Fay as freak | 8 | Sweet Dreams | Robert J. Stoller

ABSTRACT

In addition to fitting Bill’s criterion of “natural heat,” Fay had another quality of which he would have approved (had he known of it): she was at war with society. An essential of this state was her feeling she was a freak. (He says he was “a toad” when an adolescent/young adult.) She came for treatment to change from being a freak, but that identity theme was so fixed, so ancient in her, that, though she was glad and surprised that I was willing to try, she at first saw no hope it could be changed. Here she is at that point, early in treatment. S

What will they discover? Let me keep on not understanding until I do understand.

[Laugh.] Well, they’ll find out that I don’t know things.

What do you mean? The capital of Mozambique?

Simple things like who is the Governor of California? What’s the population of Los Angeles? This guy asked me what I was, and I told him I didn’t know. That proves I’m really stupid. I can’t answer basic things like, “What did you do yesterday?” “Well, went for a drive to this place.” “What place?” “We went to the 144park.” “Which park?” “I don’t remember the name of it.” “Where is it?” “I don’t know.” “How did you get there? Did you take the Freeway?” “Yeah.” Did you go north or south?” “I don’t know.” Something I would have done yesterday or even today. They think I answer that way because I don’t want to talk to them and that I don’t like them. They write me off as mentally retarded. That’s what I feel like a lot of the times, mentally retarded. The way I function is like such a person, the way I forget things. I have to go back to my room four times to get stuff that I forget to take for an errand.

I’m thinking about crying, but I can’t just sit here calmly crying. I cry every time I come in here. But the times when I have cried, I haven’t been better.

The only time you can do things right is in the protection of massage? Was massage a protection?

It has rules. Procedures. I always wondered why prostitutes

have pimps

they just want to relieve themselves to someone, and they want to get even with themselves for extracting so much money from men. They feel guilty for doing that.

Do you?

Yeah, because I would waste my money on drugs. Like I’d have to go out and get $400 for MDA. And I’d let my money get stolen by people like bums. I’d let them come to my place and serve them tea. And I’d have money lying on the table, and I’d let them walk out with it because it seems like if you don’t do that, then it means you extract money from men by being intimate with them. The worse thing is you’re a terrible person to do that unless you put something back into the system. Because they seem so vulnerable when they’re just lying there and coming. I couldn’t imagine going into any massage place like men do and having some anonymous stranger, with his clothes on, massage me. I don’t know if I could do that.

You can’t understand how men can do these things.

I admire them for it a lot; it fascinates me. A lot of my customers have asked me if I finished high school. I guess their usual experience would be that a lot of women who do that sort of thing wouldn’t have finished high school. [Long pause.] I think hooking is more suited to the male’s way of thinking, because men are just naturally promiscuous: they can have sex without love.

145S

But just an hour or so ago you said you disconnect the two.

The reason I did that is because I saw that men did it that way. I didn’t want them to take advantage of me by me loving them and they just having sex. I wanted it to be that I could not want them more than they wanted me. I set out to do that. I was trying to deny underneath that I was a whore and instead to look conservative and shy. I wasn’t really [a whore]. I always wished I was, but I fell short of being that. Because I didn’t hate men enough.

You didn’t do it marvellously well. It was spoiled by your innocence, I think.

Yeah, which I wanted to hold onto somehow. As Charlie the pimp used to say, “What are you doing in this kind of work? You should go to college.”

You never had a pimp of your own?

No. (He was black; maybe it’s a reverse of the old slave trade thing, wanting to get even or something.) Anyway, he would just come over and bring cocaine and talk. He’d keep me up all night so that I could talk to him. And keep giving me more, because coke makes you talk, right? And just talk and talk and talk. Of course he would do most of the talking, but I’d talk a lot too.

And his impression was that you were not quite a proper whore.

No. Sometimes, he would do his old spiel of trying to talk me into—not exactly into working for him—but saying, “Well, at least now you know that you’ll never have to go hungry; and you’ll never have to sleep without a roof over your head, because you can go to any city in the world and make a living.” Then he’d say, “You don’t seem like the girls that I know and I like to come and talk to you, because I’m not trying to make you work for me.” In retrospect, I think he really meant it, that I was different from the girls who worked for him. That’s why he did keep coming back. And my customers would say that too, that I seemed innocent, that I didn’t seem hard, they said, like the other girl that worked there was hard. She was definitely hard. She had taken the two years’ massage training and didn’t even have to do the extras. But, boy, she hated … She was so funny she made me laugh: she’d talk about the scummy men, leaving their slime in the bathroom, and the dirty things that they do to themselves in the sauna room, and they’re all just perverts.

146I could go to San Francisco for a week to do massage. That would be less abuse that being a hotel maid and cleaning toilets for other people. I was getting $5.00 an hour for it. Is having to clean toilets for six hours better than doing a hand-job for five minutes? I know I feel rage when I do the hand-job. But cleaning a toilet … I’d feel more rage at that, more of a slave: you get a sore back, and you get sore knees, and you lean down on the floor, your body just aches. Like picking strawberries. That position when you’re cleaning.

You want to go to San Francisco because it’s safer?

