So Sarah was a college graduate, 22, just moved to San Francisco, broke. And while waiting for the bus on Geary Street, she called a friend. But actually, I can't tell you what the friend said, without first warning you that the content of the friend's advice might not be suitable for younger listeners. In fact, the content of most of today's program, This American Life, by the way, I'm Ira Glass, may not be suitable for younger listeners.
Today's program is stories of three women and the sex industry. So Sarah's on the street, needs a job, calls her friend from college. Her friend says, come do phone sex with me. And so I went to her house that night and we got drunk and took phone sex calls.
And I did it for the first time and I was really good at it. And we made like 80 bucks. And what was it like the first night? What instructions did she give you?
She gave me a list of dirty words. It was like, it wasn't even a list, it was like just this collage. Typed or handwritten? Handwritten.
And just every single word that's associated with sex, either profanity or, you know, just words like wet and hot and steamy. And she said that if you got lost, you could really just string them together. And she was really, really, really funny. If that's what it sounds like, the normal range of guys you meet, Sarah says, some unlikable, maybe 20 percent she felt like she could have been friends with.
Another 10 percent that she really liked. She would do calls where she was supposed to dominate the man and calls where she was supposed to be black or Asian. You know, you could just sort of do this accent. It was incredibly un-PC, but you could just sort of do this accent, which approximated like a guy in Nebraska's idea of what it is that an Asian woman talks like.
And they would believe you. Okay, so for example, if you were to say something to me in this accent, for example, describe where you're sitting right now as this Asian woman. You know, I really... Your dignity will preclude you from doing that.
Yes, it will. It really will. I don't have that much dignity, but I can't do that. I'll respect that.
I also had a British accent, which was really, really awful, which I modeled after the woman on LA Law. Come on, let's hear that. No, I'm not going to do it for you. How's that?
That wasn't very good. The guy in the control room is sort of shaking his head at me. I want you to take the hands of your pants for me, please, darling. All right, you can stop right there.
It's public broadcasting. She did phone sex for a year. Then got a job as a naked dancer. She did this for two years.
She said that she hurt her back dancing for hours in high heels. She hated her bosses. Every now and then, a customer would say something mean to her. But she really, really liked the women she worked with.
And on a Saturday night, she would have a better time dancing naked at her job to loud music than, say, going to a party with her friends. Because everyone kept trying to tell me, oh, you know, you really hate this job and you just don't know that you hate it. But I couldn't feel that I hated it. I called my sort of like close friend and said, do you think it's stupid that I'm doing this?
Like, I don't feel like I don't like this job. I feel like I like it. Like, I get up in the morning and I go to it and I don't mind. And he was like, well, you know, if you don't, if you feel like you like it, then you probably do.
That was sort of a ramble. But I guess, I guess what I'm trying to say is there were really, really crappy things about it. But it was so far from the worst job that I've ever had. Really?
What was the worst job than this? I'm just going to stop the tape right here. I'm just going to stop the tape and coming live to give you a moment to consider what that worst job might be before she gives her answer. Okay, we all thinking now?
All right, here we go. Being a grant writer for the Central Park Conservatives. Being a grant writer. A job I myself have done.
She said she didn't like working in an office. She didn't like taking orders. Being naked in front of strangers was preferable to taking orders. She said if you want to understand what this job is like, she says it's really, for her anyway, not that different than other service industry jobs that she's had.
I think it was like day to day. Just like any, just pretty much like any job that's not a great job. You know, it's like waitressing. I mean, you know, there are some days where you're waitressing and you're going, oh, this is pretty cool.
I'm making pretty good money, you know, I'm working out on patio today. It's a nice out. And some days you're like, if I have to ask one more person what they want on their hamburger, like I'm going to, I'm going to shoot myself. That was Sarah's experience.
Other women have a different experience in the sex industry. Today on our program, Act 1, someone whose life comes apart working in the go-go clubs. Act 2, a guy who prefers pornography to having sex with his girlfriend, changes. Stay with us.
Act 1, Susan. Last time a reporter and radio producer Sandy Tolan was going to do a story about the sex industry from the worker's perspective with a woman named Susan Walsh. Walsh was an aspiring writer who worked in go-go bars in New Jersey to support her son. And then a week or so before they were going to start work on the documentary, Susan Walsh disappeared.
