David Hollander
All right, all right, just take it easy! For god’s sake, give me a minute here. Look: Do you like true stories? Everyone does! And listen, this one—unlike the tales I used to spin in the confessional booths of my Catholic boyhood—actually is true, and could be just the thing to save their lives, not to mention my own. But how to tell it? How to frame the disaster that bears my name? Let’s begin anecdotally, with a few examples of my modus delecto, as befits our strange and inevitable impasse:
My wife is approaching our home, having just retrieved our two-year-old girl from daycare, which is where we send her to reduce the odds of us hanging ourselves. What I have been doing, with my coveted alone time, is masturbating to internet pornography, scheduling my hard-earned orgasm to precede their expected arrival by some three-hundred seconds. This forethought ensures that I’ll be entrenched before the kitchen sink, elbows deep in dishwater, at the moment of their harried entrance. The wife comes home, sees me hard at work, and because she doesn’t really understand how time works (an ignorance not uncommon in the fairer sex) she takes my labor to be indicative of a more consistent labor and also a commitment to our domestic agenda, when meanwhile just ten minutes earlier I was staring at all sorts of vaginas, none of which were hers, though she doesn’t really let me see her vagina anymore which is one small cause of all my hatefulness and sorrow. Not to mention that my own little daughter (who is adorable, goddamn her) has a vagina too, and it’s difficult to avoid doing the math here, which necessitates a series of presently unknowable men one day ogling her sexual apparatus with the same hollow lust with which I was ogling these other—I mean, like, hundreds of others, thousands, who knows how many I’ve ogled?—sexual apparati, though I suppose if we parent reasonably well she won’t have to display hers on the internet for undiscerning fathers such as me.
This is a terrible example. Pornography is ubiquitous and everyone must do this sort of thing. Wait… does everyone do this sort of thing? That’s another problem I have. I extrapolate from my own case with wild abandon. I jerk off in the bathroom of a crowded airport, suddenly overcome by thoughts of some uber-lady’s pubic hair. Well surely, I assume post-climax, surely that’s why all these other stalls are occupied! But I should mention that I’m not like a lot of other guys who look at pornography. For one thing, the shame would kill me if anyone knew. That’s why I’m telling you. So that the shame will kill me. I want the shame to kill me before the dishes do. It’s either shame or dishes, goddamn you all.
Here’s something that might work better in terms of providing factual evidence for what I am calling my hatefulness and sorrow, although sorrow is one of those words with heft that I like to throw around (a lot like I throw around the word heft) because it seems to posit a soul in my rapidly aging body which in fact rattles like a can whenever I stumble. Empty, like in the case of the Tin Man. What did that fucker lack again? That’s right: a heart. Well forget it then. I’ve got a heart and it hurts all the time because I am so fucking sad that I can hardly breathe. Not that you care. I smile a lot too, which humans take (who knows why?) as a sign of my happiness. Recently I was telling a human that I was sad and wished my life would suddenly end without warning. She said, “Oh, your despondency shtick again.” That fucking bitch. Yeah, it’s a shtick all right, just like it’s a shtick when the coalminers emerge from their cold black underworld, coughing blood. That’s the kind of shtick it is. But the human who said this has a vagina and so naturally I was powerless to do anything but grin in the wake of her observation. But then who am I kidding? Had she been a he, the smile would have been even bigger, the self-deprecating laughter even louder. Me and confrontation, we’re like toy birds on opposite ends of a spindle, always together but never meeting. Or we’re like twin brothers who spend their lives trying to avoid attending the same functions. Or no, we’re not like that at all. I withdraw these metaphors from consideration, your honor.
