Beatdown
by Paul Neilan
November 14, 2006
I have never been overly aggressive or forceful with women. I'm not that guy who throws her on the kitchen table and rips open her blouse, popping all the buttons and ruining a perfectly good shirt. Or who fucks her up against the wall in a dark alley behind some Dumpster. I never wanted to be Mickey Rourke. I don't think he did either. It takes a willful suspension of absurdity to be that kind of man, to maintain that five-o'clock shadow, to buy that leather jacket, to put all that shit in your hair, to keep that toothpick in your mouth when all you really want to do is spit it out and buy a pack of grape Bubblicious and go watch cartoons.
Still, when it comes to sex there's always been the tacit understanding, or the pretense of the tacit understanding at least, that I'm in charge. That even if I'm not the guy in the back alley behind the Dumpster, I'm at least some guy. A guy at least.
Not with Gwen. She manhandled me.
It was always a blur of pain and fear and domination. I remembered it, and could only deal with it afterwards, as a collection of warped Polaroids stapled to the inside of my head:
Me flat on my back, my arms splayed out like I was being crucified, my legs kicking helplessly with her on top leaning over, crushing my biceps with her hands and screaming in my face.
Me on top of her, my back arched, my mouth wide open, my head almost snapping off at the neck because she was pulling my hair, while her other hand palmed my side with almost hydraulic pressure, collapsing my lung and squashing my spleen.
Me behind her but backed into the ornate wooden headboard of her bed, frantically trying to push her away as she slammed me against the wall with her ass.
Me on my back again, both my arms pinned above my head, her one hand vise-gripping both my wrists, her other hand flat on my chest, her fingers popping my ribs like bubble wrap.
Whatever position we were in, I was the one getting fucked. At first I tried exerting myself, gently, but firm enough to let her know that I could take over any time I wanted to. But then I felt the raw power, the machine-like force and resistance. It was unyielding. I would've had to push full out and strain with everything I had to overpower her, and even then I wasn't sure that I could. I didn't want to find out that I couldn't.
Not that she was a big girl or anything. She was about 5'7", medium frame, built like any twenty-five-year-old woman who keeps in shape. But she was fucking solid, and thick, without being broad or outwardly mannish. Her muscles must have been coiled tighter than a normal person's. Maybe they were more dense. There was something mutant about her. Because I don't go around getting out-muscled by girls. Not usually anyway. But with her there was nothing I could do. She was the sadistic older brother who holds you down and slaps your forehead over and over again, let's a string of spit fall until it almost hits your face and then slurps it up, over and over again. Only this older brother was fucking me. I'm telling mom.
I tried faking an orgasm but she either didn't notice or didn't care. I tried bucking her off but that only made it hurt worse. My bones were weak from the pounding. My pelvis was shattered. My whole body felt like early onset osteoporosis. I'd have to join a swimming pool therapy class and lift a beach ball over my head with the rest of the old ladies at the Y. Is calcium more potent if you snort it? I was brittle. I was a broken man.
And then, after it was over, after she was done kicking my naked ass until there was nothing left of it, she had the audacity to curl up on my dislocated shoulder, nestle her head underneath my fractured jaw and sigh and say, "Hold me. Hold me tighter."
"I can't. My arm is broken in three places."
"Ahh, that feels so good. To know you're there. It feels so safe."
This as I was openly weeping.
I lacked the strength to be incredulous, indignant, or even quietly sarcastic. It sounded like some cheap scam straight out of a trashy women's magazine. Some Please Your Man? Please Yourself! article on how to use basic psychology and transparent strategy to create the illusion of power in your relationship. There was a cute chess metaphor about queen taking king while leaving all the other pieces on the board, and some anecdotal scientific evidence about how men like to hunt and make fire, how women find shoes and lipstick empowering.