On July 16th, she left her home in Nutley, New Jersey to make a call out of a payphone on the corner. She didn't have a phone at home. She left her wallet, her keys, and her beeper behind. She told her son that she would be right back and she never came back.
Everybody close to her assumes that she's dead. So Sandy Tolan decided to set out on a different story to try to understand what her life was like in the go-go bars of Jersey and to understand what might have led to her life coming apart. Again, a warning to parents, this is another story about the sex industry. Large sections of it may not be suitable for younger listeners.
My first stop is at the Village Voice where my old friend James Ridgeway works as a political correspondent. Jim had suggested Susan Walsh and I work together. She was the researcher for his new book, Red Light, inside the sex industry, which tells the story from the point of view of the workers, strippers, streetwalkers, call girls, and porn actors. I first met Susan Walsh in the offices of Screw magazine when I was working on a book about the sex industry.
And I went to see Al Goldstein, who was the editor. And as I was talking to him, I was complaining about how I couldn't get anywhere in this whole business and asking if he could give me some advice. And he said, well, you know, there's this woman that comes in here every so often and she writes for us and she'd be really good because she really knows this stuff. And at that point, for some reason, this woman suddenly appeared and she had this kind of like long blonde hair, it was kind of flying in the wind, and she had this motorcycle jacket and she was real skinny and awkward looking.
She hardly looked like somebody you'd think was a striptease dancer or go-go dancer. She looked like kind of a college kid. Only as I later learned, you know, that Susan was in her 30s. A single mother trying to break into journalism, paying the bills by dancing Jersey go-go.
Susan started working with Jim two, three days a week. And she was very smart. She started getting into the sex business like nobody I ever met when I was doing this book and I certainly met quite a few people. She knew all aspects of it.
And what she didn't know, she'd find out. She was like a really good reporter. And she was a terrifically good mother. The big thing in her life was her kid, her son David, who at that time was, you know, 10, 11.
You know, he would come to my office and he'd work on the computer. He'd work his homework while she did her work on the telephone and we talked. And she was just totally devoted to this boy. Susan longed to be a full-time writer.
Jim got her to write a few pieces on go-go for the voice. He set her up with a couple of film and radio gigs. But dancing paid the bills. She'd work six days a week, sometimes two shifts a day, just barely making it.
And she was always toting this bag around with her g-string and her heels. And she would just, you know, if she didn't have the money to get on the path train to go home, she would just check into one of these clubs and dance a set and see if she could come out with 10 bucks. That's not exactly the high life there. At dusk, I head through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Jersey Turnpike past the big white oil storage tanks and the rusted globes of natural gas.
I'm riding with Jill Morley, a writer and actress who worked in Jersey Go-Go until a couple years ago when she got sick of it and left. Jill was a friend of Susan's. It's terribly sad. I go in and out of being emotional about Susan's son David is visiting that day.
Susan's been missing for two weeks now. We eat lunch and make small talk. Then they invite me to join them at a video arcade at the mall. Martha watches David run off, dashing between video games.
She's glad he's got something else to do besides think about his mother. She says he's blocking his feelings, not wanting to confront the possibilities. And I hope Susie is still alive, but it's the not knowing that is so horrible. But it's also what would be worse if knowing that she isn't with us anymore.
And I'm just crazy inside. I feel as though I'm broken apart. This is also unlike Susan, her most. She would never leave David like this.
Then Martha pauses a moment. She has something she wants to say. She stares at my microphone. Hi, Susie, this is mom.
If you're listening or if you hear about this, I want to give a message to you. I love you very, very much, more than anybody in the world. And I just want to see you again. And please take good care of yourself wherever you are and know that you're loved and missed so much by everybody.
I love you. Late October, three and a half months now since Susan disappeared. Jill Morley and I are in midtown Manhattan, preparing a visit on Susan's therapist, Mary Nolik, who works a lot with GoGo girls and prostitutes. We try to make sense of something.
By all accounts, Susan had a lot going for her outside of GoGo. And she wasn't making much money dancing, yet she kept doing it. Susan could not cut the ties with that world because it was a powerful pull for her. So she something was happening.
