“WHAT’S GROSSER THAN gross?” the cis boys at Saint Mary of the Assumption went around asking when I was in junior high. It was rhetorical; they wanted to tell you the answer. One of the most enthusiastic tellers of this…joke?…was my eventual eighth-grade boyfriend, Adam, who came to class variously—and deliciously—swathed in either Cool Water or Drakkar Noir colognes.
He was thick and gorgeous. His voice crackled with puberty in a way that was probably embarrassing to him but was hot AF to me, and he was obsessed with N.W.A. Lots of American white boys who were free from oppression seized upon these rappers’ lyrics in the ’90s, but in our vastly white suburb, his brown Italian skin may have made him feel like more of a police target, even subconsciously. Or not. I really can’t say.
“What’s grosser than gross?” Adam asked, so often that he couldn’t even remember if he’d already asked you. He’d answer, quickly, gleefully: “King Kong playing pingpong with his ding-dong.”
I never saw Adam’s dick. (Or King Kong’s.) I never touched it, or even ground against it fully clothed, and while we did eventually French—extremely briefly, under my initiation and leadership—he told his friends I taught him how to do it—I can’t say how much his obsession with this joke was related to cis-dude dick-size obsession in general or to his dick specifically. Or to lyrics in N.W.A. songs, which he also often parroted, about their dicks.
This is one of the countless experiences I missed out on as a person who was assigned female at birth: agonizing about my dick relative to other people’s dick. As a trans person growing up in the Trans Dark Ages of the ’80s, I instead got to agonize about when my dick might grow in, by magic or miracle, at all.
I don’t remember seeing any of my classmates on the receiving end of the punchline, “King Kong playing pingpong with his ding-dong,” react with disgust, presumably the proper response. I probably faked a laugh. How is that gross? I thought, though, wearing my obligatory Catholic-school skirt while it snowed half the year. Even now, the premise strikes me as a little weird at worst: If I walked into a zoo and saw a gorilla playing pingpong with his ding-dong, that would be fucking amazing.
What’s grosser than gross? I have so many experiential answers that are so much grosser than that. Like many victims of sex abuse, I had dissociative amnesia when the other boys at school were trying to freak me out with the very idea of ape anatomy, but on some level, I knew this joke meant I was not like other children. Who gives a shit about anyone doing sports with their dick? Who could possibly think this is the grossest thing a dick could do?
Children who aren’t victims of sex abuse, is the answer. Once, I was sitting at my table working on an awesome owl puzzle when I suddenly burst into tears. I am so tired, I thought, of being this lonely. I let the tears come, because I know feelings need to be felt. But I was a little surprised. I’d had a super social week. Maybe being around nice people had surfaced feelings of wanting to be around them even more. Maybe the feeling was old: was not about being alone as I currently was with my owl puzzle, but unknown, as I was for the first four decades of my life.
WHAT’S GROSSER THAN gross? The infinite tiny details of sexual torture. Stop reading right now if you don’t want to hear any.
The April before last, I woke up multiple days in a row drowning in flashbacks of having my father’s asshole an inch from my face. He was crouching over me, in a 69, and I was choking on his dick, both in memory and in real time—before I started taking medication, I woke up choking so, so, so often, my throat suddenly constricted by a combination of sleep apnea (now addressed with BiPAP) and the memory of squeezing hands or forced-in penises.
This time, I was having this devastatingly simple thought: I hate when he does it like this.
What’s grosser than gross? That I had, as a child, a least-favorite way to have to suck my dad’s dick. And a least un-favorite: when he was on his back, lying down, and I could control the amount of pressure coming into my face. Obviously, is how I’m inclined to end this sentence. Because that’s how regular of a fixture forced paternal oral was in my life. And I carried that alone until—well, that exact detail I told one person, one time, last year.
And how in that flashback I could still smell his asshole thick in my nose, like towels that stayed wet and needed to be washed.
Two Aprils ago, when I repeatedly woke up enveloped with the sight and scent and feelings of this terrible 69, I didn’t even try to push the flashback away. It was always my first instinct, even though it stopped working about seven years ago. Those mornings, I didn’t start panicking, or painfully contracting, or even crying. I realized what was happening, realized what I needed to do, and started doing it.
