally shook my head. “It’s fine.”

I used to keep an eye on the sun’s position in the sky through that snowglobe. It would refract the light shining through my window into a dotted line along the desk, like my own imaginary little calendar of the solstice. There was a squeaky tin globe hardly larger than a grapefruit that always stood beside it, and something about their symmetry and uselessness together always just made sense to me. As a pair, they had this united, satisfying predictability, and if ever I awoke in a cold sweat in the blue, small morning hours, the moon always drew a glossy outline around them that I could easily recognize as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The way they were placed made them look like planets beside each other, so perhaps that’s why the snowglobe always seemed to have such a celestial quality about it. But it was a trinket—strictly ornamental. It meant nothing to me. In fact, I’m almost certain it came into my possession by regifting. I never cared much for New York City.

The boy left and I showered and washed the sheets and sat on my bed with wet hair and ate dry Apple Jacks and watched a show on my laptop and tried not to think about the way my hips, and the middle of me felt a little bit different every time I would shift. I took Advil. I painted my nails. I reorganized my bookshelf. I procured myself breakfast each day, and went to all my classes. I took my permit test and a pregnancy test on the same day. I whitened my teeth.

Eventually, I had sex again in a different room, and later in a car. But for twenty-one days, Lady Liberty’s dismembered arm lay on my bedroom floor in the dry, sparkling grave of my former snowglobe. I do not know why I swept all the broken glass into the corner of my room, or why I let it sit there in a pile like a cadaver I didn’t want to deal with. I didn’t want to look at it, or think about it, but I also had to have it right there. It had to sleep in the same room as me.

Sometimes I still think about the snowglobe when I’m in bed with a man—if a picture frame falls, or the furniture shifts. I don’t remember it on my desk, though; I remember its final resting place on my bedroom floor in the corner with no sunlight. I remember the drawn curtains and the radio silence—the way I still had clothes hooked to me somewhere around an elbow or ankle, as I did not have the luxury of disrobing completely before we began. And while I do not remember the boy, I remember how he looked into my eyes, said sorry while he was doing it, and didn’t stop. He said sorry while he was doing it and didn’t stop. I swear that has never left me.

L.W.

#writing

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leewhitaker · 1 year

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Body Is Money

I quit studying policy to become a sex worker because everything you know about women, you learned from someone else. Who learned from someone else, who learned from someone else who made it up a long, long time ago. And you never thought to question it, but I did.

The fact that men are not taught to distrust in the way that women are does also work in my favor. Not in the sense that distrust is what keeps you alive, anyway. I held my cards closer to my chest, but I was sizing you up just the same; I sized up the fashion in which you sized me up, but knew how to hide it. Your ego is not made of material soft enough to fold into a shape small enough to stow, so here we are. Two reductions facing one another.

Blind are men to how easily you give yourselves away. You describe conflicts of your own creation, in the passive voice. By the third sentence, I have pinpointed exactly who you need me to be tonight, for the right price. I am your mother. I am your therapist. I am your best friend’s girlfriend. I am the pupil you always wanted to fuck. I am the intern—no, the hostage—no, the nurse. I am the cinched, squeaky cartoon with blue hair, the first time you touched yourself. I am the Virgin Mary.

You’re alone on another birthday, but if I gaze at you as though you are a gladiator and I am unlucid, you will reach for your pocket. A tango in reverse is led by the follower knowing precisely when to sidestep. You ask: can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone before? And the hook pierces clean through your cheek. The spool ticks wildly as it reels and I smile down at you, distorted through the waves.

Of course.

And you just accept the hoax, without skepticism! There was never a doubt in your mind that I may not in fact be the figment you designed in boyhood, because in this light I do kind of look like that poster, that page. De-personify as your de-fault setting is half my work done. And I love indulging you, playing the benign, unassuming little trifle who fills the her-shaped hole. Who pretends she didn’t read your opinion on the opioid crisis verbatim in the Guardian last week, because you can’t find a real woman in the world whose wow is quite as convincing as when you pay for it. Tell me your every badge, for they will twinkle in my eyes.

I know I shouldn’t laugh while I’m up here, but the satire of it all... I am your entertainment for the night? Comrade, you are mine.

Allowing a man to believe he is superior is but the careful calculation of an ever-evolving trajectory towards safety. What could you have possibly encountered to necessitate that kind of guile? Have you encountered it everyday since puberty?

Ergo, a naked woman will never go out of business. The CEO will always make a bastard by the secretary. The pastor’s hands will always wander. The producer will always coax: shut the door behind you, and the politician will always leave because his wife couldn’t keep it tighter than the babysitter. Not every man surely, but enough. You’re here, aren’t you? It doesn’t take a lot.

If your father never cheated, he’s considered it. He’s made a mental pros and cons list, lying awake next to your mother while you were crying on the baby monitor. You’ll go back and forth on that moral seesaw too someday when your baby is crying. Because of the Maxim you didn’t buy, but perused for thirty minutes at the newsstand, and the fact that we live in a century where a body postpartum is just over. Where the shapes women grow in places to sustain human life are less fuckable. Where desire is nature, but slender is nurture, and only one matters at all.

This is not to suggest that women exist on some higher moral plane. Temptation sways all of us alike; if women were in power, we’d get caught and face the occasional consequence, too. The stakes simply aren’t the same for us because up until recently, if my memory serves, you let us close to none of the capital. You condemned us, killed us by stone, fire, and rope, built institutions and invented hysteria. But when the times changed, you came to the inconvenient realization that you also couldn’t follow the rules you wrote. Because the rules are that our intrinsic proclivity to sex, which transcends doctrine, taxonomy, and time is not correct—that biology, the architect of want, is suppressible at all. Desire is a weakness only because we built a world in which it is an inconvenience.