Yeah. Down here if I get picked up by somebody with a gun in their hand, because a lot of people have guns … Also massage is illegal here. That means there are sharks. So you have to depend on somebody, like pimps. And you can’t complain to the police if somebody is after me or some creep who rapes prostitutes. They can’t complain to the police about him here. So he gets away with it. In San Francisco they have this organization of prostitutes that get together and talk about bad tricks to avoid. In San Francisco, I can sit in a hotel and get a job [prostitution].

You wouldn’t be working in a massage parlor?

No. I did that [on the street] for longer than the time I ever worked in the massage parlor.

You sit in the hotel, and the hotel doesn’t throw you out?

One time they did. Because I got really pissed off. A customer stood me up. I did him one night, and he said, “Come back the next night and I’ll give you $180 if you do my friend too.” I turned down one of my regular customers just to go there that night, and then he never showed. But then he came in, and I said did he still want a massage. He said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the time tonight.” So I got really pissed off at him, and I started saying things to him. He was there at some business conference, and he didn’t want them to know that he was having massage. I’d been waiting already for an hour, and I was mad. I could see that he was avoiding me. So I want up to him and I said, “Do you want to have that massage you asked for last night?” He said “no”. I said, “We had an agreement last night when I gave you a massage. You were going to pay me $180 tonight.” I said that in front of his friends. I’m kind of naive. Or maybe I was just mad. Then the hotel threw me out.

147S

What would you wear?

A fur coat, such a nice coat. A large fur coat that’s long down to here. My friend Fleur, who is a prostitute, had a coat like that, too. There’s something about prostitutes, they’re attracted to big, splashy clothes. She had this closet full of sequined dresses. She’d never wear them out on the streets. Sometimes she’d dress up in them, she’d show me how it looked, something to gloat over, seduction. I don’t want to do that. I really don’t, yuk! But I don’t want to work in a hotel either. It wouldn’t be right for me at this time. Now I have confidence that I didn’t have. Now I think that money doesn’t buy sex and that maybe someday I could get better [sex] than that. But in those days I thought, “This is the best I’ll ever get; so I may as well work at it rather than not have any sex at all the rest of my life.”

Working in the massage parlor was naughty. The whole situation. For the men it was “Let’s go up the dark stairway in the worst part of town and do a naughty thing in our business suit.” I was naughty, too. I could have worked in another massage parlor that wasn’t in the worst part of town.

Why did you work in the worst part of town?

Because it was bad.

You chose to be in a naughtier place?

Yeah, and I enjoyed the way my boss was always making me feel naughty by trying to spy on me and creeping up the stairs, maybe watching me from the dark at the top of the stairs. Always trying to catch me doing something bad, and I would always be trying to get away with doing something bad that he wouldn’t find out about. Like he wouldn’t allow us to take off our clothes. His own puritanical rule. So the first time I took off my clothes— which was totally not allowed—I did it to be naughty. I had this big argument with my customer, saying “I’m not supposed to do that.” He said, “Please, please, I’ll give you $100.” He would have to stand at the end of the bed and only look, and I’d only do it for one minute, right? A minute by my Seiko watch.

But after that, when it wasn’t as naughty any more, then I’d only charge $10 to $20 extra for taking off my clothes while I did a massage. Then I’d be naked the whole time. So the naughtiness of it was definitely profitable to both of us: he wasn’t paying for my nakedness as much as he was paying for the naughtiness 148of it, the fact that I was an innocent girl that he was corrupting. Later on I felt embarrassed about asking so much for just taking off my clothes. I have no right to think that men are perverted, because I did worse than they.

Did you do it for excitement? Or did you do it for naughty? Not that the two are so easy to separate.

For both and for love, to try and gain love from them, all those father figures.

S: Was that especially the clientele

older men in business suits?

Not just business suits. But those were the ones with whom it seemed more naughty.

Are you saying that one advantage of working in a massage parlor was that older men with father-like-qualities were the main customers, and so you always had this naughty excitement available and you could tease them?

Yeah. My regular customers ended up not being younger men but older men. It’s what a little girl does to her father, that’s what it is.

My parents were very concerned that I find a job that made money. I couldn’t exactly tell them, “Hey, I made $600 this weekend”. They wanted me to prostitute myself for money. It would have been worse if I’d gone into computer programming. Bad as it was what I did [prostitution], that would have been worse.

You’ve done a lot of destructive rebellion. Your prostitution was destructive.

One day I was on acid. Suddenly the acid hit me in the head and made me think about my life. I was sitting on my bed, looking at the wall, and this colored light was spinning around my room, making it look like it’s underwater, playing some music and thinking, “What am I doing trying to be a prostitute? I don’t think this is what I want to do. In fact I know it’s not what I want to do. Any every time I tell myself I’m going to actually be a full-fledged prostitute, everytime I think of going all the way with a customer, I feel just sick, I feel terrible. And even in that handjob or blowjob business I still feel revulsion. But I hate even the idea of a regular job, nine to five, break at a certain hour, guaranteed income the same every day. What I liked about being on the street was that every day was different. I’d walk there trying to pick people up.

Why didn’t you destroy yourself?

