In her elementary school picture, 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson’s almond-shaped eyes sparkle. Black braids frame her full, smooth cheeks and her shy smile reveals the gaps where baby teeth used to be. Sherrice dreamed of being a nurse or a policewoman or a dancer when she grew up. But she never got the chance. On May 25, 1997, Sherrice’s body was found in the restroom of a casino arcade outside Las Vegas. Her feet were propped up in the toilet, her clothes removed and her neck snapped. A security worker and Sherrice’s father tried to resuscitate her, but she was already gone.
Jeremy Strohmeyer, now 20, is set to stand trial in Nevada for the murder, kidnapping and sexual assault of Sherrice Iverson. A suspect has been charged, a trial set, evidence collected. For Sherrice’s parents, the only thing left to do is wait and hope a jury convicts their daughter’s alleged killer.
But Yolanda Manuel and Leroy Iverson are not satisfied with just waiting. That’s because David Cash is a free man. Cash, who was with Strohmeyer the night of Sherrice’s murder, didn’t stop his friend from assaulting Sherrice and he didn’t go for help. Instead, he walked away, only to meet up with Strohmeyer later and listen to his confession. Now he is a sophomore studying nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.
On Wednesday, Manuel and upwards of 100 protesters rallied on the Berkeley campus in an effort to get Cash expelled from the school. In her mind, he helped kill her child and should not be allowed to walk free.
“I don’t have my child with me no more,” said Manuel, her voice angry and clear. “At this point I’m going after David Cash because he was in the bathroom at the time and he didn’t do nothing about it. I’m very outraged about this. He is an accomplice to the murder.”
But technically, Cash has not committed a crime. That’s because Nevada — like California — doesn’t have a Good Samaritan law, meaning citizens are not required to stop a crime in progress or report it to police. Prosecutors in the case say they believe there is insufficient evidence to charge Cash as an accessory.
According to Cash’s grand jury testimony, sometime late that night Sherrice and 18-year-old Strohmeyer began throwing wet paper towels at each other and running around the arcade. Cash followed the two into the ladies’ restroom and looked over the stall door as Strohmeyer allegedly threatened the girl’s life and covered her mouth to stifle her screams. Then Cash walked out. He claims he thought Strohmeyer was only trying to scare the girl.
As the teenagers went to meet Cash’s father, David Cash Sr., Cash said Strohmeyer told him he had sexually assaulted and then strangled Sherrice. The boys kept silent until news reports and security video from the casino surfaced almost four days later. Strohmeyer made a confession to police, but has since pleaded innocent and has tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the confession out of court. Strohmeyer could face execution if convicted.
Since the tragedy, Manuel has enlisted the help of Los Angeles Islamic community leader Najee Ali. Together they have rallied community and religious groups as diverse as the NAACP and the Jewish Defense League, as well as a Los Angeles radio station, KLSX-FM. In a controversial interview on the station’s Conway-Steckler show, Cash showed little remorse for not taking action the night Sherrice was killed. “The simple fact remains that I do not know this little girl,” he said. “I do not know starving children in Panama. I do not know people that die of disease in Egypt. [I feel sad only] that I lost a best friend.”
It was Cash’s callousness that prompted radio hosts Tim Conway Jr. and Doug Steckler to organize the rally at Berkeley.
“You don’t have to know a child or a human being to save their life,” Manuel said. “Get yourself together, David Cash, because you know you’re wrong. You don’t have no remorse for me or my family. I have people from all over the world calling and crying with me over the telephone, David, and you haven’t called, your parents haven’t even called.”
Cash’s parents, a loan officer and an office worker living in La Palma, Calif., have been silent about the call for their son’s expulsion. Los Angeles attorney Mark Werksman, who represents Cash, declined to talk to Salon about the protest or the case, as did Cash. “He’s said enough,” Werksman said.
Several other comments Cash made to the media have enraged Manuel and her supporters, and also drawn public criticism. Cash was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that the notoriety of the case made it easier for him to meet women. He was also quoted in the Long Beach Press-Telegram as saying he planned to “get money out of this.” He has since denied making both statements.
