STEPH RANTZ
Precious Moments
Way back when I was young and stupid, I took one of those jobs you have to take just to get by. You know the kind: a shit-job. At least, I thought it was a shit-job. I mean, I wanted to be a writer, or maybe an actor, any kind of artist—it kinda didn’t matter. I really wasn’t cut out for anything practical; certainly not for anything in the retail world where you had to fast-talk people into buying things they didn’t really need. I was so introverted I reminded myself of one of those neurotic little dogs that would pee all over itself anytime anyone looked at it. But you get used to it: the mall life with its fountains and large prehistoric-looking plants, its inward-facing courtyards and cloying aromas. There were never any visible clocks, so you really couldn’t tell how much time passed while you were there. No telling how long I worked at that mall. Before I knew it, it was maybe ten years later, and I was still in the same shit-job except I was no longer young. Just stupid. And bitter. Very bitter.
The last place I wanted to work was a shopping mall where the fluorescent lighting made everything look like a faded polaroid. I’d read studies about how fluorescence drained vitamins from your body, and in truth, I really did feel anemic. I imagined myself walking around the mall with blue neon circles under my eyes like a little Edward Gorey waif:
‘S’ is for Steph whose tie caught in the escalator, Chased from the men’s room by a chronic masturbator.
If you got to the mall early enough, you’d find all those terrifying mall walkers milling about. Those pale octogenarians who signed up for the mall walking program would just walk around and around the mall on one floor and start on another like it was an amusement park based on Dante’s circles of hell. After enough rounds, the oldsters would earn something—I don’t know what—A certificate? A pin? The seniors were all there before the merchants opened their gates with those awful clacking sounds like a succession of misfired rimshots from Doc Severinsen’s band the night before.
This was the eighties. The scary decade for gay people, where if you weren’t neurotic enough before the AIDS crisis, then you really got your money’s worth during Reagan’s America. Nobody wanted to admit that gays existed, especially if they were sick. And the mall was the perfect place where you could forget all about sick people, politics, or even the weather. Everyone could just reimagine themselves as any of the densely populated mannequins: brainless with hostile elbows jutting out at sharp angles. You might realize there’s a world outside the fluorescent comfort of the mall, but that’s what quaaludes were for.
There was the bitter smell of coffee from Mr. Dunderbox, mixed in with a miasma of deli cheese. And then the sweet smell of tobacco from the Tinderbox with its racist totem. There was Wix ‘N’ Sticks with its hybrid aroma of all the candle scents in the free world mixed together, wafting out like some kind of mysterious jungle fruit, oily and unctuous. Every department store smelled like Aramis or Polo cologne. My store manager would take a squirt of each cologne and then rub them together before patting them on his ruddy face.
I worked for a large franchise of Southern department stores in its fine jewelry department. It took me forever to learn all the euphemistic names of the various departments. When someone came up to me and said they were looking for Today’s Woman, without a care and a flip of my obnoxiously long bangs, I said, “I think she left yesterday.” I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about; moreover, I didn’t care. Today’s Woman? Apparently that was the name of the big girls department. I’m talking about plus-size women. I guess we used to segregate these gals into the back corner of the store or something. We used to be embarrassed of the most ridiculous things back then—mostly human things. It’s hard to believe people are still fighting for control over their own bodies. It’s humiliating.
Someone else asked me for Foundations. How the hell was I supposed to know that was the lingerie department? Seriously? Foundations? I sent them to the basement and told them they’d have to get the janitor to unlock the door. I myself had never seen the foundation, I told them. The rings of hell were apparently innumerable. And I think I really was that stupid. Looking back, I realize it was the fluorescence leaching my brain cells.
People would ask me for anything. Someone asked me if we sold those little hooks that held up curtains. Why would you ask someone in the fine jewelry department for drapery pins? Someone else brought in the cap of her shampoo bottle and said she wanted a necklace the exact same color. I suggested soap on a rope (it was a thing back then) and sent them to toiletries.
