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June
3, 2006
How I sprained my ankle
Fucking. I'm a prurient gal myself, and this time
it was a local poet. An activist, pacifist and musician who goes
to televised rallies and gets on TV, and that's fine, but I don't
know why I was attracted to him. At first it was the Italian name,
since I was just coming down from my old boyfriend Frankie, who made
me think Italian lovers were the bomb, but John turned out to be
half Italian and half Pennsylvania Dutch, and mostly nothing exciting,
but I didn't know that yet. I didn't know anything about him,
but I signed up for his workshop anyway.
The other women in the workshop and I spent a weekend immersed in writing,
sharing, and talking. The chemistry among us was amazing, but the chemistry
must have cancelled out John's weirdness, because we stayed friends and none
of us can stomach him now. But at the workshop, John would start us off with
a spiritual or intellectual concept, and we'd all spin off into a cool, heavy
pudding of writing and ideas. All these women were so damn SMART, and I was
really stimulated, and for some reason I can't explain, I found myself getting
irrationally, insanely horny, and I started beaming this gigantic, steamy beam
of horniness onto John, I guess because I'm not a lesbian, and everyone else
was a woman, so he was the most logical recipient of my fervor. But he's small,
he's married and he wears way too much patchouli, plus he turned out to be
a gigantic phony, but at the time I just knew I wanted to fuck his brains out.
Fortunately that doesn't happen to me often, but after the workshop he
and I would meet and fuck regularly at an apartment he used for his job.
I talked John into letting me go to his next
retreat for free, because I figured he owed me. The retreat was
held at a big farm where we set our tents up
around a pond. There were eight people, and they were all hanging
on to John's every word like he was a prophet. I went in hopes
of getting another jolt of intellectual excitement, but I could
already see through John's facade, and I wasn't nearly as horny,
so it was just a rehash of the first workshop, and I was
bored. But I was also constantly nervous, because John was really
into doing things naked, so I kept worrying about when he'd kick
off the nudism. One morning we all met for yoga, and
John led us wearing just a t-shirt, and you could HEAR a collective
held breath the first time he raised his arms, because we all thought
he'd left his underwear off. He hadn't, but the nudism thing
made me tense all weekend.
On the first day we were all in a tiny A-frame where he'd have people
lie flat while he held a tiny crystal over their bodies to diagnose
the spin on their chakras. Or whatever. Everyone watched intently
to see if the crystal would spin clockwise, indicating Christ knows
what, but I could SEE his fingers spinning the string, and so could
everyone else, but not one of them stood up (and okay, we were all
hunched over, because the ceiling was low, but still), pointed a
finger at him and shouted, "NO! YOU are a charlatan!!!" Okay,
I didn't either, but they deified him and I was the only skeptic
among them.
And this isn't his fault, but what made it even worse, was that this one woman
farted and burped all weekend. Loudly and unapologetically.
Each expulsion was so dramatic that
it seemed to require a response, but what could you do but ignore
them? Another woman breathed deeply and assumed yoga postures
while everyone else talked. And for some reason, they were all mean to me,
maybe because I kept smirking, but I felt like Judas. I had my cell
phone, and I kept trying to call out and talk to someone normal, but the location
was remote, and my cell phone couldn't connect. I might as well have been on
Mars.
Late Saturday night everyone left the A-frame, except John and me, and
I thought, well, at least the one puny bright spot in this whole miserable
weekend will be that I'll get laid. So we fucked, and it was okay, but it was
hot and humid, and there were bugs, and we had to be quiet, because sound really
carries across a pond, and there was no electricity, so we had to do everything
by candlelight, which sounds romatic, but was really lame and afterwards
I was dabbing at myself damply while he lay across his cot with legs wide and
his arms over his head, looking satisfied and ready for sleep. I asked if I
could use his flashlight to go back to my tent, because the deal was he slept
in the A-Frame and his worshippers slept on the ground, and it was a quarter
mile trek through deep woods to get back to the tents.
And John said no, I couldn't borrow his flashlight. NO. Because, you know,
he was married, and everyone would see my light when I went back to the tent,
and he didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea, and oh, for Christ's sake,
so for a while I just absorbed the fact that I had to walk a quarter mile
in pitch fucking dark before I could go to sleep. I stomped out,
walked five steps from the A-frame, my foot hit a log, and I felt
my ankle roll over sideways with a really sickening sound. It hurt like
hell right away. I lay outside his hut clutching my ankle and
moaning, and he could hear me perfectly because the windows were open, but
he still ignored my moans. So I said, "John,
I'm pretty sure I sprained my ankle."
And from a reclining position within the A-frame, he said, "Wow,
man, that's too bad... But I still can't give you the flashlight."
I couldn't believe the arrogance of the smarmy little prick! I had
to limp the whole way back to my tent in pitch dark in pain, losing
the path, swearing and climbing over limbs getting branches in my eyes
and scratches on my arms. I woke up early in the morning with an ankle
the size of Alaska, so I packed my clothes, my sleeping bag and my
tent and carried everything back in three long, limping uphill trips to my
car, and I've hated him ever since.
That's how I sprained my ankle.
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