I remember sitting on her bedroom floor. I remember she had greasy, dark hair with random, unflattering blond streaks. I remember she had acne. I was sitting there with Acne Girl, and my girlfriend, but for the life of me I can’t remember Acne Girl’s name or what class I met her in.
Public Speaking 101. Maybe that was it. I had made a presentation about dangerous narcotics and about how careless Hollywood was for glorifying them. And about that animal Hunter S. Thompson. We must have spoken after class. After I read, from little index cards, my then-favorite passage in literature and pretended to be horrified by it.
“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
My recollection of this time is not poor because of intoxication or because I have a bad memory. I don’t. It’s just that I’m writing this almost twenty years after the fact.
I remember I was scared to trip, and my girlfriend, Mary, saying, “It’s just a little acid,” as she cut the blotter in half. Half a hit is what I took. And then we waited.
But we didn’t wait long. Mary had places to be. Like, anywhere but that girl’s house. That poor girl with the acne. She was so happy I had come. Mary promptly ordered me out of that girl’s house with her Louisianan sing-song rasp.
Next I was in the driver’s seat. We were driving up 17 to the House of Blues in my ’87 Nissan Maxima when I stopped at a gas station. I was thinking that I hadn’t taken enough acid to feel anything, let alone trip. It’s just a little acid. Looking for the bathroom, it became evident that I had taken enough. It was something about the darkness that gave it away. Something about the temperature. And the bottles and cans that were stacked up and all around me. And the fact that I couldn’t find my way out of the freezer. That I had gone into the freezer, thinking it was the way to the toilet, that was a sign.
I was caught up in my stupor trying to make sense of things when I saw it. An old, red flyswatter. Of all the universes in all the multiverse it had to be in mine. I confiscated the prop and found my way to Mary at the checkout counter. She was amused at my state. I was ducking and spinning and wielding my newfound treasure just like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“God damn it this is bat country man!”
Mary soared up the road towards North Myrtle. Naturally, I couldn’t drive anymore. Although what I experienced was primarily just a body high at that point. It had never occurred to me to ask what concert we were going to.
The curtain at the House of Blues frightened me, its fabric a swirling vortex. The corners of Mary’s mouth stretched high on her cheekbones as she grinned and laughed and drank her beer. Then, she was talking to a random guy next to us and he said something like, “You’re his shaman.”
It had never occurred to me to ask what concert we were going to. But it wouldn’t have mattered. There would have been no way of anticipating the volume of fear that could fill me when I witnessed the Dropkick Murphys’ opening act take the stage, whoever they were. To me, they were demons. Or men with different colored mohawks. I couldn’t be sure. They were only human for a moment.
If I’d only been so lucky as to have a shaman. Mary was sick of me. My light-weighted-ness. She was like that. She had five years on me in age but light-years in terms of drug exposure. I wasn’t acting out; I was failing to act at all. No, let’s not get another beer. Let’s not listen. Do let’s cover our ears with our hands
Our apartment complex wasn’t far. Mary flew down the highway at warp speed so she could get back to the House of Blues for the main act. She wasn’t about to let me ruin her night. For my part, I was relieved to be getting gone. But I didn’t find the peace I was looking for when I got home. There was someone standing there in our bathroom. A man. I couldn’t quite place the face, but he looked so familiar. For one thing, this son of a bitch is ugly, I thought. His nose is big and his features asymmetrical. Something deep inside me reacted very negatively to the sight of this man. The scariest part of my trip on that fair, southern night in Myrtle Beach was the moment I realized I was looking in the mirror.
***
Of course, I wasn’t really a lightweight, in my opinion. I carried a flask with Everclear’s 190-proof moonshine. But Mary had been exposed to hard drugs at a young age. She started dancing at strip clubs when she was sixteen. The world had hardened her by the time I met her at 25. She was still “dancing,” but I didn’t see her dance so much as shake people down. Men loved her firecracker personality, and her natural red hair, and her size D implants. The less she did, the more she got paid, it seemed. I really shouldn’t even refer to her as my girlfriend; we never had any commitment to each other.
In the beginning of what would become our five-month binge, that never-ending bender, I wasn’t allowed to watch her work. I turned twenty-one a couple days after the Dropkick Murphys’ show. The club where she worked had kicked me out several times for being in there underage. Once I was allowed in, she routinely referred to me as her driver. Made me hold her cash so she didn’t lose it. And full disclosure here, we both stripped there. One side was a male revue, catering to the betrothed southern belle, and the other, much larger side, was for the vacationing golfer and his abominable desire to see boobs.
Any discussion about how I got into stripping, or more accurately, why I got into stripping, and why I hated my reflection so much, should probably start with Tommy. He was my closest friend from home, and he was also living at the beach. He was the one who suggested that I do it. Because he would do it if he were taller. And he would rather do that than wait on tables. And I get naked at parties anyway so what’s the difference?