I guess the term would be repetition compulsion. It's acting out some type of an early event to get it right in the future. And she worked the whole gamut of the adult sex industry. I don't think she missed a wrinkle because she had a need to know and do this.
And then she had a need to write about it and tell people about it. And now a striptease from the beautiful Susan Walsh for you out there in midnight blue land. Hi, I'm Susan Walsh and I'm a dancer. This is what I do for you when I dance in gentleman's clubs.
I move as if I were your lover, some fantastic embodiment of Veloxed beauty, breathless, hungry, silent. Susan wrote this essay for Al Goldstein's midnight blue porn cable show. And defending the notion of free speech, they put it on. Now I will exist for you.
You say you will. You must tease my sexual nerves. You laugh when I struggle to protect my nipples from your raggedy fingers, as if I'm trying to believe the absurd notion that I'm real. She smiles, takes off her top, tells the bar patrons pathetic droplets of insect mucus.
Can we count the dollar bills you step into our costumes or fold into nauseatingly cute shapes like frogs or flowers. We unravel it all at the end of the night, our legs coated with dust and bruises and memories of your existence rush from our minds. If we thought about you too long, we'd go crazy. So we stuff your bills in our pockets, just like we stuff the idea that maybe we all lost out.
Christmas time now, I'm back in New York. It's more than five months since anyone's heard a word from Susan. Susan's father, Floyd Merchant, drives in from New Jersey to see me. He looks like he's been crying.
He says he often talked to Susan about quitting GoGo. The GoGo bars were the worst place for somebody with their head on straight. Hers wasn't on the street. First of all, she's a recovering alcoholic and drug addict and is sitting on the railroad tracks jumping off every time the train passes and then jumping right back on.
I thought she might have cardiac arrest. I was almost sure she was going to go back to drinking and using. Susan's health was failing. She had emphysema and ulcer and chronic bronchitis.
And then she did start drinking and using drugs again, mixing them with the anti-anxiety drugs, Xanax. It was a potent cocktail and Susan started getting more and more disconnected from reality. She was already living in a fantasy world and a paranoid fantasy world, not a happy fantasy world. She was running to people saying, there's a contract out on me, but don't tell anybody.
And then she'd run to somebody else and say, there's a contract out on me, but don't tell anybody. And this is a preliminary to a real breakdown. She was addicted to the fantasy part of her life. A lot of the people that she associated with from the bars and stuff like that, they played the fantasy of FBI and CIA.
And now we're back in Jersey, Newark on a windy bitter December day. Jill and I are visiting Melissa Hines, Susan's best friend. She had a friend that claimed that he was in, he belonged to the CIA. He, he was playing the role that she wanted to hear.
Oh, I'm CIA. I'm going to Washington for the weekend. Oh, I'm, I'm working undercover against the mafia, you know? So it was like this big, you know, role play and stuff that I think she, she lived for that, that fantasy and the danger that she thought she was in, you know, um, it was crazy.
And what did that turn out to be? Um, he turned out to be, um, uh, worked for a trucking company, but a lot of, um, the fantasy world that she lived in, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that, um, she was once diagnosed with bipolar disorder, manic depression. And she wasn't taking her medication. So, you know, she needed a lot of help.
Dozens of presents are piled up under Melissa's Christmas tree, most for her nine month old boy. Melissa's having a hard time talking to us. She and Susan used to celebrate Christmas together. And Susan was there when the baby was born.
Melissa gets up, turns on a light, retrieves a well-worn folder. Like everyone in Susan's life, Melissa's been trying to figure out what happened. This is stuff that I wrote down. What is it?
It's different people that seen her. I wrote down, um, who was calling her, who she was associating with. She was around a lot of different people. Friday, July 12th, Susan went to Town Tap in Irvington and was sick.
I was at her house and I talked to her and I left. That was the last time I'd seen her, was July 12th. July 13th, um, Susan worked at the show place from 5.30 at night till 1.45 AM. On July 16th, Susan left her house around noon.
By 3.30, Melissa had a strange feeling. She hurried over to Susan's. I rang the bell and it looked like there was nobody there and nobody answered. And I got a very, um, a very bad feeling.
Like just emptiness inside. At first, everyone had a hunch. Susan had been murdered by a stalker. Susan had been kidnapped and sold to a motorcycle gang.
