4
Tofu
Love them or hate them, people are the plumb line in a person’s life, and, aside from my family, the person who centers my life is Emma Absinthe—yes, that Emma Absinthe. The agoraphobic painter Emma Absinthe, most famous for her series of oil self- portraits portraying herself as the great men of history. Emma Absinthe as Napoleon, one hand clutching a roasted chicken, the other on a sword hilt, grease shellacking her carnivore’s lips. Emma Absinthe as Winston Churchill, fat cigar, impeccably tailored gray flannel, sly erection draped to the left. Emma Absinthe as George Washington crossing the Delaware, surrounding soldiers a battalion of lesser Emmas, the river faintly and ominously reminiscent of menstrual blood. Emma Absinthe as Socrates, folded linen, beetle brow, a flock of languorous Emma-boys lounging at her feet, and a cup of hemlock. Emma Absinthe as FDR, pince-nez, cigarillo, wicker pushchair, cross-dressing Eleanor behind her. You’ve seen the series because everyone has seen the series; the series is everywhere.
I knew Emma before anyone knew Emma. I knew Emma before Emma knew Emma. I even knew Emma before Emma was Emma, for when I first met Emma, she was merely Joanne Correa, a shy, milk-skinned, frizzy-haired girl who wore an endless progression of Gunne Sax by Jessica McClintock, dress after dress with pastel tiny- flower prints, a parade of dainty spaghetti straps, a procession of futzy leg-o’-mutton sleeves.
I hated Joanne from the first moment I saw her. We were freshmen at Pennistone College, the small, elite liberal arts school in
Vermont near the New Hampshire border, an institution of higher learning that in 1980 had only recently opened its doors to women.
The majority of the student body was privileged, intensely white, and frankly fussed that they hadn’t been admitted to Yale, Brown, or even Dartmouth. The remaining students were like me; they enjoyed the optimistic statistics of there being three men to every woman on campus. Math can be so animating.
The luck of residential draw slammed Joanne and me together— fortunately, we shared a very big room, for our dislike was instantaneous, passionate, and mutual. It could hardly have been anything but. Joanne seemed specifically designed as an object of my loathing. Her little-mouse-on-the-prairie dresses, those eyelashes lacquered into Marcel Marceau points, her lilac-print matching duvet and curtains. Her excessive prissiness and her endless passion for cats. There were cats everywhere. Flattened on walls and plumped into cushions, pictured cats and printed cats, ceramic cats playing with string and cartoon cats smugly punning on Mao. So many cats.
The first day I walked into the dorm, a building of arterial-red brick and blinding, deep-pocketed white trim, I found Joanne awash in frills, perched on her pouf of a comforter, weeping into a stuffed cat.
Her eye makeup had melted with her tears, running in great Rorschach circles around her eyes. She was the very picture of an adorable faux-Victorian waif, so dejected on her bed, like a little broken match girl or a flower-maker gone ulcerative from arsenic exposure. I wanted to put my hands around her slender white throat and shake her.
Joanne was just that delicate. While I had rushed my family out the door, Joanne wept over her parents’ leaving. Her fat glycerine tears rolled, unappetizing as beads of tapioca. I put my box down on the empty bed, the one away from the window with the view of the trees, close to the window with the view of the parking lot.
“I’m Dorothy,” I said. “I’d shake your hand, but you’re all wet.”
Joanne took a look at me and stifled a sob with her tufted cat.
Our relationship did not improve. After winter break, I returned to find her side of the room empty, not a sole B. Kliban print, not a single crumb of her endless English muffins, the only food I ever saw Joanne eat. I heard from the RA that I had borrowed Joanne’s
eyeliner (and had sex on her bed) one too many times, driving her to flee to housing on the other side of Pennistone’s campus, as far away from me as she could get. Occasionally, I’d catch sight of Joanne crossing campus in a seraphim wave of ruffles, but as the years wore on, the Joanne sightings grew fewer and further apart. It was as if Edward Gorey’s hand was slowly erasing her from my life, recognizing her for the mistake she was. E is for Emma who’d never be born; J is for Joanne dead from my scorn.
