The Boys Are Chasing Me
If you've ever been called BOY CRAZY, this one's for you.
My whole life spent running from boys. First imaginary, squealing with excitement as I pretended to be pursued by them while blasting Beethoven’s Fifth as a little girl. “The boys are chasing me!” I screamed with delight and terror while running down the creaky wood-floored hallways of our Victorian home in full princess get-up.
Then came real boys, who showed me their penises and tried to kiss me on the playground. The boys who wanted to play doctor. Who teased me till I cried. The one who called and sang Michael Jackson songs to me while my parents listened in on the landline. The man in the street who gave me the sparkly green Schwinn with a banana seat that I was too little to ride, just because I said I liked it. The doctor who asked if my bottom was as pretty as my top. The photographer who offered to pay me to masturbate while he watched. I was sixteen.
Ads on bus-stop enclosures I modeled for, stolen. Glass shattered in a mall window and nothing but a life-size cardboard cut-out of me taken from the store. A man that called my phone a hundred times a day and breathed heavily. Love letters and animal bones from “a secret admirer” in my various mailboxes. Every time I moved to another house or apartment, which was often, he found my new address. More bones, more letters. The men that frequented my various jobs at the mall, at the Wine Shop, coffee shops, Malt shop, the pub. All of them sitting in a booth or at the counter, casually pretending to write in their notebooks, ordering coffee, browsing a menu, but really, just an obvious excuse to stare.
The men who would get me alone in a room and start crying, sobbing, spittle flying from warped mouths. Hungry for my taste, saying they couldn’t stop thinking about me, jerking off to me, they loved me, they wanted and needed me. Men I barely knew, breaking down in terrifying ways while revealing their strange obsessions with me. But it wasn’t me, not really, only my face and body—an idea of me.