Susan had been abducted by the Russian mob for sniffing around the story she and I were going to do. Susan was a streetwalker in Newark. She was a call girl in Elizabeth, a dancer in a nightclub upstate. Or she'd fallen in with a vampire cult.
Or she'd checked herself into rehab. Or she enrolled in the witness protection plan. Or she died of a drug overdose. As time has passed, more and more of her friends, family, and co-workers have come to believe that Susan Walsh is dead.
Okay, which house is it? The one with the rolling Christmas lights? No, I think it's this one. Wait, let me just make it sure.
January. We look up a guy who says he thinks he knows what happened. He worked with Susan in the business. The guy says he'll talk on a couple of conditions.
If we don't use his name, if we distort his voice, and if he talks just to Jill, not to me. She worked gogo. He feels she understands the life. Plus he clearly prefers the idea of a woman visiting him.
I wait in the car. Okay. Little nervous. Some dogs barking.
Oh boy. Hey, puppy. Man, it is cold out. Why you didn't wear your leather pants today?
Why don't you have a drink like alcohol, wine, gin and tonic, anything like that? Here's what Jill reports from the interview. He lives with his invalid mother. Copies of Men Entertainment, The Guide to Jersey Gogo, are scattered on the table.
Nailed into the wall, there's a whip, broken in half. In his spare time, the guy makes knives. He keeps a photo album, Polaroids of his gogo girls to help him book clubs. He has 80 dancers working all over Jersey.
He drives them to and from their gigs. You're your own boss. It's your car. You can tell them to drink, smoke, or not.
You constantly have a girl saying, well, can I smoke in here? And I'm like, yeah, no problem. But I got a little bit of a pattern I can tell them no. Suffer.
Let's see you go through a nicotine fit for the next half hour. I'm sadistic. Yes, so. During the interview, the guy won't look Jill in the eyes.
He turns on the TV, puts it on mute, stares at it. He puffs on his pipe, lighting it over and over. Let me ask you more stuff about Susan. What kind of person was she?
She was your typical average dancer. If it was rap music on, she could dance to that. If it was rock and roll, she could dance Months before, Jim Ridgway and I had watched them film part of the docudrama. It was in Tower Books, where Jim and Susan had done a book signing for Red Light.
Now, the Unsolved Mysteries crew was shooting a reenactment. Up on the mezzanine, there's wine, cheese, cameras, kleig lights, and actors playing the parts of Jim and Susan. Suddenly, the director spots the real Jim. Hey, got an imposter here.
Get him outta here. What are you doing? Stop it, let's go. Go over in that corner.
I'm serious. Come here. I'm standing in the corner, looking out at actors who look disturbingly like the real Jim Ridgway, tall, gray, paternal, and the real Susan Walsh, slight, blonde, vibrant. And this is picture.
Everyone, this is picture. Stand by. Roll sound. We're rolling.
Cut. That's a cut. Back to one, everyone, please. Back to one.
Thank you. I stayed in it so long that my health was so bad. I have emphysema, bronchitis, and an ulcer. Geez.
Yeah, and I was in the hospital twice in the last two weeks. This is the real Susan in the documentary shoot with Jill and the other dancers. It was two days before she disappeared, and it was like Susan was watching herself go down. I'm just trying to hang on to my reason to enter in my reason for being at this point.
I'm just trying to hang on. But I stayed in so long that it got me. You can crawl on stage half dead, but I stayed in it so long. If you stay in it so long, you will break down your health to the point.
You just can't go out and get the job now. If I had a month to rest, get my health back, but I can't because I'm the only one supporting my son, so I can't stop. And yet staying in it is killing me. So I'm sort of scared right now.
It's Sunday morning and I'm going back home to Boston. I drop over to say goodbye to Jill. Susan is an extension of all the dancers, all of us. And so what happened to her is that typical dancer trap of going all the way down this downward spiral and choosing the darkest path.
And she chose the darkest path that we all see. We can see that path. And yet she took it and it's possible that I could have taken it or that any one of these other girls could have taken it. And that's really terrifying.
And especially that she's this really smart, warm, loving mother, funny, and even her. Even she went down that path. I mean, she was an incredible human being. Coming up, another woman and a porn customer who changes in a minute when our program continues.
