I’m writing a memoir. It’s a slow, arduous, lonely process. I stop often to replay the same passage in various ways to make sure I have it right. I spend a lot of time finding a way to narrate my experience – first person? Third person? Dialogue? Collapse time? Embellish for literary sake? And once I figure it out I might change my mind and rewrite it all.
My book writing group told me to just keep going. Get it all down. This is a first draft. Edit later. I have never written like that. When telling a story, I ramble; but in writing I measure my words too closely.
I had a friend, a butch, who told the same funny anecdote over and over about how when you tell a femme she looks good, she says.... (and then the butch would launch into a hilarious monologue about makeup and beauty techniques). The punch line was, “Tell a butch she looks good, she says ‘haircut.’”
I talk like a femme and write like a butch. A professor once told me my writing was “breathless.” This was not a compliment. I’m too succinct; I don’t add enough details, or “flesh it out,” or “unpack,” or any of those literary things you’re supposed to do. Basically, I’m not a storyteller. I don’t read or write for the story but because I get a visceral reaction to certain kinds of writing and that’s what I aim for.
So I’m trying to loosen up. Stretch the ideas, feel what it is I’m writing about and not try so hard to be a good writer – at least in the first draft. This is a memoir I’m writing; it’s storytelling. I want to write a poignant story but I can’t do that by just narrating without feeling what it is to have lived my life.
I’m an emotions chicken. I’m a pain avoider. Making emotional pain a temporary inconvenience has been my survival strategy in life. I’ve never thrown myself on a bed crying. I used to never even cry. It took a lifetime to realize that feeling does not equal weakness. And when you run from pain instead of feeling it, understanding it, dealing with it -- pain reaches out her bony claw and pulls you back so you repeat the same idiotically painful things your whole life.
When I started writing a book, I narrated my life events as if they were someone else’s life. I explained things like I was sitting across from myself in the analyst’s chair. Then it wasn’t working. I was getting bored of myself. So I decided to go to people who knew me and ask them questions; maybe learn something unexpected.
My first experiences of seeking out sources were interesting. I’ve spoken to family members, found people from 30, 40 years ago -- but nothing really changed the way I was writing and I was frustrated.
Then through connections on Facebook I happened upon a photograph. It’s a black and white photo from 1971 in the San Fernando Valley of two musicians with shag haircuts. Both are 16. The one on the left is my old friend Danny and sitting with him is Guy. My blood ran cold.
That summer, 1971, Guy asked me out to the drive-in. It was officially my first date. I had just turned 14. Guy knew of me through friends but I didn’t know him at all when he approached me. He was quiet, sullen, dark-skinned, with a prominent nose and an interesting face. I was excited to be going out with an older boy from a different high school.
He pulled up to my house and honked the horn. I strutted down the driveway in platform shoes, a tube top and miniskirt, big hoop earrings, and lots of makeup. I got in the car, and without a word, Guy picked up a napkin off the floor and wiped my lipstick off – harshly, violently, scrubbing at my mouth. He said he didn’t like lipstick. I sat there, stunned, as we drove to the drive-in with the radio on, not talking. Once there, he paid, pulled into a space off to the side, didn’t bother to put the speaker in the car, and then he raped me.
I clicked on the name beneath the Facebook photo and saw what he looks like now: A middle-aged, shifty, salesman type – dark glasses, too-slick hair, jowly, puffy face, not smiling.
A couple weeks went by. On impulse, and because I needed to know something, though I wasn’t sure what, I went to Facebook and sent him a message: “just curious, Guy, do you remember me -- formerly Robin Modiano?” I left my apartment and didn’t think about it until the next morning. He responded with six messages. He told me he thought about me, was on his 3rd wife, worked at a Hollywood color lab, was the lead singer in an 80s heavy metal band (he sent me a link to the dreadfully stupid video). The last message said, “I remember the drive-in...I remember how wild you were and I loved it!!!!!!!”
I felt like I was punched in the chest. I paced. I gnawed at my nails. I doubted myself. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was willing and he never raped me and I’m just telling myself that all these years.
I waited a couple days, in a troubled state between self-doubt, and feminist awareness that self-doubt is a condition of my upbringing.
Then I wrote back. I asked, “Did we have sex other than at the drive-in?” We did. He described two other times in eight messages. His (grammatically stupid, misspelled) messages became increasingly more sexually graphic. He sent them over two days with hours in between as if he thought of nothing else for those two days. He described what I did to him, where we were, what I did afterward -- with such clarity you’d think no time had passed between 1971 and now. His final messages were about what he wanted to do to me if I came to LA. They were a rapist’s fantasies.
I knew what he wrote was true because I remembered it all. I remembered the settings and people and my provocative attitude. I don’t remember the sex, though I’m sure what he said was true because they were the same sex acts I was forced to do to men in my family when I was a child. Blow jobs and hand jobs were my specialty at 14.
I wanted to scream. I sent his messages to a couple confidantes. I asked if they were a turn on. “Yes,” was the reluctant response. I understand that. That’s what makes a sexual trauma narrative so complicated. There’s no way to tell the story without it being titillating. Sex, in general, is complex. It is riddled with insecurities, histories, cultural standards, religious decrees, repression, perversities, trauma, fetishes, displacements, wish fulfillment, identification, desire, self-hatred, self-delusion, desperation, need.
When incest is one’s first sexual experience it gets really murky. There’s no prior sexual self to get back to. It’s formative. That’s why I didn’t even have to ask myself why I had sex with him after he raped me. It’s what I knew. It was compelling.
I tried to turn the messages into a positive. I told myself that this is not new information, but grist for my writing. When I was a teenager, men thought I was a willing participant, why wouldn’t a teenaged boy?
Pacing, fretting, clutching my hands, standing in my pantry eating potato chips and staring mindlessly at the shelf of light bulbs and batteries, staring at myself in the mirror … these are the things I do, and I couldn’t write for days. I stared at the words on my laptop and none of it seemed to matter. I wrote and it was not good. I tried again. I didn’t care about what I was writing. I was really bothered.
Then my old friend Mark sent me an email asking when we could get together. Oh my god … Mark! Why hadn’t I called Mark! Mark is an author and a writing teacher. He is one of the people I trust most in the world. I’ve written about him in this blog. I told him I couldn’t write and I had to see him immediately. He asked me to send him what I wrote thus far.
He made me tea; I sat like the non-emoting emotional wreck I was on his white couch. He had read my book thus far. He told me I have to re-write it and not distract myself. He set a deadline for me of June 2011. I agreed. He said I have to stop writing my blog because it takes time away from writing my book. He’s right. I have to not be afraid. So Mark is going to be my writing coach and we’re meeting weekly. And until I have a first draft of my book I can no longer write my blog.