I knew that article. I knew that magazine. And I could tolerate its simple, harmless, vapid philosophy. With enough alcohol I could even participate in it for a few hours at a time. But Gwen was reading a different magazine. Once you can only get over the internet from shadow publishers in former Soviet Republics. One you have delivered to a PO box wrapped in brown paper and sealed in plastic. This article was not called Please Your Man? Please Yourself! It was called He Is Not Boss, He Is Bitch! And it read in rough translation:
Strip him down. Toss him like rag doll and beat him within inch of life. Beat him until humiliation hurt worse than pain. Maybe set him on fire and laugh. Then be kitten. Tell him he is boss, is brute man, so he will pay for jewelry and fur coats. Pay for trip to America to find old man husband who will die in sleep and leave you rich fortune.
Magazines make me sad.
"Ahhh, that was so good."
It was after sex again and my head was broken. I was definitely bleeding internally. I think my brain was injured. I was having trouble doing simple multiplication. That's the test I use to gauge head trauma whenever I'm really drunk or I fall down. I'd never had to do it after sex though. I though four times three was eight, and seven times five was two hundred. Fuck.
Gwen and I had been butting heads like rams. She'd lean over and bang! smack me right in the forehead, then rear back and do it again. She seemed to like it, but I was real dizzy. I was one of those rams that had no horns, a baby ram or a girl ram, so it was just my soft head getting bashed in. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing on that mountain anyway.
"Ow," I said, lightly running my fingers over my forehead, looking for the crack in my skull. You would think that after so many sex beatings I'd have been numb to the pain, that I was all scar tissue and fused bone and dead inside, but she always found a way to make it hurt like new.
She took a breath like she was about to say something, but then she didn't and I was glad. Then she did anyway.
"At first, I thought you were just using me," she said.
"I definitely am." I just wasn't sure for what.
"Asshole!" she said, and punched me in the side. And she laughed as my kidney began to hemorrhage.
That's the beauty of honesty. Everyone's so unused to hearing it they just assume you're kidding, and you get to feel very good and forthcoming without suffering any consequences except for traces of blood in your urine for the next day or two.
"No," she said, "I was afraid you were just using me to get a position," and she waited for me to catch on and chime in with something clever so we could be just like a witty couple on a sitcom. But I was too preoccupied with my internal injuries to play Smothers Brothers. I didn't need laughs. I needed a doctor.
"A job I mean," and she grinned, pleased with herself. "But you're not, are you."
"Ugh," I said, and I flinched as she moved towards me, bracing myself for more punishing sex. But she draped her arm over my chest instead.
"Even if you were, I'd help you," she whispered as I slipped into a coma.
"So?" she said, some time later.
"Huh?"
"Do you want me to talk to anybody for you?"
"Huh?"
"Haven't you been listening? At Panopticon. Do you want me to talk to anybody about you maybe getting a job."
"Huh?"
"You'd have to start out on the ground floor, maybe even as a temp. But you'd move up quickly. I know you would."
"What?"
"There's a lot of opportunity," she said, and raised herself up on one elbow. "So do you want me to talk to anyone for you?"
"At your insurance company?" She actually seemed serious. "No thanks, I'm all right."
She looked at me for a long time. Not long enough for me to turn my head and look at her, but still pretty long.
"You're so independent," she said.
It was nice of her to want to believe the best about me. People tend to do that with the strangers they're fucking. If she wanted to think that apathy and independence were the same thing, good for her. Maybe she was right.
And it was nice of her to want to help me out with a job, whatever her real motivations were. Apart from beating the shit out of me during sex she seemed like a nice person. But nice just isn't enough anymore. Everybody's nice, or they at least try to be, or pretend to be. You have to go to France or New York City to find a real asshole these days, and they're only doing it because people expect them to, like those monkeys at the zoo who throw their shit at visitors through the bars. It's more reputation than a real desire to smear feces all over somebody. And that's just sad.
"What are you thinking?" Gwen said.
I pretended to be asleep. n°
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