Piece I read for Cassidy Grady and Annabel Boardman's "Confessions" series 11/10/24

urban dictionary's not gonna help you

everyone knows you’re a catwalker

I don’t like to explain a euphemism. You can guess for yourselves what’s necessary, that it’s a sex-act people frown upon, and that most who attempt it say it isn’t as grand as I’ve written it to sound.

But I don’t get catwalked frequently enough to write it off. That I can remember a single brush so thoroughly should prove the rule. He had a noble hairlip. I had few if any problems with him, just that beforehand he told me what he was about to do was something I should never let people in the real world do to me, and l afterwards I felt duty-bound to thank him, for what he’d hoped to convince me was a salutary demonstration, even though I’d been for-real catwalked a couple of times, already, and this time didn’t feel any different. Naturally, he said, and then he put me into my shearling coat, and he walked me out to my Lyft that had a panoramic sunroof.

Through the sunroof I watched winter fall back in; snowflakes caught the light on it like bulleted glass, and I wondered what forces forced men with nice cars to drive for ridesharing apps. I texted Caroline. Caroline whom I still cannot hate—she answers all of my questions to a sedative end—wrote me back to say that nothing economically weird was afoot. Other rich people will sometimes get lonely, or need encouragement in kicking a drinking habit. The driver seemed to fit the latter profile, he didn’t say a word to me and kept swerving, so as I exited I wished him good luck.

Caroline thinks she’s an expert on catwalking, too, even though she hasn’t so much as had sex simpliciter. She’s heard it mentioned in a documentary on Pasolini’s murder, now every conversation we have veers back to it. It’s a shame about the fascists, she wrote, but it was his appetite for catwalking that truly rendered him vulnerable. Sometimes she’ll DM me like she’s trying to pen a minority opinion. If she were applying to law school I'd begrudge it, but instead she is 20, and she lives at home with her stepmom, and she spends all her days watching Straub-Huillet rips on her Macbook, printing out screenshots, pinning up the loveliest stills in cork-board. In school Caroline was the fastest reader around. What with her mental endowments she could have grown into a fantastic evil person, could’ve been a great funds-slasher or propagandist, and in a good world people would be thanking her more often, she says, for squaring up to those temptations each day and refusing to lose.

But still I believe there are honest catwalkers left in the world. On the news, four men rob the only bank on Martha’s Vineyard, bury their guns, bury their pelf under a wife’s chest of drawers, and I’ve always assumed a unity of vices in men, that they’re easier than me in this way, and if the boldest ones weren’t facing twenty-five years to life I would track them down and let them catwalk me to the hard end of the road.

I can’t say why I require what I require. Call it “fatherless behavior,” but my dad used to think about me so much, and he had standards, too. He used to make me play ice hockey, even though the helmet made my head throb. Even though I was a flinty thing already, who ventured a commendable amount. As a child we’d spend our winters snowboarding, on a slight mountain near Kenosha, and every year I’d come back with a better injury than the last. I’d come back with a beat-up tailbone, some unsettled joints and then a tilt to my eyes that wasn’t pretty. Caroline always looked worse, but I knew kids up north who looked better. Lillian and Jack, whose home was nestled in the foothills. Lillian and Jack, who loved Ethiopian food, and would talk about loving it, too. Chicago and all of its culture is wasted on a person like me, I know this well enough as-is, but Lillian and Jack wished their parents took them down to see the city more often. They were getting too old for their backyard, which used to be nothing but trees, and now there aren’t trees anymore; their parents cleared the area to build a swing-set and a climbing-frame. Teenage Lillian would seem in hysterics over it.

Debate-team Lillian, in her power-drill cadence, said this isn’t going to score me any points in the afterlife, which did not score her any points in this life, either. But in the breakage of her voice I thought I could hear sadism, her pride which came from knowing just how much of the earth’s surface had been effaced to leave room for her fun.