149F

The drugs gave me a glimpse of how it could be to be myself. They saved me. They think that drugs do people in, but it’s really people who do themselves in. I could have destroyed myself with them, but it wasn’t the drugs. The drugs pulled me the other way a bit. That made me think that I had the capability in my brain to feel some pleasure: the circuits are all there; they just need a little push. Especially that drug MDA.

That’s your real sweet honey, huh?

It makes you want to talk to people. In this dream I have sometimes, I’m living in a Communist country. The other night I was living in a tree house; the wood holding it up was rotten. So I wasn’t going to sign the lease. It was the only non-Communist part in a Communist country. Down below were the troops. It was the only shelter. But it was on the verge of collapsing. [Therefore, she would take drugs that, for the moment, make her whole. She has never abused drugs.]

[Now she talks about a voice, sometimes voices, that keep up an almost unending attack on her. These are not hallucinations but a strong, vigilant, condemning inner commentary, an ego-alien morality. Its (their) assault underlines her freakishness, and her inability to escape confirms for her that she is a hopeless case.]

The voice is saying, “You have nothing to say,” but I have feeling anyway.

The voice is feminine?

My father’s voice.

Literally?

Yes. Well, sometimes it’s my mother, too. My mother [inner voice] says, “You don’t know that you’re going to make it. You may think you’re going to make it, but really you’re not going to.” That’s what she says, and I say [shouts], “Shut up, you bitch, leave me alone. Just because you wasted your life doesn’t mean you have to waste my life for me. I think you want to see me sad because it would make you …”

What the voices say seems to have so much power over me; they demand perfection: “You’re wrong. You’re fat and stupid.” But they’re wrong, too. They are more wrong.

I want them to begin to relate to me. I want to know what I can do to help them so they’ll become you.

150F

If they become me, then I’ll have control over them. But they don’t want anyone to control them. They’re too warped to work together with me. I wouldn’t let them continue to be that way if they were with me. They’d have to change. [Throughout this conversation, she is in a battle not to cry. When she does, her face is contorted by the impulse to destroy the crying.] Crying is what you do if you’re confident that you’re okay.

You haven’t earned that as far as they’re concerned?

She [her voice? Her mother-in-reality?] says my bad feelings are not okay, that I’m just creating all my own bad feelings and I’m just doing that to be bad, totally bad. They [voices] keep thinking of the time when I’d be sent to the bathroom to cry when I got mad at them during dinner because they’d be picking on me. So I’d cry louder and louder to make them come and say that they’re sorry and I could go back to the table. There I am wearing a little bib they made me wear. Maybe they’ll come in and they’ll say … My dad, first my mom will come in. She’ll be really sorry. Then my dad comes and says, “Don’t give in to her; you’re only training her to feel sorry for herself and to try and manipulate us by putting on an act. She’s just putting on an act.” Then I would think, “Yeah, he’s right.” Also when I’m crying there to make them come in and they do, my dad would say, “We were listening to you crying and we heard how you were not crying so hard at first, and then whenever you thought we were coming closer, then you’d really start crying. It was just to make us come here.” That was bad.

You were manipulating. The mistake you made is to agree that that’s all you were doing. Have I got that right?

Yes.

S: They stole from you any legitimacy

they point out something that you knew was correct—manipulation—but don’t acknowledge that you also were really crying. So you were left only with badness. You still carry that inside of you. So when you cry in here, you’re not allowed to cry because you’re manipulating me because I’ll then feel sorry for you. Therefore you’ve got no right to cry.

I can’t think of one constructive thing that the voice has done for me. It’s just like a vampire, a parasite. I can’t get rid of it. I don’t need it. I can do without it. I would still know what’s right and wrong without the voice.

151Every time I start to think something bad, I’d say, “That’s the voice” and then just let it talk and I don’t have to listen. I realized that every time when I’ve achieved something, like at school, it would just gloat at me and say, “Ha-ha, now you’ve done it my way. You’ve done what I told you to do. I have power over you,” and then that would make me mad and want to just run away from school and become a prostitute or something. I thought about failing all my classes and in that way getting even with that voice: then I wouldn’t feel its power and I’d be free.

I read this book one time—I don’t know if this is the voice— Crime and Punishment. The voice is now saying I’m just a coward because I never killed anyone.

Who is the voice referring to?

First I thought of the people at school throwing things at me and insulting me. But I’d never … When I was fighting them and I got them down, I’d never really want to kill them, like, hit them in the face or something. I wouldn’t do that. I’d kick them where I’d know it wouldn’t hurt as much. I wouldn’t kick them in the balls. I should have shown them once and for all not to mess me up, not to bring me down. They would have known I was serious about killing them. Then they wouldn’t have done it any more. If I’d really blown somebody away, then nobody could have bugged me after that.

There’s no other way you could have done it that would have also been honorable?

I could just have walked away from it and not reacted to it.

But your voice wouldn’t permit that?

No, it wouldn’t. It’s the voice that makes me not be true to myself.

Why do you want to do porn movies?

