M.A.S.H. by Sarah Gerard

When I was thirteen, I began flirting with a man who worked for my father. I also worked for my father, after school. His advertising agency was a mile from my bus stop. It was a mile further to my house, walking in the Florida heat or rain, elongated by the weight of my backpack and my day. The relative nearness yet remoteness of my destination compounded my teenage irritation at my father’s refusal to leave the office for five minutes and pick me up. So, I stopped halfway, to bother or help him. He paid me five dollars an hour to file, bring people coffee, and mostly sit around until he was ready to go home.

It was 1998. The office had computers with music and the internet on them, and graphic artists and other interesting people to talk to. In the office kitchen there was an early model Keurig machine, which I enjoyed sampling, because there were flavors, like vanilla and hazelnut and caramel. A poster of Jenny McCarthy in a bikini squirting mustard onto a hot dog hung outside the doorway.

There was also a photo of the agency’s receptionist in a stringy black bathing suit hanging in the lobby. She was nineteen and married to my dad’s business partner, Sean, who was in his late twenties and ran the sales department. Sean was tall, handsome, loud, and Italian. He and my dad had met a decade earlier when they were in the same pyramid scheme together. Sean had been in the Marines and already completed his term without seeing combat. My dad was impressed by his confidence. He could be very convincing on several levels. He was my dad’s agency’s first employee. My mother disliked him.

His wife greeted the agency’s visitors. She didn’t wear bras, and since it was the late 90s, she often wore butterfly shirts that tied in the back, and behind the neck, and swooped down low around her breasts. She and Sean divorced after a few years. I was told that she had problems.

Like Sean’s wife, John was also nineteen when I met him. I remember him being a high school dropout. He’d been hired into the phone room by Sean, who knew him on a personal level somehow. 

I can’t recall how it started with John. The sequence is murky. I can tell you that my favorite outfit was a navy blue skort-and-spaghetti-strap matching set with white Spice Girls platforms, out of the box on my first day of eighth grade. I can say that I saw John making eyes at a graphic designer whose name was Melissa, the name of popular girls. Melissa was pretty, about his age. She seemed to like his attention until she saw me seeing her liking it. As far as I know, they never dated, though John dated other women in the office. He wasn’t cute. He was just persistent.

At thirteen, I had a retainer in my mouth, there to close a seven-millimeter gap between my front teeth; part of that process also involved pulling my upper canine baby teeth, which still had not fallen out on their own, and which left holes that would not fill in for another two years. I had newly pierced ears and freckles. It was the year I got my period and a padded bra. It was also the year I French kissed for the first time, while shadowing a boy at the high school, one I had requested by name after meeting him dancing in The Nutcracker.

I might have known it was flirting. It’s possible I was oblivious. It’s possible I was hyperaware.

It’s possible John saw me spinning in circles on some chair or playing with X-Acto knives on the drafting table. He might have seen me sitting outside on the plaza’s sidewalk, building a house for ants out of sticks and leaves.

I might have known it was flirting. It’s possible I was oblivious. It’s possible I was hyperaware. It’s possible I initiated or that I was unaware of initiating. I might have liked it; I might have thought I should like it. I might have liked it and then not liked it anymore or only liked it in theory, but wanted to like it, or liked it when he wasn’t around. I might not have known how to act when I didn’t like it, because I thought that I should. All of the above. I was sensitive.

---

I was also lonely. An only child, on days when I’d elect to walk the mile further to my house, I’d let myself in and make a box of Pasta Roni, adding extra butter and cheese. I’d watch TRL and make music videos on my dad’s Sony camcorder. Listen to Mariah Carey and Green Day and the Indigo Girls and read the liner notes in their CDs. I’d log onto AOL on the guestroom computer to see if I had emails, which I didn’t, and lurk in chat rooms, maybe briefly chat with a stranger, then chicken out or grow bored and log off.

I’d get around to my homework before my parents came home, read books on wicca or novels about teenagers, and write poetry on the computer in my room, which didn’t have internet. I’d call my friends on the main house line, unaware that the phone in my room could link to another, different line, which only rang for me.

