#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence”
And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.
Q.
Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.
Q.
Neither would I. Who would, now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but yet rest assured it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least in the naïveté—
Q.
Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—
Q.
A large outdoor concert-slash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her prototypical Cruncher morphology was evident at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women there—it is a less uncommon typology among young educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was extraordinarily pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on her blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.
Q.
That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it exceedingly hard to take them seriously or to end up not feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.
Q.
Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re— to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—or the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.
Q.
You would be surprised.
Q.
All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can glide casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said that she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—
Q.
No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and even though we didn’t know each other had felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say hi but no something about her that made it unimaginable to deploy anything less than total honesty forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was allowing me to feel safe enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes? No?
Q.
And that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the essentially unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote mainstream women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, and views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, id est the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention, to make your indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure, the fact that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with the idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should stress. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of these apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her imported denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become compromised and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. I.e. exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside town and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number but for a few days allows her to imagine that you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—
Q.
The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.
And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.
Q.
Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.
Q.
Neither would I. Who would, now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but yet rest assured it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least in the naïveté—
Q.
Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—
Q.
A large outdoor concert-slash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her prototypical Cruncher morphology was evident at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women there—it is a less uncommon typology among young educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was extraordinarily pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on her blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.
Q.
That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it exceedingly hard to take them seriously or to end up not feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.
Q.
Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re— to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—or the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.
Q.
You would be surprised.
Q.
All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can glide casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said that she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—
Q.
No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and even though we didn’t know each other had felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say hi but no something about her that made it unimaginable to deploy anything less than total honesty forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was allowing me to feel safe enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes? No?
Q.
And that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the essentially unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote mainstream women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, and views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, id est the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention, to make your indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure, the fact that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with the idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should stress. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of these apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her imported denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become compromised and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. I.e. exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside town and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number but for a few days allows her to imagine that you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—
Q.
The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.
