I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Gobble, gobble,

  love,

  Martha

  I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness

  I spent the morning before I left for Reno on Myspace looking at pictures of my dead ex-boyfriend. The phrase my dead ex-boyfriend is syntactically ambiguous. You can’t tell from it whether this boyfriend and I were together when he died. We were not. We’d been broken up for about two years. We were together for three then apart for two, then he died. He died in a car crash.

  Myspace is still with us. You could dog-ear this page literally or figuratively, bookmark it, set aside this volume or swipe to a new screen new beginning and find my Myspace page or yours, assuming you were aged fifteen to say twenty-five in the early aughts. The reason Myspace failed isn’t because it was populist or ugly or bought by News Corp but because it was hard to talk about: my Myspace is harder to say than my Facebook. The uncooperative cadence of the phrase my Myspace page perfectly encapsulates the awkwardness of the early aughts, when our story begins.

  * * *

  —

  His name was Jesse but in the years between our breakup and his death he went by Jesse Ray, meaning his new friends and his new girlfriend called him Jesse Ray. I never called him Jesse Ray. No one from our old group ever called him that. A lot of us grew up together, don’t speak of him much now, maybe because we don’t know what to call him.

  I remember his body best of all because it was covered in tattoos. Not covered, that’s lazy. His body could not have been covered because in fact his tattoos were a secret from a few important people—his parents mainly and the people in their church. It’s not that his parents didn’t know him as I thought then but the him they knew was not the him I knew. There were at least three Jesses at the time of his death: Jesse, Jesse, and Jesse Ray. His parents knew one, I knew another, his new friends and new girlfriend knew a third. The only person who knew them all was probably his biological mom K, who lived in Elko and knew everything. Jesse and I once fucked in the sacred vestibule of the Mormon Church in Ruth, Nevada, while his grandfather’s ninetieth birthday was taking place in the multipurpose room down the hall, and she knew about that, for example. K had been a waitress her whole working life. She was basically omniscient.

  Clothed, Jesse was just a tall lean white guy. Long feminine fingers, goofy mop of glossy brown curls he was vain about, a stupid soul patch sometimes, sometimes a mustache, eyelashes of a fawn. I’m still attracted to men like him. But when he undressed he revealed torso, biceps and thighs crowded with ink: a scarecrow and graffiti he photographed in the Reno railyard and his own let’s say underaccomplished drawings. His collarbones said I love you but I’ve chosen darkness. With a period, as in end of discussion. We’d been friends of friends in high school, where his stepmother was a health teacher who believed in immaculate conception. I’m being unfair. She was a lot of other things too, but her stern piety made her stepson’s secret rebellion first-rate gossip. That and he’d had many of these tattoos done with an improvised apparatus built of a Bic pen.

  Jesse was on the football team, wore eyeliner and sometimes other makeup with his jersey at home games, suit on away days. He dated evangelical girls who would only permit him anal sex, another secret from his parents. Theirs too, I assume. His father was a bearded giant, an HVAC repairman, taught karate, led a home church of his own strict and eccentric doctrine. Their study was based on a code he had developed for unlocking the secret meanings of the Bible, something about every seventh word or fourth word. Each in their small congregation had their own three-ring binder with highlighted decryption glyphs in plastic sheaths. Jesse’s father had had a shipping container buried somewhere on their property, stocked with supplies to wait out the days between Y2K and the rapture. All this I gathered from Jesse, for though at that time I still possessed my anal virginity, I was never invited. This could be because my stepfather rocked very serious prison tattoos on every region of his corpus including his neck and hands, but was probably because my family didn’t have a church.

  I paid little attention to Jesse in high school because he was a rollerblader and I preferred skateboarders and suspected him gay. I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and didn’t know how to spend time with a boy who didn’t want to fuck me. Then all of a sudden it was August and all the swimming pools in town had gone mouth-warm so you didn’t even want to swim until after sundown and Jesse was back from college and I was headed off to the same one in a few weeks. He was working a/c, wrung out from crawling under trailers in 120-degree weather in long sleeves so his dad wouldn’t see his tattoos.