Tommy seeded the idea, but looking back at that time, I lacked the ability to refuse my vanity. If my confidence was the soil, it was broken in just the right way. If the events of my life were the till, they had raked me just so. The surface of my heart was torn open, and the void below it exposed.
We were at dinner one night with a few friends when Tommy asked the waitress to rate our looks on a scale from one to ten. The waitress wanted nothing to do with it. But Tommy was a smooth talker. He got her to give an honest assessment. It was a normal distribution, mathematically speaking. There was a low-ish one. A few in the middle. Tommy was a nine in her book. And then she looked at me, ducked her eyes, and said that I was a ten.
We were so competitive. Tommy and me. That must have really burned him. If only he knew that I doubted her. Not that she meant it, but rather that her subjectivity was a valid subjectivity. If we took a poll of many women, my score would go way down and Tommy’s score would go way up. He was voted “best face” in our graduating class. He had that perfect, clear brown skin and those luminous eyes. He had that smile with the dimples. And he hooked up with Brooke and Chelsea and Meghan at that party and they kicked me out of the room.
***
Tommy wanted me to dance so that I could make money, although I’m sure part of him got a kick out of seeing what crazy shit I would do at his suggestion. I wasn’t exactly raking it in at T.G.I. Fridays. I technically had a job, but I gave up nearly every shift. We were drinking every day, five guys in a three-bedroom apartment at River Landing, all of us waiters, and I was never the guy bringing home beer. Plus, I was sleeping on the couch. Even Steve had some privacy: a curtain at the sunroom. It was getting to be a bit much to have me around.
It would have been late on a Friday afternoon when I walked into the club for the first time. The manager had me come into his office. I remember thinking this guy definitely just did a line of coke. He was wearing slacks and a preppy, button-down shirt with the top button open. He had floppy blonde hair, blue eyes and his nose was a pointy Irish-red.
I was glad when he didn’t ask me to dance for him.
“Do you have a T-bar?” he asked.
“A what?”
“A thong. You need to wear a thong.”
I wasn’t too happy about that.
“Don’t worry,” he continued, “We’ll find you a T-bar. Also, very important, there’s no having sex with the women in the club.”
I was a bit surprised that that had to be said, but in retrospect, it made a lot of sense.
“Can you start tonight?”
***
Within the span of a weekend, I started at the club and met Mary. I remember going back to her room on the strip. She was living out of this motel with her girlfriend, Kentucky, who was a dancer as well. The three of us drank and did lines of coke off cheap motel furniture.
When I woke up in bed with Mary, it was a typical Sunday in the Bible Belt in the early 2000s. Beer was not for sale. So, I drove to River Landing and begged the guys to give me some. Because I was hanging out with strippers, and because I got laid last night, and does anyone want to come!? I got the beer and a pat on the back, but no one wanted to join me.
***
Mary loved to show me off, her little Chippendale. Somehow, they managed to bill our venue as “The Chippendale Room,” even though the club had no real affiliation with the 1980s phenomenon. Miss Bo was a seamstress and tailor who worked on-site for the girls. Mary, who was making in the ballpark of $700 a day (2003 money), had no problem taking me to Miss Bo and having me fit for an ungodly number of T-bars. Along with break-away snakeskin leather pants, and other stripper clothing. Real quality stuff too.
The night I gave my first VIP dance I was so befogged. It’s taken me all these twenty years to come to some sort of valid comprehension of what happened that night. I had real problems. Deep-seeded problems, that I was drinking away.
At the male revue our typical customers were women, and the typical occasion was a bachelorette party. I was making more money than the experienced men before any of them could remember my fictitious name. The Magic Mikes of the place, who could actually dance (I could not), and those with a serious act (i.e. the fireman, the cowboy, the construction worker, pretty much any representative of The Village People), none of these types of people could keep up with Travis Longwood.
We had four basic revenue streams. The stage, open for anyone so inclined to tip. The floor/table dance, a one-on-one experience between a dancer and paying customer out in the audience. The VIP room, a personal dance, like the floor dance, but which happened in private. We also offered a bachelorette package which allowed the bride-to-be to go up on stage and have three or four men gyrate on her.
The way to make the most money, consistently, was by leveraging the floor dance. Where the experienced men failed was on the floor. This was my bread and butter. My trick for leeching money came from one simple observation: a man in a thong is a terrible thing. The guys would come down from the stage after an energetic, and in some cases, moving performance, and just start bum-rushing tables in their T-bar. This was a mistake. They’d get one or two dances out of a table, sure, but then they’d get sent on their way, off to bother the next table that would have to pay them to leave.