The whole thing turned me off even while I was considering it. I thought, “I’m not getting any customers this way.” With a movie … This way, each time I do it, I would have a perverse pride that I’d done that [prostitution], but there is no record of if. With the porn movie, there would be a record that I was perverse in doing it. A whore. I wanted proof to show the people that I was a whore. Then they would believe me. That would be proof that I really did this dangerous, dirty, evil thing. I could say I was not just a bum. It would be better than just being a 152bum. … It’s too much hardship to get a job as a waitress. This way I could star in a way which a waitress is not a movie star. Everybody comes to Hollywood for … It would be capitalizing on what I thought I was, which is dirty and a whore. The only redeeming feature about me maybe was that it [whoredom] could be turned into something worthwhile. The only part in there that could stand up to that voice. Because the voice could crush my friendships and crush everything except for that, that dirty pleasure. It couldn’t get rid of that even though it wanted to. That was probably the thing it most wanted to eliminate, but that was the strongest part of me and that would be my strength. If I had made that into a movie, it would reveal me, it would reveal my strength.

If the voice constantly accuses you of being terrible, no good, why wouldn’t it be satisfied when you were doing things that were terrible?

Because I was doing the things that I hated the most, that I tried to get rid of the most. It would like me not to masturbate. It thinks it’s really dirty that I masturbate, but I’m not going to stop. If I did stop and didn’t have sex, I’d probably lose my feelings there because the more I do it, the better it is to a certain point. (Five times a day, that’s probably too much.) I was disobeying the voice to go into porn and that gave me a thrill. That made me think

I have some power

I don’t have to obey this voice all the time.

Have you disobeyed it at other times?

Just doing drugs. Sometimes it will let up a bit and let me down what I want to do, let me smile at a guy for a moment. Just to do that smile though is a major effort. I’m still obeying the voice.

But you said it lets you.

Yeah, but it leaves me exhausted after that. It doesn’t totally give me permission: “Okay, now I’m going to do this. I don’t care what the voice says, I’m going to smile.” He wants me to give up sex.

When you chose to do something that was, for you, filthy, hellish, you were doing it in defiance of the voice, but that part of you is an honorable part, though everybody in the world would say the choices it makes are dishonorable. Do you understand?

I don’t know. My mind is somewhere else.

Where is it?

153F

Thinking about death. I was thinking about this video I saw, sadomasochistic sexual things. There was this woman, she’s kind of like a whore, she’s always feeling herself trying to get into degradation: “No humiliation was enough for me, I wanted more,” etc. It shows her going through scenes with men. They’ll beat her up, but they won’t give her what she really wants, and finally she gets what she really wants: she was killed by somebody. The first part they showed fucking and mixed it with a lot of violence.

Why are you thinking that now?

I don’t know, because I really didn’t even hear what you said. I know you were saying something about the voice.

We were talking about defiance and how you needed to preserve yourself even if the voice didn’t like it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

Isn’t there something like that in the videotape?

Um-hmmm. Because she wanted … She said the only time she’d feel alive was struggling under his thumb just before she might die, knowing that any moment she might die, so this would be the only real moment. And that’s exactly what I feel. She was saying it almost exactly the same, talking about wanting—

It could have in some way killed you to do the porno. On the other hand, some part of you would have been free and alive?

Oooh! [Powerful feeling.] It really gives me the creeps to think about how I want to keep [have] all the evil stuff inside me. How could I seriously consider doing that porn business?

It might not be degradation for another woman; it was for you. But in the degradation is some freedom?

Yeah. The voice only allows me the freedom if I degrade myself.

The porn movie was your suicide?

Bill said there was no sexual diseases going around here. I don’t believe that. Somebody like John Holmes who has these massive sex orgies is going to have diseases. So are these other guys. Some of them have AIDS. [Holmes, a few years later, died from AIDS.] Yeah, it’s a chance at suicide. It’s sexual desire that would be killed.

If it’s what you thought, you would never then marry?

Yeah.

You would never have children?

154F

Right.

So you were ready to kill yourself, but you were choosing to do it?

Yeah.

So you were willing to go to hell for something you believed in. To do the things you don’t believe in is something you can do. Did you ever see A Clockwork Orange?

Yeah.

First third of the movie he does everything evil. Second third of the movie, society takes him and makes a good person out of him against his will, that is, by behavior modification. The third part he chooses [to return to] evil in order to be free. He’s going to be destroyed, but his choice is free choice. [The lovely heresy: to choose consciously to go to Hell is more moral than to renounce free will, and, unconscious as a dumb beast, obey the Church’s regulations.] You have a similar problem. See, when I first met you, I didn’t know that. You were just going to be a porn queen. It was very simple.

Maybe the voice is saying that I have to be perfect. I have to be good. I’m so used to rebelling against this voice that I don’t know whether I want to do it or whether I’d still want to do it if I had no voice to rebel against. [We can think of others of society’s rebels. Will they be tamed by punishment?]

S: That’s what you did in school. They beat the shit out of you

you were a freak.

Men’s organs are really vulnerable the way they hang out there. I don’t think I’d want to have that. I’ve imagined what it would be like to have a penis. I’d always be worried that something would happen to it, because somebody could kick it in the balls or something. It just seems foreign. But then, it’s like I’m not a man or a woman: my own thing that hasn’t been invented before. I don’t really fit into any roles. I don’t like the idea of having to follow a rule. That’s like following all the other rules that other people made for me, my parents.