On the whole, Pennistone was good for me. I read, I wrote, I learned, and I fucked—it was a classic liberal arts education. Of its approximately 3,500 undergrads, Pennistone men counted for just under 2,400; I slept with about fifty. You’d think that having sex with that many young men—a group whose predilection for gossip makes mahjong-playing retirees look like Cistercian monks—I’d have gotten a bad reputation. But I’d been careful. I protected my good name with excellent information, and I didn’t fuck anyone I couldn’t ruin. My philosophy has always been that if you look hard enough, you will find something wicked on nearly every man—everyone has at least one devastating piece of information. I enjoy research, and I found serious dirt, always with supporting evidence. But I didn’t use this information to coerce anyone into my sheets—I didn’t have to. No, I held on to the information until just before the amour’s bitter end and then I’d hint at the dangerous dirt I’d dredged (I’ve always had impeccable timing). Let me put it this way: I was so careful and so thorough that ex-lovers would stand up for me, not because they liked me but because they feared me.
You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.
To whit: Lyle had a hushed-up history of quasi-incestuous rendezvous with his two cousins, one female and one male, twins, possibly together. James had never, not once, handed in an original paper in his 3.5 years of higher education, and he’d never, not once, strayed from the Dean’s List. Michael, center on the basketball team, had had the great fortune of twice playing second-string on teams where a mysterious and debilitating accident had befallen the first- string players; he replaced them. Jean-Georges wasn’t actually French, nor was he actually Jean-Georges; it’s amazing how far a
family will go to cover up a spate of pubescent pyromania, given enough money, time, and loss of life. Armstrong’s father was on the run from the SEC; rumors would later abound that Armstrong père was the model for Gordon Gecko. And as a side note, Armstrong should’ve thought twice before making that phone call to my RA on that Wednesday night—it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned.
It’s a habit I’ve not given up. In an anonymous, undisclosed location, I have a file cabinet locked in a storage facility under an assumed name with the kind of information that could take down members of Congress, multinational corporations, and one very small duchy in Liechtenstein. You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much.
I’ve always been amazed by how much information is available to you if you listen quietly, read carefully, and know how to pick locks.
Dorm room doors are stupidly easy; you need only a credit card and a lissome wrist. The cars of the ’70s and early ’80s had ridiculous locks—a quick pop of a wire hanger would open most, and never underestimate the ability of a young woman with a distressed look on her pretty face to persuade a cop to help her. Residential doors were more challenging, ditto locked trunks, but hairpins, paper clips, and public libraries are remarkably helpful tools for the willing mind.
Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.
Thus, protected by knowledge and the Pill, I fucked my way through college. It was easy; it was fun; and it was educational, if not reliably pleasurable. Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again. I went to college for an education, and I got one.
By the time I donned Pennistone’s scarlet-and-marigold graduation robes—such vulgar colors; yellow the shade of bile and red the hue of an overcooked rib roast—I’d accumulated a body of knowledge tailored for adult life. I could speak Italian passably well. I could argue the basic histories, literatures, and politics of major European nations. I could cook a passably decadent four-course meal using a hot plate and a toaster oven. I could deep-throat a seven-inch phallus. I could research and write a charming, sprightly, thousand-word article in record time. And I could investigate,
seduce, and drop a man with elegance and ease. I could, in short, support, nourish, pleasure, and protect myself. I felt like a proud parent of a devious mind.
I graduated college in 1984, a year that failed spectacularly to live up to its Orwellian promise. I moved to Boston, and, based upon my portfolio of writings from the Pennistone Cynic and various other local publications, I got hired at the Boston Phoenix, an arty alt- weekly that, like so many others, eventually died a slow, heavy asphyxiation under the boot of the Internet. Funny how something as flimsy as a string of ones and zeros can be so massy. As democratic as the tax code, as voracious as a black hole, as weightless as a fart, the Internet has made writers out of everyone, and it has made publishing into a short-term con, but I digress.
