Panpocalypse Week Five: Don't Look Back
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman takes to biking through a shutdown New York City in search for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
Click here for Week Four.
WISE SLUTITUDE
#blacklivesmatter
#publishingpaidme
#jkrowlingisaterf
#fuckthepolice
#nycprotests
Put the world in the book. The book is the world.
I don’t go outside for a couple days. I’m taking care of my kid, but I get lost on Twitter. Scrolling, scrolling, posting, obsessively checking hashtags. My kid goes to visit my mom upstate for two weeks, and so now for these next forty or so pages I will be like parents in TV shows and movies—a mom who doesn’t seem like a mom, or who has silent, largely off-screen interactions with boring kids who kinda roll with it. I love the brutal bickering codependence of the married people on that show Catastrophe, but it’s wild to me how quiet and docile their toddler and baby are. Little props that are gloriously fitting for the couple’s white narcissism.
What’s going on in the #capitolhillautonomouszone? Of course I need to know. I wrote a book set during Occupy Wall Street. I live for takeovers of public space. Twitter reveals very little except for a lot of alt-right Nazis claiming that this a terrorist act of Antifa. I give up, my brain scrambled from spending too much time alone scrolling on social media.
While Guapo drives our kid upstate, I spend a lovely afternoon napping and pooping. My stomach is always a mess. I have IBS and am taking some prescription thing for heartburn. It’s nice and rare for me to get everything out. A cleansing.
When I wake up I have a message on Lex from the disappearing ad. It reads, “If you want to go to Le Monocle and touch a queer, you’ll have to pass. Do not share this link with anyone.”
The link takes me to a Google Doc. I fill it out.
“List the people you have touched in the last two months.” My kid, my ex-husband, his girlfriend, and one date who I saw once for sex.
“Wise slutitude and excellent communication skills.”
“What lockdown protocols have you taken in the last two months to protect yourself?” Aside from seeing the above four people, I have quarantined myself in my apartment except to go on bike rides, to get groceries, and to get a COVID test. Whenever I leave the apartment, I wear a mask and practice social distancing. I wash my hands vigorously many times a day.
“What is your antibody status?” Negative for antibodies. Negative for COVID.
“What talents do you bring to the club?” My fingers hover over the keyboard. What to say? Is this a trick question? What talents have I brought to any club ever, especially a secret underground queer club operating during a pandemic?
I type, Wise slutitude and excellent communication skills.
I hit submit and shut my computer. I’ve hated gay bars ever since I came out, I remind myself. The flirting rituals are wholly confusing and mostly I feel unwanted and old in queer spaces.
The Google Form is a known boner killer.
“Fuck it,” I say out loud to the no one, the nobody, the no peopleness of my apartment.
Pain
“In the bathtub I press on a constellation of new bruises along my inner knees and shins.”
Like the sockets joining my pelvis to my legs are aflame. Like my knee bones need an appointment with the muscles around them. “There’s anger and hurt in our hips,” a yoga teacher said once long ago in the time of classes and community, and I burst into tears.
In the bathtub I press on a constellation of new bruises along my inner knees and shins. Painless compared to the rest. Deep down in the muscle and tissue of my neck and right shoulder there is a baby I used to hold on that same side for one whole year. I favor my right side in all things, because when I can’t walk, when I am very sick, the left side is always worse. I don’t have cerebral palsy, though it is one of my misdiagnoses. People with CP understand the drag and pull of an unresponsive part of your body. In the “before” time, I dragged my left leg behind me like a ghost or a small corpse. My left hand and arm curled in so tightly that they sometimes cramped, like the letter C, but in pain.
Don’t Write about Me
I check in on Beemer, my supposed pandemic lover.
“You want a relationship and that’s not where I’m at right now,” he texts.
“I thought we just agreed on companionship, a germ bubble, maybe sex.”
“You’re right, I’m projecting. I don’t have a lot of experience with sex outside of a relationship.”
“Why did we have sex then?” I text back. “We didn’t need to have sex.”
“I think it’s best if we don’t have contact.”
“Why? What happened?”
I am so confused. What have I done? I go to the bad places—my body, my desires, somehow. In one night, I managed to convey too much need. Teen thoughts too. I’m fat. He doesn’t like the taste of my pussy.
I cry my queer tears. I cry my slut tears. I feel betrayed and accused of things I have not done.