A crowd, including 45 people who took a bus from Los Angeles, thronged the steps of Sproul Plaza — the site of many student protests over the years — with signs telling Cash to “go home.” Students who passed by the rally expressed various kinds of concern: discomfort at sharing dorms and a campus with Cash, disappointment with Chancellor Robert Berdahl, who has said he cannot dismiss Cash because the student has committed no crime. Some students felt the campaign against Cash was “not fair,” since the incident occurred after he was admitted.
“Berkeley has a choice about who they accept as students, and they try to screen them really well,” said Tina Rouvatis, a junior majoring in English. “In this case, they made a mistake, and now he needs to get out of here.
He needs to be held responsible,” she continued, “otherwise he’ll never be an adult. Somebody’s got to take the first step and it should be Berkeley.”
On Wednesday, Manuel, a tired-looking, small-framed woman, addressed Cash directly, even though he was not physically present. “I’m not going to give up on you, David,” she said. “I’m still crying, but I told David that I’m not going to cry no more, because he’s going to be the next to cry.”
Surrounded by boom mikes, video cameras and at least 20 reporters, Manuel softened to receive hugs and words of support from those who had come to pay their respects to a bereaved mother. Many brought their children with them.
In addition to the protest, Manuel and her supporters have circulated a petition to put Good Samaritan laws on the books in Nevada and California. So far, 20,000 people have signed the petition. Meanwhile, Iverson has filed suit against the Primm Valley Hotel where the incident occurred, claiming that it falsely advertised itself as a family-oriented establishment and then failed to provide a safe environment.
Manuel’s protest has left many students, faculty and staff at the school questioning whether Berkeley can or should take action against a student for conduct that is not illegal, but which many consider to be immoral.
Barbara Cowell, a freshman majoring in art and math, has signed the petition favoring Good Samaritan laws but doesn’t believe Cash should be expelled. “I signed the petition because I think we should change the law,” she said, “but I don’t think David Cash should be expelled from this school, because he did not break the law.” Cowell said she doesn’t want to go to school with Cash and wouldn’t talk to him, but “he was already admitted. You can’t say, ‘Oh, well, we found out that you’re not as moral as we thought you were. We don’t want you to come anymore.’ That’s not fair for students in general and at this school. There are going to be bad people everywhere.”
Because Strohmeyer and Cash are white, and the victim and her family black, many people in the crowd suggested that the race of the boys has protected them. But Manuel vehemently denies that this is a racial issue.
“I feel really awful for [Manuel],” said Donna Weir, a graduate student and instructor in English, who has two children and a 7-year-old niece. “I’m appalled and I don’t think this student should be at Cal. If we can expel people for plagiarism, we should be able to expel someone, who as far as I’m concerned, was an accomplice to a murder.”
He’s a dedicated barfly and a natural-born ham, the unabashed queen of
debauchery. Buddy Cole, who made his debut telling tall tales from a bar stool
on the Canadian sketch comedy TV series “The Kids in the Hall,” is the
creation of Scott Thompson, one of the Kids’ founders and the
only openly gay member of the troupe. Two years after the Kids
split up, Thompson is keeping Buddy alive with a continentwide
comedy tour and a new memoir titled “Buddy Babylon: The
Autobiography of Buddy Cole,” a novel’s
worth of material that Thompson and collaborator Paul Bellini
wrote for the character. The story is a classic rags-to-riches tale
– Buddy moves from his childhood home on a northern Quebec
pig farm to the fast-paced urban party scene, touching glitter and
glam, copping a feel where he can and experiencing many a night
he barely remembers on the way to momentary stardom. Like
the show from which it sprang, Buddy’s story is full of flaming
silliness and caustic intelligence, as well as deliciously random humor.
In their heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Kids in the Hall
took cross-dressing comedy over the threshold of camp into a truly original
comedic art form. It was easy to forget that none of the five Kids was a
woman. Besides Buddy, Thompson contributed a giddy portrayal of Queen
Elizabeth (to whom he bears a stunning likeness) to the group’s repertoire.