But then ultimately, a nicely dressed elderly woman asked if I had Precious Moments. Her question gave me pause and for some reason, I found myself blushing and sweating. I said, “Well, I guess we all do.” I remember blushing so hard and fast that my skin burned. I have no idea why. Even though I didn’t know that Precious Moments was a line of porcelain statuary commemorating special times in a figurine collector’s life, why would I be embarrassed about having an uncapitalized moment—something precious? Something valuable? I mean I worked in a fine jewelry department for god’s sake. But I was genuinely unsettled by that question. I should have known that the mall had everything but sincerity, and that it was against some unstated mall-code to ask a sincere question. It’s just that I never knew exactly how shallowly you should interpret a customer’s question. You never could really go low enough. I was shocked when the customer laughed at me and said, “Don’t you know what a Precious Moment is, honey? They’re little statues.”
I called down to the China department and found out that the store really did have Precious Moments. There were statuettes to commemorate any freaking hallmark moment in a suburbanite’s life: baptisms, graduations, nuptials; I don’t know what all. Your first shit? Your first golden shower? It was all crap you’d remember anyway, even if you didn’t have a little statuette to remind yourself of it. Pure-T bric-a-brac. Kitsch trumpery. Little mall souvenirs so incredibly tasteless they made Hummel figurines look like Bernini himself carved them.
When I first saw what they actually looked like, I was more than just a little freaked out. They had these big-ass heads that were at least a third of the size of their bodies. Their dilated pupils were huge and black like they belonged to aliens or drug addicts. They had more hair than a kewpie doll but were fully clothed in pastel colors; not a single hue was outside the color palette of a candy necklace, or even soap on a rope. Their hands looked more like little paws. To me, these horrid little creatures could elicit nightmares. I just gazed coldly over the entire collection and then chain-smoked two cigarettes on my break in a vacant corner of the mall. Two octogenarians making their obsessive rounds stomped on my feet.
At different times in my life I return to that question, and the embarrassment of it. It seemed as though all my own hallmark moments in life had been soiled in some way. They had all been tainted with pain or regret, which in a way makes them more precious really, at least to me. My fragile memories were all broken yet made more precious by how they were pieced back together—like a Japanese kintsugi bowl, broken and rejoined with webs of gold. Gay people always had to do that anyway—piece back together a family wherever they could adopt one. What was precious to me was definitely not precious to anyone else. The question seemed overtly personal. Is that why I blushed?
My first piecemeal family was with community theater folk. These are people you did trust exercises with, and you annealed yourself to in a genuine, albeit forced, manner. At least everyone tried to make themselves seem as genuine as possible. After all, these were actors, and we were often playing real families. At age twenty, I looked fifteen. When I earned a role, it was usually as the young son of a large family, or the naïve boyfriend. Apparently this synthetic image I projected often gave predators a wrong impression about me, or perhaps a genuine impression. I was very good at expressing my emotions on stage, and perhaps I was emotionally a bit immature, making myself a bit too available and too open. So, when a director took a romantic interest in me, I was easily persuaded to trust him.
Such was the case when I stepped into a popular Raleigh theatre and auditioned for an undisclosed play (wishing to protect the sanctity of fictional characters). Even though I’d earned supporting roles at other regional theatres, I was awarded only a non speaking role this time. I was a little nonplussed, especially when I was required to attend the first read-through. Silly me, I thought read-throughs were for the actors who actually got to say something. But after that first table read, I was approached by the handsome director and offered the position of director’s assistant—since I didn’t have any lines, he said. If I want to get more—involved, he said.
It is not unusual to have to move up through the ranks in a regional theatre, at least until a director gets used to you. My family had only just moved back to Raleigh, so I didn’t blame the charismatic director for making me go through the motions. And I could hardly say no, he just had that directorial way about him. His eyes seemed as dark as a Precious Moment, but they had a sparkle, and I liked the way he smiled at me. In private, he spoke much softer than he did during rehearsals, and you almost had to lean in to hear him.