Evidence: I am a “teacher.” I “teach” writing. This “teaching” occurs at a prestigious liberal arts college, and is directed (primarily) at twenty-somethings in search of master of fine arts degrees in fiction writing. Many of these twenty-somethings have vaginas—more than half of them at last count, given the college’s female-skewed enrollment—and I do often imagine my mouth clamped lamprey-like to these delectables, which thoughts can be a distraction given that the lion’s share of my “teaching” takes the form of one-on-one conferences with these budding prose-stylists. I have not yet arrived at the evidence portion of this paragraph, but perhaps you can already see a certain duplicity by juxtaposing the job-as-described against my tone-in-describing. Or are you an imbecile? Let’s assume you are. I’m sure that you know—having done your research—that I’m a basically unsuccessful writer who happened to publish a novel that nobody read but that I understand burns quite well. The point being that that’s how I got this “teaching” job at the prestigious liberal arts college with the students who often have vaginas. On certain occasions, I’ll bet the students with vaginas have thought about me touching them (i.e., the vaginas), and have maybe even touched their own vaginas while imagining that it was me doing the touching, the thought of which is nearly unbearable and is providing me yet another unwanted erection. But I’m not bad looking. I’m not good looking either. I’m something in between. I’m nearing middle age (which won’t be in the middle, mind you, and not only because you’re here, bringing my quote unquote happy normal life to an abrupt end) but I am boyishly charming and have nice pectoral muscles. I look reasonably good touching myself, shirtless, while staring at those digitized vaginas on the Pornography Machine. Maybe you call it a computer, but how much computing does it do? They are best (i.e., the digitized vaginas) when they appear to be moist, as if some actual sexual arousal were occurring in the mind and heart of the vagina’s owner… or not owner, but you know, in the body and brain that is attached to the vagina. That’s where thoughts and bowel movements and a thousand kinds of cancer occur. But don’t think about that. Did I tell you about my cancer? It’s right in there with the hatefulness and the sorrow, taking up space. Little black nodules like grape pits all scattered about my organs. But hey, this is all just a shtick! I’m so happy. I don’t really have cancer, by the way. It’s a metaphor. It’s based on actual events. Maybe the god I don’t believe in will give it to me now, out of spite. Well good for him then, let him. (No! I take it back! I don’t want cancer! Don’t give it to me! Although I know that you’re going to now, you filthy bastard.)
Oh Jesus Christ, I can’t even get to any of the examples. I’m too busy obsessing over the vaginas. But not all of my hatefulness and sorrow is born of vaginas. There are other things wrong with me! I am a catalog of Things Wrong! And no one knows the real me. That’s what’s sad. Now you’ll know the real me and be able to say, That’s guy’s all fucked up! Which is really all I want. That, and I want to save my family’s life. And to touch your vagina. I’m going for the trifecta.
Here’s something I think about sometimes. We’ve got countless satellites circling the earth—like, out in space—and they’re bouncing signals from our handheld electronic and cellular devices back down through the ionosphere to make impact with receiving towers which then transmit the signal to a location algorithmically prescribed by the homo erectus punching numbers, and what’s it all for? “Hey honey, should I bring home milk?” Or, “Did you want sausage on that Joe?” Do we deserve such wizardry? My Pornography Machine is streaming live programming through a cybervoid I will never understand. Wouldn’t we be better off bashing each other with clubs and stones? And who’s making these Pornography Machines? Do you know anyone who could make one? If you had to start from scratch what could you make? I could sharpen a stick at one end. Forget about the portable cellular devices. How do you make a fucking spoon? I mean, could you do it? You’re better than me if you could. You’re likely better than me anyway. Boo hoo woe is me and so on and so forth.
You’re probably very surprised to learn that I am a writing “teacher” given that this isn’t very good writing. It has no heft. But the important thing is that I don’t only think about vaginas and that I have other interests. I play Ultimate Frisbee! That ought to impress you. And I have a guitar. And I used to study philosophy. Did I understand that which I studied? Rarely, and never to the degree of which I have occasionally boasted. But everyone is like this, right? We exaggerate our accomplishments. We pretend to be happier than we are. We hope for the hopeless future. We are righteous and we justify our arbitrary views. We are guilt-stricken and frightened. We deny our mortality. We forget what we can, and repress what we can not. We are driven by lust but we wish we weren’t. We are sad, so sad. We are all cowards and criminals and our crimes follow us everywhere. How do you live with yourself? That’s what I want to know. How does any one of you live with yourself?