In his post-Kids life, Thompson is best known as Brian, Hank Kingsley’s gay
personal assistant, on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” Salon recently spoke
with Thompson about his stand-up comedy tour, his opinion of a certain gay
sitcom star and the repressed culture that resists Buddy Cole’s
alcohol-soaked wisdom.
You were just in Texas, right? What was that like?
Well, I’ll tell you, that was an education. Houston was very good. San
Antonio was good and bad. I had some great shows; I had some other shows
where half the audience walked out. But my retort to San Antonio was,
“Jeez, it’s as if they’ve never seen a feminine blond boy before, which
means they must never have seen ‘Titanic.’”
It’s interesting to go back into the hinterlands. You realize people
are different. It’s not like the coast. But that’s fine for me. I have a
real warrior mentality. I like to do battle. I like a challenge.
Of all the characters you’ve developed, why have you decided to take
Buddy Cole on the road?
Well, I’m promoting my novel. That serves that purpose. The other thing
is, Buddy Cole had an enormous amount of material that I’d already written
for him, and I’ve continued to write for him ever since the show ended. And
he’s the one character I do that is not just a character, he’s also a
person who’s very self-reflective and he has pretty much an opinion on
everything. So it allows me to range far and wide over the state of the
world. He allows me to say things that other characters are not allowed
to, and he allows me to wade into areas of taboo and somehow
get away with it. You know, some of the things I’m most fascinated by are
things that people can’t really talk about openly, like race and
self-loathing among gay men and sexuality. And I get to be a queen, and
that’s a big relief.
A big relief from what?
Well, it’s a big relief to let all of your feminine qualities reign; it
really is a release. Oddly enough, of all the characters I did in “The Kids
in the Hall,” the most feminine character was a man. Buddy Cole allows me to
access that queen in me. As gay culture has ascended, there’s been this
attempt to masculinize gay men, which I think is quite silly and very
wrong-minded, and I’m hoping that Buddy Cole can slap a little sense into
people. You know, I’d be slapping them with a handbag! But, I mean, come
on — the sissy is the truth. The muscle queen is not. That is a false
construct held up by wires, strings, steroids and the gym. It’s
not real. And if gay men aren’t going to accept the sissy, then they’re
doomed.
How have your characters changed as you’ve gone from a Canadian TV
show to a major motion picture to solo TV gigs?
It’s very difficult to create characters on your own. One of the
greatest things about Kids in the Hall was it was a laboratory. We were
together for 11 years. You had four other people who were constantly
pushing you to go deeper and to be better and constantly criticizing you,
and that’s a very healthy thing in art. So for me it’s been very difficult
to continue to create new characters without the boys. I have created some
new characters, but most of them have just been my older characters. I’m
extending their lives. Because I always intend for my
characters to be with me for life.
The standards in America and the standards in Canada are different.
Canada is more repressed but, oddly, more tolerant. America is a country
that’s got a bit of an identity crisis. America, I think, fancies itself
as a man, a big butch man — Charlton Heston holding a gun for the NRA.
Our [Canada's] symbol is a Mountie, which is a male figure, but it’s a
person without a gun who basically wants to talk to people. Our country
wasn’t
settled by a gunslinger, it was settled by a cop. So Canadians have a very
natural, inbred adherence to authority which in some ways is very analogous
to England, and that totally affects our comic way of looking at the world.
America now is in a place where you have the right to kill people, the
right to fuck your brother’s sister, the right to be 800 pounds, the right
to swear at clerks.
Where I come from, you don’t. There’s much more of a
sense of the body politic. I think in America now this individualism
has gotten out of control. I think it’s a misnomer to think that freedom
is an absolute; it is not. If you want 100 percent freedom, then go live in
the hills with the militia freaks. Because civilization is not about that.
We have such a reluctance to judge people [in America], and I’m a
satirist and that’s what satirists do — they judge. And that’s why I
think our movie ["Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy"] bombed — it was out
and out satire, and America’s more into parody, which is, to me, sort of
the inbred cousin of satire.
I wonder what Jonathan Swift would say about that.
