They're Going to Have to Ask You to Do Your Own Stunts
Skating, bathing, dating, continuing, and Tom Hardy among the lobsters
[Gentleness] sews the world together like a poem that pulls back the folds of reality but without reconciling them.
-Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living
Lately I’ve been indulging heavily in lavender-scented bubble baths to match my lavender-painted bedroom walls. Soaking myself in the fleeting heat of New York tap water meets Dr. Teal’s Foaming Bath with Pure Epsom Salt (Soothe & Sleep with Lavender)—to indulge, here, typing on my cell phone in the filling bath, in unsponsored product placement for the pure verbal fun of specificity. Around my calves, the soap forms big snowdrifts, and higher along my thighs, it swirls fainter in the water, like smoke curling off the vanilla Saint Gertrude candle I hold when I meditate in the dark, to a playlist which opens up, like a cactus’ budding bloom, with Bill Callahan telling me, and you are a fighter. The playlist is titled, “myself forever at the gates of whatever,” because when I meditate, this is what I attempt to touch—an endless me, poised to enter anything.
If we’re being more literal, the bath only matches one of my bedroom walls, that expanse left white because I got lazy toward the painting process’ tail-end. But why be so visually literal when we can instead invent a synesthesia? When I can try to convince myself, and you too, that the lavender (“Sugar Plum”) color of my three walls ought to mean soothe & sleep? The white wall is the fourth wall, broken, a massive eyeball watching me, but the others hold me in a steamy hug that this Dr. Teal’s bottle tells me will soothe my body, nourish my skin, and gently cleanse.
The last bottle of bubble bath that I ran through was the same brand, but instead of lavender, it boasted the addition of black Hawaiian lava salt. In excited anticipation of the first time I would pour its contents out beneath the running water, I thought literally. Pictured the bath turning black. I saw it as the viscous extraterrestrial “symbiote” from Venom (specifically the cinematic Tom Hardy vehicle; I’ve consumed none of the comic books), sucking my body into murky licorice depths, the ultimate codependent bond. Mirroring a spate of erotic dreams I had a while back and have been yearning to re-sleep (& soothe) through ever since, in which the impenetrable darkness, evocative of woods on a moonless night, absorbs me into its gelatinous folds in a process so slow it seems to take days. Like sinking into tar pits, becoming fossils for the future.
February 17th, 2020, I sat in the bath and prodded the massive, greening bruise mapping where calf became knee, treasuring the weight of pain waking up; I photographed my leg against the oddly cartoon blue of the water, and read Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle, a slim volume and a feather pillow wielded ironically brutally against my brain. Dufourmantelle whispered to me over the clanging and hissing of the heating pipe in the corner, “When we are seized by the feeling that nobody will ever come to us, that this solitude will not loosen its grip on us, ever, we must still find the strength to extend our arms, to kiss, to love. To say it, to start again, to hear the whisper of the wild voice that calls you from well before your beginnings.” And I photographed this passage too, like it was a bruise, a part of me and wonderfully sore. An echo imprinted on flesh.
My bruise was born at roller disco night in a gym that, by day, served as a Salvation Army daycare. Thinking disco ball, I wore a symbiote-black sweater adorned with soap-white fuzz, fistulas of silver sequins, gauzy growthless flowers, and plastic pearls. One silver moon of an earring, delicately sliced full of branch-shaped slits, clanged against the solid black disc that dangled from my right ear’s second hole. Light against night. The whole thing was a date—an extension of my arms—with a guy I’d met on OkCupid and been messaging with for a couple weeks. A’s opening gambit was the declaration that he’d love to take me to roller disco like my profile suggested, and now, after trading introductions, discussions of murder mysteries about chihuahuas, and praise-singing of collage, here we were, canceling our initial weekend skating plans to, on impulse, meet up at this place he’d just discovered over in Bed-Stuy.
As a child, I paid five dollars from my allowance for roller skates from the soon-to-be-moving next-door neighbors’ sidewalk sale. Black-with-red-accents sneakers that snapped onto wheels, disparate parts becoming something larger than themselves when connected. They were too big for me then, but one day, too small. The couple times I wore them out of the house filled me with fear at how much control I lost on the hills of my neighborhood, risking broken bones or at least grazed skin, so I ultimately relegated myself to skating indoors, back and forth across the wood boards of the family room or of the front hall. Safely contained in my flight, my pretending that I was a hawk gliding on air currents, like Tobias in the Animorphs, though I did not yet love the Animorphs. Did not give myself a chance, as a child, to appreciate the grotesque body horror, trauma of being a tween intergalactic soldier betrayed by your sluggishly brainwashed family, and the fantasy of becoming wonderfully trapped into hollow-boned smallness, fierce mouse-hunger, expressionlessness (I compile an Animorphs playlist and name it, “hawks don’t make facial expressions,” the most important takeaway, I think, from the books in their entirety).