I would go to tables fully clothed (flask in hand) and strike up a conversation with some girl. I wouldn’t ask if she wanted a dance though, I’d ask her if she wanted to get one for a friend. Who could say no, it was only $5? And it’s gonna be so funny, trust me, I’m wearing a pink thong. After I had discreetly danced for “the friend,” while I was putting my snakeskin pants back on, I’d ask the girl I had just danced for if she wanted to get revenge. Naturally, this would pique her interest. Who is the monster that unleashed this naked man-beast on me? I would never actually indicate the real girl who had paid me. That would end the sequence. I’d point to any other girl at the table. And I’d do that till I made my way all the way around. I can’t say I remember ever getting turned down once I started doing it that way. Usually, I just left because I had no one else to dance for.
I never told the other guys my trick. One of my favorite parts of this whole thing was laughing with a bachelorette party when some meathead stopped by peddling his meat. Men.
Well, it was one of those nights when I was bouncing around from chair to chair and table to table when I came across a group of middle-aged locals out for the hell of it. I probably did a table dance for one or all of them when (let’s call her Rhonda) asked me to do a VIP dance for her.
I passed the manager on the way up to the rooms and he reminded me to keep the door open and to be a good boy. Rhonda sat down on the couch by the door, and I started to do a simple strip tease. I was in my T-bar and had begun gyrating when she barked something like, “Is this it, $20 for this?”
I felt bad. I didn’t know how to dance like the other guys. I mean, I had rhythm, but why wasn’t it good enough?
I’m not sure why I did it, other than to please her, but I untucked my penis from the T-bar and Rhonda took it into her mouth. It felt gross, having it in her mouth. It felt wrong. It felt like when that guy from my church used to hold me down and touch my penis when I was a kid.
“And what are you going to do for me?” Rhonda barked, gasping for a breath.
I leaned back and stuck my head out the door and put eyes on the manager. He was by the bar. Then I reached down and started fingering her. I really didn’t want to. But I did.
So, she had me in her mouth and I was fingering her and leaning back to poke my head out the door when I spotted the manager two doors down making a beeline for us. I was able to resume a “normal” dance before he got to the room. His expression, when he got to the door, was of complete surprise. I’ve got you now, was written all over his face.
When the song ended, I was eager to get away from Rhonda. The experience left me feeling dirty. A group of girls from Charleston came in and I did my rounds with them. They were young and they were beautiful. That must have driven Rhonda nuts. I stayed talking with them for the rest of the night. At least whenever I was free.
The club was closing, and I was completely drunk, stealing kisses from a girl that worked at the Hooters in Charleston. I was set between several groups of people converging on the door, giving conversation where I liked. We weren’t really moving, as often happens when a bar closes, people were just drifting in and out of their respective circles, exchanging group members for a time, and then, reforming and rearranging and talking loudly in each other’s faces. Rhonda appeared. She was terribly drunk. Visibly, terribly drunk.
“Travis! Twenty dollars,” she screamed, “I gave you twenty dollars to suck your dick!”
The girls from Charleston hadn’t heard and I wanted to keep it that way. I quickly released a bill from those banded to my T-bar at my waist and I held it forward as an offering. One of Rhonda’s friends moved in and took it, apologizing profusely. Then she got Rhonda out the door by prodding her with the Jackson.
Did the manager hear that? Will I be fired? No time to think on that. I wanted that Hooters waitress too badly. I didn’t want to drive to Charleston, as I was invited, to visit her. I wanted her that night. That second. To be inside her. I took her by the hand, and we dipped into the kitchen. I started trying the closet doors. Each one was locked. And by the time I pulled on the last closet door the manager had come in.
There’s no having sex with the women in the club.
***
My relationship to alcohol and sex were cut from the same cloth. Give me the good stuff. As much as I can get my hands on. There was never enough of the good stuff.
I knew I was alcoholic from the age of 21 when Mary and I drank around the clock for five months straight. I went from the guy on the couch to taking over the lease at River Landing when Tommy left to backpack across Europe, the other roommates splintering off as a result.
When the money left town at the end of golf season, so did Mary and our revolving door of strip club people. I had no idea how I was going to keep the apartment through the winter. For the first time in my life, I had to find real work. The best thing on my resume was a failed Marine Corps enlistment. No good explanation for the dates of service. No, don’t tell them about jumping off the ship. They don’t need to know about that. That fucker was an aircraft carrier.
I ended up at a construction site as a laborer. This required early hours, long hours. I sobered up without rehab. Enduring mild DTs. I’d reward myself with a single 24 ounce can of beer at lunch. And I'd go in the water regardless of the month or tempurature.
In the years after Myrtle Beach, I moved back North, and I was able to throttle my drinking according to the level of responsibility my life required. I earned a degree in Electrical Engineering. I got married. Had a kid. Kids, plural. Started a career building out wireless infrastructure in Manhattan for a large corporation. But accomplishing these things took such control. I was dying to open the throttle, to zip recklessly down the highway, narrowly avoiding hazards, weaving in and out of traffic, drunk and mad and happy to be alive. And that’s exactly what I did.
