Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

Well, fine. If I got orgied, I’d also get an STD, so lucky for me no one was noticing me panting across the cave. Why couldn’t I understand what the negotiator was saying? Why couldn’t I penetrate his wounded feelings? If I got fired and had to go home, I’d hang myself from the showerhead, never mind the war that would be my albatross for life. Where was the justice in that? I was just some girl from Anaheim with a crush on her parents, a brother in a coma, and no talent for intimacy with anyone who mattered.

18. That night was a lesson learned: there’s the erotics of a woman who feels so miserable and wrecked and anxious and sad that she will get on her knees and let four people have at her with varying degrees of rupture and bliss, and then there’s everything else. I unplugged my headphones and let the tape feed through the wall speakers. None of them minded the Korean, and so it was as though his voice kept my head in quarantine while the rest of me went to town. Who took off my clothes? Had I ever kissed a girl? Were ministrations lavished with judicious regard for people’s feelings and self-esteem? Are these the questions that spring to mind? We were five; it was exhausting. Labor intensive. You gave up what you got, were debased and exalted, and also profligate in the disport of your limbs so that they might land anywhere and on anything, and sometimes on the volume button of your listening console, so that just as one guy cums (and on your forehead, because you are not, after all, a porn star and can’t even catch rain in a storm), you suddenly understand loud and clear what your Korean negotiator is saying: “I am not a man, my shame is paramount”—in short, the DPRK will bow its head and freeze its nuclear program in exchange for light water reactors.

19. A major concession. If the U.S. knew this ahead of time, they could call off Carter — Carter, who was making the administration look impotent and ridiculous, calling in an ex-president to negotiate for them. God, I felt good. Alive . And I was slick with the proof. My thighs were wet, my lips and hands, so that when I went for the tape, hit Eject, I don’t know, my finger slipped and the tape jammed. Got caught halfway. Worse, I had done the horrible but corner-cutting thing of using the original tape — a dupe took days — which meant the only way to recoup the information was to keep hitting Eject until the button jammed as well. I knew that we shredded transcripts and that we had an entire building filled with tubs of acid to dissolve paper, but also that maybe we were not above dissolving the linguist who screwed up big-time.

20. Morgan was threading her legs through spandex, snatching her accoutrements — bra, earrings, pink panties — and bolting for the door. The others almost clotted in the doorway for how fast they were trying to get out. I put on my clothes. Things in my body felt misplaced, but there was no time to get cleaned up. I went to my boss’s quarters and briefed him on what I knew. Did I have the tape? Sort of. The cave reeked of jizz and sweat, the smell defying what meager perfumes I’d levied against it. My boss snapped the tape trying to get it out, and I was redeployed.

21. Back in the States, I knew a few CIA guys and went to them for help. The help was not forthcoming. They said I’d have to start from the bottom. Apply. Spend a year at the farm , which was a training center in Virginia, and after that, who knew, maybe I’d get assigned to a country of note, like South Korea or China, but just as easily I could end up translating again, and this time at Meade, in that horrible glass box south of Baltimore. So forget that. Communications intelligence had its limits; I wanted to be on the ground.

22. So: no work, though I did keep up with the news. The Agreed Framework brokered by the Carter meeting — which went off okay, I guess — would get signed soon enough, though the agreement would not last long, the North refusing to accept light water reactors from the South under the aegis of — who knows? — the bad karma of furnishing your house with the enemy’s loveseat. Also, like anyone believed the North would actually abandon its nuclear pursuits. The upshot? Kim Il-sung almost dead, his pansy son ready to go, and me working in Anaheim at a Korean bar just to keep up with the vernacular. What kind of career trajectory was this? Sigint to dive bar?

23. I didn’t take any money from my parents until years later when I had to care for Ida on my own. Instead, I just lived with them. It was not a good time. I had come back from Australia changed. Still secretive and cross, but training these qualities to serve new goals. Because, one thing I noticed at the bar? The white guys who came in for karaoke were actually coming in for me. To chat me up and take me home. The meaner I was to them, the more solicitous they got. And I liked it.

24. For six months, all I did was have sex. If a week went by without action, I’d find myself staring at people on the street, men or women, and imagining them bent over or me just nuzzling my way up their thighs. I had no profession, no friends, and at twenty-seven, my greatest ambition was to wedge my body into places it had never been before. Every day, to work, the store, the mall , I wore crotchless thongs and shelf bras. Neither served a purpose — I had no breasts, and if I was manifesting arousal in the way some women do, crotchless panties were no kind of basin — and so these garments were all about alerting my skin to possibility. Know why I couldn’t save enough money for a security deposit on an apartment? I blew it all on toys. And gear. Leather is expensive. A PVC slave harness costs $200, and this without the cuffs or chains. Take that, Vicki — I was raw in my day.

Still, I could abuse a guy for hours or get put in the stockade myself, but neither defined my needs. Femmes, doms, tops, bottoms, I wanted to be them all. But I was not confused. The psychology of my behavior was too glaring and trite for me to be confused. When you grow up neglected by the people you love most, it tramples your self-esteem, and when you are adult enough to stop blaming them, you end up blaming yourself, which means, wamu! even less self-esteem. And so, two models of conduct: (1) I lorded over men because I wanted to recover what self-regard was taken from me, and in this model, all men were the same man; (2) I wanted to be misused because this treatment squared with my self-regard, and sometimes it’s just good to harmonize what you deserve with what you get. In the grammar of both models, low self-esteem ranked as subject and verb, and so I guess I knew exactly what I was: a woman with no self-esteem.

25. Hurt, hurt. When you sign up for hurt, hurt is what you get. I’d promise myself to stop. Every day, I’d promise. And then I’d go to work, watch the corn cheese resolve under my fingernails, and five hours later wake up with one guy down my throat and another up the rear. Roofies? Course not. Just a campaign of self-destruction, deaf, dumb, and blind.

We all do this, right? Blame ourselves for the wrong thing? My brother? The coma? Our fight not two minutes before he cracked his head on a fiberglass plate?

The bar got busy. More and more, guys started coming in from the poles. Guys with wedding bands. Guys with pregnant wives, first kid, second, third. Guys who worked for people who worked for other people who were not so keen on the consolidating ethic of a young man I used to know as a kid. According to these people, the country was given over to a liberal agenda that had colonized the White House for way too long. This young man from Anaheim was an affront. And considerably easier to take out. Need a job, Esme? Tired of your body’s trade in extremities? Yes? Then go bring me something on this man. His name is Thurlow Dan.