My heart is broken in a way that’s chronic, like a veteran’s war wound aching when it rains. And I, too, have intensive training. I self-administered EMDR by alternately tapping my two feet—they have apps for it now, though I don’t know how safe that is if you don’t have experience doing it with a therapist first. I visualized going into the scene as my adult self and shoving my father off of my young self, screaming Get off of him! What the fuck is the matter with you?! Then I took the hand of little me. I handed myself a child-size, supersoft robe to put on my little naked body, crouching down to kid-level to say, Hey, see how he’s cowering and speechless in the presence of another adult now? That’s because he knows what he’s doing is wrong.
It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.
Adult Me told Little Me that we were leaving, offering to either carry him or let him walk out, whichever he wished. I asked him if first there was anything he’d like to do to or with my dad. Like would he like me to kill him? Or did he want to kill him with my help? Or assault him with a giant dildo in his throat, or handcuff him to something, or tie a rope around his neck with the other end around my childhood bed frame in such a way that if he ever tried to get away, he’d be strangled?
That’s how I saved myself at 6:30 those mornings.
It is…a fucking insane way to have to start a day.
Before I took so much medicine, I did something similar every morning. One morning soon after those ones, I woke up chanting to myself, Behave or die. It was before dawn, and I’d jolted into consciousness choking again—asleep, and then, suddenly, not, panicked and coughing and clutching my throat.
Behave or die.
When I hear it, this old desperate mantra, it’s fast-paced and panicked, frantically strung together on repeat, behaveordiebehaveordiebehaveordie.
This particular morning, I started crying instantaneously—and kicking. That was the thing, my father told me, that made him do what he was doing the night he squeezed extra hard: I kicked.
With my right leg. Even after processing it so many ways in so many therapies, this body memory comes up still, even despite so much PTSD medicine, in twitches and jerks. I suppose on a tight technicality you could say my father saved me that night, punching CPR into my chest after I stopped breathing.
You could say that. I wouldn’t.
WHAT’S GROSSER THAN gross? That the amount of paperwork required to apply for disability is often entirely outside the energetic capabilities of those who need it, as it was the days I spent saving myself after waking up like that. And that disability is initially denied two-thirds of the time. That I already had to apply and appeal and re-appeal for victim compensation for almost a year, which stretched the amount of energy—and dignity—I had.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
And that even when I did manage to apply for disability, I was denied.
No one else is coming to help, I said to my little self during retroactive rescues so, so many times. But I’m here. I’ll always be here. The last couple of years, I told my own grown, under-supported self that wasn’t personal—that that’s just how things are here, in this time and place, for lots of people, including me. My life, like many, many, many others’, lacks justice. But it finally contains the kind of loving support that gets people through living, instead of the kind of “love” that harms.
Yesterday morning, I woke up having a flashback. It happens much less often now, thanks to my medication (shout-out especially to prazosin 2x/day), and when it does happen, it’s more like a memory, and less like a freezing ocean I’m suddenly being plunged and drowned in. What’s grosser than gross is that when I was a child, an adult man—not my father, this one—put his penis into my mouth and peed in it. It’s grosser than gross that he left me with the feeling not even that I was nothing but that I was less than nothing, a feeling that would linger and permeate so strongly that I’d be struggling with it in therapy four decades later, even after many hundreds of hours of therapy already. That the sub-nothingness was another entry on the long list of reasons that I think I don’t deserve to be happy.
How I usually feel about that is: defeated. Beleaguered. How I feel about it as I’m typing it right now is: UGH. Bored! I’m tired of letting some ding-dong play ping-pong with my…live-long. Life song. Worth-gong. No one ever accused me of being a gifted limerick writer. Today, I’m going to get a bodywork adjustment to help wring out some of the pain this emotional wound has bound up in my musculoskeletal system. It’s probably going make me cry very, very hard for a bit. But the sun is out, and Seth is in town, visiting from Japan, so after that, I’m going to the fucking beach.
