Excerpt
I'll Look So Hot in a Coffin
1.It’s Okay to Let the Bastards Get You Down, Just Get Back Up When You Can (They Hate That)There have been so many bastards, I could start practically anywhere. But there is one standout. A bastard to end all bastards. We crossed paths when I was twenty-eight.
It was at a bar in Chelsea, where someone who knew someone who knew someone was having a combo birthday-Halloween party. My look was thrown together because I’d been planning to stay home, but at the last minute, my friend Annie persuaded me to go.
As an adult, I’ve never been a huge fan of Halloween. Putting on a costume instead of an outfit I love does not excite me, nor does gallivanting with an entire city that is drunk and high and inhibition-free. When the invitation materialized, I put on an all-black outfit and dug out a headband with devil horns that I for some reason owned and figured it would have to do.
I noticed a man across the bar who looked familiar. He was dressed like a vampire in a halfhearted way: fangs, fake blood around the mouth, a cape.
If this had happened in the more recent past, his costume would seem too on the nose for my story. In the era of Twilight and Lisa Taddeo and Olivia Rodrigo, my using a vampire would be cliché and derivative. But this really was the costume he chose, not one I am giving him as a fictional flourish. Maybe the universe was trying to warn me.
I am someone who is terrible with names but gifted when it comes to remembering faces. If I sit next to you on the subway today and pass you on the street four years from now, it may take a minute, but I’ll eventually remember why you look familiar. As soon as I saw the vampire, I knew: He had been at Club Med recently, the same time I was there with Annie. Though I didn’t remember anything specifically good about him that made me want to reconnect, my outgoingness prevailed that night, and I ran over to him, explaining that we’d been in Turks and Caicos at the same time.
Club Med was the first adultish vacation I’d ever taken, and Annie and I loved it, even though it forced us into social situations when maybe we didn’t want to be, like at meals. The vampire had been at our table at least once, and by the end of our trip, we’d seen him strutting around the pool with the resort’s current Queen Bee, a skinny blond with big tits.
On Halloween, the vampire and I drifted apart and together and apart again, talking about mostly nothing. He complained that Queen Bee had become sort of obsessed with him, wanting to visit him in New York, and didn’t she realize it was just a vacation thing? I spent a lot of time talking to a dancer who took my phone number and made me swear to come see him in the Christmas Spectacular, which we both knew I wouldn’t do. Bar promises, lies we tell each other, it was all part of the fun. The room was crowded and sticky and loud; just your average extraordinary night in New York.
Then I heard, “Hey, Carla. C’mere.”
It was the vampire, sitting at the bar with two people, a girl and a guy I hadn’t noticed earlier. Though I didn’t know them, they felt familiar; they had the vague look of the spoiled, boring kids I grew up with on Long Island turned Midtown East day traders. They were the type of people who have never interested me but whose approval I long sought anyway.
I obeyed the vampire’s command and found myself standing in front of him and his friends.
“What’s up?” I said.
“What’s on your back?” he asked.
I swear I knew it was coming. Something in his eyes, maybe. An unkind little hint. I don’t know when he noticed my body. Long enough before asking that he had time to cook up a plan. Somewhere between my eagerly, stupidly seeking him out at the start of the night and this very moment.
Now, facing the vampire’s question, his entourage of enablers waiting for me to answer, I responded: “Do you really want to know, or are you being a jerk?”
“I don’t think he’s being a jerk,” his male friend offered.
“I wasn’t asking you,” I said.
“I am really asking what’s on your back,” the vampire told me, a smirk creeping onto his face. “I genuinely want to know.”
“It’s a congenital disorder I was born with,” I replied, thinking to myself as I spoke, Congenital means “born with,” you idiot. I don’t know why I kept answering him, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was as if I thought compliance would get me out of the pickle I’d found myself in. No, that’s wrong. It wasn’t a pickle and I hadn’t found myself there. It was a minefield, and I’d ignored the warning signs—DANGER! DO NOT ENTER!—and tromped right in.
The vampire’s smirk was stuck now—he was ready for his finale. It felt like hours had passed.
“Turn around so I can feel it,” he ordered me. He wanted to feel my back. He wanted to touch it with his hands. His voice never wavered. He was calm; he seemed very happy with himself.
That finally unstuck me from my place; I was too proud to let this motherf***er put his hands on me, though I would later play out a version in which I did: I’d turn around and let him touch my back. He’d laugh, sharing whispers with his friends, who would also reach out to cop a feel, my implicit permission granted because if I let the vampire, why shouldn’t they all get a turn? With every touch I’d disintegrate just a little bit more, a human Shrinky Dink activated by their hot, greedy hands.
There’s another scenario I later imagined, too, one that entailed revenge and righteous comeuppance, some gathering of superhero-like strength that unleashed itself in a violent fit that made all three Borings sorry they’d started with me. Or something quieter, like my calmly picking up one of the candles on the bar and holding it near the girl’s hair, setting her ablaze. If I could get only one of them, it would have to be her; the betrayal of sisterhood was so immense, she’d have to bear the brunt of it. Another woman paying for the transgressions of men.
Outside, not quite sure how I got there, I began to hyperventilate. Annie suddenly materialized and I told her what had happened, or tried to, because there was no adequate way to explain it. I didn’t know how to describe tonight without making it feel bigger or smaller than it was. What did happen? A not-so-nice man said not-so-nice things about the fact that my body looked different than other people’s, something I knew and had known my whole life?
It bothered me that I couldn’t remember his name. It bothered me more that I was just a quick diversion, a bit of fun to be had in a night that must have bored him otherwise, because as I was standing in the street, finally getting my breath back, I saw him leave with his friends.
Annie tried to convince me to stay and offered to go home with me when I refused, but I said no. And so I walked. I was drunk and tired and crying, but so were a lot of people. I was just another crying girl in the city on Halloween. My feet hurt, and I was limping by the time I found a cab three avenues away, tights torn, makeup running.
When I was finally in my bed, I was crying still and not sure I’d be able to stop. A tap that had been rumbling for a long time was now open. A one-in-100,000 chance, the only lottery I’d ever won. Why? Why did I get this body? It was something I’d always wondered. The roll of the dice. The flip of a coin. Just my luck.
I didn’t waste my time with other questions—Why did he target me? What did I ever do to him?—because the answers didn’t matter. Instead, for the first time in my life, I fantasized about being beaten to a bloody pulp. My mind went there easily. I thought about offering someone money to assault me, assuring them it was okay because I deserved it. I pictured myself bruised, swollen, bloody, broken, in a hospital bed, practically unrecognizable, my friends and family gazing down at my tortured body—my poor, poor body—shaking their heads and weeping.
I had never done anything remotely like this—I still don’t know where the idea came from—but I was instantly enthralled, addicted to the imagined feeling of being hurt. Elated by it. Comforted. And finally I fell asleep, no longer crying, calm.
Every night after, for years, this was my ritual. I would crawl into bed and, regardless of the mood I was in before, start to cry and fantasize about being hurt. Some people counted sheep. I lulled myself to sleep with explicit visions of being brutalized. I had never cut myself, but my practice made me understand the feeling cutters describe, how it’s a release. How the physical pain—even the idea of it—was a salve. I never died in my fantasies, I only came close. There was no fun in disappearing completely; I needed to make others look at what I had endured because I thought I deserved it.
