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date: 2019-08-20
weight: 1
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<div class="cw">Self harm</div>

It's not about the dress.

It's about that whole point in my life. It's about the way home ways. It's about the way I was left to my own devices. Every kid's dream, right?

I had no father. I had the angry, drunken man who lived upstairs. I have the man who woke me in the morning to drive me to school, who clearly showed up at some point during the night. I had this unpredictable animal living in the house that I had to please, and there were no rules for what would or wouldn't please him.

I was left to my own devices and there was always something that I needed to be doing and doing correctly, and I was never sure what it was. Do good in school, sure. Grow up to become an imortant engineer of some kind, sure. The details in between, though, were hazy.

> The rules are made up and you're always in trouble.

Or about to be, yes.

> You know now that he was flailing at life as much as you are now.

I do.

> You know now that he was actually in quite a bit of pain.

Yes.

I also know that he would close out the bar that Julie worked out, drinking the whole time.

I know that if I went with, I'd spent countless hours meandering between the corner booth in the bar and the Pac-Man and Millipede cabinets up front.

> The owners of the restaurant would dote on you. They would give you free kitsch from the glass case by the register. Little sticky-backed calenders with tear-off months and pens to draw on the backs of the pages. They'd let you pick out the licorice breathmints from the brass bowl by the register, the ones shaped like chalky pillows. They'd let you play hide-and-seek with Kevin, the other kid being raised in the bar by a drunken father.

I know that he and Julie had bowling league on Saturdays and I was left home alone.

I know that if I went with, I'd be fed quarters in a steady stream to spend time in the arcade room or on the little toy vending machines.

> You would buy the little plastic snakes made from links that would let you bend them into squares and cubes. You would drink coke after coke. You would wonder how they managed to oil the lanes so perfectly up to the foul line and no further, and when you saw the machine that did so, you were entranced by its single-minded, track-bound life. You watched him sing Devo's **I'm Too Sexy** for karaoke, mincing about on the stage and producing gales of laughter in his parody of what he knew of gay culture. You were just starting to think of yourself that way.

It was a spear through my heart.

> Tell me about the dress.

Left to my own devices, I prowled the house.

I stole a beer. I stole some Kahlua. I stole a little bit of brandy, but I hated it. I stole some of his pot. I stole a condom.

> He was so angry about that. He grilled you and you denied it.

I realize, later, that the reason he was so angry was because, if I didn't steal it, it would've meant that Julie was cheating on him.

> Tell me about the dress.

I stole a paring knife and obsessively sharpened it. I cut at my wrists until, confronted with the realization that I would be asked about it, I stopped and cut on my big toes instead.

> You told your friend, Julene. She had no idea what to do, confronted with such information. You were eleven.

What does one say to being told that your friend is self-harming? I would never tell anyone about self harm again, I promised myself.

> Tell me about the dress.

I tried on Julie's dress. I tried on her teddy. I prowled, naked, through her rack of clothing in the spare room for things to try on. I spent a lot of time naked. I spent a lot of time masturbating. I wondered if I was gay because I tried on her clothing, or I tried on her clothing because I was gay.

> You told your friends confidently in third grade that lesbians were just women who wanted to be men and that  gay men were just men who wanted to be women.

Matthew said those things, but he had been dying since birth.

> Tell me about the dress.

I tried on Julie's clothes with a mixture of guilt and shame. It was titillating and humiliating. It was transgressive. At some point, I figured that, the ontology of being gay aside, I had better get used to wearing such, as that's just what gay men did.

> Your anger is cooling down.

Yeah, it is. I can't tell if it's you shifting it away from my dad and onto the dress, or if it's just getting the words out there that's helping so much.

> Dig deeper.
