I understand: It’s human instinct to put yourself at the heart of a disaster. Not even for attention, but because it feels true. Someone who was supposed to fly the day after 9/11 was, in the retelling, supposed to fly that very day. He was on his way to the airport, in fact. He was in the airport. He’s not claiming he was booked on one of those flights, nothing like that, he just moves himself a few steps closer to the departure gate.
For some reason, though, with Thalia, I’d had the opposite instinct at the time.
Fran was right: I’d been spiraling all of senior year, but Thalia’s death affected me more than I’d ever admitted. That spring was when the water really got down to the drain.
My depression, my insomnia, my self-destructive behavior continued into freshman year of college, and it took ten visits to the free school therapist for Thalia to even come up. (In my defense: There were the dead dad, dead brother, mom in the desert, Mormon foster family to get through first.) I raised it in passing—my junior year roommate was murdered my senior year of high school—and the shrink latched onto it like a bone. He wanted to know what it had brought up from my past, how it had contributed to my distrust of men, why I wasn’t letting myself grieve.
I said, “We weren’t even friends,” and he asked me if that mattered. Yes, yes, I told him, it did.
I tossed my sheet mask in the vague direction of the trash and rubbed the remainder of the goo into my skin.
I kept scrolling:
Let’s not forget that Jerome Wager’s work is terrible + derivative. His Obama mural was racist AF. He’s just one of the many scum men who run the planet.
What @wilde_jazz has done is ferocious and brave. If you’ve been harmed by Jerome Wager, DM me. I will protect your anonymity.
Can someone explain to me how Jerome Wager still has a platform? He’s still on Twitter, and @CGRgallery has made NO statement denouncing his actions.
This doesn’t seem like abuse to me. It seems like a shitty relationship. Are we canceling people now for being bad at dating?
How on earth was his Obama mural racist?
It’s sad this has to be explained to you. Lording power over someone, even “soft power,” is structural imbalance. Abuse does not have to equal rape.
Still no statement from @msbodiekane. Hello, @starletpod?
Even if #JeromeWager faces repercussions, the damage is done. How many gallery shows should have gone to other people? How much money has he made wielding his power and keeping others down?
if you need to ask how that mural was racist you’re the problem.
We have ONE law in this country about the age of consent, and it’s the age of 18. Someone 18 can screw someone 100, and I’m sorry but it’s PERFECTLY LEGAL.
Actually some places it’s younger but this is not about the age of consent, you absolute dingbat.
I was angry—I was shaking—and I was certain now that my anger had less to do with loyalty to Jerome or concern over his reputation than with the stunning contrast between this easy online outrage and the outrage any one of us should have felt for years over people like you, people like Dorian.
It was like seeing someone hanged for stealing gum when down the street someone else was robbing a bank.
I shouldn’t have done anything. Sober, I wouldn’t have done anything. But I was not sober. I typed out a thread of messages with my pruning thumbs, posting each after a quick scan for drunken typos:
Has Jasmine Wilde even asked for repercussions? This is a work of art, not, as far as I know, a call to action. 1/
I’m no longer with Jerome Wager, but as a survivor of ACTUAL sexual assault, this all sits wrong with me. Age is not the only form of power. You could argue that working for the gallery, Jasmine had as much career power over him as he had over her. 2/
Are we talking here about the feminism of empowerment, or the feminism of victimhood? Either a 21-year-old woman is an adult who can make her own decisions or a helpless waif who needs our protection against big scary men. Which is it? It can’t be both. 3/
Are we saying a 21-year-old woman lacks sexual agency? Lacks the ability to make decisions about her own body? Whose permission does she need to date someone older? Her father’s? This is infantilizing. 4/
What age range WOULD be acceptable to all of you? Is five years older okay? Is one year older okay? One month? 5/
That said, Jasmine has created an evocative piece of art. Let’s leave it at that: art, not a call for a Twitter mob. 6/6
I stopped myself, because my blood pressure was only going up, and I hadn’t run any of this by Jerome and there were already replies coming in that I didn’t want to read. I managed not to slip on the floor, managed to make it to the bed.
31
I didn’t really sleep, just rested my body and fitfully sobered up.
Across the state, Omar was awake this whole night too; this is when he removed his own gauze and made his pillowcase into a kind of bandage, lying on his stomach so it would stay pressed to the wound. But soon the blood had soaked that through as well. His heart rate was elevating, and he thought he recognized the symptoms of shock, which was odd when he hadn’t been in shock that morning.
From this vantage point, I’d love to believe it was some psychic sympathy for Omar’s pain that kept me up—but in fact it was largely the stupid fact that my thighs still itched, which made me think of bedbugs, which made me think of the time Thalia and I both got bedbugs and dealt with it on our own, which made me think about how smack between childhood and adulthood we’d been.
Lance, my cohost, asked once if boarding school kids were more mature, living away from home. I said, “I doubt it,” and didn’t remind him that I’d essentially been on my own, at least emotionally, from age eleven.
Oddly, I remember the bedbug incident with relative fondness. I was grateful, for one, that Thalia didn’t blame me, didn’t assume the infestation couldn’t have started in her Ralph Lauren sheets and down pillows.
She sat up in bed one morning that winter and said, “What the fuck is this?” It occurred to me that it was the first time I’d heard her swear. She stuck a leg out toward me, long and tan in Robbie Serenho’s boxers; it was covered in red dots, streaked with blood.
I said, “Oh, I have that, too.” I’d been scratching at welts all week, unaware that they were in a different category than the other woes sabotaging my body—the acne, the cramps, the disobedient hair, the splitting fingernails.
She yelped and jumped out of bed, shook her comforter. She knew right away that it was bedbugs—Thalia seemed to possess boundless adult knowledge, things like how to steam clothes and how to fix our stubborn radiator—and we grabbed the bedding off both beds and ran to the laundry room at the end of the hall. She stuffed everything in the dryer and turned it on full blast, then looked down at her own tank top and boxers, at my flannel pajama bottoms and Lemonheads T-shirt, and said, “Clothes, too.”
I realize how like the start of a porno it sounds, two teenagers about to disrobe, but in reality it was embarrassing and hilarious and awful and utterly nonsexual. Plus—and I should not have to point this out—we were kids. Even Thalia, the supposed beauty of the year: She was gawky and boyish under her clothes, and I was thrilled, in that moment, to see her imperfections, or what I knew the world would perceive as imperfections—the streak of hair, for instance, above her navel, dark against her skin.
But also: She was too thin. I registered this even through my envy at her thinness; it was too much. Her ribs were more evident than her breasts. Undressing in our room, we’d always been modest. She went behind the open door of her closet, and I usually changed in a bathroom stall. But I understood in that moment that the rumors about the eating disorder were well-founded. She hadn’t been this skinny during tennis season. Her winter jeans and sweaters had hidden the slow emergence of bone.