ritual humiliation eggplant parm
written a year ago, read out loud just once, shared here for your eyes only
The most popular recipe from the New York Times last year was something called Marry Me Chicken. It involved cooking the roast bird in some kind of cream sauce, which I found inherently distasteful, and anyway, I had just broken up with my boyfriend of almost four years so I could rip bong at 10 AM away from his disapproving glances.
A few months later, I was making what I guess you could call a Ritual Humiliation Eggplant Parm. My dinner guest that evening had made clear, repeatedly, that he didn’t care for my company, and I was desperate to know how much he meant it. I sliced mozzarella with a kind of Kierkegaardian despair. I roasted tomatoes in blissful denial. I put on a Ray Lynch cassette, which lent my apartment the psychotic optimism of a therapist’s waiting room.
He arrived. I got a nosebleed—my second ever. He ate the eggplant parm, which he claimed to enjoy. He talked about his many talents; I clapped and barked like a seal. I tried to kiss him; he rebuffed my advances and implied I needed professional help. He left. I wrapped the remaining parm in foil, took two Ativan, and slept for 36 hours.
I was down bad. I had forgotten what it felt like. Scarier still, I had forgotten how much I loved the feeling. If you do it right, being down bad is transcendent. It’s an existential response to the elusive search for meaning: your purpose, now, is to bend your world towards the object of your affection. You’ll know you’re doing it right if you find yourself running through the streets of your college town barefoot at midnight, chasing your ex boyfriend in nothing but an extra large Perfect Pussy tee shirt as the guys who hang outside the CVS laugh their heads off. You’ll know if you’re going to Shenanigans on nights when they don’t have karaoke. You’ll know if you suddenly understand what Future is talking about. Just check out my clarity, you’ll think as you open a beer at 11 AM. I’m just enjoying my life.
I never got the whole “I want him to run me over with his car” type of Tweet. It reminded me of the girls on Tumblr who licked iridescent switchblades or the guys in ZBT who posted Chief Keef lyrics on Facebook: posturing at transgression. But I realized now that I did want that. I wanted to be destroyed by his hand. If he hit me with his car, he’d at least have to take down my number for insurance purposes. If I died, it would change his life forever. How wonderful, imagining him facing my parents in civil court. If I were in the room, I’d object to the hefty settlement: “No, it is I who should be paying him! For the honor and privilege of feeling his weight on mine, albeit separated by three tons of sheet metal.” I was down terribly.
No one has ever embodied “hit me with your car” energy more, in my opinion, than the late Big Star frontman Alex Chilton. Listen to the first words from the first song on his 1981 album Bach’s Bottom:
Cut my guts
Stab me in the alley
Call me a slut in front of your family
I was reading Georges Bataille, whose characters use nihilism as a numbing agent during Europe’s descent into fascism. I was like, same. The only thing that seemed to give his protagonists reprieve from their misery was something even more powerful: being down bad.
He wrote: “Born of disreputable pain, the insolence that persists in spite of everything has started growing again: slowly at first, then in a sudden burst that has blinded and transfigured me with a happiness that defies all reason.”
I was like, damn it’s true. I was transfigured from a happiness born of disreputable pain. After years of gnawing purposelessness, I felt alive.
He continued: “At this moment I am intoxicated with happiness. Drunk with it. I’ll sing and shout it forth at the top of my lungs. In my idiotic heart, idiocy is singing its head off.”
And so Chilton and I sang like two idiots as I put the final touches on the dinner from hell: “Cut my guts! Stab me up the alley! Call me a slut in front of your family!”
There was a kind of triumph in sublimating my purpose to someone who didn’t want it. It was ego suicide. It felt like control, even if it looked like chaos. Bataille said it better than I ever could, in all caps, dotted with an exclamation mark: “I HAVE PREVAILED!”
I noticed the day after my Ritual Humiliation Eggplant Parm that he had muted my Instagram. I smiled. He had to go to my profile to do that, and I looked really good in my most recent photo.
