Choke, Hold
For energy workers
[A little essay for y’all.]
I’m 20 or maybe 21. I work at Books-a-Million on Gunbarrel Road. Open at 9, close at 11. Acres of discount tables. We answer the phone, “Thanks-a-million for calling Books-a-Million.” This is such a despicable thing to say that I make up names for myself. “Thanks-a-million for calling Books-a-Million. This is Yolanda, how may I help you?”
We’ll call the boss Daddy Bear. He’s a big guy — tall, a little fat, with baleful blue eyes and broad shoulders and a dissipated complexion, all liver spots. He is the best manager I’ve ever had.
A man comes into the big store to proposition customers and workers. Sometimes he exposes himself. He says his piece or shows his piece and moves away and out the door. In a day or two, he’s back at it again. We can’t pin him down long enough to call the cops. The weasel. We’re excited, but scared of this uncanny dude.
One day he lingers a little too long and a worker points him out to Daddy Bear.
The next time he darkens the door, Daddy Bear is ready. The flasher is tracking down a lone, small customer woman and while he is on the hunt, Daddy Bear is tracking him.
Daddy Bear catches him in the pocket paperbacks section. He puts an arm around his scrawny neck and goes full-on Daddy Bear Southern Queen. “I hear you’re looking for some action.”
The perv tries to pull away but Daddy Bear has him tight.
“If you ever talk to any of my girls again, you’ll find yourself more action than you came looking for. Do we understand each other?”
The man never comes back.
The late crew closes at 11, cleans the store and leaves by midnight. We go to Alan Gold’s, the gay bar. I crush out on the drag queens and wish I had one of my own. Daddy Bear dances with younger guys. My other gay colleagues cruise the scene. Out of their number I find my very own bi guy and have my first sex. A couple of weeks later, Daddy Bear fires my guy for stealing Magic: The Gathering cards.
Daddy Bear has a party at the modest, elegantly decorated 1970s house where he lives with his mom. I’ve never seen an interior like this: no kids, no messes, male nudes in bronze and stone.
He sets up his massage table and offers energy work to anyone who wants it. I volunteer second or third. I’m tipsy. Daddy Bear never touches anyone for energy work. His hands move an inch or so above my body. I feel clots of light unfurling into long skeins. Things that are wrong go right.
“Tell me why no one likes me more than the first few hours,” I say.
“Your energy’s intense. You scare people away.”
He holds his palm over my throat.
Something blazes into flame.
I’m 36. In the tumbleweed brush I have a fight with a guy with a beautiful name. I could say His Nibs, but he’s just a brilliant, unhappy guy who — the other guys say — breaks down into sick hysterics, tears, personal attacks at the slightest provocation.
Outside the barracks he’s in perfect control, though. Bit of an Anglophile, which I find charming. Quotes, is it Chesterton? Not Chesterton. Oh, wait — Eliot. The Hollow Men. Or maybe he just listens to me quote things, say things. Maybe I attribute the better part of whole clever one-sided conversations to him.
At any rate, I don’t want to believe what I hear, which is that he’s A Little Off His Rocker.
We get off somewhere on our own one spring day and he keeps sharpening his wits on me and I try to keep up but I’m less cruel or probably just less clever so I resort to force and I shove him.
(This is my memory; he remembers something else.)
He chokes me and makes me go to sleep.
I wake up, get up, shove him again.
This happens three times.
I have never fainted before, but about six hours later I start passing out every time I stand up. Happens all night. Peters off gradually over the next few months, then years.
I don’t know what it means.
May be no connection at all.
In lots of ways this is the central event of my life, and I remember meanings into it, write story meanings into it, but — to repeat — I do not know what it means. I remember being in love, and I still am in love, but with what? With whom?
I remember he spent whole Sundays with me, before that and after. I don’t think we really discussed our fight. I don’t think he was in love with me in return. I think, despite being More Than a Little Off His Rocker, he was patient with my abject-in-love self.
I’m 38.
Babydaddy has now exasperated me in every kind of way including raping me, giving me chlamydia, and piling on days of silent treatment, by which I mean Not Even One Word.
I’ve spent nights lying at his feet, pregnant, wishing hard for him to relent. “Just speak to me, please. I’ll do anything you want, I’ll become anything you want.”
