by Matthue Roth
“I just want to be with you.” I was desperate. Grasping for words, whatever words fit into my mouth. “Any way you want. I don’t have to like you. I won’t do anything you don’t want. I just don’t want us to stop.”
“Arty, don’t. Don’t. You aren’t supposed to be alongside me every single moment, every single thing I do. And anyway—I don’t think that you can.” She rubbed her arm, the place where I would’ve been rubbing it if she let me. “You’re always asking me, what can you do, how can you help, how can you be involved in this. Sometimes it’s not about you at all, okay? How you can help is, you can give me a little space. I think I need to help myself for now.”
“So does that mean...” I said again. I struggled to piece it together. Me, the voice in my head kept whispering. She wrote that article about me. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“No!” she cried, loud enough for other kids to look up. “I mean—we aren’t going out. But, no, Arty, we aren’t breaking up.”
“Then what?” The words were murky in my mouth. It felt like all my teeth were melting together. My heart was beating fast. It was halfway up my throat.
“I think I need to take a little break.”
“From me?”
“From everything.”
I shattered.
“I just feel...” She tried to explain. Rubbing her palm again. “I feel like I haven’t been doing well for a while. I need to stop running myself down. I need to just stop everything, and fix myself.”
The bell rang. She got up and went out quick, without looking at me.
I never felt so broken.
all out war
I tried to listen to her. I really did. If I wanted to make Larissa happy, and Larissa didn’t want me talking to her, then I could do that. I had a full and fruitful life without her. I had music, art, video games. I had the posse.
I went to Damon’s after school. He told me in school that my GizmoNo goblin had finally eaten his way out—“if you care,” he said—and I could come over and finish the level if I wanted. I figured I might as well. My 90-day trial subscription was running out, and I needed to make use of it. Or to get as far as I could without having to pay, which was basically the same thing.
When we got there, though, Damon wasn’t in the mood to play. He wanted to look at porn.
We threw our bags on the kitchen table and closed in on the snack cabinet. My parents only kept salty stuff in the house, pretzels and tortilla chips, but Damon’s family were chocolate addicts. We ripped into an unopened bag of Rollos—
ME (careful): Are you sure they won’t mind if we open them?
DAMON (not caring about anything at all): Why would they mind?
—and I didn’t tell him how my parents noticed everything I ate, even if it was just a few potato chips, even if I tried to roll the bag up perfectly.
He wasn’t paying attention. He barely cared that I was there at all. It was weird—in all the time I’d known him, Damon had never treated me like this. Only now did I realize, he’d always been kissing up to me, treating me the same way I treated Larissa. Now he’d dropped his defenses. Now he didn’t care what I thought of him.
We stuffed our faces, on that and a bunch of other stuff, and when we were almost finished the bag he turned to me and said, “I’m going to put on some porn, is that OK with you?”
I said yes. I thought he was joking. Maybe he meant ironically, robot porn or something, or maybe he’d just put on Jurassic Park and let out a shriek halfway through, “Aaah! All the dinosaurs are naked!” I was thinking that it was a Damon sort of thing to do. I was thinking, the way I always do, how I was going to tell Larissa about this afterward. No: I don’t know what I was thinking.
I sat around the living room, eating Cheez Balls out of the bag, while Damon ran upstairs to get his game system. About a year ago, Damon had lost most of his electronics in one of the sporadic break-ins that happened to everyone in our neighborhood. Usually the burglars were just after a TV, or checking if any smartphones were lying around, but that time they’d gotten their hands on Damon’s whole digital arsenal. It was a crippling defeat. Damon saved his allowance, first purchasing a massive unbreakable Feynman safe, then buying back every game system and every game he’d lost. He could’ve just copied them online, but he wanted the actual disks and the actual packages. He was dedicated, if crazy.
Damon came back down with GizmoNo and the game system, and an old black VHS tape. “You can play on the kitchen TV,” he said, and he went over to plug it in. The kitchen in his house was basically in the living room, separated only by a counter. A small old TV, the box-shaped kind, sat atop the counter.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “I don’t really have to play it, we can do whatever you want—”
“I don’t mind, I’m done.” He rose up from behind the TV and turned its power on. The GizmoNo theme song was already playing.
“So you’re just going to watch...?”
“Some porn,” he repeated solemnly.
He pushed the VHS tape into his parents’ ancient box. He took a seat on the couch, sort of half reclining, not lying down or in any indecent position, but not exactly sitting on the edge of his seat either. I wondered what was going to happen.
I tried to focus on the game. On this midget screen, where my goblin was the size of a toenail. I had landed in the middle of a drawing-room with tasty mechanics scattered all over the floor, lying in open sight with no booby traps. I barely had to signal a direction and my little avatar would leap on a sprocket or a gear and start munching away.