“And please don’t write about me,” he texts.
“I can do what I want.” I am defiant and then ashamed. Is that what this is about? My being a writer?
But then I give in. “I won’t write about you.” I feel bullied and block him.
Maybe this is a metaphor for academia. Contract faculty cannot fuck tenured faculty. Autofiction has always been located in the femme space of the contract and the adjunct. I know I’m lucky to have a contract, but I do not own a brownstone with my ex who is also tenured and I can’t recognize a BMW to save my life.
Don’t Look Back
“Will I ever be over her? Can I stop looking back over my shoulder at the woman who shoved me out of the closet?”
Instagram says I have a memory and tells me that two years ago today I was on a trip with Eurydice. My face is a different face, thinner, younger, framed by a tight nice haircut—not my pandemic face, which is haggard, bored, framed by a gray mullet. I can’t believe it was only two years ago. Maybe that’s why I’m not over her. 2020, the pandemic, the Trump presidency, my medicine, have all disrupted my notions of time. Will I ever be over her? Can I stop looking back over my shoulder at the woman who shoved me out of the closet? Who didn’t care that I had a boyfriend? Who refused to make space for him even though we were in an open relationship? The woman who left her wife and decided not to be with me.
The photo is a selfie. I’m in my bathing suit against an adobe wall smirking, because I’ve just come out and fallen in love with the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. I am not dealing with the loss of my boyfriend, who I love very much still. He broke into my apartment drunk and scared us one night, and I cannot forgive him for that.
I get a new credit card and take us to Santa Fe in June, which is like going to Hades it’s so hot. But Georgia O’Keeffe went there and it’s a town full of lesbians and I have a friend there and Eurydice wants to go to Meow Wolf. My kid has been there with her dad and she wants me to go too.
“Mama, there’s a refrigerator that’s a tunnel into another room and a bone dinosaur you can play like a keyboard.”
The first day there Eurydice and I fuck the fucks of the falling in love, and because I am mentally ill, I’m slightly manic, maybe very manic. I haven’t put a trip on a credit card since college, when I signed up for a Discover card because they were giving away giant Krackel bars. Who doesn’t want a giant Krackel bar? Fifteen years and fifteen thousand dollars later, I will still stand by that candy bar.
I spend the afternoon in the hotel pool while Eurydice naps. She’s always tired because she works so much. I walk up and down the length of the kidney-shaped pool, get out, apply sunscreen, try to read my book and fail, and get back in the water. Over and over again.
When a family comes into the pool area—mom, dad, toddler, and baby—I talk to them in ways I don’t talk to people in New York.
“What brings you to Santa Fe?” I ask. My shoulders are burning I can tell. There’s no amount of sunscreen that can block this desert sun. Even the pool water is warm.
“Business for him.” The mom nods at the dad, who is indistinct to me. A man. I don’t know. I am mad at men because of what my boyfriend did. “We’re just tagging along.”
The toddler has water wings on and splashes from the pool steps. The mom floats the baby around and makes bubbles with her the way all moms do. The endless building of language acquisition that moms are never acknowledged for, which basically creates civilization.
“Oh yes, you’re in the water now. Doesn’t that feel nice? Blow a bubble. Splash. Splash,” she says to the happy baby. “What about you?” she asks me.
“I’m here with my girlfriend, just a romantic getaway,” I say, and they roll with it, are not homophobic, at least at that moment. It is such a thrill for me to say, I’m here with my girlfriend. My girlfriend. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve made out with women for years and had endless crushes that I thought were just intense friendships, or maybe this is how it is for bi-pan people. We figure stuff out when we do. Whatever.
Eurydice opens our room window, which faces the pool. “Babe,” she calls down to me, and for a second I think I’m in trouble. To be in trouble with her is not fun, and so I avoid conflict, mostly in the form of not asking for too much, letting her take the lead. She can be a total bitch when she’s angry, and I’m not used to women being angry with me like that.
But she’s smiling. Sleepy, but not grouchy. “Come up? Let’s go get food?”
I shrug at the couple like, You know, girlfriends, so hungry! Gotta keep them happy!
I get out of the pool, a little self-conscious about my feet, which are the only visible disabled part of me. But fuck it, Eurydice loves me. Who cares?