He was devilishly handsome, and a known womanizer. He smelled distinctly good in an uncommercial kinda way. No Aramis. No Polo. Maybe just soap? I had no idea he was so well known throughout Raleigh. He wrote plays and published chapbooks of poetry. I was flattered when he asked if I wanted to accompany him home after rehearsal so we could go over the notes I’d taken. He lived way out in a rural area off gravel and dirt roads, and I could scarcely see through all the dust as I followed behind him in my Vega. His taillights illuminated an eerie plume of red dirt trailing into the night. We passed fields furrowed with tobacco seedlings, which gave way to loblolly forests where his cabin nestled into the woodland understory like a birdhouse. Why do all predators live in such undisclosed locations?
We have a glass of wine on his deck and the conversation sways from the theatre realm and into his own personal script; I received a part I didn’t even know I was playing into. He had many questions for me. When had I first seen him? Where was I when I first saw him? How old was I when I first saw him? How had I first heard of him? Had I seen this play or that play? Why was I there?
“Really?” he asked, “Why are you here?”
“You asked me to come over,” I said, taking a sip of cheap wine and trying not to wince.
“But why did you come?” he asked me in such a tone I thought his script’s parenthetical gave him the prompt: in a beguiling manner. Also, the blocking here required him to inch his chair closer to mine.
“I guess I wanted to know you better. And the play.”
“You didn’t come over here for the play, really.” And he inched his way further in so that he had a knee between mine.
“No?”
“No. I think you came over for something else.”
I remember my heart beating like a trapped owl inside my chest. He looked so handsome, and the night shade fell over him languorously, like even the moon had bedroom eyes. The humidity seemed to rise, and my skin felt damp, like you could write in the condensation across my chest, “Kiss me.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?” His knee knocked against my thigh.
Even though I had no initial reason for coming over other than to go over notes, he made me feel so hot that I had no choice but to improvise. “Maybe I wanted to see how well we… fit together?”
Apparently I had to offer the right cue to set things moving forward. He gave me more of that nasty wine, but it was refreshing just to hear it glug into the glass. Then we had an awkward tumble in his hammock where we shared a knotted kiss. Treefrogs gribbited, tremulous and base. Crickets squeaked obsessively. Cicadas wound up like those old whirling party noisemakers. Lightning bugs replaced all the stars I couldn’t see through the gnarled pines. There were two tree branches that rubbed against one another so tightly, they moaned whenever the breeze aroused their ardor. The whole night sounded like a malfunctioning clock, deep behind the tungsten dial of the moon. Everything seemed wound too tight. The cheap wine just made me more tense. It tasted like it had been aged in a birthday balloon. Sour and pure plonk. Or maybe I just wasn’t old enough to appreciate it.
He asks me more questions about my interest in him like it was an application I had to fill out, and I agree to the disclaimer of discretion, that nothing would ever be mentioned, that these were kisses painted with invisible ink. This preamble was more like what you might read in a theatre’s program notes; however very well-rehearsed. Once the stage had been set, and the curtains unzipped, he led me into the house.
We fuck in a spare room, and it isn’t like I’d hoped, but he was so handsome it didn’t seem to matter. I think to myself this is just what adults do, what adult men do with each other. They put one pillow behind their lover’s head and then a second one under their lover’s ass. They grunt and pull and pound. It is painfully dry and mechanical, like windup monkeys. We just clack and clack. I’m so adult now, I think. I imagine myself as a little Precious Moment statue poised on a pillow with his legs pointed proudly up into a victorious ‘V’ and its little porcelain dick just something to be broken off in a rigorous dusting. A bibelot. A trophy.
There’s something about trauma that marks people. It’s this weird thing where you can view yourself from a distance as though you were a mere statue. You see yourself from outside of your body. You can observe your skin hardening to greenware, and then perhaps even more remotely, you find yourself glazed and fired, shiny and porcelain, frozen forever in time. Looking in memory’s mirror with the objectivity of distance, I have to say I looked really fucking gorgeous back then. Everyone asked if I were a model, but I was too small of frame, a little too precious for a career like that. I had no stature whatsoever. But acting seemed like something I could handle. I already had a repertory I replayed over and over in my mind: a theatre of trauma. Little horrors that were never really over; they just kept happening in real time, as if forever present. It’s like living inside a déjà vu that lasts for the rest of your fucking life.