I’d open my seventh-grade yearbook to the H page, and gaze at my hopeless crush. I’d passed him a note the year prior when we sat at the same table in science class. The note had been folded to hide a message inside: If you like me, pass this note back. He didn’t.

My friend Meaghan had a boyfriend named Louie. She was thirteen, like me, and Louie was nineteen, like John, and supposedly her mother would let Louie spend the night. Meaghan had shown us a point-and-shoot snapshot of them asleep together in her bed, and though their faces were obscured, we had all seen it, and we’d also all met Louie once at a local carnival, so we knew for a fact he was real.

It was a different time. We’d play M.A.S.H. in our notebooks in the bus circle, in the halls, between classes, at our lunch tables, then again on the bus ride home. Mansion, apartment, shack, or house: the available dwellings for when we grew up, a distant prospect. The future was mapped out in who we would marry and how many children we’d have, how many pets and what kind, and what the pets’ and children’s names would be. Maybe what we’d do for a living to support all these creatures. 

We always left one field in each column for our friends to fill with absurd variables from their most perverse imaginings. You could easily end up marrying someone you found repulsive. That was part of the fun.

---

Possibly it started with John in a vacant wing of the office. At the time, my father’s company occupied five total units in a multipurpose plaza, which it shared with a psychic and a chiropractor. The sales and creative and operations departments of my father’s agency made up four of the connected units. The fifth was a conference room, usually empty, that was separated from the others by an outdoor walkway. Adjacent to the conference room, a mailroom housed boxes of mirror tags and other promotional materials for car dealerships. Sometimes my father would give me a list of campaign orders and ask me to pack and label them in this mailroom by myself.

The outdoor walkway was shaded by live oak trees, under which people often stood smoking. John was one of them. Everyone smoked. The gossipy bookkeeper, the sales guy who told me he’d cured his stomach cancer using only acupuncture, the lesbian graphic designer who’d let me ride in the bed of her pickup truck. The smokers would joke around with me as I crossed between the units; I was my father’s daughter, cute but ostensibly forever off-limits. I’d joke back, linger, snoop on the conversation, act like I was cool. By this time John had added little to my name. Little Sarah. Little Sarah Gerard. His New York accent, round eyes, and square, sloping teeth, kind of lopsided, smirking as he said it.

Then I’d proceed on to the mailroom, quiet and air-conditioned, where the lights were out. I would listen to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Clueless soundtracks on my portable Sony CD player while I packed boxes for my dad. Music blasting in my ears, I weighed bundles of mirror tags according to order quantities, then boxed and addressed them to car dealerships in other states.

There was a bathroom in that separate unit. Occasionally I’d be in it, and on the other side of the door, I could hear people entering the conference room for a meeting. John would be among them, and I’d flush, aware they could hear this, and when I exited to return to the mailroom, John would follow me with his eyes. And I’d follow him with mine.

Sometimes he’d be smoking out on the main sidewalk in front of the plaza, and I would see him through the windows in the mailroom. Or I would be sitting on the planters out front, staring at the parking lot and considering just walking home the single remaining mile, when John would come out for a smoke and find me there. Sometimes he’d offer to drive me home, or I’d ask him.

That second mile, back to my empty house. John and I talked in the car, air conditioning blasting, cooling the searing seatbelts. Five minutes. The agency, his colleagues, and my father shrinking behind us. It may have been on one of these drives, in that private window, that it occurred to him, or occurred to me, or to both of us, to exchange screen names in my circular driveway before I went inside.

---

Sometimes, with nothing left to do, unsuccessful at coaxing my dad or anyone else to drive me home, I would cross the side street to the plaza next-door. I liked to browse the consignment shop there, trying on fur coats and shoes, and buying experimental items from the dollar rack with the cash my dad had paid me. 

To get there, I’d walk the length of our plaza to the opposite end, past the men who stood smoking outside of the final unit which housed the sales pit. I’d venture over, feeling his eyes on my back as I crossed to the other parking lot.

