Rehosting "Nameless Women, Faceless Men"
Race, Sex & Rock’n’Roll
originally posted Aug 14, 2018
Before I became a 1950’s dad avatar on the internet, I had a small twitter account with my face on it.
Two things made me burn it all. One was, when I started following Kantbot because he’s clever, one of my friends told me in confidence that he was worried about me “following all those alt-right accounts.” What would people THINK?
Two was a girl. I don’t remember her name anymore. She was pale, short, had dark curly hair and brown eyes. Round face, but more from her skull shape than body fat. She was in her early twenties. She would have felt discomfort being called a woman.
She had seen me at a poetry reading. Some of the stuff I read was published somewhere that linked to my twitter account, and she reached out. I was flattered that she had been able to remember enough of the text to find it.
She made it very clear that I was allowed to ask her out.
We met at a bar.
It was an unusually warm spring, and she wore a thick, heavy coat, working overtime as plausible deniability about the nervous sweating.
We said hello. She was only a little more than half my height. She began rolling cigarettes and chain smoking.
Should she have a name? I’m not sure. The chivalrous part of me wants her to have one, in remembrance at least. Force some decency on her, cover up her nudity. But she didn’t seem to want one.
She blushed and fidgeted in her seat as we made small talk. Very small, just about on the threshold of hearing.
It was very bad for my inflated ego.
She had dropped out of high school and gotten into a film production school, where she had been for a couple of years. She told me that she had been bullied in school, for years and years.
She invited me to play a card game with her. Explaining the rules, you could hear the warmth of the memories of forming friendships in her voice. A sort of gamified memory exercise. It reminded me of babysitting my cousins.
I proposed going for a walk. You talk better when you’re walking. She glanced around the room, and agreed.
As soon as we were outside, she became very talkative.
“I’m just nervous because I haven’t really ‘dated’ before.”
I told her I thought it was a bad thing to be good at.
She was an expert on the subject regardless. Her best friend was a big dater, and the two of them had an accord: when the friend would go out with a boy she had met on tinder, my date would secretly follow along, “in case something happened.”
One time, her friend had a date in the park, and she had followed along and hid in the bushes.
“I tripped over something and when I looked up they were gone. Then when I noticed some movement in the bushes ahead and heard some high pitched noises I just completely panicked because I thought she was being raped.”
Turns out they had gotten up and walked back into town instead. The scream had been a bird. She laughed. What a silly story.
We sat down on a bench at the harbour, and she made it very clear that I was allowed to kiss her. Then she started telling another cute story.
“I got in a fight with my teacher for saying that all white people are racists.”
Just around the time she dropped out of school she had found a new group of friends, and they had helped her find herself, and given her a much needed sense of belonging.
The world made so much more sense to her now that she knew White People were biologically hardwired to be racists, and that this was the reason there could never be true equality between races. Races, she explained, of which there were two: White People and Everyone Else (Brown). White people were angry, hateful people, and biologically lacked something like an emotional core, which meant they had a reduced ability for love and compassion compared to everyone else. You could tell by brain scans, and the fact that white people had less mirror neurons, higher blood pressure and something about the left hemisphere of the brain being too dominant.
She touched my arm, smiled the most gentle of smiles, and told me:
“I’m so happy you’re not white. I didn’t think you could be with the things you write about, but I wasn’t sure before. Up close I can tell you’re a gypsy.”
All of this came as a surprise to me. I had a lot of questions. Before I thought to ask any, however, she explained:
“I didn’t even know I wasn’t white until they explained it to me.”
She was as pale as me, so I could see how she wouldn’t suspect it. I could hardly blame her; I had just had much the same experience. The fact that I was capable of feeling love should probably have been a dead giveaway. You learn something about yourself with every new person you meet.
This was still a lot of new information to process, though.
I nodded along, thinking about the rumour in my family that my great-great-grandmother on my father’s mother’s side might have been half Romanian, impressed that my date was this perceptive.
She did volunteer work at a local LGBT youth organisation, and they just so happened to be throwing a costume party this very evening. Seeing as I hadn’t raped her, hadn’t otherwise overstepped any boundaries, and I wasn’t white, she asked me if I wanted to come, quickly noting:
“It’s not for kids or anything. Most of the people there, are like, twenty. You don’t have to worry about a costume. I don’t have one either.”
I was still perversely curious about whether I should fuck her or not. Let her fuck me? Let her be fucked by me?
“Sure.”
She got on her phone to coordinate with her friends. I then had the pleasure of meeting the friend. She was a little taller, thinner, and to be frank I liked her haircut a lot better.
We met them just outside the place. Nondescript building in the middle of the city. I’d walked past it a million times.
The two of them were ecstatic to see each other. They exchanged a knowing glance before introducing me. I said hello. She told me she liked my work. I said thank you.
