supplicium post mortem

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

About a month ago, just after I started blogging, I had an unusual experience while taking communion. I was thinking of Graham Greene’s protagonist in The Heart of the Matter, who saw communion as taking God in his mouth. When I got back to the pew, my mouth felt peculiar, like there was a mild and subtle chemical reaction going on inside it. I thought, Hey, something is happening in my mouth; maybe something will happen inside all of me. Presently, I had an unfocused, intuitive feeling that God was in fact moving pieces around in the world, working to redeem my life. I couldn’t see it yet, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to see it for a long time, but at that moment, my mouth throbbing, I felt the tremors of it and sensed a vague, undefined hope, however wispy.

chalice & paten

Why should I have felt that? Was it some projected wish generated by the increased casey activity? It was an event to start blogging, to get readers, and to find myself remembered and welcomed back by “assville.” It was an odd species of resurrection to think and write about all that again – like 14 years ago, but so severely different. I’m remembering and grieving the past (grieving the fact that it is past), and yet, in the act of writing for readers, I seem somehow also to be looking outward and forward for other connections.

That day, kneeling in the side chapel where M’s ashes are, I felt, in addition to the usual near-suicidal grief and crushing tears, a longing to have a purpose, like M had in his job; to do concrete good, and to be contained by a benevolent organization like he had been. And I was overwhelmed with tears for MW (the protagonist of my current novel), and prayed that I could fully realize him, this boy with such an over-bursting heart, and I sobbed with the pain of love for him, as for M.

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.