Love for that child-targeted mythical pain comes later, in an adult body, as does skating with Aurora at a rink deep on the outskirts of the Philadelphia suburbs, an hour-long train ride for our in-love eighteen-year-old assemblages of muscle (hardest going: the heart) to be able to move together in a polished wood circle, hawks holding hands. But by the time I met up with A on the dark sidewalk outside the daycare, seven years had passed since I’d last strapped on skates. He’d given me the impression that he was at least marginally more experienced in this arena, and nerves jangled in my core both because date, arms/wings outstretched, exposure therapy for the blobby monster of my social anxiety, and because I feared that he’d notably outstrip me and be annoyed at my performance of baby giraffe glued to wheeled stilts, dragging him down.
Upon my arrival, A wasn’t there yet. Just me and another man also seemingly waiting for something. After a while of us standing a few feet apart, he called me miss in a stage whisper, the first time that had happened with a stranger in I-couldn’t-remember, and asked if I already had a ticket, if I’d bought one online. I told him I hadn’t, and he said he could sell me one. Struck confused by the concept of a Salvation Army daycare roller disco scalper I said, “You mean you already bought some and—” and he corrected me, “No, no, I’m a promoter for the party.” So I handed over my twenty dollars for a colorful strip of cardstock, assured after his inspection of the ticket that skate rental was included—thankfully, because that was all the cash I had on me—and continued to wait. A appeared eventually, slighter than me, more bearded, but in a leather jacket like I was, and we hugged. Arms outstretched. He purchased his own ticket from the promoter. We were ushered up inside.
Prior to my spate of erotic, darkness-encasing-me dreams, I did not understand Venom as a sexy film. No monsterfucker lives here, in me, in this bath. A gay film, surely, homoerotic in Tom Hardy and the symbiote’s deeply romantic connection. An attractive film, yes; see: Tom Hardy. See: Tom Hardy’s early-career twinky photoshoots. Crave both being and fucking Tom Hardy. But! The sexy element of becoming encased in black goo escaped me, as did the sexy element of terror, until all I felt in my dreams was a gut-yanking fear of the finality of disappearing into this thick of moonless night, and in my dreams, I got turned on. A feeling inseparable from feeling safe. Intertwining: fear and safety; having no control, giving up and over, animorphs into the shape of arms to hold me tight. This here is the whisper of the wild voice that calls me from well before my beginnings.
(At eighteen, what a revelation: someone holding me through a panic attack. Aurora’s arms wrapped around me as I hyperventilated so hard that I had to vomit into my trash can, not knowing nothing but horse-powerful horror—knowing, as well, that I was loved. Knowing that I wasn’t going anywhere.)
Inside the Salvation Army daycare, it became clear that the man at the door had lied to me. Skate rental was an extra five dollars that I didn’t have, and A only had two dollars left in his pocket. After much deliberation between multiple employees, we were told we could have the skates for free. It was fine. Why not? Coat check was another five per person, and A sheepishly offered up the two crumpled bucks. The woman running coat check shrugged, took our matching black leather coats, and explained to us that we’d come the night of a private party, and that’s why the shake-down. On open skate nights, things ran closer to cheap. Eying how unsteady we both were on our freely given rentals, she noted, too, that we might prefer the open skate because there were more amateurs. Tonight belonged to people who lived on eight wheels, whose leg muscles had alchemized into titanium, though they moved like liquid. A rapidly diverting series of rivulets running through labyrinths carved into the earth.
Another thing that quickly became clear: A and I had no chemistry. Never have I ever felt such platonic energy rolling off of anyone. I didn’t know there was a higher level of platonic to reach. Like the time I laid back in the bath and dunked my head beneath the surface without squeezing my nostrils shut, so water flooded my nasal passages, and when I reared up into the air, my eyes were watering, I was spluttering, my brain’s hackles were sky-high, and I was less sexually aroused than I had ever been in my life. What news, that there were previously unplumbed depths of unerotica waiting for me. Let’s be clear: A was cute; A was nice; A was not meant to exist in physical relation to my own physicality. Barely even intended to skate with me, my concerns that he’d be unimpressed with my relative lack of ease on skates failing to coalesce. It turned out he was used to in-lines, not this four-wheel drive, so he too was stumbly and clumsy, and ultimately preferred to sit on the sidelines and watch the talented liquid titanium party-goers work their balletic magic across the floor.
