Notes on Cringe
With apologies to Susan Sontag
As usual, first a story. Heck, let’s start with three stories…
First, Janey.
Picture Joni Mitchell or Peggy Lipton, a girl with ironed-straight blonde hair, and there’s Janey. Maybe add a little Michelle Phillips. At the time she said I looked like Anthony Perkins, the time being when we both ran around downtown Portland, Oregon as messengers. Richard Pryor had just set himself on fire while freebasing. Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office. Janey showed at work with long, red welts on her neck and arms, welts she wouldn’t talk about, except when it was just her and me. Then she said she’d been driving behind a car on a narrow street. The day prior, she’d been trapped as this other car stopped, and blocked the street as if waiting for someone. A man sat at the wheel, and a woman sat shotgun.
In her own car, after a while Janey honked. The man gave her the finger. Traffic was backing up behind her so Janey honked again. The man climbed out of his car, walked back and began throwing kicks against her car, denting the fenders, the doors, all while he called her a stupid bitch. The woman, his passenger, got out and stood, shouting, “Oh, chickie! Oh, chickie, now you got him mad!”
The swearing man snapped off Janey’s radio antenna and began to whip it against her car, scratching the paint. And when Janey opened her door and got out to stop him, he began whipping her with the chrome antenna. All the while the strange woman shouted, “Chickie, you deserve worse! Chickie!”
In hindsight, what shook Janey wasn’t the whipping, the car damage, the swollen welts, it was that word “chickie.” As she told me the story, she marveled, “Who even says that? Chickie?”
An aside: “Chickie” is another example of how dialog fails can be more effective than the smoothest repartee.
Here the driver went back to his car. He revved the engine, and the couple peeled out. Janey, whipped and bleeding, stood in the middle of the street. She saw their car had California license plates. She had to yell… something. So weeping, bruised, and bloody she yelled, “Don’t Californicate Oregon!”
That was forty-three years ago, and Janey’s story still makes me cringe. We can hope she’s forgotten it, but that’s doubtful. In that, her very public moment of complete defeat and powerlessness, the only curse she could pull out was Don’t Californicate Oregon?!
A couple other stories I’ve already told, here.
One was the skinny guy with the beautiful girlfriend. They were in the weight room of a meat-head gym, the domain of juiced ‘roid dudes. Me being the fly on the wall, I watched the skinny guy as he watched his girlfriend stare at the massive dudes. At his moment of peak frustration, skinny guy shouts, “Yeah, I might be the smallest guy here… but I bet I’m the biggest lawyer!”
Again, maximum cringe.
My last example. Among my best friends in college was a kid who grew up in a mining town. His father was a mining engineer, and each Superbowl Sunday their house was full of his muy macho miner friends. Drinking beer. Shouting at the television. This friend—I’ll call him Don—moped around, bored. He was maybe in second grade. Until he found a battered baby doll that had been kicked around the family for generations, a doll named Sissy. As the Superbowl went on, Don washed the doll and applied lipstick and eye shadow. He combed its ratted hair and piled it into a tall French braid. This he secured in front with a rhinestone brooch, to make the rescued doll look like Marie Antoinette.
Proud of his work, he carried the doll into the football party. He stood between the miners and the television and chirped, “Look, Daddy! I made Sissy beautiful!”
The party fell silent, with everyone looking away in shame. Everyone, glad that it wasn’t their kid who’d done this queer thing. Don’s father, his face flushed heart-attack red, and it’s best to end the scene there.
Mea cringe, mea cringe, mea maxima cringe.