Sometimes after leaving the consignment shop, I’d proceed to the liquor store to buy a bag of Funyuns and a can of Barq’s Cream Soda. I might see John or another of my father’s employees there, too, buying cigarettes or a snack, or a tiny bottle of something. We’d check out together and walk the length of the plaza back to the agency. 

Others would be gathered around the back door of the sales pit, and our groups would merge. We’d stand outside on the sidewalk, and the men would talk like I wasn’t there. Then they’d remember I was, and change the subject; or not change it, but wink at me as if to say, Keep this between us.

The sales pit was a sausage factory. The guys who worked there were all friends, and they were all getting rich. They drove luxury cars and wore Robert Graham shirts that made them look like peacocks. The word money was a form of praise: That’s money, baby! I knew they all went to Mons Venus, the all-nude strip club that didn’t serve liquor. They’d go clubbing in Ybor on the weekends, do drugs, and have group sex. I’d heard this once about John, Sean, and his wife, at least. I vaguely recall hearing my dad tell my mom about it. It made sense.

I can’t recall a woman being in the sales room unless she was passing through to exit out the side door, visiting from another department on business, or coming in from the outside, briefly: one of the sales guys’ girlfriends, exotic birds in bright miniskirts and heels, blonde highlights and gold catching sun. No women were employed on the sales floor—this only, as I recall, happened twice, later, and both of those women had been my childhood friends. They didn’t last long. 

Typically, the only women to be found in the sales pit were those posing on desktop backgrounds, or on posters alongside a framed picture of Sean smoking a cigar like Al Pacino from Scarface. I think there was a Scarface poster, too.

---

At some point John was fired, then rehired and promoted. He’d taken a kickback from one of his clients at a local dealership and pulled into the plaza one day in a new car. He was gone for some time, during which he opened a nightclub in St. Petersburg, then came begging Sean for his job back when the club shut down. My dad resisted and so did my uncle, who was by now also a business partner. Sean gave John his job back anyway.

It’s possible nothing began between John and me until then, when he asked for my help with market research. For some reason, this time around, John was not on the sales floor anymore but had been given a longer job title and his own office adjacent to my father’s. There was a window connecting their offices, with glass that slid to the side should you ever need to say anything through it. It never opened. My dad didn’t like John.

Is it scandalous or naïve to say that a teenage girl wields power over a man?

I remember sitting in John’s office on an ergonomic swivel chair. I’d been tasked with making calls. I had a list of names and numbers and would cold-call to ask these adult strangers prepared questions about their last car buying experience. I recorded their answers on a sheet of paper, and this information was supposedly used. Most of these calls were easy because people didn’t answer or hung up. Sometimes they wouldn’t, though, probably because I sounded like a child, and I would ask my little questions, and say thank you. Five minutes.

I’ve thought about one man for years. He must be dead now; he sounded very old then. He told me how lonely he was, or maybe I just gathered. We talked for thirty or more minutes. I recorded his answers about car-buying, but then he kept talking, asking me questions, telling me about himself, trapping me on the phone, not letting me say goodbye, not seeming to want to leave me. Unsure how to end things, I listened, and answered politely, and listened more. What was said in that half-hour has long since vanished from memory, but what’s stayed is the feeling of intensifying panic. Somehow the conversation ended. I wish I could remember how I did it, what my technique was.

John’s office was steps from the kitchen. I would make repeat trips past the Jenny McCarthy poster to the Keurig, stopping to say hi to my dad on the way back. I remember John leaving me alone in his office then coming back and working quietly across his desk, then rolling to use another surface, rifle through a file drawer, then roll back to me, close in my proximity. 

A break outside together. A cigarette in the shady area behind the office, against a wooden fence, in dead leaves. No one could see us standing there while he smoked, and I watched him. I’d tried my first cigarette at twelve, I probably told him, confirming his hunch that I broke rules. My friend had stolen it from a retirement home ashtray. She’d been smoking since she was seven, sneaking from her father’s packs. I remember her having colorful stories to explain her injuries. We climbed a tree to hide ourselves from view, and she pulled a lighter from her pocket. I hated the taste of the smoke and the feeling of it in my lungs. I didn’t smoke again until later. But I enjoyed the smell coming from John’s mouth, and the motion of a cigarette rising to his lips.