S: Is there a question in your mind? You look in the mirror

your body doesn’t look to you like anything but a female’s body, right?

Yeah, but I don’t have hips that wide, and my waist isn’t that narrow, my shoulders are kind of wide, I have really thin wrists and thin ankles and a thin neck. It seems like my body has a strange appearance, not normal.

155S

By “not normal” do you mean masculine?

No. Not masculine, but it’s not really feminine. I’m different from everybody else. I don’t have the grace women really need; I don’t move like that.

There are women who are not graceful.

That’s true.

Are they females?

They are females, but for all intents and purposes, the less graceful they are and the less pretty, the less value they’ll have to men. Well, sometimes I am [feminine]. I like to wear skirts. I feel I look really awkward in them.

I used to think that I’m not really … Well, first I thought I was very female, like in kindergarten before it [external genitals] changes it looks like everyone else’s. But then I [labia] started coming out, when I was about 10 or 11. I just started getting a slit like I’d never seen … all the paintings that I’ve seen.

First of all, they didn’t have pubic hair and I could see their little slit there, there wasn’t any of this other stuff. I used to take my fingers and try to push them back in and tape it shut to try and get it so it wouldn’t grow, the way you try to change a tree from growing. I was being like a freak. Because nobody I’d seen had had that. In all these paintings that I saw the women didn’t have any … And I thought, well, probably most women never get pubic hair. The glamorous women in the painting, which I really hoped I’d be later on. The angels. As for the lips, I remember, even when I was 13, thinking I was weird.

When did you learn what others had?

It was when I was looking at a magazine. When I saw those pictures, it gave me something to identify with.

So that you were relieved?

Yeah.

Surprised?

Yeah. I think I was about 18 or 19 before I really realized that. Then I read in my little information book that people have these lips, but they’re hidden inside and only come out when your excited.

That’s what you had heard? But when you saw the photographs, you saw that this is part of female anatomy, not just there with excitement?

156F

No. It was only with some females: the women who are chosen for photographs partly because it gives them a look of being perpetually excited when the lips are swollen up like that, right? Either the females are excited or they cheat: they have big lips that stick out, and it looks like they’re excited. But most women that I’ve seen in changing rooms in the gym don’t. Like my friend at 13. We used to take off our clothes and look at each other. And I could see that there was a big difference between her and me. She thought it was weird.

If I had to be one or the other, I’d be a woman. I don’t know; I feel like a woman sometimes. I think that is doesn’t matter because the definition of being a woman would limit me and doesn’t improve my attractiveness because I’m so weird anyway that not even a transsexual transvestite wants me. It’s hard to expect somebody who would want me. I don’t love me, and so I can’t give love. Men want me to be loved. I learned about the untouchables in India. Nobody will touch them, and that’s what I was like. I had a doll, Dirty Mamba, my favorite doll.

That’s part of you.

Yeah.

Is that a she, he or it?

It. [Laugh.] She/it, she/he/it.

Is that what you are?

Yeah. It would never think everything I did was bad, that was the main thing. And there was a Clean Mamba. That was a she.

Was she someone you confided in?

Yeah. I’d tell her how good I was. She was partly me, not as much as Dirty Mamba.

Where did the name Mamba come from?

I made it up when I was little. It’s connected to a song that one of my babysitters used to sing to me, a black prayer to Jesus. Sweet, benevolent.

It seems to me that Dirty Mamba is more real and was with you more than Jesus.

Yeah. Because though Jesus would always hang out with sinners and he tried to make me be good, he wouldn’t like a whore, if I liked it and didn’t want to change.

157S

You have no intention or no capacity of being good in Jesus’s sense?

Not all the time.

But Dirty Mamba was willing to love you?

Every day was sad, all the time, instead of being cheerful. Like something will happen and for a few minutes I’d be elated. Like I was on the bus and there was this big black woman at the bus stop and she kind of smiled at me. I looked at her, and for a minute she looked at me too. And I just felt elated. [Pause.] I’d like to be like that, not all the time but more of the time, instead of just a few minutes each day when something good happens. You think I’m a human being. I’m pretending to be a human being, but I’m not really. I was thinking, “I wonder what happens when he finds out.”

I had this fantasy where I saw my mother’s face … There’s this painting by Magritte, with a woman’s body, and the eyes were breasts. Her eyes were little and mean there above the breast. And her mouth is at one side at the bottom. I had a fantasy of my father’s face: I took a razor and slashed through the mouth and through the eyeballs [makes rasping noises]. Sometimes I have a fantasy where I pull off the man’s penis. Drop it on the ground. He’s trying to rape me. He’s an executive and lives and works in a tall glassy building. He’s wearing a really dark suit. It makes him look very important. I’m his secretary. Well, he thinks: he wants it, why shouldn’t he have it? So he tries to rape me. He starts slapping me around, starts belting me: “Bitch.” Then I imagine that he’s not an executive but my first lover, who [really] was trying to rape me. He’s saying, “Does it feel like rape?” But I had chosen to be with him. So he thinks I won’t complain, because I didn’t have to be there but I was there. That makes me an accomplice, almost. It means that he has a right to me.

