A March of Marys, day twenty
I know I am doing the best thing I can do right now but I feel like a bug trapped under glass. A disgusting insect sealed in a sugary slump to be put on a shelf and forgotten.
Today is Day 20 of A March of Marys, a literary experience where I share a sequential chunk of American Mary, my first novel, right here online every day throughout the month of March.
This offering today wasn’t easy to write. When I first decided to tell this story, it was October 2014. A few important events preceded it. In late 2013 Safy-Hallan Farrah published “Alt Lit Has Fake Race Problems and Real Race Problems” on Fanzine about “the circle jerk and bro-ish nature” in the online literary community we called “alt lit.” It started the conversation about the white boys club, underlying racism and tokenism of alt lit, and who has power in the community and how it was being used. In October 2014 Sophia Katz published “We Don’t Have to Do Anything” recounting her experience being assaulted and gaslit by an alt lit gatekeeper, allegations which were supported by Tiffany Wines and several other women writers.
Sometime in the fall of 2014 there was a meeting in the Bay Area, which I did not attend, to discuss the rape allegations that had started emerging in the local scene, the people who were misusing their power within the scene, and how to start an accountability process. A friend of mine mentioned that my event curator ex-boyfriend was abusive. I was not named, and at the time I just wanted to be done with him and had no intention of publicly outing his abuse of me, but the news got back to him and he assumed I was trying to start a whisper campaign to defame him.
He preemptively made a post on Facebook about me to make me look unstable. The post spoke of how much he cared about me and how he was worried about my mental health. Despite feeling an intense amount of anxiety about putting myself out there like this, I knew that I had to speak the truth and share my story. I started with a tumblr post, and then wrote a piece I titled “Final Predestination.” After sharing it with my writing mentor at the time and getting positive feedback, I sent it to the well-loved online lit journal H*b*rt. My piece, and the buzz surrounding the topic of abusive alt lit gatekeepers, inspired the editor to write a handwringingly vapid takedown piece ridiculing the growing crowd speaking out against abuse in the community. She also called my submission a “shittily written story.” Lol. I’m not linking that but you can probably find it on the wayback machine if you care.
There’s a lot more to this history and I am not attempting to write a full account of all the events. Others have already done this and did a better job than I could do right now. This is merely a preamble to a novel excerpt. I’m not prepared to do the amount of research this topic deserves. I’m only writing my own personal experience as a person who was directly affected by an abusive person. I recommend checking out these articles published on Salon, Flavorwire, and The Daily Dot as well as the previously linked articles if you want to read a little more about the events surrounding the implosion of alt lit 1.0.
This was a super dark era for me and for a lot of people. It really fucking sucked. But I’m still here and I’m still writing.
“Final Predestination” found a home at Entropy and its publication must have been so spot on since it got a cease and desist letter sent to me by my ex-boyfriend threatening litigation. It was also a push for me to finish American Mary. I’ve made some edits and added some more details and I’m not ashamed to share it with you here.
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There is an argument. Something about wanting sex, but he never wanted sex when we were still dating.
*
We met under weird circumstances. I had been living with my boyfriend of four years, but we broke up because his family didn’t approve. I was the wrong religion and came from the wrong tax bracket.
I was leaving the city to live in Oakland. I was ready to be single again. I was ready to be alone.
And then a mysterious stranger careened into my life. Sending me flirty messages online. Asking me to come over to his house and 'bring honey.'
My friends were throwing down red flags before we even saw each other’s faces.
And I should have been more mindful, and I knew it. But I was curious.
He could be sitting at a table in a restaurant and convince a woman sitting at an opposite table to leave her date to go into the bathroom to have sex with him. All with eyebrow gestures. So he told me. Even though it sounds totally made up like a scene from a movie, I believed him. And it scared me, and it made me feel weird and bad about myself to hear something like that while on a date with him.
But after four years of a boring pseudoyuppie lifestyle I was ready to believe and accept anything Seba told me.
*
Getting robbed at gunpoint was the catalyst to us moving in together. We were walking back to my Oakland apartment on a dimly lit street past upper middle class homes with well maintained gardens after spending a couple hours at the CCA library with Priscilla. It was twilight. Priscilla and Seba were talking about a creative writing teacher they both studied under at some point and I was looking at my flip phone responding to a text from my sister. Two men stepped out from the ivy against a garage wall and stood in our way on the sidewalk. I assumed they were someone Seba knew because he laughed and said ‘hey, what’s up?’ Then I saw the gun. It was big and silver and shiny, catching the light from a streetlamp. It looked like a cowboy gun from an old Western.