  We were at our friend Seth’s, whose father made us Budweiser with Clamato. We were eighteen, nineteen years old. By dusk Jesse and I were alone in Seth’s parents’ semi-aboveground pool. I gave him a shoulder massage—his shoulders pallid, his neck and face sun-leathered save for little white hyphens at his temples where the arms of his sunglasses rested. After the massage Jesse said, in the voice of an animated luchador from a web series we all watched then, “Maybe you want to take your top off?”

  I was somewhere between willing and compliant. Down we called it, as in she’s down, short for down to fuck or DTF, which is what it said beside my name on the wall in the football locker room, Jesse said. Claire Watkins = DTF, inked as an insult but I’ve never taken it as one. I was indeed down to fuck. I was curious, liked exploring other bodies. I also liked to be liked, who doesn’t?

  “This is why I have no respect for rapists,” Jesse said, cupping the white triangles of my boobs and glancing into the house to see whether anyone was at the sliding glass door. We couldn’t tell, didn’t care. Seth’s older brother was the hottest guy I’d seen IRL and it turned me on to think of him watching.

  Jesse said, “Girls are really nice. Most of them will do whatever.”

  I told him that was because he looked like a white trash Ryan Phillippe.

  He blushed, turned the color he would ask me to dust across his cheekbones some mornings in the bathroom of the one-bedroom we later rented behind a halfway house off I-80. “You just have to ask. That’s all they want. All consent is is asking. If you can’t even ask, you’re a pussy.”

  “You’re using that word wrong,” I said, lifting myself topless to the edge of the swimming pool.

  “What, ‘pussy’?”

  I pulled him close, worried about my stomach rolls. I had probably been reading my mother’s copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. “You’re using it as an insult meaning weak,” I murmured into his neck. “The pussy—by which I assume you mean the vulva, clitoris, vagina and cervix—is extremely resilient. The uterus is the strongest muscle in any body. The clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis.”

  Jesse had freed his from his board shorts. “No for real,” he nodded, “pussies are tremendous.”

  “Also,” I said, “it’s a term that belongs to a community. Like the n-word. I can say it but you can’t.” I pulled the crotch of my swimsuit to the side and we kissed.

  I said, “I can use it as an insult or in reference to my anatomy. I can say, ‘Fuck my pussy, Jesse.’ Or, ‘Let’s fuck, you pussy.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  All this was mostly fun and erotic (though we rarely came) but it was also my survival strategy. You could question its efficacy since it made sweet boys afraid of me so that I always ended up with the crazies but in this manner I went from being raised by a pack of coyotes to a fellowship at Princeton where I sat next to John McPhee at a dinner and we talked about rocks and he wasn’t at all afraid of me.

  Anyway, I didn’t like sweet boys. I liked filthy weirdos who scared me a little and I still do.

  Someone eventually shooed us out of Seth’s pool and Jesse and I drove out to BLM land and lit off fireworks and fucked a few times in the back of his little pickup where he said, “How do you like it?” and “No, I’m asking.” Then we were boyfriend and girlfriend an
d then we lived together up in Reno working retail and fast food and taking night classes and Jesse quit drinking and proposed on Christmas and I reneged on New Year’s and Jesse started snowboarding and going to shows and doing hard drugs and I started writing and Jesse fucked a girl in a tent up at Stampede Reservoir and another girl at the Straight Edge house and I fucked a kid whose dad had an amazing cabin at Tahoe and in this manner Jesse and I broke up a few dozen times and eventually tacked a curtain across our living room and that became my bedroom where I would occasionally find Jesse napping in my bed because he missed my smell or on my computer without my permission doing homework or jacking off.

  Jesse lived like he knew he was dying, a saccharine nugget of pinspiration terrifying to actually behold. Take it from me, you do not want to room with anyone who actively lives like he’s dying. His body was coiled with eros, anarchy and other dark sparkling energy. He looked for fights at shows or by wearing eyeliner and little boys’ superhero shirts he bought at Walmart to strip clubs, waited for someone to call him a faggot and then beat their ass. He had been on the club boxing team before he dropped out, and tech bros in town for bachelor parties did not expect his long arms, nor his gigantic martial arts father. Afterward he went to Awful Awful for an Awful Awful or a buffet for prime rib.