Anyway, he starts to push me down on the floor. He’s just going to hold me down and go inside me while I’m struggling and he’s hard. He didn’t make it [first lover in reality]; he’s got a fat body. In my fantasy, I just punch him out. He gets beaten down in the beginning, but in the end, through sheer stamina, he wins. And then I take off his cock. He can’t rape me any more. When I grab onto it … It’s not like I’m tearing it off. It just comes off in my hand because I have so much power. There it is in my hand, and I throw it on the ground, and now he can’t rape me.

158S

Is this a sexually exciting fantasy or an angry exciting fantasy?

It’s an angry exciting fantasy …

When it’s just a physical act, the lack of the emotional is made more obvious. But it [heartfelt intercourse] is the ultimate love. Two people totally together, merging. The barriers of your body dissolve, and you melt into one.

Have you had that experience?

Yeah, but mostly in my fantasy. I’m not as much afraid to have sex with somebody as I am to love them, although I’m also afraid to have sex because of the lack of love that I have with that. I used to go out to bars and try to pick up men with my girlfriend, but I’d never get picked up: “Ooh, I wish somebody would pick me up; I wish they would.” But then a few times I did get picked up by people who were sleazes, and I did go to bed with them. I don’t know if I really enjoyed the sexual experience that much. But the next day I would just feel great. I would feel totally high.

But you wouldn’t repeat it?

No, I didn’t want to go back [to that person]. Because I was afraid of what I’d say to him [the devastating shyness]. One time I went over to this guy’s trailer home, and [to be sociable] he showed me his photo album. Then we talked, about just anything we could think of, like “Where are you from?” No depth.

This was after you slept with him or before?

Before. I didn’t know how to say anything that’s really on my mind. He told me a lot more about himself than I told him about myself, the little stories or something you bring out when you have a one-night stand. Most of the time I was thinking, “This man is a total stranger. What am I doing here in bed with him?” He turned out the lights, and I got really scared because I couldn’t see him. I didn’t even remember what he looked like. That really scared me, because I didn’t know who the hell he was. But then I remember what he looked like. But then the next day I felt really good. I had achieved something. I had gotten past some barrier: I made contact with somebody. It wasn’t much of a contact, but there was some. I felt I’d been really brave. And I was high from having some kind of closeness and from having escaped some kind of danger. I could have been murdered or something. But instead he was nice. It was pretty bad sex that time.

159And the other times with strangers it was bad sex. I didn’t come; it just didn’t feel good. Like one time with two truck drivers that I met in a bar and went right from the bar to their truck and did it. I was really drunk. They were just going to drive me home from the bar, but I started taking off my clothes in the truck. I said, “Let’s park here for a while.” I don’t think men are really that bad. I bring out the worst in them. They don’t really want one-night stands, but I push them into it. And they’re not supposed to turn down an opportunity. The male ego here, especially when there’s two of them to witness the other one turning down an opportunity.

Why did you do it?

Because I just wanted to be close to somebody, and I felt really horny. I was drunk. I was wasted out of my head, even peed my panties, I was so drunk. This guy started eating me. He went down on me and I’d peed myself, and he was really nice about it. I can’t believe that a man would do that for a woman. There’s no way I’d do that for a man, a stranger. If he had peed—well, it’s different for a man, because it doesn’t go all over everything. That time actually it was good, maybe because I was so drunk, and maybe because it went along with my fantasies of loose abandonment. And because there wasn’t too much talking before, where I felt I would betray the person if I didn’t like them when I had sex with them. With these guys, I didn’t really have to like them, and that’s what made me like them more. Whereas sitting down with that guy and going through his photo albums and hearing about his past girlfriend who he was in love with for years, I started to think’, “Now I’m supposed to like him, and when I sleep with him, I’m supposed to feel love for him because I know all about him.” And I didn’t feel that. He still seemed a stranger, though he told me all that stuff.

But partly I did it because those two guys had been coming on to my girlfriend. I just sat there. She finally decided she had to leave, right? I was still sitting there. So they started paying attention to me. Later, I suddenly went into shock: this thing I was so proud of myself for doing, “I could have been killed. I could have gotten herpes” (Which I did get). To have sex with people I didn’t know and didn’t like! And doing it totally drunk and totally out of control. Those one-night stands never worked out.

160[She no longer sleeps with strangers.]

I keep thinking about this object on your wall. Now it reminds me of a lion. It reminds me of Inca gold pieces, funny little bodies, like little monsters. The Aztecs and the Incas. Blood sacrifices. Human sacrifices. They had a big pit where they—this is not what they did, but this is my imagination—where they throw the young maiden down to the dragons, because that’s how they felt about young maidens. Instead of each man going out and torturing a young maiden, it would satisfy him that there would only be one victim for all the men—like watching violence on TV—in the tribe. That way they could conserve their young maidens. [Pause.]

Anger, rage, hating, sadness, one big bundle of tightness inside you. I asked you if it was erotic or was it anger, not that there can’t be a lot of erotic in anger or anger in the erotic.

