Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Confession: I’ve been involved with a Catholic. A real-live, card-carrying Catholic. One who gave up sugar for Lent (naturally occurring sugars in fruit juices OK). If I’d been surveyed on possible things to give up for Lent, I might have suggested running away, default or misogynist short-story writing. Candy is easier, and easy is very important.
This week, I learned that the man I’ve been having sex with for the past six months regards me as a whore. I knew I shouldn’t have let him pay for all those $12.99 Ethiopian platters we shared. I’m a cheap whore on top of everything else. Evidently, I spread my legs for $6.50.
Yesterday, I googled “whore” and “bible,” and I figure even if I didn’t let him buy dinner, I’d still be a whore. I like sex, you see. I’ve had it before. Before I met him. With other men. Men I’m not married to. Even if I hadn’t had sex before, I think I’d probably still be a whore. I am a female. Odds are I’m probably a whore for that alone.
Actually, I’m a whore because he needed a whore to make himself feel so fucking shitty that he can trot down to the wicker room to confess to the priest that he’s been having sex with a whore. He’ll pray to god to forgive him, and soon thereafter, he’ll feel OK again. He will be forgiven. It won’t be his fault, you see. It’s my fault. For being a whore. He can blame all of this—what I was foolishly calling “a relationship”—on me.
I get to star in the role of whore while he will forever be the victim, without any choice in anything. He regrets his whole life. Evidently, everything just happened to him. Default, he calls it. His whole life happened by default.
I have wondered for a long time if, in his mind, buying dinner translated into me being a prostitute. I would say, “Thank you very much for dinner,” and he never said, “You’re welcome.” Instead, he made a funny noise. I always wished he’d say, “You’re welcome, Celia.” I never really felt like I was welcome. Now I understand why. It was payment for the sex.
Wednesday he sent me a short story in which his protagonist thinks his 12-year-old daughter sips coffee like a 50-year-old whore. In my notes (I’d been asked to edit his story and told “not to hold back”), I said I didn’t know the difference between how 20-year-old and 50-year-old whores sipped their coffee. I was insulted. I’m a 51-year-old woman. It seemed like 50-year-old whore was the worst insult he could come up with.
I asked if it was a reference to me—I sip my coffee very loudly—and I asked something I’d wanted to ask for a long time. If he thought of me as a whore. That was the start of 24 hours of silence (24HoS).
After 24H0S, I emailed again: “Because you may regard me as a whore, I don’t want to see you again.” His campaign of silence was also an issue. He stops communicating when there is a problem. He managed to splutter something back about me being correct and that it was unhealthy for us to continue seeing each other. The vague implication that he did regard me as a whore was probably meant to provoke a reaction. Instead, I packaged up the jacket I’d borrowed from him the Sunday before and walked across the street to the postal outlet, thinking $6 max. When the clerk said $8.59, I winced.
“OK,” I said. “Go ahead. Then he’ll be out of my life for good.” As the clerk weighed and measured, metered and tallied, I told her all about it. Well, maybe not everything. Not the part about me being a whore.
This guy is the master of dropping bombshells. He has more baggage than the Ringling brothers, Barnum and Bailey—and any siblings they may have—combined. He refuses to be known. Will not communicate. Does not want me to communicate. These are the kinds of things—the past, relationships, sex—he didn’t want to talk about. Unfortunately, these are exactly the things I do want to talk about. If he fantasized that I was a hooker? I’m not actually that choked. I’m curious, more than curious. I wanted to know. If he actually regarded our relationship this way? Maybe I should know.
I was 13 when my mother tried to control me by calling me a slut. That didn’t work, so she informed me that I was not an attractive girl, and if boys were nice to me, they only wanted one thing. At the time, I thought she was a jerk for saying that to a 13-year-old girl. Now? I wonder if perhaps she wasn’t more correct than I have ever wanted to admit.
I have an aversion to a father comparing his daughter to a whore. As it happens, it rubs me the wrong fucking way. I’ve been down that road with my mother. The effect of being called a slut at 13 never left me. For my teenage years—and beyond—it defined my self-image, esteem, worth. To this day, the word slut is lodged, etched, bashed into my sexual psyche.
Nope, a 56-year-old man is not going to call a 12-year-old girl a whore under my nose. It’s just not on.
In the end of his creepy and disturbing tale, the protagonist is pleased about another character, a drunken dink, getting away with something he’s not supposed to. In my notes, I said, “What an ending … Just what the world needs, another man getting away with things he’s not supposed to … Why not have the protagonist pulled over by the cops and fingered for a spate of unresolved rapes, beatings and murders of women?”
Anyway, that’s the end of that “relationship.”