When I drive home later that night after our encounter, the tobacco fields look much taller than they did when I drove by them earlier in the evening. But then I feel taller too. I feel happy. I feel like I am swimming into daybreak, the early morning light so unweaned from the night that it is nearly green. Teal. A soundless teal light. I imagine I’m playing music on the way home. It’s1980 and you turn up the radio when you want to feel good: Give me the Night, Upside Down. It’s 1980 before gay men learn that each sexual encounter is a bit like Russian roulette; it is before sex becomes weaponized. It’s when closeted men never let their male lovers spend the whole night asleep in their arms.
When I see the director the next day he asks if I’m alright. He says there was so much blood in the sheets that it was like a wedding night. I don’t tell him I am still bleeding. Isn’t that normal? When you prick yourself on a piece of sharp porcelain, you bleed. Right? My father, in a rare moment of oversharing, told me that his own honeymoon was called short because he had to take my mother to the hospital. She couldn’t stop bleeding. It’s all normal, I tell myself. At least I haven’t hemorrhaged like my mom. I feel proud that I can do something so normal for him, that it’s a sacrifice I can make. However, a couple days later I went to the doctor in pain. The rip inside me is just something that will heal on its own, I was told.
“Why haven’t you returned any of my calls?” the director says cornering me at the theatre a couple days later. I am always nonplussed how theatres have so many freaking corners. Every time you turn one, there’s another of a completely different scale, dimension, or time period. And at the back of each scene’s flat, there’re even more mysterious notations like runes. They mark the floor with glo-tape like diagrams from some forgotten heathen ritual. Even the theatre’s dust is a kind of narcotic that smells of fresh sawdust and ancient motes, paint thinner, and stage black where shoe scuffs show up like crime scene chalk.
“I’ve just been really busy at work,” I say as I turn a corner and wander out onto a terracotta colored set of a South American motel. The peculiar fleshy smell of latex paint lingers, almost nasty, definitely piquant. I think it might be him. He follows me to stage right where there’s—as if on cue—a hammock. I cross my arms and fold into the hammock more gracefully than I had at his house. I just don’t want him to know how sore I am. I can’t improvise anything that makes sense. At least not now. Perhaps it’s the lack of cheap wine.
Leaning over me and posturing like the fake cactus I can see over his shoulder, he whispers, “I want you to come over. Tonight.”
“I really don’t think I can,” I say, unable to articulate my dilemma.
“You have to. After rehearsal. I need to see you.” And like that he leaves, the cactus looming into full view, looking rather menacing with its spiky arms jutting out from its sharp hips. The director is always like that. Proclaiming what one has to do with the implication that no one has any choice about it at all. Free will is just an illusion. In the theatre, everything is an illusion.
So I come over and I confess that I have a bit of a rupture, and he seems truly concerned. He says he needs to take care of me. He folds me into his arms and the relief I feel is immense. He runs his hand through my hair and kisses me. I can feel myself falling in love, like it’s a real and true precious moment, you know? But then he says he needs to give me an enema to clean the rupture. One enema now. And then another later. As a young man, I find this entirely demeaning but I go along with it, genuflecting so that he could fill me with warm water. When he places me on the toilet, he sits across from me at the edge of the tub so close our knees are touching; he watches, cold as porcelain. I tell myself that this is just how he shows his warm caring side. His concern. Afterwards, he wraps me in a fluffy robe and sends me to his bedroom to rest.