I froze.
One of them said ‘give me your phone,’ and I immediately handed over my backpack and my flip phone. It wasn’t until later that I realized they wanted Priscilla’s iphone.
I looked at my feet. I didn’t want to see their faces. I only wanted to do what would make them go away and leave us alone.
The whole interaction only lasted a minute. They were gone, driving off in a waiting vehicle nearby before I could process what was happening.
‘We need to call the police,’ Priscilla said. I burst out crying, almost like I wasn’t in control of my body. A family with two small children passed us on the sidewalk and Seba said, ‘watch yourselves, there’s robbers out here. We just got robbed.’
The next thing I knew we were on Piedmont street where there was a ton of foot traffic and retail stores casting their warm yellow glows from picture windows onto the sidewalk. We borrowed a landline phone from a flower shop and called the police. I didn’t want to. I’d done this before, at my father’s insistence, when I had been robbed before back in Philly and knew it was a pointless pursuit. Cops can’t and usually don’t want to do anything about petty crimes like this. I can’t even remember if a cop showed up to take a report or if Priscilla just relayed what happened over the phone. In any case, nothing came of it and we ended up in Priscilla’s living room taking turns on her laptop canceling our debit cards and making awkward conversation with her 60-something year old housemate who had heard me crying and came out to offer support in his bathrobe.
The three of us spent the night at my apartment, curled up on my futon together, trauma bonding. Priscilla was a friend and former romantic interest of Seba’s, but this experience brought the two of us together in a way that I had never experienced before.
The next day Seba hosted a poetry reading in the abandoned apartment above his and I drank too much three wishes cabernet drowning my anxiety in cheap red. Seba suggested I move into his Lower Haight apartment. When we first met he was living in the back parlor of the apartment and subletting his bedroom for $800 a month. It was his sole income, but he promised me he would find a job, and if I covered the first few months he’d pay me back. I was too traumatized to stay in my apartment at 41st and Broadway, one block away where we had been robbed at gunpoint, so I agreed without thinking too much about it. I did ask Koa if she thought it was a good idea, to give up my apartment after only a few months, to live with another man so soon after spending the past four years living with the person I thought I’d marry, and she said ‘yeah, why not?’
So I did it. I packed up my few possessions, my clothes, my computer, Baruch’s stuff, and donated the futon. I was soon living back in San Francisco, a mere thirteen block walk from where I had been living when Seba messaged me about bringing some honey to him.
*
We break up because there was no intimacy, just emotional abuse. Jealousy. Mind games. Hungry eyes.
The honeymoon phase didn’t last long. At first he seemed excited to have me around and wanted to involve me in the event series he organized and hosted, but when he saw that his friends and acquaintances liked me and started inviting me to spend time with them, inviting me to send my poetry to their online magazines, he changed his energy toward me.
Seba would never introduce me to his women friends at parties, instead cornering and cuffing them, absorbing all focus. He needed all focus. He would leave his mark when he would find me in the company of any person he felt threatened by, make it obvious that I am property. He would act ashamed of me when we were in public together, staring intensely at other women on the train or on the sidewalk and trying to make eye contact, staring at their feet with his mouth open, keeping himself separate and looking single, unless another man or a woman he deemed attractive was giving me attention.
Now we are broken up and he wants sex. He wants sex all the time. He wants sex from me and doesn’t like the idea of me seeing other people or even the idea that I won’t sleep with him. It’s been two months since we broke up and he pays more attention to me now than when we were together. We don’t share a room anymore but we are still living in the same apartment. I have the bedroom next door because I need space from him, and he won’t let me leave.
*
‘Where were you.’ Seba is in his bedroom, sitting on his bed with his laptop on his lap, door open. Probably waiting for me. His room faces the apartment’s front door.
‘I was just out.’ It’s late, after midnight.
‘Who were you with.’ His face turns a slight pink underneath.
‘I wasn’t with anyone.’ I am lying but it is none of his business. We had talked about this and we both agreed that if we did go on dates we would not tell the other about it. Or bring them home. Both were his suggestions. I am following his wishes.
‘Yeah, right.’ He looks down. ‘I bet you weren’t with anyone.’
‘I wasn’t,’ I say. ‘And besides, even if I was, you said you wouldn’t want to know about it.’
‘I know,’ he says, ‘but I don’t want you to see anyone else.’
‘I’m not trying to date anyone,’ I say, ‘but I do want to be out of the house. I should be allowed to do that. I am not questioning you when you go out.’
‘I don’t think I could live with you if you started dating other people.’