Our species would cease to exist if the act itself didn’t feel so good. So you’ve read The Wealth of Nations, both Testaments, did your pheromones subside?

“Sex is not an enterprise—unlike writing a book or building a career.” Susan Sontag wrote that in her diary, but I’m paraphrasing. “There are no promises, no goals. It’s not an accumulation.” We just want it, badly and more, no matter how much of it we have already, no matter how satiated we were yesterday. Lust returns. How convenient it would be, if we all just divided independently like cells. I don’t know, like I said I never finished college. What I have come to learn in praxis, and no classroom, is that underneath my clothes there is a market. And for a brief window, this body I am in—this service, this good, is my most lucrative asset.

Under capitalism, an affair is a fluke; the decision to have one disrupts the vertical gridlock of power. Sex is the sole commodity for which the consumer is willing to risk almost anything; it’s unusual, no? Sex is expensive, but the opposite of rare. It is irresistible, and always at your fingertips. A man will readily, eagerly welcome scandal, defamation, sacrifice a campaign, smear his own legacy. Every accolade lost—a lifetime’s worth of work upon generations of nepotism, and for what? The tiny thing between my legs, which his wife also has?

It makes me laugh. It makes me sad. I want the Disney love, too, some days.

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.” Vladimir Nabokov wrote that line in Lolita and well, before I am the cosmos I am twenty-three, and what I want out of this abject, hallucinatory burst of light is to sparkle naked before strangers in a dark room. This is what gives me a sense of completeness so little else can achieve, in a way that feels good not to question. I feel no strong, unlearned predilection to be prolific, or remembered eternally. I have spent this long deteriorating, waiting to want the veil and the Jack and the cul-de-sac—what frightens me more is putting all my life-eggs into the grocer-dyed basket of suburbia. I have wondered about it with a therapist. I have wondered about it extensively alone. Getting to the bottom of whatever I internalized in the oven-fired clay of my childhood to set this in motion, will do little in the way of unbraiding the pathways of neurons. And I don’t want a consolation pottery wheel, I want to strip. I want the primping beforehand, I want the puzzlement of my friends, I want the title, the absurdity. Each time I second-guess the absence of my shame, I stop myself from relishing the presence of my joy. Why shouldn’t I respect myself just because you don’t?

I have been beaten, spoken over, plagiarized, violated, broken and entered—all before sex work, and by people who I was either led to trust or had no choice but to depend upon. I have been castigated for the ways in which I adapted to survive my circumstances, then turned around, and scathed mercilessly at other women over their means of survival, to which I have never personally needed to resort. “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman,” indeed, but often the voyeur within is a council of people who think and act the most like you. And why must we endure the arbitrary wrath of the patriarchy without so much as a return on our tax?

How many years have I paid tithe in cotton wallpaper? How much of my paycheck lost to circumventing motherhood, while hurting the other things inside of me? If born a little bit beautiful in a world where so few of us are, why not lean into it a little, if only out of spite? For the sake of the gratis rum and coke, for the assembly of the bookshelf. I will continue to fight tooth and nail for the rest of my life, I will attend every protest; the might of the American patriarchal stronghold is still going to outlive me. Those two truths coexist. There will be babies born after I am gone, who grow up to believe in the fairytale of whores.

Who are we anyway, to interpret the divine parameters around when and how sex—a six million year-old ceremony—ought to be enjoyed? And then go on to conclude that white, Christian men in the last few centuries were the first and only ones to get it right? You don't think a Byzantine seventeen year-old on mushrooms could have thought up Nietzsche? Since when has the first to write it down, equated to the first to make it exist? Have you never told a lie? Jesus was thirty-three when he died. What if you told a lie and then it became a religion?

You could have been born in a remote village two hundred years ago and met fifteen people all your life—a life equally insignificant and profound, engorged by passion and unfathomable grief, with connections to family, to the earth. Every color perceivable and alike in richness to the ones you know now. You may never have seen written language, but you would know the magic of an orgasm.

But to you in this life, staring up at me in this spotlight, you scarcely believe that I might reason. That there is a world inside me, too. And what a shame that is for you. How much you have missed out on already, to not really think your mother is a person. How fuller my life will be. I can hear the chasm of my inner monologue as you invent it:

Twirl here. Crawl there. Bite lip.

Toss hair. Arch back. Take tip.

You watch me, mesmerized and jaw-slacked over no news: the same supple mirage which you conjured on a screen earlier today, later tonight, and tomorrow. You adjust your crotch, huddled in the dark with the knowledge that you will both lie about where you were later, and come back. I move the blood in your body, and you can’t even keep my eyes.

Every president has whined, and pressed himself against a pillow. Every glossy paper face at the newsstand has been a spectator in a shadowy booth. For every naked woman spinning there is her reflection in a dilated pupil, every eye split with a silver pole begins to resemble a reptile’s, and every brothel has a back door for heroes. I have met your idols and they have all asked how much for the hour, for the night. Most men have feigned naiveté over the process of coercion, as it’s more convenient than atoning the way they’ve always lived. Most men have said c’mon in response to no until it was no longer playful.

Have you ever asked yourself why men kill women, but need from us first so, so much love? Tell me, when you chase that intangible quality a parent had lost by the time you could remember—some adrenaline between love and repletion—is it yourself you have to hurt to get the high, or someone else?

L.W.

#writing

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