Sometime later, he says some guy is coming by and they are going to watch television together, but he will check in on me later. For quite some time, I listen to them laugh and play in the living room, and I start to have real doubts about life in the theatre. I love the sound of an audience, but the canned television laughter coupling with the more intimate laughter of the director and his guest becomes more than I can bear. I call a cab and ask them to meet me along that long dirt road, that I’ll be walking somewhere along it and to please find me. I leave out of the bedroom door and close the screen door behind me as quietly as curtains. I walk for over an hour and no cab ever comes. The tobacco fields look nearly tropical out there in the moonlight. Large glossy leaves rustle in the wind, reflecting back the silver of the night. The field looks more like an ocean at night, with its own tides rushing the top leaves of emerald ligero.
Eventually I hear a car coming up the road behind me and I’m suddenly in its spotlight; the car slows and stops. It’s the director. When I see him, I start running across the field, but he gets out of the car and chases me down, grabbing my arm. I imagine myself under the melodrama of the moon like Bernini’s Daphne escaping Apollo. I can feel the tobacco whisking against my legs. There is no difference now between the veins of the tobacco leaves and my own capillaries, inhaling the moonlight and exhaling smoke. My body wears the hairy seco leaves; the natural down of my own skin exudes a fragrant nicotine. My eyes are all sfumato. My fingers are frozen midair like cigarettes, and puffs of smoke leak from under my fingernails. I am frozen mid-wail as he reaches forward and pushes me into the dirt.
“I want to go home,” I say, “I just want to go home.” I am crying.
So he takes me to his home. At least I get to spend the night.
Looking back, I feel like such a drama queen. In my mind, this is the actual sequence of events, but I know there had to be other things for me to react the way I did, things besides mere hurt feelings and lying in bed alone listening to two guys having fun in the next room. Is the other guy the same one who creeps back into the house the next morning after my second enema when the director and I are both in robes on the living room sofas?
Someone knocks at the door. I look at my director and he puts his finger to his lips and shuts his eyes. The door slowly opens, and we pretend to sleep (I pretend, the director performs). I hear the intruder cross through the middle of the room and sit in a chair between the two sofas. It seems forever before I am brave enough to peek under my arm at the figure: it’s this young man and he has his face in his hands and he’s sobbing quietly. Eventually he leaves the house just as quietly as I had the night before.
I honestly don’t know why I ran away. Maybe at that point I was already fed up with his womanizing and all his girlfriends that he paraded in front of everyone, and then his boyfriends he hid away in the spare room. All his mechanisms of control. Maybe before we even fucked he stood me up as he did so many nights, leaving me waiting on a busy Raleigh street. Usually this was because of something that happened at the theatre, but once he confessed that some old girlfriend had come to town unexpectedly and that he slept with her.
“Why did you sleep with her when you don’t even like her anymore,” I asked.
“Because I felt sorry for her,” he said.
Maybe I’m already completely fed up with his ego when I escape out into the tobacco fields. During the interview on his deck that bloody night, he asks me when I first saw him, I tell him, “At the auditions for the play.”
“C’mon!” he says. He can’t believe that I didn’t grow up watching him like thousands of others. Every year he rents the civic center to perform an annual extravaganza that he wrote, directed, and starred in. He is cherished by the whole town, he explains to me. I honestly have never heard of him before, but I’m too polite to press the point.
Another time he tells me he fantasizes that I’ll sit under his desk and suck him off while he conducts business with other people in his office. That’s definitely something one of his girlfriends can do, I told him. I would often help out on his little suck-capades where he picks me up and takes me to the woods somewhere, where the trees drip sap and ticks, and tells me to suck his dick. Sometimes if he’s in a real hurry, I have to suck him off in his car. I’m really confused now about how there could be two parallel timelines in my head. One where I bleed out in his guest room and then run away, and the other where I feel such a compounded hatred of him that I wish only to escape.
We were never exclusive, and I promised that I would never reveal his bisexuality. But one night, he thinks I’m seeing too much of someone else and has me call and break up with him while he sits across from me nodding with that same look he had when he sat me down on the porcelain throne, that conceited coldness I somehow found attractive. It draws me to him. It’s kind of glamorous to be under his gaze even while you shit your brains out. He really is very talented. I am enthralled with his talent. It isn’t just his ego; he really is very charismatic.