  He got gnarly nosebleeds all the time and our best talks happened with him in the tub letting the blood slide down his face and red the warm water. He was in the mug club at the tavern around the corner, an investment he called it, not because a mug club member received his beers in a personalized stein, though that was appreciated, but because members could purchase another pint for a friend for a dollar, which Jesse did often and then occasionally he smashed the pint on the floor to emphasize a punch line or one time into the side of a guy’s head because the guy called Jesse’s favorite milf waitress a cunt.

  He liked to sing classic rock karaoke and uproot street signs and use them to smash too-nice cars parked in our bad neighborhood. He once shit his pants while rollerblading to work then worked his whole shift like that. He owned three pairs of rollerblades, two snowboards and about a dozen books in a crate beside his sleeping bag until he read Walden and announced, “I don’t need this crate!” We had taco night at our apartment every Tuesday for all the runts and strays in our friend group and Jesse cooked the meat. He cut lilacs from the bushes on campus with his Leatherman and piled them on my unmade bed even though we were broken up because the previous spring we’d been walking together and I guess I’d stopped and smelled them. He stole a keg from behind a liquor store and I could not get his new friends to leave our apartment until it was tapped at which point Jesse rolled it back where he found it. He was very good at keeping secrets. Needless to say he became a junkie junked out on all sorts of things near the end but he was also very much alive.

  One day I came home from my new job forging signatures for my butch Women’s Studies professor at the subprime mortgage company she owned with her lover and Jesse was at my computer, a piece-of-shit Dell I’d maxed out my credit card for. He must have gotten a nosebleed during, because he was jacking off covered in blood. I let him finish, kissing him, then told him it was time to get the fuck out and he agreed he would after the World Cup because we’d gone halvsies on the cable.

  There is no story—he was there then he was gone. I am a dumb lump scratching my head baffled by this most basic, ultimate fact: he was there then he was not.

  I found out he’d died from my sister, who found out on Myspace. His current-now-suddenly-former girlfriend was in mourning: black hair black clothes black makeup, long all-caps passages of pure screaming grief. You want to know whether I hated her? I did.

  People die on the internet now, really die. We can watch them die in real time, every gruesome frame if we like, and sometimes if we don’t. In dorm rooms, in cars, off bridges, black and brown people executed by the state, unarmed fleeing autistic hands up, fathers mothers children sisters starring in snuff films screened in the airport.

  Of Jesse I have only pictures—his body on Myspace. I like the selfies best, you can see his gaze in them, see what he thought was hardcore, what he thought was punk. The last he posted before he died are of some operation he had, his fingers folded in metal horns beside staples in a savage line from his sternum to his navel, a few inflamed sutures beneath the navel disrupting the outline of a new tattoo on his abdomen, one I don’t recognize.

  There was a car crash, someone was fucked up, probably everyone, though I don’t know that for sure. I heard Jesse was flung through the windshield into the desert, on the way out to BLM land, the place we first made love. I’d like to put it that way.

  He kept secrets, hated condoms. I watch his ex online for signs and symptoms. I check his Myspace and I know she does too since she is me is my own sister. We have the same thing living in our blood now. I am not doing a good job of this.

  Jesse always let me be the good guy. He did not pay much attention to what I was doing and this is the version of freedom I have grown most accustomed to—most protective of. He saw I was a watcher and gave me something worth watching. He was not violent but he enjoyed violence. He was a vandal and a fighter but he was never mean, never tolerated meanness. He was the person I called when I was afraid. He walked me anywhere I asked him to though he admitted the only time he felt unsafe on the street was anytime he had a girl with him. He always let me be the better person even though I wasn’t better than anyone. He wasn’t cracked up but he let me be the steady hand, made me make myself feel safe. When I was with him I was always in control and this was true somehow even the night we drove to Berkeley to see Radiohead and after drove a little stoned across the bridge and slept at my sister’s place in the Tenderloin, on the living room floor because we were twenty, twenty-one.