It was hard to concentrate. On the much-bigger screen in the other room, a couple of friends were sitting in a cafe. Three of them. Two girls and a guy. They were talking loudly, in overstrained voices, about something real people would never talk about. I forget what it was, maybe the sexual experiences they’d had last week? A sex scene in a movie? One of the girls stood up and said she had to make a phone call. As soon as she left, the other girl leaned across the table and started without warning to caress the man’s arm. He didn’t seem to mind.
“I have my cell phone set to vibrate,” said the woman. “And you’ll never guess where I keep it.” She took a hold his wrist and showed him.
I tried to ignore it. My mind was a solid series of red exclamation points, Oh my G-d, he’s serious and How is this happening and He is watching porn. I mean, we’d been friends since elementary school. That television was the same one we’d watched Saturday morning cartoons on. (Well, no—that particular TV got stolen a few years ago. But the TV space was the same. It was holy space.) Now the new tenants of the space were...well, that.
Those horrific realizations led to another, more realistic horror: More than that Damon was watching porn, I was watching porn. Even though I was doing it secondhand. Even though I didn’t pick out the film or know its title. Somewhere in my mind, I’d decided I never wanted to watch porn. I just wasn’t that kind of person. One day far in the future, I would have a girlfriend—I’d always imagined it to be Larissa, but even, as my life seemed to be indicating, if it wasn’t, this would still happen. We’d be stretched out together, in bed maybe, or on the lawn outside the Art Museum, and I’d be silently admiring her recumbent form. She would turn to me and ask, seemingly out of nowhere, “Have you ever watched a porn movie?” like the possibility was the silliest thing in the world, and it had just occurred to her. No, I’d say. Curious, she would ask why, and, running my hand down her curvaceous side, I would say, innocently, “Baby, you are my porn.” I would call her baby. She would be okay with that.
On screen the woman was, for no earthly reason I could follow, now completely naked. The man was still wearing most of his clothes. He was crawling all over her. It looked like it would be really uncomfortable. Like, was his belt buckle digging into her skin? He would press up against some random organ of her body, like her navel, dragging his tongue all along her completely-hairless leg, and then switch to her boob. ( It was Larissa w
ho’d taught me to call them boobs, a nonchalant and self-deprecating way to desexualize those most sexual of organs.) It seemed like just an excuse to show the different parts of her body, or to make the sex part last longer. It was still only like three minutes into the movie, and they were already having sex.
The worst part was her breasts. They didn’t even look like a part of her body. They looked like they’d just been plopped on, attached by ill-intentioned aliens who’d been experimenting with the human genetic systems, seeing just how much in the way of mammary glands the human body could handle. They were like completely independent organisms. Even when she moved, they didn’t.
I was afraid to look over at Damon. I did, eventually, just to check. He wasn’t doing anything. I mean, he wasn’t doing anything sketchy. He was just sitting there, one hand sloshed against his stomach holding the remote, the other dangling off the couch.
He noticed me looking. “Are you okay?” he asked, not looking at me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Do you want me to leave?”
His eyes never left the TV. “You don’t have to. You can if you want.”
I thought about doing just that. I didn’t particularly want to go home. That was the only other place I could think of going. And something about the situation bothered me. Like, if I left now, I’d be admitting that I morally disagreed with Damon, which would be like saying that Damon was on the other side, Mitch’s side.
“I don’t understand,” I said instead. “Where did the other lady go? Or am I not supposed to think about the storyline...?”
“No, she comes back for the second scene. After Jasmine and this guy finish up, she comes back down and they both have their way with her.”
I was trying to play it cool. I could treat it like learning the rules to a new video game, or a new culture. “So, you’ve seen this one before?” I asked casually.
“Oh, yeah, tons. We don’t have a lot of videos here, just a few. But this one is the best. That other girl, the phone call one, she’s really famous.”
“We?” I said. Damon didn’t have any brothers.
“They’re all my dad’s.” On the screen, the woman’s hips looked like they were about to split in half.
“Does he—does he know you know about them?”
“Mm-hmm, yeah,” Damon said absently. “He doesn’t know I watch them, but he probably figures I do. My mom always yells at him not to keep them in the open, but it’s not like he can hide them. Besides, he gets Playboy, and we keep that out.” He waved over at the magazine rack that I’d already known about, that had scared and fascinated me as a kid.
“Those women in the movie. Do you think they...” I trailed off.
“No. You think they mind? They make tons of money off of this. You know there are conventions, they go on tour? You can write them letters and they’ll write back. Not in a gross way, like a fan club. Some of these women are more famous than actresses on TV shows.”
“Damon, they are on TV.” Extremely on TV, actually. Currently, there was more of this woman on the television screen than most regular actresses would be in their lives.
“You know what I mean.”
“But she doesn’t look like she’s enjoying it.”
“Sure she is. That’s what they call acting.”
“Or getting used.”
“You can’t think of it like that, Arty! She wants to be there. She’s not, like, smiling. But people don’t smile when they have sex, they don’t look like Ronald freaking McDonald—”
“How would you know?” I said.
“How would you know?” he said, and I was quiet.