For two weeks here in Bedford Hills, I couldn’t write. Nothing so humdrum as writer’s block—rarely does anything stand between me and full, easy expression—I couldn’t write because I had no pens, no pencils, not even a crayon. An inmate that people call Deuce stabbed a guard. I don’t know Deuce’s real name, nor do I know how she became Deuce. She was inconsequential to me until her actions impacted my life. Deuce worked in the kitchen; she’d spent some number of stolen hours smelting a ballpoint into a shiv, melting the end in the gas burner, then rubbing the pen against a rough concrete corner until it held its edge. The word whispered across the line is that the guard—a squat, hairy comma of a man known to take liberties during pat-downs—grabbed Deuce in her crotch. Her response was to coolly slip her hand into the waistband of her sweatpants, spring her shiv, and, in one silky move, slip it knuckle deep into the guard’s neck. It was, the whisper-line said, like watching a viper uncoil and sink her fangs into unsuspecting prey.
The guard’s blood spurted in a high arc of droplets, ruby red on the institutional butterfat yellow of Bedford Hills’s halls. Within seconds, some other guard had hit the alarms, and we inmates dropped to the floor, brooms, books, saucepans, and rakes beside us, like so many narcoleptic goats fainting in rigid, wary lines.
Our stuff was searched. Our things were rifled. People with pistols overturned our beds and pored through our cubbies. Our
pens, our pencils—my pens, my pencils—were seized. Deuce was whisked away, disappeared into the bowels of Bedford Hills, although her belongings lingered for a day. Deuce was gone but not forgotten because, while Deuce was no more, we had to live with the consequence of her actions. Deuce couldn’t cope with a homunculus pawing at her parts, so I couldn’t write. Such is communal life and carceral justice.
I was forced to store up my stories like nuts in the cheeks of a squirrel. Two weeks passed before the guards let us have short, choppy pencils, like the kind that come with Yahtzee games or IKEA shopping baskets. When the pens returned in another six weeks, it was as if no one could remember why they’d been taken away in the first place.
Writers say this kind of thing all the time, but to me writing is like drinking water or eating food. Writing sustains me. I don’t know who I am if I don’t write. More important, you don’t know who I am. If I don’t tell my story, it’s as if I’ve died. I’m in prison for life, and I’m not going to die early.
It was 1986, and I had been living in Boston for almost two years, when, crossing Harvard Square to buy some linens at Conran’s, I saw a small, fierce woman dressed in all anarchist black. She rode a bulldozer, perched high above a knee-high forest of egg-white vulvar ceramic vases. She had shut down a portion of Harvard Square, and a small crowd of students, professors, and errant Bostonians had formed a semicircle around the ceramic forest. The tiny virago leaned precariously from the cage of the bulldozer, her body on the verge of toppling out. She held a bullhorn close to her lips and murmured a stream of feminist epithets in a rhythmic, shamanistic drone, sounding like a Filene’s Basement Patti Smith channeling Andrea Dworkin. It was hard to hear her patter—her voice rose and dipped illogically like a poorly designed roller-coaster—but so many dust-heap feminism phrases fell, thudding with the threat of wooden nickels.
The woman abruptly dropped her bullhorn and ducked into the cab of the bulldozer. The engine flared. The gears ground. The machine lurched forward, crushing the white vulvar vases, mashing
them into pointy white shards, and grinding the shards into dust.
Backward and forward went the bulldozer with stuttering movements, herky-jerky and ill-conceived as the woman’s speech. I was fascinated by its palsied grace.
Soon all the vases were reduced to fine white dust layering the cobblestones. So much white dust and so many pieces scattered like cremains. As the small, fierce woman was picking up her bullhorn to begin another unintelligible screed, the Cambridge police swooped in to arrest her, plucking her from the bulldozer’s cage with cartoonish ease. The cops frog-marched the woman to the cruiser, and she lifted her head to look at me. We made eye contact. It was that visual electric snap that rarely happens with strangers, that shock of inexplicable recognition, that fast catch and firm latch that happens when a cerebral switch is flicked.
Usually these moments come and go, ephemeral. They get filed in the uncanny corner cabinet with déjà vu and validated premonitions, then they’re forgotten. But this was no stranger, I realized, looking into those blue octopus eyes. This was my college roommate, Joanne Correa, formerly frilly, now feminist punk and wildly more fascinating for it.
I decided to go to the jail and bail out Joanne. It was the least I could do, after stealing her navy eyeliner and setting fire to her pink tufted cat that first semester of freshman year. It was no grand act of charity. I just paid the fine, a few hundred dollars, and she was free.