***
A thousand summers on the Greek islands would hardly be enough.
It was the last night of our vacation and we were sitting on a balcony in Athens drinking beer and mojitos. I was saying something about going to sleep, when I believe it was my wife’s second cousin, a rotund middle-aged woman, with dark skin and a heavy Greek accent, who said, “You drink too much beer. If I drank as much beer as you, I would sleep for a month. You have drunk all of the beer in Greece!”
“I drank everything I could get my hands on,” I replied.
I didn’t care what the woman had said. I carried on as usual. I drank another beer. Forget sleep, I thought. First of all, on any sort of binge like the one I had recently accomplished, your body becomes accustomed to the alcohol. Secondly, the thought of leaving terrified me. I required more sedation.
I quickly drank every beer in the apartment. Then I excused myself to buy more beer. As a pretext, I was on a beer run, but actually, I was determined to hear her voice again, the girl I met on the island.
The girl I met on the island; she was in Athens too. I felt my final chance to see her slipping away. So, I left the apartment with an eighteen-inch laptop fully ajar and playing music at maximum volume, and I tread through Nea Smyrni at a New York City pace, toward the kiosk with the beer by the pay phone.
For reasons you’ll never fully understand, I’ve come to consider her and I, like earthworms forging through rich, dark soil. Like worms we were blind. But like worms we could feel.
As I made my way toward the platia, the music of the island ran loose in my mind like the toro bravo down the streets of Pamplona. And loose in my mind were the moments we shared. Like when I danced with her, and felt splendor, festivity, rejoicing. But for me, I experienced all these graces amidst the degradation of something I possessed, something which wasn't exactly morality, but rather, my best attempt to be someone that I could live with, or so I thought, on that late-summer's night.
I had been perpetually fractured. Beer. Whiskey. Red Wine. Ouzo. Rum. Whatever else came my way. Yet nearly every night on the island I hit the town with my son, Leonidas. He was eighteen months old that summer and the true spirit of adventure was already in his nature. He never fully adjusted to the time zone change from New York, so at night we explored the maze of steep cobblestone roads surrounding the old port. In the old town we passed lively establishments open late into the night. We listened to music fill the harbor and echo all the way up the labyrinth. We found village kittens and held them in the palms of our hands. I remember the sea below us and the moon above and the world rolled out to infinity. The island was good for him. It was good for both of us.
Scattered throughout the old town of Skiathos there were water spigots built into something like stone altars. Whenever we came across one, I would open the spigot and pick the boy up. Suspended horizontally, he would drink from the flowing water. Then I would hang my own drunken head and drink while clutching the boy close to my chest. Heads touching, we would smile and laugh at one another’s wet, dribbling faces as we both drank down the cool elixir. Our lives sustained from the island we made a bond with the Earth in that particular location. And in doing so we made a bond with each other.
I was walking very quickly and very awkwardly with that huge god-damn laptop. I was listening to that gypsy song. The song I heard playing over and over again while I danced with her, the barmaid. That was who I was rushing to call, the barmaid. The girl who brought me drinks night after night on the old port of Skiathos. Pathetic and depraved, racing down the street, I wanted to feel the way she had made me feel… forever.
I should have left it to be nothing more than a summer romance. Let that thing which almost happened never happen. But I felt I had to call the girl. Even with no viable plan for meeting up with her. Because. I'd have settled to hear her voice again. To hear her name upon answering the phone. God. Her name. I melted when she said it for the first time. I melted when she spoke. Her accent. Her eyes. I was Icarus incarnate. Entangled. Careening. Struck down to the Earth. Struck down by the Sun. Struck down by my primordial adventure with a goddess.
***
I met Tatiana through a friend. I met the friend, Melissa, in the first year of marriage to my first wife. At that time, I was still faithful. And my Leo was a newborn.
Melissa and I had the type of friendship that bothered both of our significant others. It was how we met. I was dropping my bicycle off at the shop where she worked, and we exchanged numbers. There was a sort of spark I guess, and we were searching for a way to be able to have a legitimate friendship, so when we were chatting it came out that her husband, Gary, attended the prestigious university that I was applying to. She thought that it would be nice to all hang out and ride and I agreed. But my wife didn’t cycle. I hung out with Gary and Melissa and left my wife at home with the baby. One hot summer day, after we cycled and had gone back to my house to swim in the pool in our underwear, my ex-wife, Kelly, told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re fucking both of them.” Gary had an objectively weak personality. He was like our third wheel.
Tatiana was a PhD candidate in the same doctoral program as Gary; that was her connection. But I knew Melissa and Gary for over a year before I ever met Tatiana. I knew she cycled, and the idea was that we would all ride one day.