This American Life on my class. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers, documentary producers and performers to take a whack at that theme. Today's program, three women and the sex industry. We are at act two of our program, Striptease.
It's easy to imagine the guy in this next story as one of the customers in a go-go bar in northern Jersey. He's an extreme case, though, and he changes. Lauren Slater is a psychologist and writer in Boston. This is an account of one of her cases.
Again, a warning to listeners. Some of the story may not be appropriate for younger children. George came to our clinic in early autumn and was diagnosed by the intake worker with an antisocial personality disorder, a sociopath, a deviant, whom I, a newcomer to the field of psychology, was now assigned to work with in therapy for an undefined period of time. He looked almost ridiculously tough, sitting in a sleeveless leather vest in the clinic's lobby, hair scrunched back in a ponytail, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, tattoos coiled over his arms.
Immediately, I felt awkward in his presence. The day I met George, I was wearing my working garb, a sundress, a pair of falling-apart flats, legs stubbly from hair I'd only half shaved, and perhaps a swatch of slip showing beneath my hem. I felt stout and dumpy. As a therapist, I think I should be beyond these silly social embarrassments.
I think I should at least be beyond my own bodily insecurities enough to throw my full attention into the client's waiting lap, but I'm not. Around George, I'm not. And the sense of shame he evokes in me to this day is part of our treatment story together. My office at the time was windowless and so small we had to sit with our knees near brushing.
I got ready to ask my usual orienting questions. Age, I asked. Instead of answering me, George gave a dramatic sigh. I have been waiting for this day, he said.
I've seen six of you guys, and so far no one's worked out. I need a doc who can really push me. I need to be challenged. Challenged, I asked.
Like how? I've got my problems, George said, and I can admit to them. The other six I went to just sat there and stared at me. I want someone who will give me feedback, make me see things in a new way.
So what are these problems? George sat back, ran one hand over a large tattoo on his bicep. Masturbation, he said gravely. I can't stop.
Can't. Seven, eight, nine times a day. I have a strong drive. Now he pulled a list out of his pocket and began to read.
Masturbation, pornography, aggression, defensiveness, pride, control. These are my problems. Sick porn. I love it, but the truth is I'd rather do it with a videotape than with my girlfriend, Joanne.
We have huge beefs, huge, George said. My anger is just... he paused. Like I think I could kill her.
I've killed a few people before, so I wouldn't put it past me. George was staring straight at me when he said this, testing me for my reaction. So why do you think you prefer porn to people? I said, keeping my voice even, despite the fact that I suddenly felt like fleeing.
Don't get me wrong, George said. I like Joanne. She's a real smoker. But I'll be honest, a picture's just a lot easier.
Just a completely quiet and beautiful bod. I thought of my own bod then and felt my breasts beneath my dress burn with shame. George is 35 years old and has lived seven of those years on the street, drugging, knife fighting and stealing. He has been clean now for half a decade, a really remarkable achievement, which he attributes to his spirituality, a weird blend of mysticism and heavy metal.
In his apartment where he lived with Joanne, he has two special cupboards side by side. In one of them, he keeps his incense and tarot cards. In the other, he stores his collection of sadomasochistic videos and magazines. Oddly, the second cupboard is lined with floral contact paper left by a previous tenant.
They bring him satisfaction, these videos. A lot goes on for him each day. Joanne is, as he said, a beautiful woman, but she is also unpredictable and self-absorbed, a series of seismic cycles he cannot control. He tells me he is from the old school, expects his woman to cook and clean, to have fish on the table by six, dustless halls and sex where hormones are synchronized to his.
When Joanne lets him down, he gets mad, really red-faced furious, so that he hauls her up against a wall, wallops her across the face. He feels so much sheer and rational hate that he has to retreat to his room to watch his videos. They soothe him, images of female flesh controlled. In our first several sessions, I tried to find the origins of his hate.
For instance, George's father beat him, but the beatings were not as bad as the humiliation that went along with them. He remembers the strap, the hands that were like hatchets, but the intensity of his tale lies for me in this image, a small boy pressed against a refrigerator, white as a nuptial bedsheet, the man pressing against him, shouting at him. George could feel his father's groin, hot and hard, right in the nook between his thighs. He started to think of himself as having a nook there, a gross scaping place.
