Coop: or, What I Got, Part the Second

[Note:  So, I wrote this shortly after my previous Coop-based blog post, but I just couldn't manage to edit or revise.  But I can't add anything new until I post it, since I can't stand to have a Part the First without a Part the Second.  So here it is, in all of it's un-revised, un-edited glory.  ~Lulu]

Another strange thing about the way Coop magically shows up at the exact moment I need an old friend around is that he has no idea that he’s doing it. It just so happens that at the exact moment the proverbial shit hits the even more proverbial fan in my life, Coop starts to feel old, so he looks me up to get a hit of youth.


Now, Coop isn’t old at all. He’s maybe six months to a year older than me. But he starts to feel old. And really, he started a family super young, and you know, he’s got three little kids and a wife and a mortgage and he has to work two jobs to keep it all afloat—dude, I start to feel a little haggard just thinking about it. And since his whole reason to move to The Snowy Cities in the first place was to make music with his band, I can see how he’d feel like his youth has slipped away.


So he calls me. And asks me what new bands I’m listening to and what places I’ve traveled to and what trouble I’ve gotten into and yeah, maybe who I’ve lent my heart out to. He wants to hear about my “adventures” because for him, I think it helps him remember his youth. (Which totally isn’t gone—it just feels like it’s gone.) But because I don’t have a partner or kids or a house or Cub Scouts meetings or anything like that, he thinks I’m still “young”.


Which I am, but not in the way he means it.


My senior year in undergrad, there was a group of people who had a bit of a poetry salon going. (Yeah, yeah, I know—the simultaneous glory and pretentiousness of the tiny liberal arts school.) But it was just the kind of thing where people could read and discuss their own work with the group, or if they wanted, they could read and discuss work by, you know, real poets.


And when this group was forming, I was invited to join. And I was writing quite a bit of poetry at the time, so I said sure. It met in the lounge of the upperclassmen boys’ dorm, aptly named Score Hall. And so when I walked into that bastion of masculinity the night of the first salon, I looked around the lounge and discovered I was the only woman there.


Because I was the only woman invited to join.


Now, I never figured out why I was the only woman there—I suspect that Steven, that sweet, gentle boy with the Iowa Reserve who I had that ongoing something with—had a hand in it. But all of my studies in feminist literature and theory suddenly became crystal clear as I started to discuss what makes for good poetry with a group of guys.


Anyway, a few salons in, one of the guys read one of his favorite poems—and it was by one of the Romantics, either Shelley or Wordsworth, I forget—and it was basically singing the praises of Boyhood from the perspective of the author as an adult man. And I listened, and as much as I tended to enjoy the Romantics, I was just thinking the whole time, “Yeah, yeah, childhood is awesome and whatever, let me hear something that means something.” But as I looked around at all my compatriots in their faux-leather wingback chairs, they were all nodding in silent agreement with the Truths being spoken about Boyhood, and they all got a bit lost in their own respective reveries.


So of course when the poem was over, I was all, “Okay, so…what’s the deal with boyhood? Poets don’t write about girlhood like that. I don’t get all this waxing rhapsodic about what it was like to have been a boy once. Dudes, what’s the deal?”

And of course, all the guys kind of jumped in at once but they mainly tripped over their own words—I don’t think any of them ever thought they would have to explain the Idyllic Awesomeness that is Boyhood. Steven, however, was most articulate when he said, “Boyhood means you have absolutely no responsibilities. You’re not beholden to anyone; there’s nothing you have to do; you’re not in charge of anything. You don’t have to think about anyone else. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want—you only have to do what brings you pleasure. That’s boyhood.”


And it was my turn to sputter and choke on my words, “Wha—? Wait—WHAT? THAT’S BOYHOOD?!?! You all had childhoods like that?!?! That’s what it’s like to grow up as a boy?!?!”


And I sat in stunned silence for a minute before adding, “Girlhood isn’t like that at all. Goddamn, I want a boyhood.”


Because girlhood isn’t like that at all. I mean, I hope all the parents out there with some kind of social conscience are changing this, but when I grew up, girlhood was constant training in Caring About Others’ Needs. Nearly everything was training in How to Make Other People Happy. I won’t waste my breath with the toys that centered around baby dolls and cooking and housekeeping and fashion—all toys which I loved, admittedly—because everyone knows that “girls’ toys” are training grounds for stereotypical Wife- and Motherhood. But behavior-wise, too…I mean, all the reprimands that I heard directed at me and my girlfriends centered around “being nice” and “playing fair” and “how do you think that makes her/him feel?” And the always-popular “Boys don’t like girls who do that”.


Of course, me being me, I got extra reprimands wherever I went about being too loud and too rambunctious—there was no brushing it off with a “boys will be boys” when I acted up. Because there wasn’t a model for girls acting up. Because we were supposed to be quiet and sweet and pretty and easy—because it brought other people pleasure. Because it made other people’s lives easier. Girlhood was a continuous exercise in learning how to do things for other people and learning how to make other people happy—because that’s what good girls do, right? Make other people happy? That’s what girlhood was like.


Well that, plus there was lots of swimming. The swimming part was great. But goddamn, all the swimming in the world doesn’t even begin to compare to boyhood—at least according to the Romantics and to the dudes in this college poetry group. There ain’ enough swimming in the world to compare to that.


