My Life Sentence

When I was 14, I was a rebel. A novel I took out from the school library had some jacket copy: “this gusty bestseller about literature, Paris, something, sex, dueling, something,” and so on. I wanted to read that book. I took it out. But now my name was there, on the slip for checkouts. The slip was glued to the page facing the jacket flap; people would see. Sex. There my name was and there was that word.

If people saw, I’d feel helpless. I think that’s what I sensed. If people saw, walls would close in, I’d be trapped. By what? Nowadays we say judging, so I’d be trapped under judging. It would flatten me like a cave-in. My personal cave-in, just for me.

So I prevented it. I took my Bic BallPoint and scribbled out the word. Once, back and forth with the pen tip. Again, because I could see the letters. Again, because the lighter bits made me think somebody might see through. One more time and the word and the blue scribble had become a dimple in the paper, a reverse divot stiff from ink and looking black. Then I stopped.

I did this in November 1975, in a suburb of New York, in a high school where girls wore tight jeans and the use of joints and condoms was much talked about. But I didn’t qualify for the milieu. I was a basketcase and I wouldn’t qualify for a basketball team, a game of Ping-Pong, or life among kids who had sex. I barely qualified to hold a conversation. Now I think this was because of autism, but either way—the reflexes weren’t there and I felt ashamed about it.

I read the book (King of Paris, Guy Endore, a lot of fun) and returned it. Three years later I was a senior and I got it down. No names after mine. I wasn’t checking, I just like to revisit past pleasures; maybe they’ll show me something. But no names after mine, and before me the last person had been in 1971. The dimple was still there, of course.

I forget, maybe when I was 12, I did much the same thing to another book. To its cover, not a jacket flap. This was a paperback I owned (Who Fears the Devil, Manly Wade Wellman, a bit disappointing), a science fiction title from the years when Kennedy was president. Speculative fiction anyway, because its focus was the supernatural and folkloric. The cover painting featured a brief selection of fantastic things and creatures, with the hero planted foursquare in the middle. All was done faux-naif: the rocket ship, the satyr, the mermaid and her hair, the fat stars planted by the hero’s feet, the stars near his head. Above the mermaid’s lute (the music notes traveled along her hair like it was a trellis) one made out a dot. The curve next to the dot might’ve been a slightly generous pectoral. But dot and curve together showed she was naked. That was her breast.

I don’t know when I scribbled it out. But at some point I did. I worried about that cover with the mermaid nipple. I considered the threat before me and finally I acted: I drew over her. Covered the dot and then kept going. I ended up drawing a blouse, I think. Sleeveless, but probably the shoulder went down further than usual. Also, looking at the cover, I see I would’ve had to fill in a pair of stranded patches beneath her lute, where her waist can be seen before the tail begins. I suppose I would’ve done it.

I remember in eighth grade, a moment I was alone in a study room, no one else there. I noticed how I kept justifying my behavior in my head, kept telling myself that whatever I was doing at that moment—sitting down, checking my binder, checking the ink in my pen—was something a person might do under the circumstances. Catch me alone and those were the thoughts you’d hear; that was the project going on in my head.

And sometimes I’d scribble out a damning fact, a circumstance that would put me crosswise with everyone and therefore helpless. A nipple-dot, a word. My choices show that I was afraid of sex, I suppose. Sex was for the people in charge, the kids around me who decided what was what and who was who. My actions also show I was confused about my chief goal, concealment. Scribble out a three-letter word and people will guess what was there. When I was 24, I sent a nosy girl a letter and crossed out a depressing section, so of course she held it up to the light and made sure to read it. All those years later and nothing had changed.

A blouse on a mermaid, black ink; probably I did fill in the bits down near the waist. My life feels like serving a sentence. At moments like this, I get an idea what the sentence is.