Oh! You’ve said the right word! I want “Buddy Babylon” to be compared
to Swift. All I’m looking for in a review is one word: Swiftian. Then I
will be so happy. That is a very big model for me. The book is a
picaresque kind of journey. I’m not saying it’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” but
there are certain elements of it that are analogous. I mean, when Jonathan
Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” about eating the Irish, people wanted to
kill him, because people didn’t understand. In my career, people have
wanted to hurt me and hold me down because they mistake content for intent.
And you just have to ignore it.
Looking back now on the Kids, how does it fit into the comic
landscape of other shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “In Living Color,”
“Mad TV”?
I think of it as music — “The Kids in the Hall” was Sonic Youth. We sort
of affected the whole scene, but we never got the kind of attention of a
Nirvana. I think people came along and took our ideas and became bigger
with them. But I think we laid a lot of those seeds.
How would you compare the gay comedy of “Ellen” to Buddy
Cole?
Oh. OK. I get in a lot of trouble over this.
That’s good. Trouble’s good.
Yeah, trouble’s good. Trouble, trouble, trouble in River City! Buddy
Cole’s comedy is not driven by an agenda. It’s not activism, it’s comedy.
Buddy Cole, number one, is about the joke. “Ellen” became about
empowerment. And the only empowerment in Buddy Cole is the empowerment of
talent and the empowerment of a great story. You look at Buddy Cole and
he’s not what you would call a paragon of virtue. Buddy Cole is not
somebody you hold up and say, “This is what we should all be.” I didn’t
create Buddy Cole or any of my work to make people feel better about being
gay.
He’s just sort of stumbling through it in a haze.
Absolutely. He’s human. If there is empowerment, it comes through
laughter. I think I have a good metaphor: My work turns over the rock and
looks at the worms and the maggots underneath. Ellen’s [DeGeneres] show
turned over the rock and pretended there were candies underneath. A lot of
that kind of work, to me, ignores the ugliness. I’m sort of a pariah
because I try to tell the truth, and historically, people aren’t always
really interested in the truth. Not to shit on Ellen. I think she’s
hilarious. But I really do think the show got caught up in activism and
became hijacked by those — I don’t even know how to describe those people
– by the fascists.
Who are you talking about?
GLAAD [The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation].
They so wanted a leader that they picked her, do you think?
She didn’t have the chops. Ellen was a physical comedian. I saw her
live before, she reduced me to helpless laughter, but at the end of the
show, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about her. That’s fine.
Everybody has their own muse to serve. And I think it was ill-advised for
her to try to serve this muse. Her muse is Lucy, not Lenny Bruce.
Who’s your muse?
My muse would be Lenny Bruce — and Lucy. I look at things sometimes
and I go, “That’s ugly,” and I just have to say it. Whereas, I think other
people will stop themselves because they think it will hurt the cause. My
cause is me. My cause is comedy. It makes me sound really selfish, but
artists are selfish by nature. Art is selfish, it is dictatorial. It is
not politically correct. It is not inclusive. It is not democratic. Art
is a bitch riding a horse all night and then putting her away wet. That’s
the beauty and the ugliness of it. You have to accept that when you do it,
you’re going to be misunderstood.
Eleven little girls in two straight lines, led by a nun in a well-tailored habit, enter the hallways of the Hopital Saint Vincent, bearing sunflowers. Dressed in blue coats, white collars and white gloves, they greet their friend — the smallest of the group — as she lies in bed recovering from an appendectomy. First she feigns agony, then leaps from the bed to proudly shock them with her scar.
This is the spirit of Madeline, the round-faced, redheaded cabotine who has leaped off the pages of Ludwig Bemelmans’ children’s books for three generations. She leaps just as vividly off the screen in the form of 9-year-old Hatty Jones. Innocently curious, with a knack for sniffing out unseemly doings, Jones’ Madeline trusts her instincts, defends her compassion and smiles a great deal.