One of my former students with a vagina tries to bludgeon me into contentment. She knows more than a lot of you, about me. Have I ever touched her vagina? Don’t be ridiculous! Not only have I never wooed or been wooed by a student, but I have frequently told students-with-vaginas that I find such behavior despicable, that I could not tolerate a teacher abusing his or her power, nor understand how any married person could carry on that way. See, I’ve got shtick to spare; it’s just not the same shtick that the bitch in that other paragraph claimed to recognize. But so this one student has a way of penetrating my lies. Here is how she does it: she cares about other people, and thus notices them. (Thankfully it’s a rare condition and you’re not likely to suffer from it.) So I’ve had to tell her a little about my hatefulness and loathsomeness and sorrow. But she undermines the fantasia of my self-pity by suggesting alternative perspectives. She thinks that my actions are as important as my thoughts. A dangerous notion! She says, But what does it matter if your thoughts are wicked, when you do so much good in the world? This is the kind of platitudinous straw I cling to when I’m snorting a lot of cocaine. But I haven’t snorted it much since I stopped snorting it a few years ago. Stopping was the best way for me to slow down. Of course I’m just trying to impress you now. Put down the weapon and listen carefully. My story must be told! And I must live to tell it! I must live and live and live and live and live. If I ever die it’ll kill me. Anyway, I can’t die, not anymore than I can shit pumpkin seeds and flap my wings to Omaha. What a ridiculous idea, me dying. I’m not afraid of you. (But seriously, stop waving that thing around.)
Okay, let’s try another tack here. Evidence: A guy I’ve known since college calls me on the phone to complain about his depression. He says, Two nights ago I had a gun in my mouth and God help me I nearly did it. (Yeah, right, sure you did buddy.) His wife is insisting that he enter some sort of inpatient facility for depression otherwise he’ll never see her or their kid again. So what’s my reaction? Well what do you think? I need to be loved by everyone, all the time! Never mind that I’m thinking about his beautiful, long-legged wife, who some years earlier suffered my bumbling, half-drunken attempt at seduction while my friend was ten states away attending to a screaming mother dying of some slow and inoperable cancer. Never mind that I’ve lived ever since with the buried but still coldly glowing fear that she’d find reason to share news of my unkind behavior with this friend, thereby catalyzing events I’d be ill-equipped to endure, fisticuffs or worse, my friend’s disappointment or loathing. Never mind that even at this moment, on the phone with this very dear friend, never mind that the image of the black gun thrust up against his palette is sort of overlapping with the image of his wife’s very naked, very warm body. Not that I’ve ever seen her naked body, but with such a vast array of vagina-images in my mental safebox, it’s easy enough to play mix-and-match to create a lovely little film of her spreading her legs and saying something dirty to me. Never mind all of that! What I say to my friend is I’m here for you, buddy, I love you like a brother, I’d do anything for you. I see two, three emotional moves ahead. I countersink my compassion and love so deep into his heart that he’ll never pull those fuckers out. But I’m also running this fantasy in my diseased mind in which he is conveniently institutionalized, leaving his wife’s vagina in need of a shoulder to cry on. I never really made a pass at her, by the way. Do you really think I’d have that kind of gumption? Seriously? The point is, I wanted to, and want to right now, just like I want to lower my cheek to your stockings and feel the emanating warmth, despite the predicament in which we currently find ourselves.
And you’ve come today, of all days. I celebrate this little anniversary every year, privately and in my own way. I reflect upon her over lunch. Once I even lit a candle, said a few words. I try to make it real, what happened to her. I try to accept my own complicity. I think of her there in the back of the car, alone and unable to move or cry out. The twilit world streaming by. I wonder if she thought of me at all, or of our parents. I try not to imagine what they might have done to her. To you. It’s all so complicated, isn’t it? The way lives intertwine and intersect. You probably don’t see it yet, but if you live long enough you will. I guarantee that.