Then, Melissa invited me to sleep at Tatiana’s apartment in the city. Apparently, there was a bike race the next morning at Grant’s Tomb that she thought I’d like. I didn’t even present that idea to Kelly. Hey, do you mind if I go sleep over some single girl’s house? Tatiana notoriously didn’t date.
I learned about all this in Tatiana’s life, without ever having met her. And I got invited to her home, without ever having spoken to her. It all came through Melissa. I assumed that if Melissa had the OK to invite me to sleep over, Tatiana was onboard, if only for Melissa’s sake. A friend of yours is a friend of mine.
I felt a fun flirtation with Melissa. As we laid out on the grass drinking beer during summer barbeques at my house. As we watched the sun rise over the Hudson having cycled up the Palisades to Piermont. But it wasn’t just a feeling, it was something obvious and visible. By the end of that summer my wife made me cut her off. It was probably just in time. The night I called her to tell her I’m so sorry but we can’t be friends anymore, she was out at a club with Tatiana. Those two never went out, but she had wanted me to join them. Me, and not Gary.
After that I didn’t talk to Melissa and Gary for some time, but I didn’t delete them from social media. Fall came and went and then it was winter. During that time, I interacted with Tatiana online, in a limited capacity. My impression of her from her Facebook posts wasn’t very good. She was too conservative. She took some shot at Jon Stewart that rubbed me the wrong way. I was a diehard Daily Show fan at that time.
When it was spring again, since Tatiana knew I had been close with Melissa, she invited me to a surprise baby shower for Melissa. This was the first I had heard that Melissa was pregnant. I mentioned it to Kelly, not expecting for us to go, but when I did, she acted as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t stood in front of me and commanded me to stop talking to the girl. Of course, we should go, and bring them a gift. The threat eliminated I suppose.
When I finally met Tatiana, a few weeks before the shower, her, Gary, and I took a ride up the Palisades to meet Melissa, Kelly and friends at a scenic lookout. Tatiana was a very serious person. She biked hard, and it was obvious from initial conversation that she worked hard on her research. She was driven. She was someone who complained a lot. But there was also something kind of sweet about her. I was making homemade ginger ale around that time and when Tatiana hosted the baby shower at her apartment, she was the only one to drink it with me. She told me it was very good, and she smiled at me. Kelly used to tell me it tasted like shit.
But Tatiana’s complaining did get to be a bit much sometimes. It was her mentor that was dragging out her thesis, adding years to her program. The guy on her cycling team who was a reckless child who she kind of liked but could never like. And then it was the insurance company that was withholding payment after she broke her leg at a race. All valid complaints, she just seemed so utterly shaken by these things; shook to the core.
***
That fall I was finally at prestigious university, and I was working in the city as well. Tatiana lived right by campus. I lived a hefty bridge toll away. The length of the commute depended on traffic, but an hour , one way, was standard, and at night when everyone had gone it was only twenty minutes. All this to say, once I was in the city, I wanted to stay in the city till I was done for the day.
Tatiana and me hanging out happened by circumstance. At least that’s what I told myself. For me, it was convenient to go to her apartment after work, if I had a night class. And for her, with a bum leg, how could she resist a healthy person stopping by who was offering to bring her food or coffee or whatever she needed? We’d lounge around her bedroom in front of the AC to get away from the summer heat that refused to yield. One time she wore this short denim skirt.
I always brought booze. She didn’t drink much, which was OK with me. A single screwdriver around happy hour time. A glass of wine. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t not want her to get drunk. I wanted everyone to lose control with me, always. But I wasn’t so desperate. I subscribed to the David Aames method from Vanilla Sky, “You keep the relationship casual... until the absolute breaking point, and then one evening or afternoon or morning... it could be months from now... well, you know how it works.” I didn’t care if there was a breaking point for Tatiana and me, but if there was gonna be one, I was gonna be there for it.
I wish I could say I was so innocent. As if being aloof is justification. But I did eventually choose her over my family, and that was the beginning of the end. I didn’t have class one night, and I didn’t have to go back to work, and I stayed to watch a movie with her anyway. I remember getting up after the movie, my mouth tacky from red wine, and going to give her a hug goodbye. I remember looking at her in a way that made my attraction transparent, something I always hid. She demurred. Her body language clear that she didn’t want me to come in for a kiss or anything. It’s so strange, how sometimes more can be said when no words are spoken.
After I left her apartment that night, I made a promise to myself to never hook-up with Tatiana, for my own good. We were watching that old movie, Road Trip. It’s filled with sex and booze and raunchy humor. She had never seen it. And I think she could have gone her entire life without ever seeing it. She hated it. Certain scenes made her very uncomfortable. Which made me wonder if she was a virgin.