Bemelmans’ stories were set in late 1930s Paris, but for design purposes — and for the larger issue of avoiding the complications of World War II — the producers and director Daisy von Scherler Mayer (“Party Girl”) set the film in the mid-1950s. (Too bad; I’d have loved to see Gertrude Stein driving an ambulance past the girls on their morning outing.) The filmmakers have also turned Madeline’s school into an English-speaking one (and though the accents seem to come and go, most of the actors are indeed English). The greatest liberty taken here, however, is the decision to make Madeline an orphan, which is the way some readers prefer to interpret Madeline’s situation, but which was not Bemelmans’ intent, according to quotes given to Vanity Fair by members of the author’s family.
Unlike Little Orphan Annie or Shirley Temple’s character in “The Little Princess,” Madeline isn’t waiting for her parents to come and save her — Madeline saves herself. She has a remarkable self-sufficiency and a grounded, realistic point of view. After the school’s benefactress dies, her husband, Lord Covington (aka Cucuface), decides that the girls “lack discipline,” and that he’ll no longer indulge the school. That leaves no place at all for Madeline, and we know she isn’t going to give up without a fight.
The movie doesn’t offer much in the way of unexpected plot twists, but, then again, we don’t read the six Madeline books over and over again in search of the unexpected. The stories all begin with the same vivid, rhyming description of a house in Paris covered with vines; Bemelmans created a nurturing, regimented world, filled with romantic depictions of everyday life. In the film version, there is, of course, a boy nemesis next door and a snotty, boy-crazy girl, but she and Madeline tolerate each other rather than spar. I saw the movie with an audience made up mostly of children, but they did not respond to some of the bucket-on-the-head sight gags and stupid-adult jokes that were thrown in to pump up the action; they cheered at the film’s end, though.
The fact that “Madeline” was shot in Paris is as good a reason as any for adults to see it. It’s a well-manicured film with brilliant colors and shots of the Eiffel Tower, the Sacre Coeur and the Champs Ilysies. French actress Chantal Neuwirth (“The Double Life of Veronique”) as Helene the Cook is the film’s great treat for grown-ups. Her role allows her wildness and color, with lines like, “I was in love with a carnival man once … He had a tattoo,” that leave the girls wide-eyed in their tidy gloves and hats. I’m not sure if the PG rating comes from Helene’s little moments, or for the momentary glimpse of butt-slapping carnies, or for when Madeline wrestles the Spanish ambassador’s son to the ground for almost harming an innocent mouse. In any case, parents needn’t be concerned about bringing small children — the film is safe for kids, without condescending to them.
Yes, there is a guardian watching over this slumber party. School headmistress Miss Clavel, played by Frances McDormand (“Fargo”), is the barometer of the girls’ well-being — whenever there’s trouble in the middle of the night, she sits up in bed and announces with her index finger in the air, “Something is not right.” Miss Clavel is not stern, but she is reserved. She’s of the “What punishment do you suggest for yourself?” school of discipline, which works fine, since the greatest mischief the girls get into is jumping on their beds. And when things seem to be falling apart, she insists on “maintaining composure.” Miss Clavel’s emotional restraint is evident in the book, but it’s even more pronounced in McDormand’s portrayal. The maternal presence that’s standard in most kids’ movies is quite muted in “Madeline,” and the girls don’t seem to miss it.
At first I didn’t know what to make of Jones’ Madeline. She’s so angelic; I wanted her to be a little more wicked. Yet Jones possesses Madeline’s principle charm — her innocence — and plays her with the effortless sophistication that only a 9-year-old girl, it seems, can have. This Madeline is an original child movie heroine. She doesn’t need to be the leader. In fact, she fits quite naturally into the back of the two straight lines of girls. “Madeline” is the rare children’s film that doesn’t make one character “special” at the expense of the others, one that allows for tight social bonds instead of antisocial egotism.
Madeline’s strength lies in her perceptiveness, courage and the way she sticks to her principles. “Don’t judge people so quickly,” Miss Clavel tells Madeline, to which she responds, “Maybe I just understood him quickly.” She turns a refusal to eat a chicken into a dinner-table debate about vegetarianism. Madeline faces what she fears, be it the tiger in the zoo or the greedy villain who wants to turn her out into the street. She knows her home is paradise, and she is determined to save it, or to find another before it falls apart. “You can’t make something happen just by wishing for it,” she says to Miss Clavel. She also makes the lonely boy next door her ally by making him believe in himself, passing along her mantra: “I can do anything.”