The person he makes me break up with is a man I met while I was a freshman, before I got beat up at the university and went home to Raleigh. He’s a teacher at a local arts school and he tells me funny stories about his time in New York City where he went to grad school. He sent me a drink at a dance club called Whams and we sat under the strobe lights bouncing to Whip It, discussing Sartre’s Nausea without even the slightest bit of absurdity. He tells me about all his artsy students and the creative Halloween costumes they wear, like the one who came into his classroom with a wing on his right shoulder and a potato hanging from his belt at his crotch. He asked the student, “And just who are you supposed to be?”
And the student says, “A right-wing dick-tator, of course.”
I find the teacher utterly charming, and the most reasonable person I’d ever met. He’s as far from the emotional theatre world as I can imagine. It is this man the dick-tator makes me break up with over the telephone. Youth is cruel.
In writing this, I feel sheepish that I can’t remember exactly the timeline and when the field incident occurred, except that both points of reference seem to be true all at once. Such things can happen in the theatre where your own life fuses to that of the characters you portray. Similarly, I can’t believe that I was ever that stupid or thought so little of myself that I would go along with a dick-tator’s antics, let alone feel proud that I was his secret lover. I had no little trophies on my shelf, no little statuettes, but he gave me things. No big gifts that would have made me feel even more cheap, but meaningful tokens of his affection: a signed book of poetry, a handkerchief that he wore in a film, little things like that would make me believe that I wasn’t wasting my time, that he really truly cared about me. That this was my big adult romance even though I couldn’t tell anyone about it. So why should I be surprised that there were two timelines and two different versions of me: one that was completely fed up and the other that was in his thrall.
In the theatre, sometimes a director has you do character building exercises. In these exercises you essentially brainwash yourself into the character you’re portraying. Muscle by muscle you build your character, first in your imagination, and then in physical exercises. You lie on a rehearsal room floor and scrunch up your shoulders, and then you release the tension with a sigh and imagine all of it escaping from your body. Then you tense your abdomen, and exhale, releasing your stress through the bottoms of your feet. You repeat until you get to your groin. You tense up your groin, and then release the tension and exhale. Now how does your character hold their shoulders, their abdomen, their groin? How do they feel? Are they tense? Are they relaxed? Where do they hold their tension? How does the tension in your legs make your character move? What other muscles do they use to walk? In the theatre, you are always two people: the cold one watching and then the warm one under the spotlight feeling just as natural as possible, sensing and tensing where appropriate, breathing out the tension, and breathing in all the electricity from the audience.
Then there are the standard trust exercises. It is necessary for a director to develop a trusting environment so that actors can feel comfortable taking risks, failing and trying again. There is the standard ‘trust fall’ where you take turns closing your eyes and falling backwards into your fellow cast members’ arms. Everyone knows about that one. There’s the one where the actor walks blindfolded across a circle, trusting that your cast members will pull you back in line. And then there is the clay and sculptor exercise, where the blindfolded ‘clay’ does the bidding of the ‘sculptor,’ who moves the malleable actors into various positions. So, when the dick-tator, asks me one night in his bedroom to put on a blindfold it did not seem that unusual. Nor was it entirely strange when he asks me to trust him as he takes off my clothes and binds my wrists together.
“Don’t you trust me?” he whispers into the hollow of my ear, the moisture of his breath dampening my cochlear hair.
Then he rolls me over onto my stomach and I hear an electric buzzing. You know you’re gay when even moments of genuine horror are pure-T camp: the buzzing wasn’t a meat grinder or even any kind of power tool. It’s like an electric razor or something (a nose-hair trimmer?)—he’s shaving my asshole. I’m very shocked. “What are you doing?!”
“Trust me. Relax. Take a deep breath.”