In this case, it’s just a surge of adrenalin.

What happens when you are in the presence of men’s cocks? To what extent are you angry?

The thing that would make me angry when I was doing it [with customers] is if they would try to touch me. Touch my breasts or something. I’d be massaging their hand, and then they’d hold onto my hands while I was doing their fingers. That would make me mad, because then I’d have to go along with it if I wanted to keep all my regular customers coming back to me, keep them from going to the other girls there. One of them knew how to give a real massage, and I didn’t know. But the men came to me because she had a really dominant way about her.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe you weren’t angry.

But, I was, a lot of the time I was really angry. Especially when they tried to touch. If they’d just lie there and keep their hands to themselves and give themselves totally over to me and let it be up to me if I wanted to linger. The way I did the massage, it was really tender even when it was firm. I’d do it really slow, and it would seem like I really liked them. If they’d just lie there and not try anything, you know, pay me a little extra, then I’d feel really kind toward them. I would feel tender toward them. But if they tried to touch me, it was like they were trying to take something from me. They were trying to take affection, but as soon as they tried to take it, I wouldn’t want to give it.

161I used to think while I was doing that: would I rather be doing massage or selling donuts for five dollars an hour? Or even if they paid me the same for selling donuts, would I rather be doing massage? Because how much contact do you get with … You’re being bought just the same when you have to stand there and smile at people and perform very simple … You’re less of a person to your customer when you’re doing that then when you’re giving a massage: “What would you like?” “I’d like a chocolate éclair,” “Okay, that will be 57 cents,” bing, bing, bing. What does that reduce you to? To a totally mechanical device. But everybody has to put up with shit in their jobs, right? Everybody works for somebody else.

Another woman would say: “Look at the amount of shit she has to put up with in the massage parlor.” But you might be different from another woman: in reality there were pay-offs for you doing massage. You weren’t a slave, especially if you could keep the situation under control, when the man didn’t try to get something he hadn’t earned. You know things other women don’t know. Or rather, they may not be conscious of what they know.

I think if I know anything more, it’s not the important things. They have some extra sense of female, of being powerful, that I don’t have. I went to this toy store. They had stuffed animals. [Starts to cry.] I went around looking at this big stuffed … and little stuffed bears and cats and dogs. And I thought: other women will get to experience these stuffed animals. [Crying hard.] They’ll have children and become children again. [Pause.] Little babies are really cute. I won’t be able to have them. A lot of them who are my age already have had them. Some girls have babies when they’re sixteen. If I had a kid it would be a disaster. I’m not just saying that because I’m being down on myself. I know that it would. I’d treat them bad. So I had my tubes tied.

I wish I had gotten pregnant by accident when I was, say, nineteen. I wish, sometimes, I had gotten pregnant. Then I’d have a little kid now. If I had a little kid, I would have found some way to make it work, I think. Sometimes I think I would have made a supreme effort to treat my kids really well, even spoil them maybe. But I’d treat them with respect. I’d let them make their own decisions, that’s the main thing. I wouldn’t criticize them all the time for whatever they wanted to do. If they wanted 162to be rough … I wouldn’t get on their case for every little thing they broke in the house. I don’t think they’d turn out that bad. I don’t know. Sometimes I think they would totally be … Like I think that they’d die or something: I’d do something like I’d leave the oven on, I’d go out and something … some electrical thing in the house would start it on fire and the kid would be there and I’d only be gone for ten minutes, I’d come back and the house would be burned down. Mostly I think of them getting burned up in the fire by accident, not where I intended it. Or being on their little tricycle and getting run over by a car, five years old or something. I’m getting all sad about something that hasn’t even happened. [Weeping.]

One time I was babysitting. I was mad at him because he was crying so much. He just kept crying. I tried to play with him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. Then I’d pick him up, and I’d just be really mad and gritting my teeth when I threw him up. He would be laughing—kind of scared—because he knew something … He was laughing because he was hoping to make it funny, not because he thought it was funny. Anyway I went away on vacation, and he died. He had pneumonia. I think it might have been because of the way I treated him. Maybe he thought he wasn’t wanted. You don’t know the bad things I did to him. You think that I’m exaggerating what I say. They way I threw him up I could have broken his neck.

You mean you took away from him some optimism about life?

Yeah. If he lost the will to live, then he wouldn’t fight against his pneumonia as hard.

S: What did you want to talk about

being a murderer or having been murdered?

Maybe it’s more to the point to talk about being murdered. One time my mom put her hand on the stove and she burned herself. She was really mad, she was crying, and she was saying she didn’t want to be a mom any more. So I put my hand on the stove too. I was about four years old; I held it on it. Because it would make her less mad maybe if something happened to me. Then she was threatening to leave me. I don’t think she wanted to kill me. I used to think I’d go down the drain when I was really small. I didn’t want to take a bath, because I was terrified of going down the drain. My mom would say, “You’re too big 163to go down the drain,” because the drain is really small, right? “You couldn’t fit down there.” I’m wondering if I’m just wasting your time. When I listen to myself talk, it sounds really boring.

