SCAR

My white American childhood came with a fair amount of erotica. It was everywhere, and the boundaries were confusing. Brooke Shields had been photographed for an art book put out by Playboy. She was nude, in a hot tub, wearing eyeliner, and she was eleven. Those were the 1970s, both different and the same as the decade in which Lewis Carroll took lewds of a ten-year-old Alice while her socialite parents made sure not to interrupt. 

Adults defining childhood excitements as sexual is an old problem. Adults struggling to find words to explain the sexual revolution as it unfolded was a contemporary problem, but not one that replaced the former. The decade played host to a steady flow of full-color print and video pornography as it flooded into a culture grappling with a transition in what capitalism required from society sexually.

I lived with my parents only a mile from an official Playboy Club, where a big white sign shaped like a bunny head wearing a black tie marked an impossibly intriguing place. Every woman who went on to do anything in life started in one of those bunny costumes. The thought tormented my nervous system on the regular. Playboy magazine and the lifestyle it built around its brand defined what was fashionable, classy, and intelligent. In 1977, Star Stowe became the first Playmate of the month to be featured with a visible tattoo. The chances are high that I heard the words tattoo, playmate sexy in the same sentence and decided it was absolute law.

When I was thirteen, Samantha Fox’s song Touch Me was in rotation on the top forty, and I loved it; those opening bars, the dance beat break out, and somehow, straight up orgasmic moaning. It’s a good, solid ’80s pop song that contributed nicely to the then emerging tradition of women crooners voicing their desires for sex over the commercial airwaves. It was the sexual revolution continuing with its confused messaging and failed attempts to contextualize women in a reality where sex is no longer a favor they do, a burden they bear for their husbands and children. One response to this cultural movement was the original Stepford Wives film, wherein no women were spared, no final girl remained, all the men lived happily ever after with the literal shells of the women they married. So, Samantha Fox singing, You made me feel myself, offered a simple idea that I could exist in my own body. All I had to do was understand what that meant. 

I wanted a tattoo and was oddly desperate to get one, though I was only fourteen and knew neither what or where this tattoo was going to go, but the urge was real. Age-appropriate problems were beyond my ability to cope with because other situations took my attention from trying to grow up. Honestly, I was in my late forties before I even sat down to consider that I had never sat down to consider how to go about becoming an adult whom I liked and could count on. I never thought about growing up at all. I lived in the pure chaos of the angriest people I think I have ever known. I lived in a house and I lived in a body, but I didn’t. So, one afternoon, I changed that.

My most mischievous friend was over and we were in my bedroom doing what we did; listening to music, playing with make-up, and talking about celebrities. She was the only friend I had who liked bands like Led Zeppelin and the Dead Kennedys. Thinking back, I doubt she ever had the same affection I held for Top 40, except maybe The Eurythmics and R.E.M. I don’t remember what we were listening to when it was decided that we would brand ourselves, burn symbols into our flesh to hold us over until we could get tattoos. 

We heated up a dangling earring shaped like a flat spiral with a Bic lighter and laid it on the skin of her ankle. It looked pretty cool, but I wanted mine deeper. I was completely committed. I unbent a paper clip into an L shape and heated the inch-long short portion until it was searing hot, and then I pressed it deliberately, confidently into the skin on the outside of my leg at the knee. I did this again and again, six times total, until I had formed a crooked arrow pointing downward. And I loved it. All of it. The shape, the red welts that formed scabs, the sizzle sound when the metal hit my skin. I loved that flash of orange and white pain jolting me like a lightning bolt as it marked the formal surface of myself. A single message ran along my nervous system to say you are here, you will always be here. I got the message and never put another intentional burn on myself ever again. 

I knew this was not what Samantha Fox meant when she talked about feeling herself, but dissociated children grow into adolescents who can’t feel anything, much less themselves. The crooked arrow meant something to me. It was mine. A controlled burn. A decision I made. A claim to someone I would someday become. It was my own grounding ritual, pointing toward the soil of the earth, toward the center of gravity. If the future was going to be as pointless and painful as it seemed to insist it would be, I declined. That’s all. I just declined to do it. I would find my own way, or I wouldn’t, and that crooked arrow marked the moment I said: so be it.