October 2018: You Will Need All Your Anger Now
Once, years ago, my roommate ordered a pizza. It was 2004 or so, back when ordering a pizza meant calling the pizzeria and waiting by the door with cash. When the buzzer rang, she let the delivery guy up, unlatching the door while we heard him take the stairs two a time, like he was showing off. He peered into our apartment as my roommate paid for the pizza.
"You got a boyfriend?" he asked.
She gave a half smile. "That's none of your business," she said before closing the door. We ate the pizza and thought nothing of it, until later that evening, our buzzer rang again and again. When my roommate punched the intercom, it was him. He asked if she was home. "I think you like me," he said, his voice crackling through the intercom. Even without seeing his face, you could hear the leer in it, the entitlement. It startled both of us, that giving your address for a pizza could become giving your address to a jerk. My roommate sat in the kitchen, fuming, while the buzzer rang again and again and again.
After thirty minutes, my rage spilled over and I stalked to the intercom, jamming the button. "Hey!" I shouted. "Go away, please!"
My roommate looked at me. "Did you say please?"
My rage turned to shame so quickly. It was like the emotional equivalent of pissing yourself - cold and awful. The please had been automatic, compulsive.
The man continued to ring our buzzer for another fifteen, twenty minutes, until it stopped. Still. He knew where we lived.
I thought of that man last week, navigating the city streets, the every day, filled to the brim with rage.
Watching the Kavanaugh hearings had me in a vise of anger. At work I tried to take a break by taking a walk, which in midtown is about as soothing as trying to relax in a bath full of nails. I walked up Fifth Avenue, clutching my oversized tote bag, wondering what it would feel like to clobber some man, any man, with it. The street was crowded with them - men in suits, men hurrying, men taking long strides, men selfish, men oblivious. I had an itch I hadn't felt since I was drinking, this itch to hit something, someone. I could imagine what it would feel like to unlatch my tote bag from my shoulder, wind back and swing it forcefully at the head of a man. The tote bag was leather, the straps sturdy, its weight enormous. In my tote bag I carried two library books, a journal, water bottle, zipper pouch full of Celexa and Advil and Chapsticks and tampons, loose pens, a Sharpie, clumps of receipts, an empty Tupperware, my house keys, my office keys, a wallet fat with punch cards and ID cards and the debris of being a consumer, everything, everything, waiting for this moment where I could swing its full weight and feel the impact of knocking some man, any man, to the ground.
On the corner of 48th street a man plowed through a waiting throng of pedestrians, checking me with his shoulder. Now! I thought. Now! I would shout and he would turn and I would wind up my rage and I would take him down, I would start a tiny revolution, I would be one of many women swinging their bags at the waiting faces of dumb men. I wanted them to take responsibility. I wanted them to hold one another accountable. It was a fantasy that filled me for one moment, until the man continued on, unaware, plowing on, and I was just a scowl behind him. I could get mad as hell and it would stay internal, as I'd been taught, as I'd been conditioned. It filled me with shame all over again.
My instinct with feelings is always to get rid of them as quickly as possible - to dismiss, to exhaust, to minimize, to justify, to explain. Feeling this much rage - and I'm late to the party, as people of color and particularly Black women have felt this kind of exhausting, dehumanizing rage for ages and ages, which has to be acknowledged now and always - is overwhelming. Last week I went back to the music I listened to when I was young - Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney, PJ Harvey - albums where women could holler and scream the way I wanted to. I listen on the train, I turn the volume up, I tend to my rage now, not wanting to dismiss it. I keep remembering one sweet night when I was in my mid twenties and I went to a show at Silent Barn to see Each Other's Mothers play - this band of women and queers playing math rock (math rock!) which such intensity and tenderness that I haven't heard anything like it since. It was a band we'd seen before, a band we loved to go see, it was summer and we rode our bicycles and locked them all together in a pile on the street, and I'd push to the front of the crowd with a pack of femmes, queers, all of us sweaty and jostling against each other and I could close my eyes and let the bass sink into me and feel very much alive. We danced and hollered and it is important to remember when things were good because while we'll never get back there - this has changed everything - I know what I'm fighting for. In the patchwork of trauma and news and reactions and rage last week, many people posted what Mrs. Whatsit whispered in A Wrinkle In Time: Stay angry, little Meg. You will need all your anger now.
keep loving keep fighting,
xo,
c
* I highly recommend Rebecca Traister's essay in the New York Times on fury as a political weapon, as well as her (perfectly timed) new book, Good and Mad.
* Something to look forward to: October 15th I'll be reading at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn with these fine folks. C'mon out for good stories and good company. We can rage together and make a list of what we're fighting for <3.