Is it scandalous or naïve to say that a teenage girl wields power over a man? That I honed it to get cigarettes and later weed and alcohol, that my friends used men for the same purpose? That I used John, and that at times, I let him use me, too? 

---

Soon I was fourteen, in high school. I had a crush on a boy on my school bus, in my same grade. He smoked and would buy his Marlboro Reds from the newsstand by our bus stop. I’d follow him there. The man who owned the newsstand had grey hair down to his shoulders and was shy. He asked me my name. His was Elliott, which made me think of Elliott Smith, my new favorite singer-songwriter. Elliott and I would talk about music and magazines. I remember thinking he was cute, and knowing he thought I was cute too. He would sell me my first pack of cigarettes. He might also be dead now. When I search his name and the newsstand, I find him telling the local news that he knew the woman who was murdered and set on fire in the plaza’s dumpster.

By fourteen, I’d felt the influence of other men, older and not, strangers and not, trusted and not, transgressing and testing and teasing. I’d made choices to seek their attention, and it worked. It blindsided, flattered, scared, confused, excited, and hurt me. I’m not remarkable.

I learned that I could use my body to gain access. I learned that my body could be accessed for gain. I hadn’t yet learned its worth, or my value. Or unlearned the story of my body holding value for the purpose of exchange. I thought only of the possible cost if I used it the wrong way: Don’t tell your dad.

Two of my friends were young mothers. One of them would discover her baby had autism and place her for adoption while we were still in ninth grade. The other, that same year, stumbled pregnant down the stairs in Building 7, and the panic of our classmates catching her before she hit the ground sent ripples through the school. 

He was twenty or twenty-one and had started calling me Trouble.

John could smell it on me, on all of us. He was twenty or twenty-one and had started calling me Trouble. My friends would sometimes take the bus home with me. We’d get off at my bus stop and walk toward my house, stopping at the plaza, hoping for a ride, cigarettes, alcohol, or weed from John or another guy. John wasn’t special. He was just the only one of those guys who put his hands on me. That’s why he gets a story. 

---

It was on one of these walks toward the office that my friend and I spotted a bright blue car painted with white flames. We stopped to watch it pass. One of us pointed at it. It turned around and passed us again, going the other direction. Then turned down the next block, ahead of us, and waited. 

We approached. A man in his twenties was driving. He rolled down the window, revealing close-cut blond hair. I was wearing the navy spaghetti strap tank top that I’d once paired with the skort, but skorts weren’t cool anymore, so I was wearing it with tiny shorts and blue Velcro cutout sneakers I’d bought at Hot Topic.

We talked to him. What matters is we continued walking, unimpressed. He wasn’t unattractive. I couldn’t say what it was, a feeling. We were halfway down the next block when he called us back, but only my friend returned, while I waited.

She came back upset, and he drove away. We were across the street from the elementary school, still three or four blocks from my dad’s office, just on the other side of a gated complex and the plaza with the consignment shop and the liquor store. He had shown her his dick, she told me.

Initially, I thought this was funny. I did. I laughed. I thought she would laugh too. I’d forgotten she was upset, though she was right in front of me. 

She didn’t laugh. We walked on to the office, and I wondered why she was treating this like a big deal. Guys show everyone their dicks, don’t they? Isn’t this a good thing? Or at least comical? I thought my father would think it was funny too, the way he thought how the sales guys acted was funny.

I remember us telling my dad, and me laughing, and the sinking realization that he was not laughing with me—he was instead picking up the phone.

We were escorted home. That evening, a female officer came to our house. She showed me a binder of grey photocopied mugshots in plastic sleeves, with numbers underneath them. She pointed to a page of faces and asked me if I recognized anyone on it. This one, I said.

---

Come fifteen, braces, glasses, and acne. My adult teeth grew in. I cut my hair short and regretted it, gained ten pounds when I quit ballet, became bulimic, lost the weight, lied to my dad when he asked me why there were vomit splatters on the tile beside the toilet. I lost my virginity to a boy whose nickname derived from attempting to spell his other nickname in pee on the sidewalk, and not having enough pee to finish the job. My mother put me on the pill. I joined the high school choir.

