What I Really Want to Talk About by Kelle Clarke

It’s not the split pea soup, if that’s what you’re thinking. Though it does leap to mind. What a mess, right? But let’s back up. It’s important you know that this is typical for me, finding myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens all the time. I don’t just mean being crapped on by the crippled pigeon at the corner of Fourth and Market three days in a row, or having a live roach drop into my Panang curry tofu while eating lunch on the fire escape, or even my near brush with death when lightning hit the back spokes of my hot pink Huffy when I was twelve. It’s the collection of these things; the tide of incremental bad luck that builds up over time. It could be worse. There was a man in one of my support groups who survived the mass shooting in San Bernardino only to be shot dead two years later at the one in Las Vegas. Imagine that. What I’m talking about is less dramatic.

There was the time I was living in the Bay Area, for example, back in the early dotcom days. I was barely scraping up my half of the rent on the apartment I shared with a sharp-dressed roommate, a fresh Berkeley grad I met through a Craigslist posting. She worked market hours, which meant she was up and out, riding BART to the financial district long before the West Coast sun came up. Our bland two-bedroom apartment straddled the razor-thin fault line separating Berkeley from Oakland—two zip codes with pretty divergent reputations at the time. I’m not sure if that’s the case as much anymore. But it was a fine location, a decent enough place.

I’d been in a hurry that morning, rushing across Russell to zigzag toward the clinic. If I played my cards right, I could grab my prescription, double back to snag a takeout salad-by-the-ounce from Berkeley Bowl, and still catch BART at the Ashby station in time to cross the bay and make it to work by 10am. I worked part-time back then, 10am-2pm, Monday through Thursday, riding near-empty, post-commute BART trains for four stops, then soft-click-clicking my acceptably professional short heels toward glass elevators that whooshed me past everyone else in their spartan offices, most of them already several hours deep into their work days.

I tend to move at a pretty quick clip, even when there’s no real reason, headphones secure, eyes toward the ground as I swiftly enter and exit crosswalks. I would have made a decent New Yorker. That particular day was no different: head down, feet moving, but by the time I looked up, just outside the clinic, I was already bodies deep in some kind of human swarm. I was caught in the middle, like a playground mush pile with no clear exit route, even if I yelled “Red Rover” and flung myself at one of them, which I was tempted to do. It wasn’t a large group—not yet—but they were loud and obnoxious and holding enormous cardboard signs, making a fuss, chanting about baby-killers, the whole deal. And there I was, smack dab in the middle of them. A man with thinning charcoal hair pulled into a greasy low ponytail pushed past me, hoisting a hefty white cross with the words Abort and Abortion painted criss-cross in red on its horizontal and vertical axes. I ducked the cross and slid past a teenager wearing a lavender t-shirt with a white Jesus ironed on its front, his ivory face encircled with thorny vines and the words, “Pray to End Abortion.” Good lord, I muttered, as I broke through the protest and rushed into the Planned Parenthood.

With a quick nod to the unrattled receptionist and a swift debit card swipe, I had my pills and little time to waste making my way back. But the protestors blocked not only my path, but that of a younger girl next to me who looked terrified and alone as she walked out of the building and into the foaming mouthed mob. The teenager in the Jesus shirt spat on the ground in front of us. “Baby killer,” she said, her voice that of a child’s. She squared her larger body in front of mine, and I pushed her back, then took my elbows out to my side as if I was playing a zone defense, pushing into the crowd so that the girl leaving the clinic behind me could rush through the space invented by my body and get away. “This is what your Jesus tells you to do?” I yelled at spitting Jesus-t-shirt girl, as the crowd started chanting at another young woman walking out of the clinic — baby killer, baby killer, baby killer.

The teen looked poised to spit again, locked eyes with me, then turned away. I shoved through the protest, the whole stupid crowd of them, throwing out a couple “fuck off”s and “go home”s as they got up into my face. Angry and disgusted and defensive. Sweaty now, too. All for some cheap birth control to help my sad, celibate self manage my severe PMS and occasional ovarian cysts. But what if I’d just had an abortion, and had to deal with this horrible bullshit on top of it? What gave this group of ugly, self-righteous assholes the right to harass people, spit on them in the street, block their safe pathway home?

I must have been yelling at Jesus t-shirt girl when the journalist snapped the photo.