Cut to some years later; I don’t know how many. It’s spring in A Town Near You, and midnight, and I’m flat on my back on a low leather table. My jeans are undone with my panties pulled down to my personality while I’m being marked by a shaman who is named, of all things, Dan.


It was for me a very important ritual that would result in a 7” x 10” tattoo on my lower abdomen. It was about bravery, I suppose. Not in the experience of pain or anything. By that point in my life I had fallen down more staircases than I could count; I had knocked a nerve so hard I screamed for five minutes straight; I had had a week-long stomach bug that left me hallucinating; I had had a Spinal Tap Gone Wrong. So endurance of pain wasn’t a big thing to me, and tattoos are nothing compared to that other stuff.


Really, the ritual of bravery had to do with claiming my body as mine. Hence, the placement. I mean, growing up a fat girl, there’s usually one place that becomes the representation of one’s fatness, depending on where a girl carries her weight. For a lot of girls, it’s the ass, but for me, it was my stomach. It’s where I’ve always carried the bulk of my weight, and it’s not a secondary sexual characteristic, so there’s no kind of celebrating it for it’s essential femaleness. You know, like you can get all earth mother-y if the weight results in glorious, giant breasts or majestic hips. But with me, it was just a stomach. A gut. The place on the body that always gets shown when the local news decides to do a story on the “obesity epidemic” and features clips of anonymous, beheaded fat torsos at the state fair. The stomach becomes representative of fatness itself, and by extent, having a fat stomach broadcasted to all the world that something was wrong with me.


For me, my stomach was basically public property. My family talked about it ever since I can remember—every since I was put on my first diet at five years old. (I don’t remember a ton from my early childhood, but I sure remember that.) My peers talked about it growing up. The culture at large constantly talked about it and others like it in the media. I carried it around on my body every day, but it didn’t belong to me. I was constantly reminded that it was this symbol of my failings as a woman, and I was steeped in such intense body hatred from childhood to young adulthood that when I started sleeping with my first boyfriend at age 18, if he accidentally touched my lower stomach when we were messing around, it felt like I was getting stabbed with a knife. The shame was so intense, the shock of it resulted in actual physical pain.


So undergoing this ritual years later was no small thing to me, so much so that it actually took me about six months to finally approach Dan about performing it. Because it meant I had to bare myself to this strange man in full fluorescent light with his assistants present. We had to discuss “the space” in detail, repeatedly, over the six weeks it took him to determine something appropriate to fit it. And he had to lay his hands on “the space” for the hours it would take him to complete the tattoo.


But long story slightly less long, Dan had me come to him late at night, after his usual healing hours, and I was there for a long time, and Dan talked to me through the whole thing, about people and life and such, and he was lovely and kind and comforting. As he was finishing up, we were chatting about what he was like when he was younger and chasing the girls, although he was only a few years older than me. And as he was talking, I saw the spirits come upon him, and something shifted. Something changed.


He had both hands placed on my bare belly, a place that up until that point, had only been touched by doctors and lovers, and he said, “There’s that moment when someone opens their soul to you that can’t be faked. There’s that moment when someone hands their emotions over to you, and you have to respect them. You have to be careful of them.” I stayed still and quiet and watched him, wondering what would happen next.


“Sooner or later,” he continued, “everyone needs to come to this realization. Otherwise they run around acting like 13 year-olds forever, which is a shallow, hollow life.” And he stayed quiet for a few moments, and his hands, stained with his ink and my blood, felt hot on my stomach, as if he were burning the lesson into my body.


Then the spirits left him, and he smiled and said, “Sorry—was that too intense?”


So of course I said, “No. Not at all.” And it was true. Although the truth he burned into my body was one I already knew and carried with me every day. You know, that someone trusting you, loving you, is sacred, that people’s feelings are sacred. That they’re so, so delicate and need so much care. And this is ingrained in me to such a degree that I can’t really separate my feelings from those of a person I love. I mean, in the sense that if I’ve hurt someone or if someone is unhappy with me, I think about it constantly. It stays with me. Like lately when we Skype, Shiawassee has taken to saying, “Forget about everyone else—what’s going to make you happy?”


And I never have an answer to that question.  Because I can’t conceive of a happiness in which others are not happy with me. I mean sure, when I’m by myself, I can choose to engage in activities that bring me pleasure, but when we’re talking the larger picture in which other people are involved, all I can think about is the delicacy of other people’s feelings, the importance of taking care of them, and then there is no really being happy for me unless I’m making someone else happy as well.


And now, since Dan the Shaman and his ritual, using my own blood to bind me to the emotions of others, when people I love are unhappy with me, I feel it deep in my gut, right behind Dan’s mark. The displeasure nests in there like a little pile of stones that I carry with me wherever I go. And if I can’t transform the unhappiness, then it just stays there constantly. If I can’t change it, then I at least have to feel it because to ignore it would be disrespectful. Because it’s my duty. Because it’s my responsibility somehow.


So now whenever Coop hits me up in a fit of nostalgia, and I can tell he’s looking for something, this youth that he feels that he’s lost and he’s implicitly asking me to give him a little taste of it again, I feel a little inadequate because I know that I don’t have what he’s looking for. Because he’s not really looking for youth or freedom or energy or passion. He’s looking for Boyhood. And I can’t give that back to him because I never had it.


So sure, I may have something. And it may even be something worth envying. But it isn’t Boyhood.


Whatever it is that I got, it isn’t that.