Dissentery

Freshman Year: Fateful Swans of Never

home, and I don’t feel like updating the CM until I get photos, so I figured I’d do a little more on my life’s history. I’m getting a real Proustian kick out of all of this.

So junior high summer. My inklings towards popular music were confirmed over the summer of my 14 year when I was listening to a smashing pumpkins (“1979”) single and heard a b-side called “Cherry.” The lyrics were so sensual and the arrangement unlike anything I had heard before, that I instantly fell completely in love with Billy Corgan. I mean fell in love. I probably am still in love with him—sadly enough. I will know that I am in love with a man when I can love him more than I love Billy Corgan, and so far that hasn’t happened. I worship this man. So I get home from the trip and I start obsessively collecting magazines, CD’s, music videos. I once stayed up until 2am watching the “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” video on repeat, which still stands as one of the most erotic moments of my life. The band combined my interests of the romantic, the dangerous, the sexy, the macabre. I started getting into other bands with similar images and sounds—Hole, Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, L7, Soundgarden, Placebo. I started adopting the look and feel of these bands, the attitudes and lushness. It sounds very insincere, as if I was mimicking the posturing of rock bands, but actually, it was as if I had found comrades—people who acted, elucidated, and verbalized things I had always felt but could never quite share. A marvelous sort of rushing of emotion, hyperbolic speech and gesture, became de rigueur. I became dramatic and verbose, with more than enough attitude for everyone. By the time I started high school, I was kohled, booted, and ready for blood.

However, simultaneously I was undergoing a huge amount of stress to be just so. Mom was just coming off of her tumor, and dad was really pushing the grade issue. While college had always been my main preparation, now it became a looming, tooth-and-claw monster. Grades were expected to be perfect, homework perfect, and yet I couldn’t pay attention in any of my classes no matter how hard I tried, I was bored and had to read things over and over and had no ability to follow class lectures. Luckily I had enough of a knowledge base to fill in gaps and guess on tests, but I was floating along with B’s, and that was simply not good enough. So there was this pressure building, and I couldn’t push myself to work any harder, and as a result I became deeply depressed and unhappy.

And then, Laura Terry.

The name still rolls off the tongue, like Humbert’s Lolita. Laura Terry was a young woman that I tripped over in a starlit field during a freshman camping trip. She had red hair, green eyes, the whitest possible skin, blood stained cheeks. She was a fabulous artist-to this day I haven’t met anyone who’s artwork has moved and fascinated me as much as her work. She was a border—I used to come to her room after school—there were photos of all of my bands on her wall, her paintings everywhere, blue cellophane on the lights, the strangest books of poetry and fiction stacked in piles. She got me into Fiona Apple, Ani diFranco, Sappho, and Jeanette Winterson. She painted her nails black and wore as much eyeliner as I did. She was as depressed as me. And I loved her for it.

I connected with Laura Terry in the most amazing, electrical way. Standing next to her used to raise the hairs on my arm. She and I had secrets and understandings, but at the same time I was terribly afraid of her, as one would be with any creature of supernatural force. Her eyes burnt holes into me, and I could never be alone with her without feeling like I was drowning, but in the most exciting way. She was in every respect a siren.

In the rare instance that anyone I knew from high school reads this, I won’t betray Laura’s secrets, so I’ll have to abstain from mentioning any more about Ms. Terry. Suffice it to say our relationship caused me guilt and anxiety which exacerbated my stress. I started cutting myself around January of freshman year. Small cuts at first on fingers and hands, and then I would use the blood to make drawings. I would turn music up full volume in the car and then bang away at my legs with fists in time with the drums, leaving blood stars and bruises all over my thighs. I stuck needles in my vessels and tried to draw out syringes of blood (always unsuccessful, as I had trouble hitting the veins) and then, one night at a church activity, sliced two huge holes in my upper arm that caused such a river of blood I still have nightmares about it. I have huge worm scars near my left shoulder as a result. The church incident was much talked about in our ward, and soon my parents knew about my habits, and once they knew the guilt was so profound I had to stop the masocism.