I turned a pair of old jeans into a purse and went from dreaming of a career in opera to one in fashion, a designer or photographer. Then a musician like Conor Oberst. I liked talking to this new guy at the office, a sensitive aging New Wave rocker who clued me into the Cocteau Twins and Catherine Wheel. 

I’d ride around in my friends’ cars and the backs of pickups, take the public bus for hours north and south, sometimes hitchhike, go to punk shows, loiter at the mall movie theater, shoplift from Target, smoke Marlborough Lights I bought at the newsstand, drink Smirnoff Ice. It was a different time. I’d do whatever it took to get out, whatever that meant. I was throwing myself at experience. 

---

I was chatting on AIM. My screen name was Sarbab because Sarbabe was taken, and I had not yet changed it to BadGnrtion, and then afterward, TheMelancholies. It must have been the weekend, early evening, the sky dark. John was on and messaged me, or I did it first, and he responded.

I asked him to pick me up. It’s not that I wanted him to, or that I wanted to hang out with him specifically; it’s that I wanted something, anything, to happen. I wanted to know what the limit was, and I was afraid of finding out. I told him to bring beer.

I say this like I’m sure how it happened, but I’m not sure. I’ve written this scene a handful of times, and it happens a different way each time. I asked him to buy me beer and realized only after he arrived that he expected us to drink it together. I had thought, stupidly, that he would just give it to me. Sometimes he brings a six-pack, sometimes a whole case. Today he brings a case. I’m sure they were brown bottles, and that they were warm.

Here’s what is certain. He pulls into my driveway. He keeps the headlights on. No. They might be turned off. I tell my parents I am going out with a friend, then John and I go to Indian Rocks Beach, the closest to my house. The beer rides by my feet, then we carry it onto the sand.

We sit on two plastic lounge chairs with wide horizontal slats, white, just beyond the lights of the condos. We look around to make sure we aren’t seen. We try to make conversation, but it’s awkward because we have nothing in common, and I’m smarter than he is, and I don’t want to be there. I didn’t know we’d go to the beach together. Or I suggested it but didn’t know it would feel like this. I imagined it feeling more exciting. I don’t like the taste of the cheap beer, which fizzes and makes me burp. I’m bored.

We drink. I feel sleepy from the alcohol, though I’ve only had one bottle. It’s too dark to see the horizon. The waves rush the shore and atomize. I’m cold. At some point we start kissing, not because we feel moved to do it, but because that was the tacit agreement once John’s car left my street. 

Do I need to tell you that he unzips me? How his hand is clammy? How my body does not respond?

How, in my memory, this feeling is linked to the year I met him, when a friend of my friend’s older brother climbed into a waterbed next to us, and told me, It’s alright, it’s okay, while my friend slept? How I woke her up and she yelled at him to leave, like she knew exactly what he was doing there?

John and I didn’t become friends. We didn’t become lovers. We didn’t become equals. We didn’t start hanging out. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t a boy I was talking to. He wasn’t my colleague. He didn’t love me. Didn’t long for me. Or think about me. Ask about me. He wasn’t an authority, or caretaker, or partner, or adult.

---

This memory is clear and specific. We were at a birthday party at John’s girlfriend’s house, the one they shared. People from the office were there. I remember learning about the party, and that he had a girlfriend, and wondering what she looked like. It wasn’t a feeling of jealousy, but something different, something I still can’t name, more akin to morbid curiosity. 

We were at the house they rented together—I remember being impressed by this, that he lived with someone, and that they had their own house—packed into their sunny kitchen in the afternoon, most people drunk but my parents and I sober. 

John was telling my parents that his girlfriend worked in the Charlotte Russe at the mall, a store where I had shopped and shoplifted. He called her the “clothes lady,” and I cringed at this ham-fisted nickname. We were standing in a conversational square with my parents.

