the villains we know
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
On Friday I ventured into my office cupboards where I recently relocated all my journals. There was a specific one I was looking for.
In order to find the right journal, though, I had to leaf through many more. I knew the one I was searching for had to be an early 2002 journal, if my memory served me. In that particular composition book, I looked for one specific journal entry. But even as I skimmed pages, I knew that any entries surrounding it might illuminate more about the subject of that entry.
The reason I went on this dig: Villain Era, “a literary magazine of revenge.” Charles Jensen is the editor, and I remember when he first announced it online, I immediately loved the tagline: Our justice? Poetic. Charlie is an author of memoir and poetry books, and I know him to be a warm, friendly person. And I absolutely loved that Charlie was hosting a venue that heralded a villain era.
There have always been villains, of course, of all makes and models. I’ve personally faced a number of them, and I’m certain I’m someone else’s. At the moment we have numerous villains running around, creating chaos openly and without shame. The previous villains used to do their harm to the people of this country more quietly, but the current lot openly enjoys cruelty and advertises it (see: Twitter, or X, as one of the villains who bought it renamed it).
But let me not get carried away. I was looking for a journal entry about one of my personal villains. Though I still wonder if she does indeed rise to the actual status of “villain” in my life.
Paging through my journals, as always, amuses and pains me. In the rosy beginning of 2002, I was a few months into living alone, in Hollywood, where I would write the text that became Hollywood Notebook. My journal entries are a mixture of gin and tonics at the bar, corner store beers, dropping money I shouldn’t have at the strip club at the end of the block, and online dating. Melancholy would sweep in and be swept out as I stepped out the door of the apartment and into another man’s car. Indeterminate fleeting sadnesses would surround me in my studio. I had to ban one song from my life even as I picked up a whole new album to get deeply into (and that would haunt me to the present day).
What startled me is that I have very few journal entries about this would-be villain. Back in 2002, she was a friend. In my memories, I was more intimate with her than with many other friends I had at the time, and her presence had sometimes felt sweetly suffocating. She would not become a villain to me until later, but the seed was planted in one phone call in 2002. When I found the entry, I read it and was surprised by the fact that it only took up three sentences.
What you’re reading now is clearly not the full story, not even half of the story. In recent months, this person has been brought up to me in a couple of different contexts, and it occurred to me that I contemplate her existence very little until someone brings her up. BUT when Villain Era arrived on the scene, I did enjoy thinking a bit about who my villains are, which is a revisiting of my list of grudges. And there she is, bidden and unbidden.
I’m still considering whether or not I will write the essay that completely bares the entirety of that relationship. For many years, knowing that she was writing characters based on me, I enjoyed the fact that there was really nothing I wanted to write about her. After our friendship ended, I wrote two poems that featured her. After that, nothing.
Until now.
The risk in writing the whole story is that I give the villain too much space. More space than she took up in my life, more space than I give her in my head.
The pleasure in writing the whole story is that my justice might indeed be poetic.
When someone recently brought her up to me, I texted back, she’s already dead to me. I’m an excellent severer. When I’m betrayed, I do not go back—in person, or virtually. So, do I revive her if I write about our shared past? Or can a creative work about my experience of her drive a stake through her metaphorical heart?
It’s not really that deep, though.
The pleasure can also be in writing what is, actually, a good, interesting, little story about two writers, friendship, jealousy, and the subtler cruelties inflicted in interpersonal relationships.
In any case, I love a prompt that inspires me to think of villains (again, including myself, as I know I’m someone’s or many someone’s!) and seeking revenge.
Right now, the most obvious everyday villains are abducting and kidnapping people off the streets, and I know I’m not alone in dreaming of the vengeance I’d like to take on them and their superiors. A girl can dream.
Villian Era comes to my email inbox. They’re accepting submissions.
This week I virtually attended the Fourth Annual Alchemy Lecture, Sound—at the Interregnum, which I highly recommend watching/listening to while you can (I think I read that this link is good for two weeks. The lectures will become part of a book, if you miss the video.) Enjoy.