‘I just moved into the room next door. I just painted and paid rent for this month.’
I knew he wouldn’t like the idea of me going on dates. Even leaving the house could make him angry. Everything I do is suspicious. It’s sneaky work to even go on a walk alone. Maybe I should have looked harder for another apartment. Maybe I should have looked in Oakland.
‘Look, I got you a lollipop. It has a scorpion inside.’
I pull a green lollipop out of my purse and hand it to him. I had bought it at the natural foods grocery store on my lunch break. I was in the checkout line waiting to pay for my cup of soup when I noticed a display of assorted lollipops with dried insects inside of them. It reminded me of when we were first dating and I visited my dad and uncle in Las Vegas. Seba had asked me to bring him back one of those paperweights with a preserved scorpion inside, so I looked at all the weird gift shops I could find on the strip, dragging my dad around to peruse knickknacks after seeing a Temptations impersonators show at the Mandarin Oriental. My dad kept saying he could just buy a paperweight for me on amazon or whatever but I said it wasn’t the same, I needed to find a real souvenir. I didn’t want to disappoint Seba. After he sent me that weird voicemail. I couldn’t disappoint Seba. I ended up not being able to find one so my dad bought the scorpion paperweight online and had it mailed to me.
‘Thanks,’ he says coldly and puts it on the shelf behind him. I don’t want to hate him because we have to live together but I kinda hate him.
I go to my room. I turn my lamp on, get in bed with Baruch, my cat, and start rolling a spliff. I look at my phone and see that I had received a text from the boy I just got back from a first date with. I read it, smile, and send a reply, ‘I had fun with you, too. I listened to Diamond Eyes the whole walk home.’
I turn on my laptop and watch an episode of Breaking Bad before falling asleep.
*
He stops in front of my bedroom the next morning while I’m watching Breaking Bad. I’m halfway through season two, and Seba had watched most of season one with me because at that point we were still sharing a room. He pokes his head through the door frame.
‘Can I come in,’ he says making a sheepish, childish face at me.
I am cautious but I nod. He comes in.
‘Can I get into your bed with you,’ he says making a cartoon face with phony tight-lip smile and sparkly anime eyes that I realize I hate.
I say, ‘I don’t think that is a good idea.’
Standing by the bed where I am laying, he gives me the yip and says, ‘Why can’t exes watch tv in bed together.’
I give him a look that says, please don’t.
He says, ‘I thought we were going to be friends.’
And I feel bad for him so I say, ‘okay, fine,’ and he gets into bed with me and makes Baruch move to the foot of the bed because she was laying on the other pillow and we continue watching the episode of Breaking Bad and he is making jokes about Malcolm in the Middle’s wife looking like Courtney Love and she kinda does look like Courtney Love, all tall and blonde and tough, and I’m laughing and things seem okay
and before I know it I am pulling his hand off my crotch and saying ‘no, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and trying to be gentle with him and try to show that I’m not afraid like you do with dogs so that they will listen to you
and he is insisting and his eyes are scrunching up like he is about to cry
and I say, ‘I don’t want to make things confusing,’ and I feel worried and look around the room and then outside the bay windows and see a woman pushing a stroller up the street
and he says, ‘confusing, does that mean you still have feelings for me,’
and I say ‘no,’ and I’m not sure if I should move and throat feels tight the way it does when I have to do something I don’t want to do
and I say ‘I just don’t think it’s a good idea,’
and he looks sad but then says, ‘I think you still have feelings for me,’ and he’s touching me and putting his arms around me and I am saying ‘please don’t’ and I don’t know how it happened but he fucks me and afterward I take a shower and I feel disgusting like I will never have anything good happen to me I will always be wandering aimlessly and letting any snag keep running and I hate myself.
*
A week passes and I go to work and stay late and go to Koa’s house afterward to eat dinner and watch tv until I am ready to go back to the apartment to sleep. A week passes and I feel like I am getting pretty good at pretending.
The summer sun is rising and I am waiting for the train out in Richmond to get to my job in the city. I went on another date with the Deftones boy and spent the night at his house after an evening spent exploring a tunnel in my favorite cemetery wearing headlamps and galoshes. I find my phone and exhale and turn my phone on.
I had turned it off the night before because I was afraid Seba might text or call me when I was out on a second date with this nice artist boy who makes large scale paintings of the theoretical universe. I am afraid he knows what I did and I am afraid of seeing him. I’ve seen him get angry before, voice raised, bulbous eyes panicfaced and seething like he has nothing to lose. Like a cancerous Walter White waiting at my door. I touch my stomach. Anxious because I knew he wouldn’t be happy about me not coming home after work or telling him where I’m going.
