Possibly Naked 2
Setup: One person is reading the italicized part, someone else is tied up to a chair on the stage reading the non-italicized part
Like a nose, an eye, a baby toe, an armpit, my vagina is simply a body part and it definitely is not deserving of a monologue.
My vagina is just something people touch and use as they wish, like a pen, a keyboard, a subway pass. It is a tool, like a carpenter’s hand or the sole of a trapeze artist’s foot. And like the palm of a hand, the sole of a foot, it is worn and used.
My vagina is not special, it is not unique, it is not pretty or ugly, it is not strength or fear, it is not woman any more than my pinky toe. It just is.
Maybe he had changed. That’s what I thought. His house sure had: the move from a shanty to an apartment all on his own. He certainly thought he had: his phone calls desperately pleading with me for some sort of acceptance, friendship. His lawn had flowers circling a pine tree. It was a start.
Oh wait. Nevermind. He had a basement rental. The flowers weren’t really his. The pine tree definitely wasn’t his. The staircase with the stained carpet, frayed on the edges, was his. The brown plywood door at the bottom leading to his one room apartment was his. The damage to the door, that.. may have been his. But, really, perhaps he had changed.
Once perhaps it was special. Maybe my vagina did define me as a little girl. But then I learned the secret. Sure it’s true that special things have power. But special things give other people power over you. So when I was young, I said you can’t take this and make it yours. From now on you pay me to touch this. From now on this is a business deal.
Just because he used to hit the wall when he was mad at me. Just because he would bend my thumb back, hold me down, tell me nobody else would love me, and call me a whore, it doesn’t mean that he made that hole in the door. It could have just as easily been an accident.
Anyway, it ends up he was still big. He still had shaggy hair and an unshaven beard. He still had a cigarette sticking from his pursed lips, a beer bottle in his hand. He hugged me tight while the smell of cheap tobacco and day old beer forced me to concentrate on filling my lungs with oxygen. Or perhaps it was the fear. At this point, I’m starting to think he hasn’t changed. But it’s not exactly like I can leave.
Bent over in a warehouse, in this one’s car during school break, in the conservation park, in that one’s cheap, dirty basement, in Motel 8 (pay by the hour), in this one’s expensive house with the satin sheets, My unspecial vagina went to all these places. I know you’re all asking why I started. You want to be able to point to something and then fix it. An uncle, a neighbor, a mean boyfriend. Well don’t you think I want to be able to do that too? Blame it on someone else? But life doesn’t always give you reasons. What about that guy? ..oh that happened after.
I don’t know what was said in that room, but it must have been charged. My memory is of shaky, sudden movements. Just like a music video attempting a plot, lips moved, sometimes there was anger, sometimes there was sadness, indifference, and anger again. He wouldn’t let me leave until he made me suffer, until he proved he owned me.
My vagina can never be special again and it will never be a part of me. When someone touches it, when I touch it, it will always be with a goal, some goal.
He could have just stripped me and fucked me instead so it would have been over with quickly.
It will never be beautiful, mystical, magical.
Instead he took my car keys and stripped me naked. He sat me in this chair. He called me names. Told me he would never let me go. For hours. He wouldn’t touch me. He wouldn’t let it end quickly.
It was worth it to be spared years of violation and humiliation when I gave people that “special” part of me. Spared years of emotional attachment to what is quite simply another mound of flesh.
I sat it out. I wasn’t humiliated.
Eventually he wore thin and let me go. I went home and watched TV.
Wow that is so deep! I don’t know what to think of it.