The night Hurricane Sandy smashed us in the Northeast I was asked to stay at our headquarters in the city to support the critical infrastructure (which failed). It was a good opportunity for me to gain some visibility to upper management and make some extra cash. And all it amounted to was getting paid double-time to fall asleep on a cot since nothing could be done anyway. I was on the clock for 24 hours straight.
The next day, before I went home, I was going to make use of the opportunity to have dinner on my corporate card. A reward for the long hours worked. I sent Tatiana a message asking if she wanted to eat with me.
Was I still subscribed to the David Aames method? Or did I just want some innocent company for dinner? I wasn’t resigned to a life of infidelity at that point, I struggled with the idea of it, that is all I know.
***
Tatiana had just gotten her cast off. She did want to get out of her apartment. Come out with me. Our first choice was something close to the school, but Manhattan was pretty much closed. We ended up finding a bar that was open several blocks south. It was packed like a Saturday night on a weekday afternoon. Rampant destruction and the closure of most places of business acted as some sort of cue for the city to drink. To drink heavily. This is something I understood.
We had a pitcher of beer wherein I drank three of the four pints, and we ate. We were walking out when we saw the beer pong table. Tatiana had never played before and I’m sure I told her she had to try it, or she should try it or something. Anyway, we played. And it was, to this day, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. She didn’t miss a cup. This girl was so straight she couldn’t understand why anyone ever missed. I, on the other hand, missed every shot. She would later tell a Title IX investigator that she thought I missed on purpose to start getting her drunk. But I’m much too competitive for that. When we lost to those frat boys, and I had to buy them a shot, I was quite disappointed in myself.
We went for one more at a bar by her apartment. And to a liquor store after that, to get fuel for what we had decided to do. We had decided to record submission videos at her place for Survivor, the gameshow. In-between takes, the conversation got personal. Deep. She opened up. I opened up. I read her a story about my trip to Greece. My story about a girl other than my wife. As we spoke, she went from the shattered and shaken person I had known, to a girl who could let her hair down. She even spoke with confidence on her last take. I thought that this was a sign that she was becoming a better version of herself, but in her eyes, she was becoming a version of herself that she never wanted to be again, because of what happened next. We had sex, kind-of. And she ended up reporting me to the school for sexual misconduct.
It wasn’t a case where it was even alleged that she said “no,” and I defied that request. It was a case of whether she was able to give consent because of the level of her intoxication. Her memory of the night was poor. And in retrospect, it looked very bad that I kept pursuing drink all night. As if I pursued the drink as a means to an end. The end being her body. I was found guilty of misconduct, that I most likely had not received affirmative consent. However, the Title IX board did not account for the fact that once I had crossed the Rubicon, that point of no return, that once I had passed that point, I would have drunk to oblivion, whether she was with me or not. It didn't matter who she was.
But she was with me. She was. I stayed because we were having fun. And at the absolute breaking point, she looked at me and did not demure; she smiled and lifted her glass and said, “I think I’m going to need another one of these before that happens.”
She looked enthusiastic to me at the beginning of our sexual encounter. She had asked me to get a condom and when I came back, she was completely naked. She even took her socks off. After some time, she asked me to stop, which I promptly did. Then she got sick. Then she vomited. I cleaned her up, helped her into bed, and left a plastic bag for her to vomit into. Then drove home to my family, although a part of me wanted to stay with her. But before I left, she revealed the true extent of her sexual experience. I had taken her virginity.
When Tatiana woke up the next morning, she sent out a flurry of rage-texts. I can’t believe that happened. We’re never drinking that much together again. And don’t talk about my legs. I can’t believe that someone with a beautiful wife and a beautiful child would do that. I hate myself.
I didn’t help the situation. I tried to convince her we should do it again. I was so self-centered that I didn’t even acknowledge that she had just told me she hated herself. And so out of touch with my own self-image that I had forgotten how it feels. I know that hate. Where was my empathy? Remember the mirror. Eventually, she stopped talking to me.
***
According to her website, Hannah Stotland is a two-time Harvard graduate with over ten years of experience in college and law school admissions consulting. She has spent much of her time since #metoo counseling students who have been expelled from their university for sexual misconduct, and helping them to get back into school, usually at a different location. She is not a fan of affirmative consent, easily verifiable through an article she co-wrote which appeared in The Crimson, “The Hidden Perils of Affirmative Consent Policies.”
I heard Hannah on a Radiolab podcast. They were doing a show on consent, inspired by radio-maker Kaitlyn Prest’s mini-series called “No,” which explores consent and Kaitlyn’s own experience with someone disregarding her verbal “No.” In episode two, Radiolab plays the full Stotland interview, which is something they claim they rarely do. But when you hear the interview it’s easy to understand why they did it. Kaitlyn Prest and Hannah Stotland are diametrically opposed on the issue of whether expulsion of young men from college campuses is the correct answer to #metoo. Their conversation is real, passionate, and valuable.