  He was harmless there, the street was noisy, and the living room was lit orange from the soda streetlights and we collapsed into a hillock of sleeping bags and yoga mats and pillows and somewhere in there my sister’s cat making my eyes itch. I woke up with Jesse rolled atop me wanting sex. I was tired, didn’t want it he was not at all violent but also not relenting, his body unyielding, his long arms beefed up from snowboarding all winter and lifting boxes in the stockroom at work. He held me down.

  I remember thinking in italics. Is this when it happens? And then I answered myself. That’s up to you. I decided that it wasn’t, it was simpler. I was determined to make it out of college unraped, an actual goal I had. Though before I even started college I met a kid in the shoe store where I worked who invited me to a party but the party was just playing cards and so I was playing poker, a tourist’s game, with him and some other people and drinking a Corona, then I woke up and it was morning and I was on the bathroom floor sore with my pants around my ankles. I walked into the master bedroom looking for the kid who’d invited me, whose apartment it was, the only person I knew at this party. He was in bed asleep with an erection, no blankets, and another girl I didn’t recognize naked, spread-eagled on the bed, her hands tied to the bedposts I think, but I could be wrong. I wrote my phone number on his bathroom mirror with what I am just realizing now must have been her lipstick.

  What’s your family church? Jesse’s father asked me the one time in three years I had dinner at their house. We don’t have one, I said, or maybe I said work. Work was our church, and laughter too. Laughter and work and words. Rocks and photographs and dogs and books and TV. Breaking into houses, viewing things at night. My sister my mother and me around the kitchen table bullshitting. The earth the body the sisterhood.

  * * *

  —

  Theo has a dead love too. We traded them on our first date, by my count the night we were the last two left at the bar, and we walked to the United Dairy Farmers on High Street for ice cream that we took to another, hipper bar open later, where we sat on stools playing footsie and drinking beer and eating sundaes with the ghosts and thereafter went home and dry h
umped without kissing in my bed, where eventually Theo slept with his jeans on. This was in Ohio.

  Telling Theo about Jesse was as intimate with another person as I’ve ever been, was my way of telling him about my mother. Theo would not know her name for months.

  Theo’s love had been in grad school. She went on a research trip to South America, something with biomes, bacteria, got an infection but didn’t know it. She came back to the States and died in her sleep. Her roommate found her in the morning, cold in her bed. She’d had bulimia some thought, and that might have compromised her immune system.

  Theo never got to see her body. I never saw Jesse, never saw my mother. She was cremated while I finished my midterms. By the time I got home she was the ash we spread in the garden in Tecopa, where she had spread my father. I don’t know where Jesse is now.

  Jesse, I wish you were here. America is violent and queer as fuck. The snowbanks are rising and every morning I drive over a frozen river past a mosque an elementary school this week sent a letter threatening a great time for patriotic Americans. I pass a kid who looks like you walks like you, I pass a sculpture by Maya Lin called Wave Field, which is like a bunch of waves made of grass, covered in snow, so like a bunch of bumpy snow. I drive to a strip mall and smoke weed in my SUV and do rich-bitch yoga with these fierce old dykes and suburban sorority girls and other basic traitorous cunts, all of them my sisters, and for twenty dollars each we all come out an hour later looking like we just got fucked.

  Maya Lin was selected to design the Vietnam Memorial when she was still an undergrad at Yale. Ross Perot called her an egg roll, remember? We were kids. Did you ever get to see the Vietnam Memorial? I don’t think you did. I’ve seen most of the monuments in DC. I’ve been to Paris and The Hague and Antwerp for a night and London and Toronto and the Amalfi Coast in Italy and Wales twice. I’ve had coffee with Margaret Atwood, lunch with Justice Stephen Breyer, and a beer with one of the Game of Thrones bros. Once I was talking to Michael Chabon at a reception and Ira Glass interrupted Chabon to talk to me and then—then!—someone cut in to talk to Ira and it was Meryl Streep.