It can’t be boring. But why our discrepancy? You talk about childhood fears, of disappearing in a horrible way; of a mother who couldn’t stay in contact with her baby; a baby who tried to hold on to a contact with her mother by even, if necessary, murdering herself. What’s boring about that? Or is it that people just don’t listen to you?

Yeah. They get bored as soon as I say anything, even one sentence would bore them. I imagine that your other clients come in here and are more intense.

I don’t have any clients, I have patients.

Now I’m just feeling sorry for myself. I’m embarrassed. I say that and try and get you to comfort me.

If you expect that this treatment is going to change you into somebody else, then you’re going to eventually despair in this treatment. You know no treatment could ever turn you into somebody else. Nor do you really want to.

Could I turn my fantasies into love, like use that hostility to add to my sexual excitement? … Yeah.

It doesn’t make sense that you would be so sexually deprived, when you want it. If you didn’t want it, if you were avoiding it, that would be a different story. You don’t understand it either. Is it the men? Is it the environment?

I don’t talk to them. You’ve got to talk to make things run. I’m not aware of anything that I could say. When am I ever at ease? The other day someone called me “Heidi.” First she called me “Fay.” She asked me something, and then I didn’t say anything for a minute. I was thinking of something to say. So she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, is that your name”? She said, “Somehow I always think of you as Heidi. I think I just got laid a certain number of times it would go away. Two times a week. I just feel bored with myself. Anything I could say would bore me. So I don’t want to say it.

I feel you’re being boring right now. But it shouldn’t be. I don’t believe it. If you told about you interior, what’s happening inside of you … Do you know what I mean by that? Suppose you were alone and thinking, and suppose we could hook you up to a machine that makes the noises of what you’re thinking.

164F

Noises of teeth-grinding and [fierce growls; laugh]. That’s what my thoughts are. [Growls again.] Sounds of ripping flesh, tearing bones.

If that’s what’s under your shyness, then let’s see it. The raw material of your mind, not elaborations.

Okay. I’ll be at home and lie down on my bed, I’ll think of a washing machine spinning and churning the clothes. I’ll think of the time I looked up an Indian boy’s ass and saw shit churning around like clothes in a washing machine. A story about dirt. Trashcan sculpture with rubber body parts and a can of fluorescent paint between the legs. My thoughts. [Laugh.] My thoughts about food, like cookies I’d like to eat right now. Mean thoughts, about slapping your face. Baseball bats smashing skulls. I think maybe you should pass me the Kleenex in case [of crying].

Anywhere I go, I think of some other place. [Pause]. I’m all knotted up. I wish you could have a more bland face; you’re sitting there waiting for me to break out.

I’m waiting for Fay to come out in the open.

What do I come out in the open with? Trivial talk? I told you about tearing flesh. So what am I supposed to do, get up and scream? I can say I feel angry.

It’s like eating chalk when you say it that way.

[Shouts, trying to cooperate.] I feel angry, goddam it. [Quieter.] I feel angry all the time. How can I be pushing it down if I feel it all the time?

You push it down; you don’t push it out.

Get what out?

A [non-hallucinated but alien, disparaging inner] voice is talking continuously and you never report that unless I ask you about it. Yet that goes on all the time, doesn’t it? When I say, “What are you thinking?” you don’t include that.

They just make sounds too. [Growls.] I’ll tell you what the voices are saying: They say you’re just a poor invalid [my broken leg in a cast].

Because I hop?

And they say you’re a rabbit, and if you go chasing white rabbits, you’re going to fall. Maybe I’m the rabbit [laugh]. Probably I’m the rabbit. Rabbits are fuzzy and warm and soft 165and not too smart and they run away and they get sick easily and they die easily. [Pause]. I’m going to put on my sweater. I’m cold. I mostly hear these noises in my head like machine noises: scraping and grinding sounds. I see black oil a lot of the time. [Makes grinding and screeching noises.] Monster sounds. That’s how the voice sounds most of the time when not actually saying something. It just makes these sounds: jab, jab, and witch laughter [cackling laugh sound].

Is it frightening?

Saying am I frightened is like you want to put me in my place as a frightened little girl.

If you are a frightened little girl, I wouldn’t be putting you in your place. I would be trying to comfort you.

Okay. Okay, I’m a frightened little girl [kind of mimicking?].

Are you making fun of me for having said it?

No, I’m admitting to it. Okay. [Pause. Dubious. Wry.] I can go ahead and cry.

[Long, long pause filled with silent, contorting crying.]

I was thinking, “He’s sitting there with all his thoughts focused on me.” You made a mistake in focusing on me, because I’m not interesting to focus on. I feel embarrassed. I feel on the spot. Because I’m in the spotlight: I’m expected to be good, or something interesting.

Are you going to reveal yourself?

Yeah.

Let’s get going.

[Long pause. Crying.]

I felt sad about the times that I felt really close connection with someone and I could never show them that. So they didn’t even know. Or even if I told them, I told them in a way that they didn’t believe it. I cried for all the missed connections, and how I feel like snarling at everybody. [Speaks with dead voice.] For being a lost little child without any secure feeling that things are going well, which most people have, that kind of sense. [Pause.]