These might sound like distinctly ’90s notions, but I swear, Madeline’s elegance and forthright strength are right there in Bemelmans’ primary-color sketches. She is worlds away from the wounds of modern girlhood. The principles and routine of Miss Clavel’s school are a comfort to which consumer placations cannot compare. While the film does justice to the spirit of the books, in the end, it’s Madeline herself who will remain far more memorable.
One windy afternoon I sat on a bench behind my high school and watched kids playing soccer in the yellow grass. I was 15. My head was clouded with anger at everyone around me. The targets kept shifting from my family, which was actually stable and supportive, to my friends, who were dealing with their own personal and academic problems, to the pretension and hypocrisies of my Southern prep school. None of these things on its own was particularly remarkable, but that didn’t keep them from being any less intense. One moment I was furious at these people, the next desperate to protect them from my illogical rage.
I was sick to death of my feelings, but I did not want to die. (Deep down, I knew if I could just graduate from high school, everything would be all right.) I pulled a box of matches out of my bag and set a binder up over my knees to shield me from the wind. One by one, I lit each match and extinguished it on a patch of skin in the crook of my right elbow. With each match in hand, I mustered the nerve to ignore my instincts and hit the already-pink, stinging spot, feeling the pain wash through and fade out again in a finite wave. When the box was empty, I was calm. Endorphins pumping through my body made me feel more awake. I stopped needing to cry.
Years later, that patch of skin is healed into a slightly bumpy oval a shade lighter than the rest of my arm. It looks something like a track mark, and thus still occasionally elicits surprised revulsion. I have other little pale marks on my wrists and arms and thighs, standard spots self-mutilators choose, as they are sensitive and easy to hide. But that’s all that’s left of those impulses. I have two college degrees, a terrific job and lots of friends. I have a great relationship with my family and big plans for my future.
Steven Levenkron’s “Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation” lacks any uplifting story of resolution such as this. Rather than following a set of patients through life’s trials to a promising future, Levenkron ends most of the case histories after the first few sessions, with a brief account of how long it took to elicit a thorough confession. Like most pop psychology books, “Cutting” begins with widely applicable insights that read something like a horoscope for teenagers: The self-mutilator feels misunderstood, lacks self-esteem, does not possess the maturity required to express her feelings, is likely to have experienced physical or mental abuse. But by Chapter 3, the sensitive healing language that marks pop psychology vanishes into a clinical explanation of the complex emotional machinations behind the behavior.
The book does not sentimentalize or dramatize self-mutilation in the way most media treat teenage problems. Levenkron, a psychotherapist in New York, estimates that about one in every 250 girls is a self-mutilator, roughly the same percentage as those who suffer anorexia, which is Levenkron’s other area of expertise. He mercifully avoids waving red-flag words like “addiction” and “suicide,” stressing instead “removing the drama and replacing isolation with sharing.” Levenkron’s calm tone throughout the book portrays a professional disposition that seems to answer his personal call to compassion with level-headed action and listening.
Unlike Mary Pipher’s popular “Reviving Ophelia,” which spoke to the average Middle American parents, “Cutting” mainly targets therapists, a group that, according to Levenkron, is still unfamiliar with ways of dealing with the phenomenon. While Levenkron explains the various terms — dissociative, symptomatic, disorder, etc. — as clearly as possible, one can practically hear the frightened mother worried about the cuts on her daughter’s arms screaming at his picture on the book jacket, “But what do I do?”
Self-mutilation was common at my high school; we called it “masochism” and among our circle of masochists we allowed for certain exhibitions. During geometry class, we’d have contests to see who could endure rubbing an eraser across their skin the longest. In a competitive environment, the most screwed-up person was the one who got the most credibility. Yet outside of our circle, we hid the marks on our bodies with long sleeves and lied about their causes. I was ashamed because the effects of my venting were sickening to look at. My pain was self-inflicted, an outward proof of my illogical feelings. There seemed to be no reasonable justification for my emotional turbulence, or for my way of dealing with it.