Of course he does not speak right away. Who gives up power like that? He waits a few days and then bestows his speech again, usually in the context of sex. Fuck first, grace me with his words second.
One time he squeezes my neck and I pretend it turns me on.
So he does it again and I pretend again and all the time I hope he’ll make a mistake and I won’t have to wake up any more.
But he’s a grown man — a Marine, even — and does not make foolish mistakes like that. He never makes me unconscious or even a little dizzy. I’m still here, right?
Babydaddy calls me up. He’s better. He’s taking medicine — heavy diuretics — to help with the extra pressure in his brain. A couple dozen concussions resulting in a skull fracture and damaged blood vessels in your brain will make you do strange things, it’s true. Babydaddy doesn’t remember much about our life together before he got his medication right.
“I’m good. You good?”
“Still kickin.”
I’m 45. My friend Dancer becomes my massage therapist. She fixes the scar clotting my jacked-up hip. I tore my hamstring, not clean off, but a smidge off from the sit bone. I’d been overstretching my split, way past 180, and then did a silly thing in a combination, what did I expect? The green bruises and pain went away but the functionality was slow to return and this big gristly knot of scar tissue kept me from sitting comfortably on my behind. I had to kneel in chairs, a habit I’ve kept.
Dancer pokes into the knot from all angles with her fingers. Deep pressure. Long pressure. Unrelenting.
“Breathe,” she tells me.
She shifts the angle a fraction and digs in again. “Breathe.”
She’s a belly dancer. She has a soft wide face and what I think of as hobbit-like eyes. But when she gets to fixing my hip, she’s fierce.
“What you want is pressure that’s almost too much, almost not enough,” she tells me.
That’s exactly what I want. From life, from art, from everything.
She’s learning energy work and asks if I’ll be her guinea pig. I pay her some nominal amount and she moves her hands over me, searching through the channels of force.
She passes her hands three or four inches above my neck — the throat chakra, she calls it — and I panic. I sit straight up. I gasp for breath.
“Trauma there,” she says. “If you want to make another session, we can work through it slowly together.”
“What was it like?” I ask. “What was the energy like?”
“Darkness.”
I’m 47. My friend the Poet gives me a massage. She’s my age or older. Fifty? Not a dancer. A poet and an artist, too. Her hair is golden. Her touch is light. My throat seems — okay? Maybe okay. Okay for accidental touch, anyhow.
One time I come over to help her pull poison ivy and in the house afterward she lays her hands, warm and earthy, onto my face.
I get a crush on her and cry and feel like a damn fool and don’t ask her to touch me again for years, though she would if I asked, I think.
I’m 50. My hip is acting up and I need a new massage therapist who’s familiar with dancers, so I find a young fellow who’s also a dancer.
He’s a talker. Not about himself, but about his work. He does silly burlesque, political burlesque, straight-up Chippendale burlesque, and drag burlesque. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t volunteer, whether he’s part of the gay community. He talks about the dance communities in Chattanooga and Atlanta. He talks about the political climate facing trans folk and queer folk. He talks about art as activism. He talks about acupuncture, which he’s studying. He makes lots of dick jokes.
He’s older than 20 and probably not 30.
At some point he places a warm, wet rag under my neck and accidentally touches the front of my throat as he gently crosses the ends of the rag. I gasp and do not sit all the way up or part of the way up, but my hands rise protectively before I can stop them and at the same time — on the same impulse — as I’m guarding my throat my toes spread wide apart in the start of an orgasm.
Just half a second of stillness.
“I’ll just leave that like this — ” opening the rag.
He’s the professional but I’m the grownup, more than twice his age, so I say, “It does seem like our experiences live in our bodies. And then completely unrelated kinds of touch or movement can bring that experience out. And of course it’s not personal at all.”
We talk about how dance relies on the memory of the body. He tells me how that relates to acupuncture. I give him money, which I have because I’m old, and he takes the money, which he needs because he’s young and wants to get a kind of hippie caravan and go around the country practicing acupuncture at festivals and pagan fairs.
Memory lives in the body, but flesh is more vibrant than its meaning, I think. He’ll carry the curl of energy from my throat like a flame on his palm — like those dancers in A Night on Bald Mountain, remember them? — and touch someone else’s instep or palm or dick and it’ll mean what they need it to mean.
Yeah.