“You look rabid,” said the gossipy office manager and only other woman in my office, peering over my shoulder later that afternoon, when I discovered the local news story on my Yahoo home page captioned: Hundreds of Pro-Life Activists Block Entry Way at Oakland Planned Parenthood. Hundreds was a stretch, but it was the image accompanying the headline that most disturbed. The first one was a larger scan of the crowd, for scale, and the second a zoomed in shot and damned if the photographer hadn’t captured me in close-up, the fury in my eyes. But instead of showing it aimed at the protesters, I looked like I was one of them. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

The place I worked at the time—an arbitration firm in the financial district— was super conservative, which I was clearly not. But I was something else there: Invisible. Like I said, I didn’t even show up until 10am, where I was greeted not by other humans but by a stack of tiny cassette tapes piled on my chair containing the dictated case notes read mostly by retired judges. That’s where I came in. I was an underemployed temp worker, shouldering the weight of school loans, born of the last generation to take typing class as an elective, not like kids nowadays who come out of the womb swiping right.

For four hours a day, four days a week, minus two fifteen minute coffee and/or smoke breaks, I’d plug in the dictation machine and run the tiny tapes through my headphones, using pedals at my feet to rewind, pause, and fast-forward the voices of the arbitrators as I typed. My fingers flew, I typed so fast, their words singing in my ears. I still ponder the effect of listening, for so many hours, to all of those men’s voices, no women among them, all of them so plump, verbose, and full of power, so exacting in their diction as they built arguments brick by brick, some of them kind and persuasive in their tone, others rough and dismissive. Brusk, intimidating; warm, engaging. I was paid to listen to all of them. I wish I could explain what it was like, having their words flow directly into my brain like that, day after day. Like, it was kind of a mind-fuck, honestly, given where I was in my own life at the time, given what I’d been through. But that’s a whole other story. So, as you can see, I wasn’t worried that people at work would care. Or even notice, for that matter. I was invisible.

It wouldn’t matter to them, I mean, that I had made front page Internet news, albeit local, as a radical pro-life advocate. The point is, most of them wouldn’t know me if they ran into me in the communal kitchen, which they sometimes did. Literally. But it mattered to me. There I was, my recognizable pixie-cut, auburn thrift store faux-fur trench coat, angry mouth. Smack-diddley-dab in the middle of ardent pro-life protesters, my left eye covered in the picture by a cardboard sign showing a rudimentary sketch of a curled up fetus superimposed on an equally horrendously drawn American flag. Not an artist among them, I can tell you that.

That’s just one example, and honestly, it became, over time, more of a funny dinner party anecdote than anything else. I can see that now, retrospect being 20/20. You’d be surprised how many people spotted and recognized me, though; how many times I was forced to explain it over and over as a big misunderstanding. Maybe the East Bay was more “small town” then than it is now, maybe more of us knew one another or ran in similar circles, I can’t say for sure. I haven’t been back in so long, for good reason. But they’d noticed me. I’d explain myself and my obviously pro-choice position, they’d laugh about it all, and so would I, we’d drink some more wine, and then I’d stay awake through the night wondering who else saw me. Who else did I need to explain myself to, for this or any other number of things that had gotten blown completely out of proportion? It got a bit tiresome, to be honest. It became easier to just stay home.

But this isn’t really what I wanted to talk about. Because I know what you really want to hear about, right? Not about the old retired judges with their sweet, grandfatherly tones, or the ones that truly scared me, gave me nightmares, or why it was that I hid in my room when my overachieving roommate would arrive home from work shortly after I did, often with her boyfriend. How they’d quickly fill our small, shared space with the sounds of talking and laughing, the thick, rich smells of the Moroccan-spiced vegan foods they cooked in our cramped, 1970s-style kitchen, while I remained silent in my bedroom, tucked beneath my bed covers, so silent for hours on end that they assumed I wasn’t there at all.

This isn’t what you came to hear. You want to know why I did what I did. I wish I could tell you, beyond the obvious: I wanted more than anything to make myself visible, to be in the right place at the right time for once. It sounds so easy, right? Now, I’m not so sure where to begin. Maybe you could help get me started by telling me what it is you already know?

………………..

Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer and journalist with deep L.A. roots. She received an MFA from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and her work has recently appeared in Superstition Review, Blood Orange Review, Pidgeonholes, Orange Blossom Review, and Barren Magazine.

Twitter: @kelle224