Meanwhile, I glided. I fell. I got up. I glided. I fell. I got up. Again, again, always falling and always getting back up. This was my whole being: failing and continuing, breath and heart heavy in my chest. At my most spectacularly broken dive, round road rising up to meet me, a talented, truly discoing girl turned around, skating backward as seamlessly and wonderfully as a water-skimmer crossing a pond, to give me a grin and thumbs up, and I laughed and grinned back at her. I would smash into the floor. I would smash into the padded walls. When my breath got too discordant, or sweat necessitated I peel off my gaudy disco-ball-adjacent sweater, or I simply wanted to check in with A and his voyeurism, I’d go crashing into the plastic schoolchild chairs lined up near the door. And always: back up, back to gliding, persistent. I think now of Kate Bush singing, in “Rubberband Girl,” If I could learn to give like a rubberband/I’d be back on my feet. A rubberband faggot: I gave, twanged, snapped.
Construction of this essay underway, two posts about roller skates pop up in my Lex feed in close succession. First comes, “bubbly bitch looking for a rollerskating companion in bk!! I am not very good pls teach me,” and next rolls in an attempt to sell “Vintage Roller Derby Skates.” The skates are my size and available for pick-up close to my apartment. The first photo on the seller’s Instagram depicts skates in leather the creamy color of banana pudding, with erotically, moonlessly dark heels and wheels. They’re darling, and I’m dearly tempted, but it seems like a terrible investment when this bubbly (bathy) bitch is also not very good, in need of teaching, and anyway has nowhere to perform the sacrament of falling and getting back up but within the limitations of my railroad home.
(Sometimes, too, I see posts from A in my Lex feed, and think how strange it is, that he continued to exist, diverting to run parallel to me, visible from here but no one I will ever touch.)
Kate Bush continues, Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub / Rub-a-dub-a-dub / Rub-a-dub. Is this any coincidence? Resilience and the bathtub braided together? Embodied in the figures of the rubber duck springing back to the fullness of its shape after being squeezed in a fist, or of me, naked, bruised, and examining my knee, receiving Dufourmantelle’s wisdom, “Gentleness liberates skin from being skin, it doesn’t resonate, it merges, it winds itself around the lines of landscape; it doesn’t dampen anything, it gives space to things and removes the weight of shadows.”
What if I seek gentleness from the weight of shadows, eroticism and comfort from impenetrable night like a sucking mouth, liberating my skin from being skin, merging with me? Should I be conceptualizing these shadows, despite their density, as weightless? This ride as a rollercoaster—we flip upside down, but I am held, strapped in place? Safe, because this is not the opening massacre of Final Destination 3. This is only an inverse skating situation—rather than falling and getting reliably back up, I am lifted but come back down. All directions amount to the same thing if you go both ways.
Sick with symbiosis, envenomed, Tom Hardy seeks reprieve from a bath of an unconventional kind, submerging himself into the lobster tank in the middle of a restaurant. It really is appropriate now for me to say “Tom Hardy” rather than naming him fictionally, because this moment was notably unscripted. Tom Hardy saw that the production designer had placed a lobster tank in the restaurant where he was having a meltdown and he said, “Well, I’m going to go in the tank,” and so it was. The lobster tank’s many meanings—the luxury and feeling of bloody-mouthed wealth with which it imbues a restaurant, its inescapability and transparency, job as a container through which the moments before a creature’s death are placed on display—are transformed into Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub. Rubberband springing back to life! Fitting, with how Tom Hardy is about to die but keep on ticking.
My own bathtub is a much more private affair. I do not share it with any doomed crustaceans. It is not in the center of a fancy restaurant. Rather than a glass tank, it’s your typical white porcelain with bonus curtain for drawing closed. But it’s where I retreat when I feel full of venom, or like a lobster on the killing-room floor. Ever since I was eighteen and overcome with the luxury of being able to indefinitely run the hot water into the tub because NYU was footing the bill, when I was hyperventilating, sobbing, lost, I would retreat to being held in the hot and wet. And—another but—I insert a crowbar and pry open this privacy, choosing to photograph my knee against the water and post it to Instagram alongside bookpages. Choosing one day months later as well to take watery nudes for texting to a friend. While often I do turn to the water for privacy, I know always that I have the option to place myself on display, my bruises, my gentleness, my skin that has been freed from being skin, my rubbery bantery self, held safely by heat and lavender.
In the woods at night, Sakiya and I seek a place to sleep. The dark is dense as a dying star or a well-muscled cat, the ground marshy and rocky by turns. We hold circles of light in our hands, and the spaces between what we illuminate I conceive as the gutters between comic book panels. The spaces where anything might have happened; you can intuit based on what’s changed from one image-container to another, but you can never really be sure, can you, what’s there in the blankness, that might be feared or loved? Gentle or bruising? Unerotic as water up the nose or erotic as pitch-black symbiosis? We search panel to panel, light to light, the unknown all around us, wanting only somewhere we can safely lie down, and in the morning, drenched in sun, get up again, and keep going, arms extended, the way one extends to keep one’s balance on skates, even if only for a moment, even if only to be able to break a dazzling fall.