Then John steps in closer, and my parents move away like water flowing down another celebratory groove, into another pool. John leans into me. How many times a day do you think I fuck her? he says. 

Meaning his girlfriend. He wants me to look at his girlfriend and imagine him fucking her on the table where, right now, in this very moment, she is serving herself tropical punch, beautiful and blonde and grown.

Nine times a day, he tells me. I fuck her nine times a day.

What did I say to this? Nothing. I was mute at the feeling of my stomach catching fire in my parents’ presence. The flush in my cheeks. The suggestion that he might have wished for her to be me or was glad that she wasn’t me, but that he wanted me to wish I were her because she was the one who fucked him.

---

Soon after, he was driving me home, but he didn’t drive me home. I climbed into his car, parked facing the main road. To the left was my house. He exited the plaza’s parking lot, pulled up to the corner, and turned right.

He took me past the place where the man had shown his dick to my friend. 

A few blocks further, across from the elementary school, he pressed into a shady neighborhood with green lawns and no sidewalks. I asked where we were going. He might have said we were going for a walk. 

We arrived at a park. I recognized it because my summer camp used to come here to look for fiddler crabs. 

The day was hot and humid. I wore a knee-length jean skirt and a button-up collared shirt, tight under my arms. I was carrying the purse I’d made out of jeans.

A boardwalk led us through mangrove thickets to a stilted gazebo looking out over an inlet. I stood at the wooden banister. The water was murky. Flying insects landed on the surface and shadows moved underneath.

I’ve written this scene a handful of times over the years. I feel like I’ve been writing it forever. I’ve written about this park in other stories without telling this part. I’ve written it as fiction. In the real story, John comes up behind me. He presses himself against me, bending me at the waist, over the water. I feel the sun on the back of my hair. I am confused, unsure if he is holding me affectionately, because his grip is rough. 

He tells me to lean back into him. Press my ass into him, he says, and grind against him. 

I attempt to do this without knowing why, what the purpose is, absent of the expectant signals like kissing, fondling, heavy breathing, that I think are supposed to precede sex. I notice the absence of any shape of an erection through the layers of thick fabric between us.

A couple interrupts John and me just as he’s trying to move me onto his lap. We play it off, say hello. Like it’s a normal day, and we’re a normal couple. We leave.

---

I want to say this next time was the last time I saw him, but it wasn’t. He continued working at my father’s company until it closed in 2008. He dated another woman who worked there, one closer to his age, who dumped him and then endured months of sustained harassment: flowers on her desk in the mornings, rumors circulating throughout the office, people asking her why she wouldn’t give John another chance. Her brother worked in the sales pit. There was no HR department. Or my dad was the HR department, and it was a different time, and there were other things happening within the company, which took precedence.

I could have but didn’t want to get John fired. I was afraid to get him fired, afraid of that responsibility, naïve to the impossibility of such an outcome, to the truth that it wouldn’t have been my fault if he were fired. He was very good at fucking himself. 

Others might have thought it was my fault, though, if John had been fired. Or known. About us. It’s possible I didn’t want to tell my father that I’d been lying about whether something was going on between John and me, like he had asked me. I thought I would be in trouble. I’m still unsure what I should have said was going on. I never confessed to anything, not until just a few years ago.

John was driving me home. It was 2003. I was a senior in high school, and I was wearing a knee-length khaki skirt and a seafoam green button-up elbow-length shirt. He drove a sports car, of course. I think it was white with black leather, but in my memory, it merges with the car with flames.

I want to say that the air conditioner was blasting. But it was near the end of the school year, so it would’ve been very hot out; the air wouldn’t have gotten cold in the five minutes it took for him to arrive at my house. We must have been sweating. As I write this, yes, I can feel my shirt tight against my skin.

I was tense. I didn’t want John to drive me home—I wanted my father, but John offered, and I wanted to be alone inside my house, not stuck at the office for hours. We pulled into the circular driveway. He said something about coming inside with me, but I said no, that I had homework. He got out of the car anyway. 

He followed me to the front door. It occurs to me now that my shirt was burgundy. Looking down at my keys, poised to turn the lock, the door cracking open, that’s what I see. Dark red.

