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*This is a revised version of a piece I posted a couple years ago.
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It was—I believe, at least in sobriety—my first time being “sexually assaulted” by a woman, and yet I understand fully that I more or less did it to myself.
Let’s call her Daniella. I met her in a writing group when I was living in NYC in 2019. I was 36. I’d found a writing group and joined. Every two weeks the group would meet at a different member’s apartment and we’d read our work aloud and critique each other and spend an hour writing silently and discuss writing, books and literature.
Daniella had been there one night in a young member’s Crown Heights apartment; the member was the typical cliché: Thin, middleclass corn-fed white girl from some vague Midwest town who was pretending to be poor and living in a rough part of Crown Heights full of hardcore sketchy locals who stared at you as you sheepishly walked by, their eyes saying they hated your gentrifying white guts and they wanted to rob you and would do so if given the chance.
Anyway.
I’d read at that session a short piece about my mom and a moment I experienced with her when I was six or seven, in the late 1980s, when, in the midst of a full nervous suicidal breakdown, my mom had, at 3am, forced me into the car and driven across town dropping me off to spend the night with a strange man who happened to be her psychiatrist. (How many laws did that violate?) Everyone had been very silent while I read and after, and people one by one had affirmed how “powerful” the piece was. (They were one step away from doing that stupid Millennial finger-snapping thing.)
Outside after my reading on our 15-minute break, Daniella came out and started talking to me while smoking a Virginia Slim. She was probably a few years younger than me, but perhaps also older. She had a strange timelessness about her. Thin, short (perhaps 5’2), and with wild tangled afro hair which immediately made you think of a young Bob Dylan. Indeed she had a sort of masculine quality to her…and yet she was also extremely feminine. Her voice was high and squeaky. Her arms and legs were thin and hard. She was fairly attractive, but she also terrified me.
She stood too close to me, blowing smoke away from my face, telling me how potent my story was. I thanked her. She said that she had two books published by Harper Collins and that she’d once written for The Spectator in England, where she’d also once lived. Then, apropos of nothing, she started telling me about her ex-husband, an “egocentric asshole writer” who, she said, “used to beat me up for fun.” Her feline gray eyes peered so deeply into mine it was as if she were trying to snatch my soul. I didn’t trust her one bit. Alarm bells were going off inside. And yet, of course, I was also attracted to her.
We chatted a while and discovered that we lived not far from each other, me on 130th and 5th Ave and she on Amsterdam and 145th; though separated by Central Park, we were both in different parts of Harlem. (Again, two white kids in the wrong hood.) We exchanged numbers. She smiled at me, another Virginia Slim dangling alluringly from the side of her thin lips. Her teeth, small and jagged, had a gross yellow hue to them.
I hoped I’d never see her again.