I’m not even the teensiest bit turned on. I prefer visual stimulation, but I’m very eager to win his approval in all things. We make love like the blindfolded panelists on the old game show, What’s My Line? I can hear his voice but can’t quite place who he is. I have never since tried anything like that since; nothing personal to BDSM aficionados, but it’s just not my style. To me, the issue of the blindfold is to trust and to have faith in him as a lover. For him to accept me as his partner. I want that more than I want the sex. The sex is secondary. I admire him as an artist, and as a lover. I want him to need me. I think this is what I have to do so that he might need me. I think that this must be how adults behave, that it’s the natural order of things: that some are eternally bound, while others do the binding. That some do what they’re told, while others direct.
One night after a rehearsal, when an actress could not get the dramatic tone right, when she could not let go and give into her speech with complete emotional authority, the dick-tator walks onto the precipice of the set and tells the actress to sit down in the audience and he proceeds to play her role for her. He takes a moment before he sinks to his knees, overcome with the intensity of the scene. He recites her speech, sobbing, and his face glistens under the spotlight. Everyone is very moved. It really is the right way the scene should be enacted. There was a truth in what he did that was emotionally raw and beautiful. It was truly a precious moment. It takes my breath away. I want him, I think. That dick-tator. I want him to envision me like that. To direct me like that. So that I can be perfect too.
During the next production, I serve as property master. I see the dick-tator off to the side with his video camera on a tripod. He smiles boldly at me and says, “One day I’m worried I’m going to kiss you madly right in front of everyone.” It makes me so happy. And he points to the video feed where I see myself, naked with my wrists bound, blindfolded. He had taped the whole fucking thing. There I was, just a little porcelain figurine with an impossibly smooth asshole. A white figure of clay twisted to his provocation, trying to hug with bound wrists the sculptor, to press him close to me as if I needed his heart for my own to beat.
“Trust me,” he tells me. Perhaps I should be grateful that I am videotaped when I look so good, when I’m young and malleable, precious. “Trust me,” he whispers into my wet ear.
I have no idea why I didn’t insist that he erase the fucking video the moment I saw it. I only blushed. Had I felt ashamed even though I had no idea it was happening? Did it make me feel powerless? Used? Betrayed? Or had he taught me enough about vanity, loose morals, and self-glorification that I felt proud? I remember only that I turned away. I really was stupid enough to have felt that it was a way for him to show his love for me, that he liked to look at me so much that he taped me. That I was in some way a comfort to him. My god.
I really hadn’t had that many lovers to compare him to, at least any that lasted the year we were together, and by together, I mean the year he sought out my company. Eventually, I went back to the man the dick-tator made me break up with while he watched. I married him. My husband and I have now been together for over forty years. It has taken me quite some time to trust him, to feel like I’m not made of porcelain. To learn that the ceramic firing hole in the bottom is not just someplace to fill up with clay slip, that it’s there so that a vessel might emerge from the kiln unshattered and whole.
I’ve learned we are often the opposite of how we actually perceive ourselves. Sometimes you can only understand what love really is by learning first about its pale reflection. That real love isn’t necessarily that shiny—that shiny part is just the back-silver, a thin veneer that only gives the illusion of depth. Needless to say, I quit performing in the theatre, but in truth, I learned more about acting from my life in retail. The only useful skills I picked up from the dick-tator was the art of seduction. I learned how to seduce each customer into becoming a 14k gold statuette of themselves. I’d hold the mirror in front of them and talk about how beautiful the necklace looks on them. I’d ask them questions. How does that make you feel? How long have you wanted an emerald? When did you first see an emerald? Do you know the story of the emerald? I think you came here to buy an emerald, didn’t you?
Somehow I’ve become extraordinarily strong willed, and, with my husband’s help, I have been able to hold down a job (outside of retail) long enough to retire with benefits. I’ve even gone back to school. Twice. I feel like I’ve gathered enough insight to realize why I blushed so heatedly when that woman asked me if I had precious moments. And why I instantly thought of that horrifically vulnerable moment when I saw myself bound and naked on that camcorder screen. I felt at once a triumphant shame and a shameful triumph. I wanted to cry. Twice. Or once out of each eye: one time for what I once was and another for what he made me. It was a complex performance—really just actor’s instinct. Let’s call it muscle memory. Sense memory. We all have precious moments, don’t we?