He follows me in. I remind him that I have homework, but he says he’ll just come in for a minute. He shuts the door. He steps toward me, and I step away. He shoves me up against the wall in the entryway and tries to kiss me, his hand searching for the space under my skirt, but unable to find it. The fabric is too long and stiff.

I fight against him, as he insists. I shove him away from me. He says something like, Come on. I shove him to the door. This is what I want to think happened. That I was decisive. Somehow, I get him to leave. Somehow, I lock the door after him. I wish I remembered my technique. I watch him through the sheers as he turns away, despondent. 

In my memory, this image merges with another. Another man in the circular driveway, a man very much like John, but not John. A boyfriend from that summer. Soon after I made John leave, this man held me down in his bed and had sex with me. I shoved him off, too, kicked him. 

The next time I saw that man, he was standing in my parents’ foyer. He insulted my outfit. Asked me why I always made myself look like shit. I told him he should leave. Just like John, he walked to his car. Climbed inside. Drove away.

---

In 2017, I searched John’s name. I sometimes did, over the years. He was married with stepchildren. His wife owned a yoga studio in Tampa. Together, a few years earlier, they’d run some kind of telemarketing or direct sales phone scam, evidence of which has since disappeared from the internet. Finding this, I thought: Figures he wouldn’t do something honest. I thought that he didn’t age well. His eyes got buggier. I wonder if he’s having sex with his wife’s teenage daughter. Should I tell his wife what we did? She accepted my follow request. I wonder if she’s reformed since they were scam artists. 

I wondered if I’d made this all up in my head. I wondered, What does consent mean? Did I invite his attention? Yes. Did I know enough to do that? 

His wife is a lot older than he is. 

Should I send his wife an anonymous letter? Should I take a yoga class at her studio? I bet he works at a Verizon store now. Or on a car lot. Or delivers Jimmy Johns. 

I bet he hasn’t read a book in ten years. I bet he never thinks about the coworker he sexually harassed. I bet he never thinks about me. 

Is he going bald? I wonder if this is still his home address. I wonder if he fucked any of my friends. 

My friend’s sister worked at my father’s office for a period, in sales. I was told she did a lot of coke. I was told she had issues. 

Then her sister, my friend, worked in the office too. She later told me John had forced her to give him a hand job on their lunch break.

I also thought: Here’s someone I know from the literary world on his wife’s Instagram. 

He looks happy standing in front of this tree. 

Why does he deserve to find love? 

---

I search for him again in 2024. Two years ago, he was indicted in an SEC lawsuit for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a “digital media and content technology company,” as the temporary co-CEO. His name is all over the internet. He funneled a large part of the money through his own competitor company, which he’d lied about not being affiliated with. 

A letter from the chairman of the board warned that John had “manipulated and lied” to the company to steal this money. His wife helped him embezzle another $250,000 through her own job at iHeartRadio. 

A Change.org petition by the shareholders alleged that John’s “disingenuous conduct has apparently resulted in a halt on all trading of the Company’s stock.” 

There is an entire sub-Reddit dedicated to the SEC investigation and lawsuit, and a Twitter hashtag, populated by the company’s stockholders, hosts frequent Live discussions about how to recoup lost money.

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Around this time, I also find John’s Blogspot. It is named after him, with the phrase “words of the day” in the title. He hasn’t updated it since 2014. His posts were no more than a few lines, full of misspellings, with pithy or philosophical themes. “A contained thought is a seedling of tomorrows reality,” says one. “Negative or Positive, it is going to grow. Depending on the amount of water and sunlight you choose to provide to it, will only then determan what tomorrow will bring.” 

Another one says, “Forgiveness is the most powerful weapon against our enemies.” There are quotation marks around this, but he doesn’t credit the line to anyone.

The third-to-last post shows John standing in front of a small single-engine airplane, smiling in black sweats. “We all have had things in our lives that we enjoyed doing and then stopped for what ever reason,” the post says. John advises you to think of one of those things you used to love doing and start doing it again. 

John’s last post says only, “The only difference between tragedy and laughter is time.”