My phone loads and I look at all the texts popping up and buzzing and my stomach starts twisting into a knotty braid and I am shallow breathing. I read text after text from Seba, starting at the beginning of the night when he began texting me after I didn’t come home from work, and he wants to know where I am, and he wants to know who I am with, and he is making predictions about my whereabouts, and with every text he is growing more paranoid and more furious about how I’m going to be sorry and how I fucked up and how I should get my stuff out before he gets home and changes the locks. I can feel all these little fire ants running under my skin and the hole in my throat tightens.
I am still waiting for the train. I call my friends. Feeling frenzied. Joan’s phone goes to voicemail and I remember that she is still on tour and gets back tomorrow. Oh right I forgot what day it is. I call Priscilla and she answers and calms me down. She says she can help me move my stuff and keep it at her house. I ask her to meet me at the house in an hour. I call Koa and she doesn’t pick up, so I text her to tell her what happened. I get on the train. Koa texts me back, ‘I told you not to spend the night with that guy after what Seba said the first time.’ I don’t respond. She texts me ten minutes later to ask if we’re still going to the Brit & Co networking event that night. I text her back to tell her that I am forcibly being vacated from my apartment and I might not make the networking event.
When I get to work I make an urgent facebook post about needing a room. Immediately. Constantly living in the present because I can’t afford to do anything else but moment to moment. Andrew messages me on facebook to tell me that a room is opening up in his house and I can have it, but not until later in the month, and he has to check with his roommates first. I leave my office to walk around the block and call Andrew for more details and I’m crying, passing by concerned looking tourists, and I thank him.
I go back to my office and fiddle around with paperwork but my hands keep shaking and I keep thinking about making myself as small as I possibly can. Like scrunching up and folding over and dehydrating into a small solid object, something so tiny that could be kicked up the sidewalk. After spending ten minutes compulsively refreshing my facebook page, I shut down my computer and close up the office to head back and pack.
I am wearing sunglasses on the train and trying to keep myself from feeling like I’m falling out of my body. I count the number of open-toe shoes I see on the floor of the train. I play ‘Angeles’ by Elliott Smith on repeat on my ipod. Someone’s always coming around here trailing some new kill. I keep my hands folded in my lap when I’m not using my fingers to wipe tears from my cheeks. So glad to meet you.
I get home and run into the apartment into the room I just moved into and start throwing clothes in trash bags. I clean out my closet, rolling my dresses up and stacking the rolls inside some clear boxes I got from the container store last year, from the first time I changed apartments in the bay area. That was a shitty situation but it wasn’t scary. This is like a bad lifetime movie. This is I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know what I’m doing but I guess I’ll figure it out and oh god does this mean I’ve burned a bridge is he going to hurt me physically socially financially careerwise did I just fuck up my life maybe I should have just listened to him and be his pet and he would take care of me so long as I listen to him oh my fucking god I can’t do that but this is so fucked.
Like I don’t realize I’m being stepped on.
I’m trying not to cry. I sit down on my bed and look around at all the packed boxes and bags. The doorbell rings and it’s Priscilla. We sit on my bed and I cry for a little while and explain what happened in so many words. She hugs me and I pet Baruch.
Koa calls me and she is annoyed when I tell her that Priscilla is here and she is going to help me move my stuff out. She says ‘you should have just done what Seba told you to do.’
I am upset and I tell her I have to go and finish packing stuff up with Priscilla. I roll a spliff and light it and put on a Blink 182 album on youtube while Priscilla and I finish putting knickknacks and clothes away in the rubbermaid boxes.
Baruch has been watching us. As I’m stacking clothes hangers in garbage bag, she runs over and bites my ankle. She has seen me pack before. She might think I’m just packing for a vacation, but she doesn’t like it when I leave her. She might not know that we’re moving again, but she knows that something is up. I just want to hold her and I feel like a terrible mother because I can’t bring her with me right now. I feel like I am leaving my only child with her manipulative stepfather.
We put the boxes in Priscilla’s car and plan how we’re going to do this. Should we take as much as we can now. Should we do two trips. Should we try to move the bed and furniture. Will there be enough room in your house. Will your roommates care that I have my crap all in your living room. Is it even possible for the two of us to move all this stuff.
We pack as much as we can, mostly boxes of clothes, and I throw some things in a backpack like my toothbrush and soap and underwear so that I can stay clean until I can figure out my life, until I can move in somewhere.