“I forgot how short you were,” I said as Joanne walked through the police precinct’s tall wooden doors. Just below my chin, Joanne’s hair, a fuzzy aureole the color and shape of a benign white dwarf, exploded around her head.
“Thanks for the bail,” she said and faltered. She looked around and hoisted her purse farther up her shoulder. It was one of those green canvas gas-mask holders from World War Whatever that the kids those days carried to affect affectlessness. Joanne looked around, lost. I was afraid she was going to cry. I hate crying. So pointless, and so damp.
Joanne’s back tightened under her black canvas jacket.
“Thanks,” she said again.
“Hey, Joanne,” I said. “I liked the bulldozer. Very impressive.”
“It’s not Joanne anymore. It’s Tender. Tender deBris.” And she walked down the steps, away from me.
I looked at her walking away and considered taking her to lunch, but she had the look of someone going through a “meat is murder” phase. Intrigued as I was, I couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting in a café that smelled like unwashed anarchist listening to Tender née Joanne talk about feminine energy while a plate of tofu scramble slowly congealed in front of me. There are things that simply won’t do, and anything that tries to make tofu something other than what it is—an unappetizing excuse for protein with the texture of boiled pencil eraser and the flavor of brown paper towels wetted with weak tea—is one of them.
I let Tender go on her way, but even with the name change, Joanne wasn’t hard to track down. Of course I found her. How could I not.
I wasn’t writing about food for the weekly the Boston Phoenix.
Not food, not yet. I was a reluctant reporter of “lifestyles.” When I think about those meaningless lifestyle columns, I hear humanity’s death knell. All those words written on color-coordinating small appliances with your biorhythms, all those column inches devoted to finding inner bliss through low-impact aerobics, all those hours going clackety-clack on the keyboard while trying to stave off homicide with another thousand-word piece on the Scarsdale diet. (You have to respect Jean Harris, though you can hardly give her points for killing her ex-lover with a common handgun. Any moron with a clean record and a government ID can buy a handgun, but how many can engineer a perfectly timed bee sting?) I hated the lifestyle section. Lifestyle means nothing; it’s the part of the paper dedicated to making its reading public feel pointlessly bad about themselves—and then convincing readers that the solution to their existential woe is buying the selfsame stuff that made them feel bad. The lifestyle section exists to prescribe a standard of living to which ordinary people should aspire and ultimately fail. The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame.
Still, I enjoyed writing, and I loved the access that writing professionally gave me. For example, working at the Phoenix allowed me to interview Nina Hagen in Boston’s two-block Little Germany. We ate schnitzel and drank yeasty beer, at least I did.
Nina is a vegetarian, regrettably. Later that night, I sat in the second row of Hagen’s show at the Beacon and enjoyed the sight of her bass player’s right testicle, which had escaped the confines of his tight carpaccio-hued shortshorts. The next morning, I woke swaddled in clammy white sheets at some hotel, wrapped in the bass player’s dreadlocks and wafting with the mushroom smell of scrotum and the fetid green-tea stink of pot.
Make no mistake: the Phoenix got me laid. Never underestimate the seductive power of a reporter’s notebook and red-tipped nails grasping an elegant black pen. Lifestyles-section sex is the only thing that makes me wish that, rather than covering floor coverings, Ric Ocasek’s wives, and Cabbage Patch Kids, I’d covered politics.
Who doesn’t want closer access to the Kennedys, if only for the post-cocktail hour lubrications, midnight lucubration, and later revelations.
Using my Phoenix resources, I found Emma, then Tender, formerly Joanne—her unlisted number posed no difficulty to me. She was remarkably easy to find, and as soon as I found her phone number, I called Emma, née Tender, née Joanne. We had coffee, and then we had margaritas, and then we collapsed in her bed, surrounded by sketches of vulvas. We laughed, we talked, we drank.
We grew. We changed. We got closer. All these years after finding Emma, much to my anguish, I have yet to lose her. My relationship with Emma might be my greatest accomplishment—it’s certainly my greatest wound. But maybe that’s just nostalgia finally hitting my cold, fortressed heart. Prison will do that to a person, even a psychopath like me.