In part two of Radiolab’s “In the No” (yes, different from Prest’s “No”), Hannah shares the details of one of her cases. She says she’s allowed to share the details because they’ve already been made public in a court filing.
This is an excerpt from a transcript on the WNYC Studios, Radiolab website, Stotland speaking:
“…my student is a big Black guy. You know, well over six feet tall, a lot of muscles, he’s an athlete. And it’s undisputed that he and the accuser were in her dorm room together to hook up. They took off all their clothes, and she touched his genitals and performed oral sex on him. And she said that she did that because she was fearful once they were both naked. And she felt that – that the situation was so overwhelming that she had to reach out and touch him, and then reach out and use her mouth on him. And the – the school decided in that situation that the only thing that had gone wrong was that there wasn’t a verbal confirmation. And so, if you go in somebody’s dorm room and you take – and both of you take off your clothes, and she touches you and places your penis in her mouth when you’re not speaking, she has not conveyed consent.”
When I first heard this story, I thought that Jane Doe and the school had taken an indefensible position. But then I found similarities between her experience and my experience with Rhonda. I felt like I had to “perform” for Rhonda. After all, I had woken up that morning, put on a thong, taken off my clothes; the full monty. Who was I to protest?
How could Ms. Doe not want the athlete’s penis in her mouth, yet find it there anyway? I understand this, because I unequivocally loathed every second my fingers were in Rhonda, and she had me in her mouth, yet those event’s happened, even though I was more than capable to stop it, physically.
In The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison, she shares a drunken sexual encounter with a stranger, one which she knew in the moment that she didn’t want, yet she didn’t stop. Jamison says, “…consent when you’re drunk means something I still don’t have a good language for. It was as if I’d already made myself available as someone without pride, and it would have been hypocritical to become someone different.”
***
If you can't find, at the very least, an acceptable, miserable existence, then you begin to ask yourself some questions. Like whether you can change. Become someone or something that you can live with. Or if maybe you should end it all. Or if somehow you could bury that loathing and contempt. Bury those feelings deep within.
The path of least resistance is certainly the ostrich. Keep your head below grade. Hide. Do this for as long as you can. Ignore how you felt when you first decided to avert your eyes. Stand firm when you finally take your head out of the sand and see that you’re about to be devoured. And when your life flashes before your eyes, choose what you loved most about this world. Bring it to the forefront of your mind.
A thousand summers on the Greek islands would hardly be enough.
The paragraphs you’ve just read are the opening to a semi-autobiographical novel I worked on. Specifically, that is the opening I had on March 20, 2019, the last time I saved the document, four days before my last drink. I had been working on the novel for years and had rewritten the first pages hundreds of times. I had become obsessed with taking my own life in the last months. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. But I just couldn’t let go until my story was out there. I had to have a final draft. I needed the world to know my pain. Until I didn’t, and I just wanted out, no matter what.
***
They say the worst thing about sobering up is that you get your feelings back. Getting sober, for me, was like waking up from a dream state. A state in which I had no empathy, no feelings, and no ability to relate to another human being on a humane basis.
I looked up and saw my family. My then-wife. Both boys. The girl. I saw distress in their eyes. And I felt nothing for them. And I wanted to feel less. That’s what the blade was for. I lay in a fetal position on the basement floor. I cocooned the knife, that sharp metal edge waiting to take me away, I cocooned it in the mass of my limp body so that she couldn’t grab it.
“Give it to me,” my wife said. “We can talk about it in the morning.”
Where was that tenderness twenty minutes ago? When she realized after ten years of marriage that she was married to a whore? Why wouldn’t she let me die in peace?
I got up off the floor and handed her the knife. I caught sight of the family portrait at Disney World. My wife and daughter, each wearing mouse ears. All of us with a natural smile. Something had been funny. What was it?
“I’ll be back,” I said. Then stumbling up the stairs. Then grabbing my keys. Everyone rushing behind me.
“Don’t go,” she said, “just get some sleep, yea?”
Fuck you. Then why did you wake me up and confront me with the affair. The affairs. While I was passed out. Piss drunk. Where was the forethought?
“No, I don’t think I will,” I told her. Now at the door. Now out on the front lawn.
“So where are you going?” she asked.
“To the bridge,” I said, barely able to look back at them.
“No, Dada,” my son called out. What remarkable intuition. At just eight years old he sensed the danger. I had expected my wife to understand that she wouldn’t see me again, but not the boy. “Stay, Dada, please.”
I looked at him. A cold look. “Why? Why should I stay?”
“Because we love you,” he told me.
