I’m going to the library today because I realized, from the small class I took, that you must absolutely have a place or a space to go when you want to write. Sometimes, when you’re younger, that “space” can be the corner of your couch. But for me, nowadays, I must seclude myself to do work. So I’m going to start today with the library.
I want to work on this story which is essentially a story about bullying, but it’s about bullying that comes from a different angle. I don’t want to do the thing where you would talk about how awful bullying is, and it seems to me that almost all of human interaction could be taken as a form of bullying. When someone yells at someone, even for legitimate reasons: “You blocked my driveway you asshole,” or “For the umpteenth time, my last name is xyz,” that might be bullying.
But what happened with the classroom comments is that this one particular guy — an awful person — said, “Oh for God’s sake, it’s been 50 years, can’t you get over it.” He was talking to the character, not to me. But I thought, “Well that actually just proves my point.” Because every bullied person who tries to talk about the trauma of being bullied, always gets that answer. I can almost guarantee that every single person in the world who has been bullied and traumatized has been told to “get over it.”
This is the same attitude that women all over the world tried to battle with the MeToo movement. People thought that what they were describing was either “bad sex” or dates that didn’t go well.
I told 2 people, I think that was the extent of it, that my first… what I would call “genital experience” was oral rape. Both of them gay men, they laughed and I decided I would never again tell anyone that being orally raped created a trauma that I still have. It didn’t destroy my sex life — in fact, even after the incident which happened when I was 18, I still kept walking around wondering about when I was going to lose my virginity. I had been trying to “lose it” for a couple of years, but high school was impossible, so then I began college and still kept thinking about it. I never thought about a woman. It was always a man. I was one of those that never, as far back as I can remember, ever had a doubt.
But, in a weird incident that lasted about 30 seconds, someone walked into a public bathroom, into my stall, shoved his dick in my mouth, held my head against his stinking crotch, ejaculated, forcing me to swallow it, and then ran away after quickly zipping up. He had a small dick because I didn’t choke or vomit, which I would have if it had been larger and reached that gagging area.
It was Burned into my brain. And from then on, I could not use my mouth to do very much except kiss — and even kissing I really didn’t like too much. It really depended on how aggressive the guy was being, and men tend to be very aggressive. I had trouble being touched, by anyone more or less, whether friendly or not. And I could never initiate. I was watching a rerun of a show recently and the contestants were told to do something that resembled a date that they had had. And I realized that I don’t think I ever went on a date. That aspect just never was “in there.” It was never anything that came up as a desire. Sex was always there — at least in a form that I could tolerate. And pornography also became something that kind of helped in a bizarre therapeutic way. I would be able to watch, for example, men use their mouths in a way that was impossible for me. In a way, what I was unable to do physically, became erotic when I could watch it in someone else.
But yea, since I started working on this bullying piece, and especially since that asshole in Florida made that comment about “just get over it already,” I’ve encountered so many instances of bullying that it seems to me it is just as terrible a problem as it ever was. Thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have online bullying and, in probably what the best episode of “Black Mirror,” the episode called “Hated In The Nation,” which begins with a journalist bully, getting bullied herself and murdered by what appears to be an internet hashtag. The truth is much more convoluted — that’s why it’s a good mystery.