I began letting out aggressions in other ways. I started a club with my friends called the Black Flame Alliance, which wrote emails about how much we hated life, how we were going to take over the world (milk, TV). These emails would get violent and confrontational in nature. I would pick fights and eviscerate complete strangers. I wrote horrible, mutilating poetry about bondage and murder. I dyed my hair black, I wore torn stockings, boots, and black leather on dress days. There were many concerned parent-teacher conferences. The headmistress routinely read my email to make sure I was not planning anything dastardly, as I was more or less the leader of the BFA, whether by charisma (doubtful) or brute intimidation (likely). The whole thing was a mess.

So mom and dad figured over the summer that it would be good to get me away from my influences—namely, Ms. Terry and my BFA cohorts—so they pushed me into applying for a semester in Switzerland. It seemed romantic enough, and Laura had sent me letters from the Marquis de Sade’s castle in Provence where she was studying painting, so I figured a European vacation was just what I needed for artistic edginess. My aunt also prescribed Adderall to help me with my concentration issues.

The Swiss semester experience ended up being one of the best and worst moments of my life, and was a real turning point for me in many ways. The director of the program was a Nazi, and his son was even worse. There job was to groom us into Ivy League gentlemen and women, and this was accomplished by crushing anything that was seen as being slightly inappropriate. We were told that if we were not social, if we tried to be loners, we would be sent home. If we got fat, we would be sent home. (The girls got many ‘you’re getting fat” lectures, though we were hiking 4 hours a day). If we didn’t dress appropriately, we would be sent home. If we didn’t get high enough grades in our classes, we would be sent home. If we were caught dating anyone in the program, we would be sent home. We were told that our parents were 7,000 miles away, and that they couldn’t do anything, so we weren’t to bother calling and complaining. And yet, many people in the program loved these men (Mr. Robinson and KR), a fact I attribute to Stockholm’s Syndrome.

I was not social, I did not dress East Coast, I was not athletic, I was fat, and I listened to strange music. Needless to say, MR and KR hated me. They criticized me at every opportunity, pulling me aside to ridicule me about my clothes, criticize me for ‘trying to avoid making friends’, telling me to do extra hikes on Saturday to make up for my slowness during hikes on the weekends. The humiliation was so constant and so aggressive that I lived in perpetual fear of those men. So, I learned my most valuable life lesson: schmoozing. My relationships before had been based on my extreme honesty and sincerity. I learned instead that what you feel is not always as important as what you appear to feel. I found out that when I want to be, I can be extremely charming and elicit all manner of confidence from people. So I made friends with the preppiest students, borrowed their J. Crew sweaters, wore makeup, listened to country music and Jamarequi. It became like a game of survival, and I played it to survive as best I could. After a while, I started enjoying aspects of it.

I was never able to keep up on the hiking—at first I was too fat, then too exhausted—and by the end of hiking season (November) I was 5’10” and weighed only 115 pounds, and was too malnourished to put in the energy. I stopped my periods and I looked gaunt.

In winter I studied with John and Robert Kennedy’s ski instructor (scary and excellent), becoming an expert skier by the end of the trip, skiing down the Matterhorn to Italy. I chased many boys named John who did not return my love. But somehow, in those months, I became stable. I took etiquette classes and learned that wearing one’s emotions obviously is not necessarily a virtue. Honesty is important, but one conducts oneself in society so as to show courage. To assume that everyone’s happiness is easily won is rather vulgar. But as I was learning to compartmentalize, wear suits, have proper dinner conversation (I could write a book on the Swiss semester dinner etiquette courses we had EVERY NIGHT), behaving in every way like an adult, Laura was sending me letters. Beautifully illustrated, soul crushing letters. And I knew that I couldn’t balance a healthy life if she was in it. When I went back to school sophomore year, I didn’t handle things gracefully.

posted by Mary @ 1:40 PM