Unspeakable

There was an interesting cross-blog discussion recently about the issue of self-censorship in blogland. One cool blog friend went so far as to take down her blog because she felt she wasn't being totally honest in it, so why bother? I miss her blog, but I admire and even envy the integrity of the move. When I started blogging I thought: wow, I can say anything, because nobody knows who I am anyway! But then you make cyberfriends. Cyberfriends you really like. And you want them to like you. So you start to issue press releases instead of genuine messages from the heart.

Tonight I make a move toward real honesty. I tell something really horrible about myself. In sophomore year of college I had two roommates. One was as lost and sad as I was, but with even bigger shames and secrets. One was a player, outrageously good looking and at ease, with more girlfriends than he could handle. Note that during this year I didn't just have acne, I had cystic acne, which means big red weeping golfballs under the skin, always where it counted most: nose, jaws, between the eyes. The good looking confident roommate (for whom I ghost-wrote a paper once in exchange for a few hits of windowpane acid) had two gerbils and a white rat named Henrietta. He'd go to classes with Henrietta on his shoulder. They were very close, my roommate and that rat. I tortured the rat and the gerbils. It was my revenge on my roommate for being good looking and getting laid all the time. I would poke the gerbils with sharpened pencils and once, or maybe more than once, I swung Henrietta around my head by the tail. The other roommate did these things too, but I wasn't a follower in this. I would get sexually turned on by torturing the animals. I'm sitting here thirty three years later trying to remember if one of the pets died from this. I think maybe yes, but that may just be guilt talking. I was never found out, though the other sad roommate and I used to talk freely about the fact that we were doing it. My only defense here is that it happened over three decades ago and I haven't done anything remotely like it since, or wanted to. But that doesn't change the fact that I did it. The good looking roommate is now a big deal real estate guy in Manhattan. We had lunch a few years ago and he seemed happy. He does, however, carry a certain amount of anger at me---because I talked him out of being pre-med. (I did this because he was miserable and hated and couldn't pass organic chemistry and didn't want to do it anymore. He didn't take much convincing.) He thinks he would have made a good doctor. The other sad roommate was a gifted pianist with hopes of a solo career but he would get extremely nervous playing for people, his hands would go all to spaghetti, and I may be the only person who knows that he really had a measure of genius. Now he teaches piano at a girl's school in Canada. He says that in twenty five years of teaching he has never had a talented pupil. And many years ago, while Richard Nixon was president, he and I tortured our roommate's pets.

Now: will I have the nerve to press "publish post"?