He imagined his body was a girl's. George was disgusted, horrified. Soon afterward, he learned to fight, started to lift weights, running from the softness that is the requisite of all rapes. I had at first a hard time dealing with George because he offended me.
I understood his pornography obsession as a deflection of his own anxieties, so he wouldn't have to feel his fear, his memories of helplessness. He tried to control women. Now understand, I am a woman who has spent much time aiming to please men. I am a woman who, in her adolescent days, denied herself food or threw it all up so I could fit into the airless image this man in my office was both struggling to possess and shed at the same time.
I remember the smell of myself as an anorexic, a frail dry odor like scorched grass, my limbs coated with hair. Because of these memories, it was impossible for me to like George, but I did feel deeply for him. After all, hadn't I once driven for his same goals, to eradicate the weak part of the self who hurts and bleeds and feeds? During the first few weeks of our therapy together, I began to feel the old shame about my body returning more strongly than it had in a while.
Although George said he wanted help to overcome his pornography obsession, he was sometimes driven to watch five, six Positioned his head in place, kicked away the sticks, so all of a sudden Teddy swung, neck bunched in the noose. I was leaning forward in my seat. The rope broke, he said. I knew it would.
I just wanted to scare him because I wouldn't be had. I can't be had, you see what I mean? I didn't say anything. Otherwise, I feel like I'm just a doormat.
He took an angry drag off his cigarette. But do you think everyone in the whole world wants to treat you as a doormat, abuse you in some way? Absolutely, George said. I know it would.
Must be tiring having to think that. You can never really let down your guard. Have you ever cried in front of someone to show that you're scared, upset? George didn't say anything.
A long silence settled between us. We were a cut cord, a swarm of static. What's going on, George? Why is it unsafe to feel anything but defensiveness or violence in this office?
Do you think I'm going to take advantage of you? Immediately, I realized I'd made a blunder by allowing him the opportunity to sexualize our interaction. You take advantage of me? Isn't that supposed to be the other way around?
He leaned back in his chair, lit another cigarette. I saw the smoke slide from his mouth, felt it wrap around me in a blue and gauzy cloud, decking me in the moving material of the see-through dress. George believed that the bodies outside him were missiles poised and poisonous. His aggressive, slit-eyed stance is a typically male phenomenon.
My eating disorder, the obsessive desire to be thin, thin, thin, and perfectly, poisonously poised, is typically a female phenomenon. George and I were both victims of our culture's fear of the feminine, unable to lay down our system of weapons and spread our legs open to life because we learned that in this posture, we will be shamed, not invigorated. We did not know how to trust what we could not dominate. And the recovering anorexic is not only in a particularly good position to articulate these truths.
She is also, ironically, in a particularly good position, vis-a-vis therapy, to treat the misogynist male. She understands perhaps better than anyone the urge to whip and dominate, discipline, and even delete the female form. For years, I was hungry but could not risk the softness of surrender. I dreamt of letting down my guard, sitting at a table on which silver dishes steamed and ingesting colors, orange carrots, the soft wombs of tomatoes, the tangy dirt of chocolate cake.
But I couldn't dare, couldn't trust enough to let myself go. These are the memories that came to mind when I looked at George, rigid in his chair, his face set against the seepage of any emotion that wasn't cruel or lewd. He told me about forcing himself to rise before dawn each morning, working out two hours a day, jogging barefoot in the snow. I nodded yes, having done the same to myself.
The more deeply I went into it with him, the more difficult he became. Our therapy started to evolve so that I played a mostly silent role, while he went on and on, endlessly, it seemed, about Joanne's anatomy, the six-hour plow, her tight little sex. What about me? I wanted to say to him.
Does it occur to you that I'm a woman here? That you just might be offending me? And beneath that, another, smaller voice was crying. What about me?
Am I not also attractive? Do I not measure up to your standards? Why not? I began to realize our sessions were a lot like porn, in which I, the silent subject, absorbed his fantasies and in my featurelessness reflected them back to him.
George let me know clearly what my role in our relationship was by shifting impatiently whenever I spoke, by the quick brushing motions he made with his hands as though to sweep away my words, by interrupting me and then exploding in a tyrannical temper if I asserted my right to finish my own sentence. Quiet, he once roared at me. And I, like a little girl, sank back down in my seat and felt darkness grow up around me. I wonder if you ever think, I finally burst out to him one day, that I might be uncomfortable with your sexual talk, with the kinds of expressions you use.
