STAND UP (OR
JAVELINAS, MY BELOVED)
CHARLOTTE ISENBERG
The first time I spoke openly about the abuse I experienced in my last relationship was in a stand-up comedy routine. I realized this a few weeks ago while regaling some friends with one of many stories that I had, up until that point, convinced myself were very funny.
I was going on about that time we were hiking deep in Sequoia when, just as the sun was setting, I caught a glimpse of something walking behind us. I stuck myself to his back, frantically whispering that I thought I saw one of the mountain lions the rangers had warned us about. I asked him to stay close so it wouldn’t pick me off. I had no idea if there was actually a mountain lion, but something about the unfathomable wildness of the Sierra Nevadas made me a believer in all things more ancient than myself. It was obvious in my voice that I was honestly, genuinely scared.
He perked up. Almost immediately, he began shoving me away from him, telling the maybe-lion to eat me. His yelling reverberated off the massive trees. When I kept clinging to him, he realized he could simply run away, and he did. I chased after, trying to hide my tears and embarrassment. Out in that wilderness, on the opposite side of the country from everything I knew, I felt completely alone.
I caught myself at that last part, watching the faces of my friends change from amusement to concern as they saw me remembering how terrified I had been in the moment. I scrambled to remember the funny parts. Instead, I remembered part of an essay I had just read for my Appalachian literature class. It was “Deciding to Live” by Dorothy Allison.
She’s talking about how she first scribbled out the horrible, true memories of her life, only to seal them up in favor of telling a sanitized, funny version to strangers for approval. In it, I found myself staring back at me: “I told myself the yellow pages were as raw and unworked as I felt myself to be, and the funny stories I was telling people were better, were the work of someone who was going to be a ‘real’ writer. It was three years before I pulled out those old yellow sheets and read them, and saw how thin and self-serving my funny stories had become”.
I thought about the stand-up and the stories at parties and the lines stretched thin. I thought about how the open mic went quiet when I delivered what I thought was a great punchline: our ages. When we started dating, I was newly fifteen, and he was twenty-one. Lol. Lmao.
In all of this, I began to wonder what it was doing to me and my understanding of what actually happened to tell this horrible abuse, over and over, as a big joke. Because it wasn’t really that funny, was it? To be riding through the middle of the New Mexico desert, well past midnight, with a man threatening to throw me out of his car for the toybox killer? Was it funny because he was laughing, or because I was crying?
I decided I didn’t want to tell that story anymore. I didn’t want to be a punchline, a perpetually mortified victim, or anything in between. I searched for a truer narrative.
Pretty often, especially towards the end of our relationship, I would find little ways to rebel against his casual cruelty. One day, I learned he hated javelinas. For the uninitiated, these are big, reeking pigs that roam the Great American West, throwing over trash cans and taking no prisoners. They are also known to gore stupid people with their tusks if provoked.
Having grown up in a wealthy suburb outside Tucson, in a town that should not exist on multiple fronts, he obviously felt the presence of this natural wildlife was offensive to his God-given right to live in a place his skin couldn’t stand the sun for ten minutes. In response, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of. I professed my love for javelinas, making Instagram fan cams and glorifying their fuckless rebellion. To me, they were a symbol of resilience, Indigeneity, and resistance.
I vividly recall one Christmas at his parents’ house when, after a long dinner, his little brother announced that there was a pack of javelinas in the neighbor’s yard. We all ran to look. I took a step past the threshold of the door, and all the men started yelling. I could see the sounder out in the dust, well away from me. It was a good-sized mother and her little babies. I had no intention of disturbing them or of hurting myself, but I stepped forward into the night just a bit, listening to my then-fiancé and his brothers yelling that I would get myself skewered. None of them reached out towards me.
In the cool air, I turned to them, my back to the pigs. I smiled, stuck my nose up with my finger, and snorted.