We sat there, subdued, everyone under the spell of the moment—my quavering, tranquil freaking out, Damon’s unmoving poise on the edge of the sofa, posture straight and rigid like he was in school, like he was at a yoga retreat, and the girl on TV, her eyelids flickering dramatically, meditatively shut and then half-open. She had big, soft, ovular deerlike eyes, not the kind you feel like porn women should have. Cold shivers shot down my spine. I wasn’t sure if this would arouse me. As it was, I wasn’t thinking about sex at all. I was thinking about the movie. I tried to ignore her below her chin, as if I was having a conversation with her. I tried to read her facial expressions and wondered what emotions she was trying to convey. Did she think of herself as an actress? Was she really trying to act? Was this really what sex was like, was she enjoying herself, was she really what women were like when they had sex? I mean, she was having sex. At this moment, in this recording, at one point that had been captured on film. She wanted Damon to watch it, and he wanted to, too. There was nothing wrong with the picture except me.
And he really did know more about sex than I did.
“You don’t have to be here.” Damon sounded snide.
“I’m not—” I started to argue, but put the brakes on. The moment I started to speak, I could feel that my lips were twisted into a scowl that I didn’t even know I was making.
But the real reason I stopped talking was that I realized, nothing I could say would make a difference. Damon didn’t want me here. My goblin in the video game was being ignored. Everything he said was right—aside from me, everyone was completely happy. There was a perfectly balanced ecosystem going on here. I was the pollution.
Outside, the air on the street cut the moisture in my eyes and the corners of my mouth. It had turned from just-cold December into bitter, hardcore February in the space of an afternoon. The sky was dark when I walked home. Daylight had vanished, just like that. By the time I got home, my parents had already finished dinner. “Do you want to eat?” It was all they ever asked me. It was the only relationship we had.
My mother was unbothered by my showing up late. I said I wasn’t hungry. I pulled out the three-ring binder from my bag and made a tower of textbooks on the kitchen table as my father wiped up. Annihilate my classes one by one. And then I would be finished, the tower would be gone, and my time would be my own.
i see now
Start with the villain.
You can always introduce the hero later. You don’t have to make your audience love the hero: They already do. Bring out the villain first—show him, not as a villain, but as a character. Then the fight in the audience’s mind will be a fairer fight, and they won’t automatically root for the best people. They will have looked evil in the face and thought, if only for a moment, that they could be friends with it.
I drew the villain big. Hair short and spiky (like Mitch), a jutting triangular jaw (like Mitch’s). His stomach was convex, sinecurvelike, like a little kid who’d stuffed a pillow under her shirt, pretending to be pregnant. It was a pre-21 beer gut, an early warning system for the rest of us, considering Mitch was the only one of our friends (our ex-friends) (my ex-friends) who drank. He had babyfat all over—his palms, his forearms, his double chin—but that tummy was the most pronounced of all. Sometimes in his polo shirts you could see the outline of his belly button stretching the starched cotton. In Spandex it would look even worse.
I put him in Spandex. Red and purple, Magneto colors, modeling him after that presumptive arch-enemy of the X-Men, most hated of mutants. A genetic freak who couldn’t be comfortable with his own freakiness until he’d enslaved the rest of the Earth. I gave him undies, on the outside, of course. His paunch hung over it. I made the crease of his privates small. Revenge.
I gave the page a simple 4-panel layout. In the first, our villain faces us. The second, an empty, lonely city. The hour late, the streets barren of pedestrians, a few scattered streetlights casting uninterrupted shadows.
In the third panel we meet our heroine.
(This isn’t right. We should take more time introducing each character—more drama, more pace before the punch. We should introduce their quirks, their defining attributes, let the reader see them from every angle. This is why comics develop a more rabid fanbase than any other art form: unlike paintings, we see our subjects in all positions and scena
rios; but, unlike film, we have to fill in the movements between panels ourselves, a bond shared between reader and character.)
But: I can only draw so many panels, especially when I’m supposed to be paying attention in class, especially when my mind is racing so fast. We catch Our Heroine already in action, in the middle of her day, with only hints and speculation to use in divining the greater facts of her life. In this panel she’s already in mid-run, both feet touching off the ground (flying?), keys in hand (she has a car), wristwatch extended, fresh from being checked (she’s late), glancing behind her (has she heard something?).
She’s both specific and anonymous. She’s everywoman, caught in a situation we’ve all found ourselves in: late and lost, alone around a hostile presence, possibly about to be attacked. I had to tone her down, for purposes of my story. She is attractive enough for us to care about her, but not so attractive that we’re turned off caring, thinking she’s too good for us, invincible.
In the next panel comes the reveal: She is invincible.
Mitch-neto, Mitch the Merciless, Queen Mitch, His Royal Mitchiness, touches down to Earth in front of her, cape flowing behind him, his full magnanimosity on display. He raises up a gauntleted hand, palm up, not doing anything, but, in our ignorance (so far), we fear and suspect that—in that costume, with those powers—he could do anything.
