The First Bad Man

by Miranda July

He cured my athlete’s foot.” He lifted his foot and then put it down again before I could smell it.

this. Also my ears: darling little shells. I wear my hair tucked behind them and try to enter crowded rooms ear-first, walking sideways.

An outsider, such as Nakako the grant writer, might have thought this moment was degrading, but I knew the degradation was just a joke; he was mocking the kind of man who would do something like that. He’s been doing these things for years; once,

I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described.

She was a woman. So much a woman that for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was.

The vast majority of people will be so young or so old that their lifetime won’t even overlap with one’s own—and those people are out of bounds.” “On so many levels.”

I said of course. I could tell him about Clee another time.

We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that’s what I was to myself.

No need to kill it, my sweet girl, he’d say, reaching into the toilet bowl with a slotted spoon. We need a dog.

There’s a scenario for every beverage except beer and wine because I was too young for alcohol when I invented this technique.

She didn’t need to thank me for my honest forthrightness, but if she insisted I would be forced to accept. I accepted a few times for practice.

Dr. Tibbets’s receptionist was a fraud and a thief and a pretty good therapist.

“Jim and Cheryl can take notes alone; they are the best at taking notes—”

If a task requires a group effort—for example, moving a heavy table—it should be begun by one person, and then after a respectful pause a second person can join, with a bowed head, saying, “Jim can move the table alone, he is the best at moving the table, I am joining him even though I’m not much help, because I’m not good at moving the table.”

Kubelko? Yes. Am I in you? No. You’re in someone else. A sad and awkward silence followed. I cast about for some way to express the bereavement I felt every time we came across each other.

“Who might you want to give a candle to? Candle, flame, light . . . illumination . . .” “. . . wick . . . wax . . . soy . . . ” “Who? Think.” “Clee?” “That’s interesting. Why Clee?” “That was right? Clee?”

“I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table. “We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea. “For me it’s a little more intense.” She was bouncing her knee unconsciously. “I guess I’m ‘misogynist’ or whatever.” I’d never heard the word used like this, like an orientation.

When she shoved me against my own desk I head-butted her and everyone else who wasn’t capable of understanding how nuanced I was.

This was the opposite of getting mugged. I’d been mugged every single day of my life and this was the first day I wasn’t mugged.

But this, something in the ballpark of this, was who I really was.

flitted around the city either turning heads or else walking by heads just as they were turning.

“The first bad man.”

She wasn’t the first bad man ever but the first I’d ever met who had long blond hair and pink velour pants.

Connection to clee the mysogynist

Was everything redneck actually mystical? What about guns?

I kept my hand over Clee’s moaning mouth so Kate wouldn’t hear.

“Everything she does to me, I pretend I’m doing to her, as Phillip.”

I saw a lazy, text-messaging, gum-chewing embryo, halfheartedly forming vital organs.

I could see it so clearly, the zygote—shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.

Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal. It was like talking someone off a ledge. Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times.

Phillip and the plumber and all the other men had missed the point completely. The point was kissing.

Finally a snobby British man came on. It was a Gregorian chant from the seventh century called “Deum verum.” “This doesn’t have to be our song.” “Too late.”

Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one.

She was more than young, she was chivalrous:

“You named our baby after their baby?”

but was love the right word for that? Or was it just a very feverish pity?

“We’re more than happy to help out with her rent,” Suzanne assured me.

She wore a blouse with diagonal pastel stripes that looked like it was from the 1980s; it was a joke about how silly the time before she was born was.

“Don’t worry, there’s not just me. You have other people.” Who? he said. No he didn’t. He just waited for whatever was going to happen next.

He seemed less and less like Kubelko Bondy and more like a baby named Jack.