Track 11: Wolves Like Them by Erika Gill
A ringing fills the air. The drums begin a driving beat. They dance. The guitar riff comes in, insistent. They dance until their feet burn in their cheap, unbreathable, ballet flats. Their mouths form idiosyncratic grimaces in the face of point-and-shoot digital cameras. Their arms thrash and flail, with no real power behind them, deliberate. Of course their flying hair is flat-ironed straight. Of course they’re performing a bizarre pantomime of dancing to a song with a fucking Ginsberg reference in it. They’re 19 and drunk on blackberry merlot (purchased with a flirtatious smile and a fake id) and nothing matters more to them than the image they’re creating, the memory that is as self-conscious as it is self-aggrandizing.
Looking back on these chaotic, small house parties feels like staring into the wrong end of a telescope. The scene: five to seven misogynists and a roughly equal number of the most intelligent, beautiful young women you’ve ever seen in a small, dirty apartment filled with thrifted furniture - no silver to be found. Sure, they’re prey to the curse of the manic-pixie-dream-girl: personality quirks (read: undiagnosed mental illness) and at least two of them own a ukulele, but they were cast in that mold and daily grow to escape it, when they’re not being crushed back down by the unrelenting fist of sexism from these, their dearest male friends.
I was a flame sheathed in skin, I was effervescent until popped, cruelly, by the words that I would hold within myself. “Baby doll, I recognize, you’re a hideous thing inside,” one of them recites, right into my face. I internalized this. I’ll continue to revisit this moment for years, wondering what the intended effect this moment could have had, if I were neurotypical. Would I have not realized I was being manipulated?
I never let any of them touch me in a meaningful way, but their stares and inside jokes bored into my skin and I barked along, pretending to understand them, trying to maintain a facade of cool. So cool, I never said a word about the misogyny: the comments, the put downs, the couples caricature of my best friend hung on a corkboard that the guys who live there refer to as a “Wall of Shame”.
What led us, smarter than sheep, to that space? Were we drunk on more than cheap wine? Was it the moon, round and full? I remember a feeling of power, of acceptance. I also remember when he counted the number of times I used “like” as a filler word in my sentences. I remember my stories being rushed and truncated in the face of impatience. I remember dancing. Dancing as an exorcism. Dancing as transformation. If only my teeth had found their way into unsuspecting flesh, then. That pack disbanded with time, realization, and fumbled (unwanted) attempts to get into pants, but the bond between those women, a fearsome thing, grows, underground, even now. Howling, forever.
Erika Gill (they/them) lives on unceded Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) land in Denver. Erika is Editor in Chief of Alternative Milk Magazine. Their poetry appears in fifth wheel press, MORIA, Birdy, and others. Their collection, Lone Yellow Flower, is forthcoming from Querencia Press. Socials: @invariablyso