Going in, her friend eyed an opportunity for privacy. She took her by the shoulder and dragged her out of earshot. Her friend cupped her hands around my date’s ear, and whispered:
“[unintelligible] he‘s so fucking hot![unintelligible].”
I suddenly felt much less out of place.
Shedding our coats at the entrance and walking deeper into the building, I imagined being buried in piles of naked, strange young women who for some inexplicable reason confused “homeless” and “hot,” and would all jump my bones the moment we got inside.
All the universal inclusivity and openness she had described seemed daunting though. I have a lot of things to be ashamed about, so shamelessness doesn’t really speak to me.
I hadn’t expected literal orgies, but I did expect debauchery. Music, dance and drink, loudmouths and girly screams, dice games and underhanded dealings, drugs being vended in corners and bathrooms, and then openly indulged in.
Sure, it was a “youth” organisation, but I was knee deep in drugs when I was twenty. Maybe not quite “I had a friend OD while I was in the next room in a k-hole” or “running a train on a fat middle aged woman in exchange for her supplying any participant with a weekends supply of cocaine”, but maybe something a little like that. Probably the highest hourly rate I have ever been offered for any job, by the way.
What I didn’t expect at all, was stepping into what felt like a stuffed hospital waiting room with eighties pop music blasting on in the background.
The room was a repurposed office space. Despite attempts to liven it up with colourful paintings and old furniture, it had an air of sterility to it. You could still smell hints of chlorine underneath the alcohol and cigarette smoke, from the Chernobyl-level industrial cleaning detergent it had been stewing in for years.
Most everyone except the group we arrived with was elaborately dressed up as clowns, Disney princesses, pirates. Anything your wicked little mind could imagine. A few drag queens, and whatever the reverse is called. Maybe sixty or so people all together. Most everyone tightly packed on couches, barely talking.
A group of around twelve people was sitting around a small table were playing Cards Against Humanity, a game that was designed to let people simulate the experience of banter. The music was there to cover up silence, rather than to be listened to.
Despite the lack of costume, I didn’t feel underdressed. I felt invisible.
I’ve never been good with crowds. I think I’m decent one-on-one, but the only way I can enjoy any sort of large social gathering is by being massively intoxicated. Looking at the faces around the room, it was nothing like how I had usually experienced parties (before the point of the night where I would black out).
Everyone looked exactly how I felt. Uncomfortably invisible.
Excusing myself from my host, I asked a human-sized Banana for directions to the bathroom.
The first thing that met me was an entire shelf with nothing but condoms and lube. There was something almost hypnotic about it, and I just stood watching it for a little while.
More than anything I was underwhelmed.
I kept looking at the condoms.
That was the thing. Sex. I had taken her out because I knew it would be easy. It still would be. I had been high on it. I wasn’t exactly a catch at any point in my life, and this, what seemed like a complete freebie, was absolutely intoxicating. I was desired. This was what I had really wanted from her. For her to want me. To rub it in the face of the ghosts of my teenage infatuations.
I had hoped to be overwhelmed in some way, to walk into a lion’s den and find something weird and secret. Something wild and preposterous. Something I could tell stories about, when I later told my friends I had infiltrated a secret LGBT party by accident. A punchline.
For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the stupid condoms. Their sudden appearance hadn’t seemed sexy. They didn’t seem disgusting either. It was just mildly distasteful. Just a little bit ugly. Like acid reflux.
I felt pathetic. And I felt pity. They all looked so much like me. Despite the feather boas and what-have-you.
Three sharp knocks on the door. A quiet voice through the cracks:
“Do you want some company in there?”
You never really know something until you ask the right question.
“I’ll be right out.”
She looked like a puppy. An extremely self-conscious puppy who had just been caught trying to initiate bathroom shenanigans, but still hoped for a treat. She didn’t have a tail of course, but her body wagged a little.
I told her I had had a nice time, but I had work in the morning and would be heading home. She told me she wasn’t really feeling it either, and asked me to wait a minute while she said some quick goodbyes. Then she followed me to the door.
“Where are you going?”
I told her.
“Oh, I’m going the same way”
Then she followed me home. We talked about the weather.
It would be so easy.
Turns out we live only four streets apart.
It would be so easy.
She made it very clear I was allowed to invite her in.
It would be so easy.
I wondered how her tits looked.
I started groaning the moment I closed the front door, and only stopped when I fell into a chair in my living room.
Looking at the ceiling, I had a couple of deep, conflicted breaths, trying to figure out what I was doing, when a thought snuck up on me.
“Wait a minute. She was a huge racist.”
I started laughing. Before I had fully processed how big of an idiot I am, another thought overwhelmed me.
“Nothing I have done today has been noble. The only reason she didn’t get what she wanted was because she seemed like a textbook example of someone who would cry “rape” the moment it would be convenient to her. And she’d believe it too.”
She knew where I lived now. I counted my blessings that she didn’t have my phone number. Then I deleted my twitter account.
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