Guilt by Dissociation
Content warning: sexual assault
1981
Ride around Kankakee in the backseat of a grimy Dodge Dart driven by a guy who’s the friend of the friend you’ve come to visit. Watch the green fields of thigh-high corn blur past the open windows. Smell the manure. Feel the heat saturating everything, even the wind. Sing along to Waiting for a Girl Like You on the radio. Feel disappointed that the guy who’s driving has a new license but not much personality. Back home you never just drive around but here you are, you’ve traveled overnight from Pittsburgh on a Greyhound, so tell yourself this is how it feels to be grown-up and free. Turn to Annie, who’s sitting next to you. Watch her grin dimple her cheeks. Notice the space between her two front teeth. When the music stops and the voice on radio announces the death of Harry Chapin, receive the news as though you’ve been struck not by lightning but by thunder.
Barely notice that the guy is pulling over as you scream into Annie’s startled face that it can’t be true and pray she’ll tell you you’re right. Find her confused look unforgivable. Grab the hot vinyl of the front seat with both hands and let your head drop between your arms. Start to keen. Feel the sobs more than you hear them. Heave. Become a smear of tears and snot. Try to talk, to explain why this can’t be happening. Try to make Annie grasp just how many hours you’ve spent in your bedroom listening to Cat’s in the Cradle. Insist that, though you can’t explain how, the song was written just for you. That Harry Chapin was singing it just for you. That somehow Harry Chapin knows – knew – this song touches you more deeply than it touches anyone else. Explain how the song predicted what would happen, what was happening, to you and your father: the yelling, the silences, the falling off your respective pedestals as you turned to boys and he turned to booze.
After your sobbing shudders and stops and the car pulls back onto the flat two-lane road, try again to make Annie understand this death is personal. Take her hands and look in her round brown eyes as you tell her how two years ago, you and your best friend Lisa, the only person who loved Harry Chapin anywhere near as much as you, saw him in concert. How she somehow got tickets. How together you rode the blue Port Authority bus from your safe quiet town right into downtown Pittsburgh. How you somehow found the Stanley Theatre. Tell Annie how in the lobby after the concert, you and Lisa approached the merch table and you splurged on a T-shirt and you asked, shyly but buzzing with adrenaline because there he was – that mane of hair, that cleft chin, his whole self wet with sweat – if he would sign your program. Describe the surprise of his hand on the back of your head, the swiftness with which he pulled your face to his, the shock of his tongue in your mouth, the startling amount of saliva. The fatness of his tongue filling your 14-year-old mouth. Don’t tell her that when he released you, smiled, and moved on, you didn’t wipe off the saliva coating your chin.
1999
Trot out the kiss incident for the something-you-don’t-know-about-me ice breaker during a work retreat. Say “I was kissed by Harry Chapin.” Add “He actually stuck his tongue in my mouth!” Laugh incredulously with everyone else. Secretly remain unsure whether it’s titillating or gross.
Eventually forget about the whole thing.
2017
As the #MeToo drumbeat gets louder, sink without knowing it into a dark place. Wonder why you feel lonely. Wonder why you feel lonely and ashamed. Notice the shame is even bigger than the loneliness. See that in your mind #metoo is lower-cased, anemic. Raise your fist, mouth the words, but secretly know you’re a sham, a coward who hasn’t earned the right to join your brave sisters in righteous indignation. Feel haunted, feel taunted by all the times you’ve never talked about and never will because unlike your brave sisters you did not find an exit ramp, you didn’t say no thank you or no means no or a dress is not a yes or I’m calling a cab but instead you waited for it to be over rather than make a man mad. Every day deny yourself your bona fides as a self-respecting feminist because the anger and revulsion that the accusations flooding the media have dredged up in you are, in the end, annulled by every instance of your appalling passivity.
2019
Walking around Brooklyn with your 24-year-old daughter, come upon a small fenced-in area. Get closer so you can read the green sign with the NYC Parks maple leaf that’s hanging on the fence: Harry Chapin Playground. Feel a tepid nostalgia stir in your gut. Start walking again as you begin to tell your daughter who Harry Chapin was, what he meant to you when you were young, how he sang the songs of your sadnesses and yearnings, how he plucked the very strings of your highly emotional heart. Describe how you listened to Cat’s in the Cradle, the saddest song in the world, over and over and over until the song entered your body. Sing her a few lines with embarrassing earnestness. Try to make her know how it felt that day in Kankakee, driving between cornfields on a two-lane road 845 miles due west of the Long Island Expressway, to learn that Harry Chapin, whom you loved, had been crushed by a truck.
Then, without thinking, begin to share with her the story of the kiss. Note that as you tell it, it doesn’t sound like a fun fact anymore. Note that you’re walking more slowly. Know, because she squeezes your hand, that your daughter can tell you’re struggling when you get to the merch table part. Note that what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a kiss at all. Stop walking. Feel queasy. Look at your daughter’s face. Understand that this is the moment you lose him, the moment you let go.