We’re in the car and Priscilla is driving and I have my flip phone out and I’m texting people Priscilla and I both know to see if they can help move some stuff but it’s too last minute and most everyone we know left the city early for the weekend.
‘Whatever, we packed up enough,’ I say. ‘I guess I’ll have to rent a u-haul for the rest.’
I haven’t eaten in like two days because I’ve been nervous and being nervous makes my stomach hurt. The pit sinks further and tightens and twists into a tangled cord and even though I know I should eat it feels pathetic and inappropriate. Trying to shovel bits of food into my mouth is uncomfortable. Like, what is the point.
Priscilla asks if I am hungry and I say I guess I am and so we drop my stuff off at her place and then drive over to a diner in her neighborhood that makes pretty good hamburgers.
We sit on the patio outside the diner. The whole patio is ours because it is 2 pm on a weekday. I look at my phone and see a chain of texts from Seba asking why my stuff is gone and telling me he is sorry and that he loves me and that I didn’t really have to leave, he was just exaggerating about changing the locks, the room is still my room. ‘I didn’t say you had to leave. I don’t want to lose you,’ he says in another text.
Hot angry tears drip down my face and I know exactly what he is trying to do with me and I can’t believe I let this person into my life and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I can’t deal with it anymore. I know I am doing the best thing I can do right now but I feel like a bug trapped under glass. A disgusting insect sealed in a sugary slump to be put on a shelf and forgotten. Why am I letting him do this to me. Why did I let this happen so long. I put my sunglasses on.
Our waiter brings the burgers to our table and looks at me as if he is wondering if he should say anything to me but he just puts our burgers in front of us and asks us to let him know if we need anything. We say thank you and watch him walk back into the kitchen slowly.
I look at my burger and I don’t think I can eat. Like I forgot. I think I can’t eat. I hold the burger up to my face. I stare at the melted jack cheese oozing down the side of the patty. I smush the soft greasiness of the brioche roll. I bring it close to my mouth and take an extremely small bite. I chew but I want to spit it out. I hold the burger up to my face like it can hide me and cry.
Priscilla puts her hand on my shoulder and the waiter comes back to fill up our water glasses and quickly looks at me with a half smile before going back to the kitchen. I adjust my sunglasses.
‘I’m sorry Seba’s being so weird.’ Priscilla says.
‘He’s not just being weird. He’s a fucking asshole,’ I say.
‘I’m sorry,’ Priscilla says.
‘I’m sorry I’m being like this. I feel like I’m losing my mind.’
‘No.’ she says. ‘Don’t apologize. He is the one who needs to chill. I don’t know why he’s doing this.’
‘He’s doing this because he is jealous and immature,’ I say. ‘It’s probably good I’m getting out.’
‘It’s definitely for the best,’ Priscilla says.
‘No, I know, but I wish it didn’t happen like this. What am I going to do about Baruch.’
‘Do you think she will be okay there.’
‘I mean, I hope so. I don’t know. I don’t think he’s going to do anything to her, but I don’t know.’
‘I could keep her for a few days,’ Priscilla says, ‘but I need to check with my housemates first.’
‘You’ve already done so much, I would feel bad.’
‘Oh no, I’m sure it would be fine.’
Seba calls. He says the same things he had texted. I cry into the phone. He demands to know who helped me move. He wants to know if a boy helped me. I tell him Priscilla helped me.
He says, ‘haha yeah right. You got your new boyfriend to help you.’
‘If you don’t believe me, Priscilla is sitting next to me right now.’ I hand the phone to Priscilla and she says ‘hello,’ and I can tell he changed his energy to speak with her. They don’t converse long, and Priscilla isn’t really saying anything so I imagine he’s trying to talk himself out of the image of him Priscilla might have in her mind currently and Priscilla gives me back my phone and I say, ‘yes.’
‘I just really love you. I really believe you are the one for me. I wanted us to get married.’
‘I can’t do this right now,’ I say. ‘I’m sitting in a restaurant and I want to eat this burger. I’m going to pick the rest of my stuff up this weekend, and I’m going to ask Joan if she can take care of Baruch until I can get her.’
‘Can we talk in person.’ he asks.
‘What do you want to talk about. What is there to say.’ I pause a moment. ‘I want my rent money back.’
‘Yes, I will get that back to you.’
‘We can talk when I pick up my stuff.’
‘I hope you change your mind.’ He is crying and I feel sicker than I did holding the burger.
‘I have to go.’
I hang up the phone and put the ringer on silent. I stare down at the food on my plate, which by now is probably completely cold. How perfectly suited to the moment. A burger I didn’t even really want in the first place turning cold and useless on me.
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