But you're a shrink, George said to me. That's what you're here for. That's your whole job. I wanted to reach out and slap him.
Not even in my office am I just a shrink. I am also a woman, and the way you talk about my gender disgusts me. I would never talk to a woman I was trying to make it with like that. But you're not supposed to.
Supposed to what? George looked uncomfortable. Hallelujah, I thought. Supposed to mind, he said.
Surprise, I said. I mind. George looked up at me, his expression confused. My face felt all red.
For one moment then, our masks dropped away. I could tell by the way George was looking at me that he was, for maybe the first time, considering me not as a function, but as a feeling. I smiled at him. He nodded.
Hello. Shortly after this encounter, George left the state for six weeks to do a series of carpentry jobs in Arizona. He returned to therapy in late May. He slumped down in his seat, looked at his lap.
I was going to call you, he said in a low voice. I had never heard him use that voice before. What happened? I asked.
She left me, George said. He shook his head. Just like that. I called her at her parents and she says it's completely finished.
Gonezo. But I'm chasing her. I'm running after her like a goddamn desperate dog. Phoning her 10, 20 times a day, bawling in her ear.
It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter what you do, I said. Tell me more about that. I've been trying every ploy with this bitch for the past week and I'm...
What? You're what? Helpless. His mouth was a bitter line of tension, but his eyes were wet.
I think that's what upsets you the most about Joanne's leaving. That you have no control. That you feel helpless to get her back. George, to my surprise, nodded in agreement.
His own pain had made him flexible, open to vision and suggestion. For the first time in six months of treatment, I think we really talked. The next few weeks brought some changes in George. He found himself facing an emotion he could not defend himself against.
No amount of swearing or swaggering could express mourning. The pain of Joanne's leaving so suddenly broke his shield with an intensity neither of us had anticipated. I was drawn into George now and I told him so. In some moments I think I saw his real face, the flow of emotion across it like wind working on sand.
And I grew to love him and love the strength in his slow surrender. It is August. I am 23 years old. I have never met George.
I am just out of college. I weigh 88 pounds. When I look out my bedroom window, I can see tulips. They are the most trusting beings, they with their throats always open, their long gold tongues hanging out.
Nothing bad happens to them. The sun doesn't rape them. They don't gag on the rain. This day is really many months.
I watch the world. I watch the natural cycle of things. Cliché as it may be, this is what cures me. There comes a moment when recovery is religious.
When a person says, all right, I will have faith. I will lay down my sword and shield and see what the world works in me. I look away from my bedroom window and go downstairs, out onto the porch. Someone has set a table for me.
Sliced strawberries lie like the tongues of maidens on a platter, wedges of cheese and bread. I put food in my mouth. For the first time in years, I swallow the softness of ice cream. I want to see if my body will blow up in disgusting fatness with this slow animal stupidity swelling in my stomach.
It doesn't. Letting down my guard, opening my many mouths does not bring about the ruin, the rape I had feared. On the contrary, food brings vitality back to me. I feel my hair take on its sheen, grow longer, as though new stalks of thought are springing from my brain.
My brain, now nourished, thinks in colors instead of calories. I can run harder. My eyes are moist enough to cry. George started to taste styles, voices, times.
He reported allowing himself to sleep late one morning. He started going out some nights without his leather vest or black boots, tried kissing a woman on the neck and going no farther. He brought wood home with him at the end of working days, stayed up late making small objects without any obvious functions, a box, a mobile, a chiseled plaque. One day he came to session and told me he had met a woman, Lucky, whom he thought he could fall in love with if only he could get over Joanne.
The other problem is, George said, she's the greatest person, but she's heavy, maybe 30 pounds overweight. I've never made it with a fat woman before. You know me, I'm used to perfect curves, thighs I can grab a hold of, someone I can flip like a doll. He gave me one of his lewd George smiles.
I was enchanted by the idea of George with a fat woman. I had seen enough of George changed, naked, to imagine how his body would be within a fat woman's arms. I imagined her rocking him and him kissing her face and mouth. I could not help but see her spread legs on a