Up in the hotel room, there is so much licking and then we go out for Mexican food. An old-school place where we meet my friend, also a lesbian, who I have known since graduate school and love very much. Eurydice is competitive with her about weird things and my friend doesn’t take the bait. I feel embarrassed, but I drown it in margaritas and bean enchiladas slathered in cheese and sour cream.
When we were in New York, in her tiny Washington Heights apartment, which sits on top of three different hills, Eurydice cooked for me. Many different delicious kinds of eggs mostly and sometimes dishes pulled together from the cupboard. One time, we tackled a Blue Apron box that someone gave her. We loved the little packets of ingredients. Things I’m personally too lazy to buy or never have the energy to care about. We cooked in our underwear and marveled at what we’d become.
I don’t ever want to lose that, so in Santa Fe, I pretend nothing is wrong and that in the fall, she will still be my girlfriend.
Meta
“I’ve started and stopped five different novels, anywhere from five to a hundred pages long.”
My robot dictator isn’t working so I’m typing. It’s faster anyway, and I have a deadline, which is my own fault. I pitched this project to Feminist Press as a partially serialized novel. It was my idea to set a constraint for myself so I wouldn’t be able to stop writing. In the last year, I’ve started and stopped five different novels, anywhere from five to a hundred pages long. I sent each one to my agent, and each time she told me to keep going. Eventually she dropped me, which was devastating, but something that happens all the time. Agents are allowed to drop their clients. She wrote simply, “I don’t know how to help you anymore,” which is baffling, and sounds a lot like something my mom would say when we’re fighting.
As long as I don’t type for too long, I tell myself, my shoulder won’t be in too much pain. Microsoft Word keeps jamming and doing the you’re fucked rainbow swirl, and then I lose the writing I’ve just dictated. What do you do when the hack doesn’t work right? What if you get leg braces and they make it worse and actually deform your feet and make life miserable for a year? That happened to me. Disabled people get experimented on all the time. Touched and groped against their will. Made to try out dumb things and then not listened to about their pain.
My friend Richard Scott Larson wrote an essay that helps me understand what I’m doing in whatever writing life I’ve managed to cobble together. In “On the Origins of Queer Autofiction: A Review of Dorothy Strachey’s ‘Olivia,’” Larson writes:
Queer writers have long taken to the use of autofiction as a dominant storytelling mode. . . . This impulse is perhaps rooted in telling our stories like we’re often forced to live our lives, so many of our most fundamental traits disguised and outwardly reconfigured in order to meet certain expectations of form. Autofiction—fiction drawn from life, sometimes in almost photorealistic detail—allows for both obfuscation and exaggeration, but it also creates a kind of necessary distance, a way for a writer to give shape and structure to often painful lived experiences, and thus to reclaim control over them.
Telling our stories like we’re often forced to live our lives
Photorealistic detail
Obfuscation and exaggeration
Painful experiences
Reclaim control over them
Yes, exactly this, yes.
Antibodies
My friend Picasso asks me to meet up for a walk. Once when we first met we had sex, or we tried to have sex, and were interrupted by his roommate’s stupid knocking right as I was about to make him come all over my face. He was so rattled he sent me home, and since then, Friendsville.
I haven’t seen him since the lockdown started.
“Are we hugging?” I ask.
“Yes,” and it feels good to touch and smell him.
We walk west to Stonewall and Cubbyhole. I get a blister but I don’t say anything. We sit in a pocket park with the other masked queers.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Remember the Beemer guy I texted you about? I think that was a bad experience. I feel tricked, but maybe he just didn’t like me.” My mask absorbs my tears. “Are you allowed to have sex? Am I allowed to have sex?”
“Nobody knows,” he says. “I mean, we know, but it’s not sustainable for depressed queer, single people to never touch.”
“I’m negative for COVID,” I blurt, and then regret it. We are a couple blocks from what used to be Saint Vincent’s hospital, and I feel historical/ahistorical. I never wanted to be one of those queers who cares about disease status, blood work, antibodies.
“That’s a relief,” he says. “I need to ease my mind too and get the test.”
“It was easy. But I don’t have the antibodies. I don’t know anyone who does yet.”
“Let’s hug more,” he says.
I scratch his back like I know he likes. I will take any touch I can get right now. I am touch starved, a tactile person, a watery Cancer with a Scorpio moon, which I think means I crave stability but cause myself a lot of upheaval.
“Oh that feels so good,” he says, and then he leaves for the train, and I walk home with my throbbing blister foot.