Maybe this will help you understand the real me. It involves my own dear mother, God bless her soul. When I was 15 I actually molested her. No, no, this gets funnier. She was asleep on the couch with a cigarette still burning in the ashtray and I was crouched on the rug staring at scrambled-cable images of fornicating adults because sadly my parents did not subscribe to pornography. I had the sound on low and strained to listen to all the filthy chatter while catching strange glimpses of bared skin, or of alien landscapes or fighter planes, really who could tell? I had extricated my erection from my jeans and was touching myself in a vague and worried way when it occurred to me that just behind me was a flesh-and-blood woman with, presumably, all the requisite parts. I crept over to her and unbuttoned her pants while she snored lightly and then I discovered her black lace panties—the nerve of my own dear mother wearing lace!—and just as I was pulling back the waistband she woke with a start and, no doubt flummoxed by these uncommon circumstances, rolled away from me to face the back of the couch while I went through the motions of zipping up, turning off the television, and retiring to my own bedroom where I writhed in a fit of anxious longing and regret that has yet to subside. After achieving orgasm, that is. (She never said anything about this, I should add, and when I saw her lying in the black casket, her face lined with age and fear, I remembered that night with perfect clarity and cried and cried.)
I swear sometimes I’d swear I was asleep, that this was all a dream, that’s how impossible it seems that my thoughts—which run about a million miles a second and have nothing to do with anything I actually do or say—that these thoughts are somehow the result of real physical stuff, neurons and ganglia and synapses and all that… material. Sometimes, seriously now, sometimes I think that the world must be more like my mind than it seems, intangible and without causal connection and just sort of hazy and nebulous and infinitely malleable. Either that or my mind must be more like the world, with thoughts streaming from my scalp’s follicles like silly string. I mean, it’s just too cruel that these two categories of things could coexist, right? That there could be physical stuff existing alongside, but eternally divided from, the bytes of consciousness. It’s absurd. And it’s exhausting to try and talk about it. And it’s not helping. Let’s move on.
I would have gladly fucked a chicken, when I was a boy. What I mean is, I’d read a story about people fucking chickens—farm people or whatever, lonely freaks and cow-milkers—and I thought to myself, I’d like to give that a try. I suppose this is irrelevant. But you know, I later went to college and I discovered I was pretty smart (but again, not that smart) and there were girls around and interested and some of them even went to bed with me (and every time, every single time, the fact that I was having sexual intercourse with these girls seemed an impossible blessing, something that couldn’t possibly be true or real, so similar was it to the machinations of my fantasizing mind), but even then I wished I had a couple of willing chickens around, just to sort of fill things out. And now that my wife no longer lets me touch her—I’m sure you saw her shy away from me, when I was duck-taping her hands behind the chair a little while ago—well now the absence of these hypothesized chickens leaves my heart heavy with longing just about every single day. You know, not the actual chickens, but the form of the chickens, which if you’ve read Plato you’ll know is very very funny. I’m a barrel of laughs, if you’re me.
Do you know about John Searle’s idea of the Chinese Room? Yes, it’s relevant, goddamn it, it is totally relevant. So this philosopher-type, Searle, he thinks up this scenario in which there’s a guy inside a windowless room with a little mail-slot-thingy, and he has in his possession these lengthy instructions written out in his native English, along with an absolutely enormous supply of Chinese characters and expressions written on little index-size cards. Outside the room are Chinese speakers, who scrawl messages in Chinese and then send them through the mail slot. The guy receives the communiqué and consults his lengthy instructions which prescribe a return Chinese card (among his ridiculous piles of Chinese cards), one that will give the semblance of his having understood the initial card’s meaning. The point of all this being that this frazzled guy fretting within the Chinese Room, does not know Chinese, despite his being able to give appropriate responses. I’m pretty sure that for John Searle, who clearly had too much time on his hands, this was an argument against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, because even if a machine could speak Chinese it wouldn’t quote unquote know Chinese. Maybe that wasn’t the point at all, I wish I could remember, but there was this girl in that philosophy class who seemed impressed by my smarts and so most of the time I was thinking about licking her thighs and not the repercussions of ridiculous thought experiments. Which, by the way, let’s consider that such a Chinese Room could never actually exist precisely because language is so complex and inexhaustible that the harried dude inside the room couldn’t possibly perform this mix-and-match with what would essentially be an infinite number of flash cards, which doesn’t exactly flip the tables on Searle but at least shows that he’s being sort of redundant and maybe a bit of a dumbass (it is exhausting trying to talk about this, by the way), although my real point has nothing to do with the ins and outs of this egghead hypothesis but rather with this fact: I often feel like I am the guy in the Chinese Room. I am not a native speaker of this language. There’s nothing behind my actions and interactions, no act of comprehension or assimilation. I just respond to stimuli. Card comes in, I check it against my brain’s enormous list of cards (because here in my Chinese Skullthere are indeed infinite resources), and some reasonable response comes spilling back out of my mouth hole. I’ve convinced people of all kinds of shit that I don’t intend or understand myself. I’ve fostered a million false impressions, just by spitting out the right card.