I thought about the bridge. That span between New York and New Jersey. The one I had so often fantasized about as I drove home drunkenly at night. How I longed to fall from it. How I longed to dive from atop the tall, steel tower. My swan song. That boy. He knew. I could lie to him. But god-damn it he knew. I couldn’t drive away with that kid knowing he’d never see me again. He had won.
On my way into the house, “Fine.” I said. “What do you know about love anyway? Boy.”
What a piece of shit I am. I couldn’t even let him enjoy his victory. I had to disparage the kid, after he had saved my fucking life.
***
“If my bottom had been any lower,” I said, “I would have been in the Earth.”
“I got news for you, my friend,” Chris responded, “the bottom is bottomless. You ever see someone die of cirrhosis? Not a pretty way to go.”
Chris was my sponsor. He was a blue-collar man. A family man. His hands had grit and his skin was like leather. He was always smoking a cheap cigar. But his deep-set eyes were soft with compassion and his life had life. We sat in the cool night air on the patio in his backyard.
I had been sober over a hundred days. Since the basement floor. My wife had filed for divorce and had the kids taken from me. Remember the hardest thing about sobering up? Getting your feelings back. This is where that came into effect. Turns out it felt bad knowing what I had exposed my kids to. Turns out I missed them deeply. I was just getting a glimpse of what being a real parent could be, while we were trying to work it out. And then poof. They were gone.
“So,” Chris asked me, “how’s it looking on the Kelly front?”
“Not good. We’re done. I got a message from another one of the girls. Kelly found her on social media and sent her all this nasty shit, slut-shaming her and what-not.”
Chris raised his hands in the air and his eyebrows flared.
“I told you man. Sometimes it’s just better to… restraint of pen and tongue. You gotta stop talking to your wife about the women you cheated on her with. It’s just hurtful now.”
I looked up at the clear sky dotted with stars and remembered how I ‘fessed up to all my affairs.
“How many were there?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe fifteen.”
He couldn’t help but laugh and I hung my head. Any vestige of pride in my conquests turned now into a thorn in my side.
“We haven’t spoken in weeks, since she filed,” I said. “All this came out after our therapy. The therapist said we had to restore honesty and that I should tell her anything she wanted to know. She wanted to know about all of them. Everything. She couldn’t believe that women like this exist, that sleep with married men. The therapist also warned her about hearing too much, but Kelly said she had to know for sure that everything was done. That was probably just a line. She wanted to know every detail so she could leave me; she wasn’t trying to heal the relationship.”
“That may be true. Look it. Having a way with the ladies isn’t such a bad thing. Not so good that you were married. But it’s OK. You’re gonna be OK, dude. No. You are OK.”
I didn’t believe him. My eyes watered. I tried to stay away from that force which pulls me toward the bridge. Toward the edge. Even sober it was still calling me. And if I thought I’d never see my kids again, the bridge was all but certain.
“Hey, hey, I know that look,” Chris said. “Come back to me.”
I took a deep breath and held back tears.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“You need to take the first step.”
I raised my head to meet his gaze. He looked at me with those deep-set eyes and that compassion which shone like a flicker of light.
“How?”
“I’m gonna ask you a question, and I don’t want you to answer right away. I want you to think about it and let me know.”
“Ok.”
“Those terrible things you did to your wife, all the lies and the cheating and the bullshit, would you have done them if you weren’t drinking?”
He said it again but with more emphasis, “Those terrible things you did to your wife, would you have done them if you weren’t drinking?”
It’s a rare quality to know oneself. I have never known myself particularly well. My mind both malleable and rigid. I often make war against my own intentions. But I thought I saw my true form that day.
“No,” I said.
“Good. Then stop hating yourself and hate the disease.”
I turned my head from the constellation Orion back to Chris. The compassion had left, and anger simmered.
“Stop hating yourself and hate the disease,” he yelled at me. “It took your family away! Not you!”
“But-”
“No but. But what! You see, that’s how I stay sober. I don’t hate myself. I hate the disease. It killed my father. It killed my brother. And it wants me dead. So, I say fuck you. Fuck you,” he stood and yelled into the blackness of night, spit flying off his lips. “You can’t have me you mother-fucker!”
I stayed down. And when he was seated, I was still holding back tears.
“You’re gonna be fine, my friend. You can do anything. You just can’t drink. And you know, we’re not bad people, we’re just sick people. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet a girl one day and get married again. I wouldn’t be here if my dad didn’t have a second marriage.”
“But,” I said, “I’m gonna miss my first family. What have I done? I lost them, and for what? All for something strange? Something new? I wanted to feel something. And I never did. They never cared. None of them. They just used me.”
“Yes, they did. And you used them.”
I let saline water fall from my eyes. Ten years flashed through my mind in a moment. Something had been funny, a lifetime ago. Some thing at Disney World. It was me. I had been funny. I was their hero. I was their father. But my beautiful family was gone.