- – - – - – - – - -
Most of my friends and I were on the mild end of the spectrum. “Cutting” tells many stories of extreme cases — where victims of incest and other physical abuse attempt to use self-mutilation as a means of treating their problems. Over time, this strategy only makes things worse. The behavior collapses into a full-blown dissociative disorder and the victims lose contact with reality. They fall into trances or periods of amnesia in which they inflict physical harm on themselves without consciously knowing what they’re doing. Over time, these flights of amnesia can evolve into permanent psychosis.
Levenkron explains that for kids who have suffered mental or physical abuse by parents and caretakers, pain is fused with their sense of security. Children are unable to judge their parents, he says, and even an abusive parent is better in a child’s mind than none. To decide that mom or dad is a bad mom or dad would cause a separation anxiety much more unbearable than any harm that parent might inflict. So to cope with what feels like inexpressible “crazy” pain, they invite physical pain. They take out on themselves the anger they are afraid to take out on other people. (This introversion of anger probably accounts for the fact that the overwhelming majority of cutters are female; male depression usually expresses itself as outward rage.) It falls along the same logic as chopping off your arm to take your mind off your headache.
Cutters respond to the visual stimulus of seeing their own blood flow. They describe a sense of calm and of being grounded back to reality, since the physical pain is finite and reminds them of their physical reality. Pain is often a kind of self-medication because of the endorphins released in the brain. In essence, it’s a quick fix that does mental and physical harm and not much good. Self-mutilation ultimately causes shame, which further hinders girls from expressing their feelings.
Levenkron’s conclusion is obvious enough: Self-mutilators need to go into therapy (“twice a week, outpatient”). They need to develop trusting relationships with people who can handle their problems. In many of the cases he discusses, therapy is that much more vital because abuse by the parents is the origin of the children’s problems. Once we accept this solution, the fact that the book doesn’t specifically target an audience of parents seems less troubling. Perhaps psychotherapists need to be reached before the parents of self-mutilators can be.
My mother caught a glimpse of the gruesome red patch on my arm one day. When she asked me what it was, I nervously made up a story about a freak curling iron accident. Nearly sick, she nodded and let the issue drop. Later, she gathered up her strength to tell me I could either go to a hospital or private school, but that we couldn’t afford both. This was exactly the jolt of reality I needed. I never discussed the burning with my therapists except briefly, in the past tense, mainly because it felt like a symptom rather than a central problem. Also, I was embarrassed about it, and I didn’t think even a therapist could have understood. To protect herself from liability, she probably would have tried to send me to a hospital, which I didn’t need.
According to Levenkron, I was probably right. +In case history after case history in “Cutting,” his patients tell him they have been “too much” for their previous therapists. Even within the psychological community, self-mutilators are considered “sick cookies.” A therapist needs a small amount of medical knowledge (about as much as is contained in the Boy Scout manual) to inspect the wounds for severity and medical attention. Most shrinks, Levenkron says, would rather have patients who “free-associate about their childhoods.” If this is the case, “Cutting” is an important pop textbook written for an audience of professionals with a lot left to learn.
I was nervous about my stay in Rome. I was to share an apartment for one month in the summertime with 14 other American students in an old palazzo between the Vatican and the Pantheon. The litany of horror stories I’d heard leading up to my departure had created a little film clip of nightmares running through my head: from being relentlessly hounded in the markets to being cornered in an alley, from being groped on a train to being raped in the street. I have problems from time to time in my hometown of Seattle — being followed, propositioned and yelled at, no matter what I happen to be wearing — so I dreaded what it would be like in Italy. But I figured it was the chance of a lifetime, so I braced myself for the hassles.
Then I talked with a French friend who’d spent two years in Italy. She was baffled by my fear. “Yes, they’ll come up and talk to you,” Marie said.
“They’re forward?” I asked.
“They are very friendly,” she said, “and so attractive!” She shook her hand back and forth, in a French gesture for “woowee.” “You will wish they were interested, but they are only making friends.”
