Finally!

Hair, Teeth, Hand, 2012. “You have white girl hair, but it can take a punch.” - my colorist, who blonded past some of the remaining brown-on-black-on-gold-on-black-on-brown I have shooting through all this. (Also, a famous teenager was at the salon getting some blonde. I hate when I’m shorter than them, which is always.)

Last week, while I was unable to even see straight because of personal stressonomics, I tried to point out on the internerd that while it is obviously very disturbing that all those girls were posting stuff about how Chris Brown can “hit me anytime” (do they know they sound like retired, cigarette-wheezy hairdressers laying out in Boca Raton when they talk like that?), it is equally obvious that girls are interested in men who hurt them. ??!! It is the guy-with-a-motorcycle writ large, the need for dramatics writ even larger. It’s partly about needing to get hit to get off; it’s partly about something so much bigger than sex. (ha, “Bigger than sex!” Impossible!) I know very few women who have not been in an abusive relationship, at some point, if not physical than emotional, which, DOY, is just as bad.

Is that such an impossibility to understand, normals? To my tweet, one girl said “I’ll bite” and asked what I meant; a smart friend played dumb; some jag told me he’d hit me whenever I wanted him to. (Which, as I tweeted to him then, is why we Can’t Talk About Things.) I mean… IS IT? Is it so hard? It can’t be that I, in this harsh fog of distraction and waiting around for the Diet Cokes I had delivered to arrive (really), was the one who was pointing this out? There is obviously some element of those girls being provocative for the sake of it. Buuuuut. Being all shocked by their sexual gnarlsism is demonstrative of the worst kind of possibly willed naivete.

ALSO, look. Chris Brown is a monstery monster who should be in jail, and it’s appalling that our culture is the kind of culture that is cool with him. BUT, do you know how many other people who performed at, organized and attended the Grammys are also monsters? Probs not. Of course not. Do you know how many other musicians, actors, writers, newscasters, teachers, are monsters? Hunter S. Thompson was a horrifically abusive motherfucker and I call him “my favorite.” Salinger was a dick. Hemingway was maybe the worst. Powerful, charismatic, talented people, the people we love, are often monsters. How is it that Monster Chris Brown is somehow an outlier in his monsteryness?

Like, consider that I have 342 Facebook friends. If half are men, and one in four women are sexually assaulted by age whatever, it’s more than fair to say that a portion of those men have done violence to a woman. My sample is obviously way skewed toward men who are gay, or straight and cool, kind, feminist and lovely… but, everybody knows their date before they’re a date rapist. I knew mine. He was hot, rich, smart.

Anywaysies, to me, the Chris Brown stuff (and all of this is excluding the fact that one Rihanna has just released two collabos with her abuser, a.k.a. come the fuck on) has been deeply, darkly frustrating about what people seem to think is… normal. I know that being a journalist who primarily writes about other people’s feelings and secrets and desires skews my sample toward the weird, too, but, really. Chris Brown is by no measure uniquely monstery. Chris Brown just got caught.

Friend:  [REDACTED] is pretty cool   

When I very-first came to L.A., when I was still on the bottom deck of teenagerhood (bad hair, still a shy little midget, albeit with hash-oil hands and hand-me-down orgasm opinions), I was driven into Venice. Right as we cruised by Venice High School, which is famous if you are in the deep end of LA cultural lore, the song “Doin’ Time” by Sublime came on the radio. I’d never heard it before. After that “Jane Says” played. I’d heard it many times before. Both are entirely Californian; neither band is Venicey in reality but both bands are, of course, on the L.A. gorgeous-filth continuum. In those few minutes I was silently and forever transformed, and understood magic, and from then on those two songs were crucially a part of me.

(A year later I watched my crush’s band cover “Doin’ Time” and on that line “I’d like to hold her… head underwater,” he sort of smiled and jokingly did that head-push hand gesture which now would get an eye-roll but then had my eyes rolling back into my head.) (Seven years later I heard “Jane Says,” and all of its Californian everything, and that steel drum, while I was writing an essay that I hated for school that I hated in my attic bedroom in a shared house in the Annex that I fucking hated and it was without question one of the five darkest moments in my life.) (Another of those was sitting in my parked car, with my dog and my then-boyfriend in the backseat, crying so hard that I broke some blood vessels around my eyes. I think my memories of some years of my twenties are so few because for a while there it was too, too, too dark.)

I don’t tend to like melodrama, or moments-in-time-as-meaning. I focus in on the “Yeah but” and the “Anywaaaaay” far more than the “It was like this.” But really, really. It was like that. 

Yesterday I was driving to Venice, in my rental car on a perfect afternoon, wearing the right sunglasses for my face and the right SPF for my skin, and “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins came on the radio, and I put the windows up so I could scream-sing along. Have I been happier this year? In months? Nope. Then, THEN, as I was driving into Venice-proper, approaching the high school, “Doin’ Time” came on the radio. Just, like that. I was late to meet my friend for lunch (mahi mahi tacos; two Diet Cokes in small glass bottles; skateboard-wheel soundtrack) so I stopped myself from crying as much as I wanted to and didn’t need to and just listened to this song, and I willed my kid-self to know somehow that I grew up into a woman who, just like that, drives herself to lunch in Venice in a car she paid for on a trip she made from a life she has and wants.