At the college, they call this teaching.
Well hey, you’re the one who’s tied and gagged my wife and daughter and are threatening to kill them if I don’t tell you a good story. It’s funny, I always knew this would happen. I knew you’d come. I also knew you’d be beautiful and have shapely legs accentuated by thigh-high stockings the tops of which are just barely visibly beneath your silky black dress. Anyway, it’s okay, I don’t blame you for any of this, and I won’t beg for their lives. It’s your decision. It always has been. I’d just like to say that I’m a decent guy, basically, and that my wicked thoughts shouldn’t override all the good I do in this world. Sound familiar?
All of you people, you all make me sick.
And have I told you how much I love this wife and this daughter? Have I mentioned how sometimes when I look at them from across the room my heart fills with mercury and I could actually expire from the density, from the sheer sinister joy of it all? Or how I would do anything for them, anything, work five jobs or steal food or stab men to death, anything for my girls. Or how the thought of something bad happening to either of them is so difficult to bear that I’ve taken to popping illegally obtained anti-anxiety meds just to nip such thoughts before they can like, gestate? Have you ever been in love? It’s terrible. Anything, I’d do anything! The other night I had a dream that my daughter had fallen into a lake and that I dove in to save her. It was murky water and I kept losing sight of her pretty little polka-dotted dress, then glimpsing her, then losing her again. Down and down we drifted but I could never touch her. She was always just beyond my fingertips. I woke in a sweat and crept into her room and touched her hair and then fell to my ass and sobbed at the foot of her crib for the next hour, writhing. You think this is fun? You think things are good out here? You think I need to be paid back for all of this?
Do you know she’s pregnant again? The wife, I mean. A couple months ago we were drunk, she was feeling generous, I’ll spare you the details. But the point being that that’s three lives, not two. In case the calculations involved here are that simple. In case another bead on your little abacus alters the decision or weakens your resolve or whatever. I’m just saying. Someone I’m destined to fall in love with—and isn’t that what this is about? Don’t you think I’m unable to love?—is there inside of her. And he or she hasn’t done a damned thing wrong yet, is the indisputable truth, though I suppose billions upon billions of now-dead humans provide solid statistical evidence that this unborn human will inevitably fuck everything up and die constricted in a twitching ball of guilt and envy and longing and resistance. I’ve got no ammunition to counter that argument, if it’s the one you’re making. But there is one more thing you ought to know.
This is not our first encounter. I’ve been here a thousand times with a thousand wives and a thousand daughters and a thousand gun-wielding vigilantes. I’ve been telling this story for longer than you can imagine. Remember how just yesterday you were a little girl? How you ran through sprinklers at the playground and shrieked with joy? How your daddy swung you around by your wrists and the world rushed by in an excited blur and you giggled and gasped and begged for more? Remember how not long ago you would fall asleep in the back of the car on a long trip home with the engine rumbling and your mom and dad holding hands across the console and how you would every so often wake up and open your eyes and feel so relieved that you were still miles from home, that this wonderful sleep could continue? Do you remember how you loved them? All these wonderful souls, mommy and daddy and your best friend Katie and the cat you named Matthew before realizing it was a girl-cat, how pure and unadulterated these feelings were, before you developed those legs and those hips, before you put on those stockings, slipped into those heels? Well I remember too, because I was there. You’re thinking, no buddy, you’re not my father, my father was a saint and a lover and he sacrificed everything for me. But there are only a few of us. We perform according to type. Just a handful, and we go around and around. I don’t see how everyone doesn’t get that.
If I’ve done my job, if I’ve entertained or educated you, then you’ll have to let us go, just like you promised. And if I’ve failed and if the truth means nothing to you, if you can’t tell how hard this story was to tell or how much I’ve sacrificed to tell it, well then I guess you’re just a heartless punisher like all the rest of them. So go ahead. Do your damnedest. Do your goddamn damnedest to us all.