By the time I arrived, I didn’t know what to expect, and at first I was more concerned with surviving the hustling cab drivers at the Stazione Termini and the frantic traffic as I crossed the street. But before long I came to appreciate the distinctive Roman style Marie had admired: the slick, dark hair and olive skin, the loose, energetic gait of the men in stylish suits or tight jeans, sandals and sunglasses. As it turned out, these men were forward, but for the most part far from threatening. And their honesty won them points right away.
“You will sleep with me tonight!” said a member of the Italian navy to my friend Becka after they’d been chatting for a few minutes on the Spanish Steps. “No, no, I have a boyfriend,” she replied. “Yes, yes! You will sleep with me tonight!”
The propositions, the whistles, the strange clicking sounds the Roman men made became a fascinating topic of conversation. We looked at their behavior with anthropological curiosity as we read D.H. Lawrence’s description of the “phallic culture” of the Etruscans. These exchanges were part of a larger social flamboyance that is as quintessentially Roman as peeling stucco, coffee bars and cobblestone. Rome is like a giant carnival stage, where people speak as much with their gestures as with those words we could barely understand. We watched from our deck and from the crowded streets the old ladies, the richly suited men on fancy Vespas, the punk rockers, the teenage couples making out passionately for all the world to see.
And we realized that bodies take up a different kind of space in Italy — public space. The Italians bump into each other, slide by each other in a crowd, kiss and hug, ride on the backs of each other’s mopeds. Bodies are exposed, especially in the July heat that makes even a tank top feel heavy. Bodies surround one another, old and young; they knock into one another, and they mean no harm. Exposed penises and breasts delicately carved in marble line buildings like the Palazzo Spada, a two-minute walk from our place. They are whole, and revered, a welcome contrast from the disembodied parts splashed on billboards. Even the body of the Virgin Mary, the patron goddess of Rome, is corporeal, represented in infinitely different ways, from ample breasts and round face to the slender hips of a young girl.
“Bella ragazza,” a man in white jeans said one day as I walked
down a narrow, shop-lined street. “Ve-ry beau-ti-ful,” he said again,
looking at my body through the blue cotton dress and then at my face with
a smile. I may not be interested in what he’s interested in, I thought,
but how could I not smile back at such a compliment?
I felt as though my
body were being appreciated rather than attacked. I began to wear the
short spaghetti strap dress I had, and the nearly see-through sheer skirt,
not just for the pleasure of the warm wind and sunshine touching my skin –
I also anticipated with a little girlish pride the looks and occasional
comments I would receive.
What was happening? Was my feminist stamina lapsing? Where was
the icy don’t-fuck-with-me face, the bitterness of my Seattle pedestrian
days? It just wasn’t the same. Some of these guys might be lecherous, but
they weren’t aggressive. For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt
safe enough to stop worrying about it. Even when the overall-clad
man in the Campo dei Fiori market pinched my ass, my first thought was
simply, “Oh yeah, that’ll win me over, big boy.” His gesture was silly,
neither flattering nor threatening. I rolled my eyes and off he went.
Had
I treated the place like an amusement park, as some of my young
countrywomen did, I could have gotten into trouble. But I found that I
could be aware of my surroundings without holding onto my fear.
And by losing that fear, I could be pleasantly surprised by this other
system of social behavior. In that month I had more genuine interchanges
with Italian men, using the few words I knew of their language or their
few words of mine, in bars and shops and out under that bright sun than I
have in a year with unknown American men.
Now that I’m back on the streets of Seattle, some of the shields are up again,
because the fun is gone. “Hey, baby,” doesn’t have quite the same ring as
“Ciao, bella,” for starters. But there’s also an anger behind the eyes of
the men here, a barely concealed resentment. Catcalls here don’t mean the
same thing. Those Campo boys would never shout “bitch,” either. The old
feminist refrain comes back to me: It’s not about sex; it’s about power.
I’m sick of that refrain; I’d rather understand what’s
driving the behavior. But seeing one’s own culture is always more
difficult. For now, I simply content myself with the knowledge that it
isn’t like this everywhere.
