CUNTSVILLE.ORG
That churlish smirk made me look down, not in submission, but in search of a shattering vessel to address her kisser. The perfect hourglass-vase was back home in Oregon, but in Switzerland, I had only my wits, a delicate defense mechanism wrecked, along with allusions of literary camaraderie.
To the tune of over $5,000, I’d flown over 5,000 miles to attend a writer’s workshop in the Swiss Alps. Expecting welcoming and supportive criticism, I found myself instead smack in the middle of live looping scenes from mean-girl-high. This ten-day workshop, too, soon became more perilous to navigate than the nearby, famed Matterhorn. The workshop director proved to be, just as here, icy and unapproachable.
Selected participants had come from all over the world to critique and to have their writing critiqued by other writers. I’d submitted chapters from Babe in the Woods: Self Portrait. The 166-page manuscript had gone through half-a-dozen beta readers, but I thought it needed more censorious feedback. Workshop participants read excerpts prior to our meet up as I, too, had read their work.
From the first to the last workshop day, we sat in a semicircle taking turns reading from our work. Afterwards, participants commented on the marked-up manuscripts that had been handed back to each author. For the most part their responses, except the woman whose petulant scowl mirrored her sour literary commentary, were constructive, yet limited to textbook, technically varied, MMFA (Millennial Master of Fine Arts) educations.
“My best friend was a cat named after a Lakota Indian sweat lodge,” is a sentence I wrote in a chapter that introduces a cat named Inipi who kept me company at my log cabin, central to my writing. One workshop reader’s red Track Change response to this sentence reads as follows:
“Hi, Indigenous person here. I’d actually rather you drop the work (sic) Indian. That’s one of the words that you don’t get to call me, but I can call myself, if I like. Instead, just Lakota is great, I’m happy to talk more about this.”
I’d never met this woman before (she handed back her edits) so I knew absolutely nothing about her background or ethnicity, and I did not call her an Indian. I used the word in a sentence to reference a wigwam type structure central in a ceremony to embrace spiritual purification, rejuvenation and rebirth by “Plains Indians,” which is the title of the book where I learned the Native American name for a sweat lodge is Inipi.
When I did lay eyes upon her, this woman’s natural order appeared to be bonded to a population of Kraft Jet-Puffed Jumbo Marshmallows. She was white and square as a sheet of 20-pound bond printing paper, lived in a major metropolitan apartment with her parents, though she piously announced at workshop the first day that she was part of an indigenous population that existed in a time she never occupied. Oh, and she stressed, “I do not drink alcohol.”
Indigenous people, as I knew, were original to a specific region. The culture she claimed to be a part of crossed over an ice bridge 12,000 years before she was born, a country now torn away by salted currents. A country she never set foot upon. And who gave a rat’s ass if she tibbled or not.
Oh, and the participant that begged a vase in the face, she continued to be combative in a war of words she chose to interpret. One evening after the workshop, she sat down, uninvited, and interrupted a conversation I was having with another writer about how disappointed I was in the hard-nosed, Jewish, businessman/literary agent/attorney, who I believed was not representing my books as he promised.
“You better watch what you say!” she directed her angry stare at me, her puckered mouth distorting her eavesdropping, telling me that I had said this man was a “Jew” who took all my money.
I used the word Jewish (not Jew) to describe this agent who did not work on Jewish holidays, and this slowed the transmission of my manuscripts. And he was hard-nosed, as in the 1917 definition of someone who is blunt, focused, unbending, and tough-minded, all characteristics that led me to sign with this agent.
Because she barged into a conversation, she interpreted only what she fabricated to use against me. Later that evening she must have convinced others to shun me. The next morning and every day afterward I’d look down upon the Matterhorn shaded courtyard where workshop participants and leaders gathered, like imprinted ducklings, to follow along on outings and even pre-scheduled working sessions that excluded me.
This writer’s workshop did not inspire me to write. It inspired me to develop new forms of protection against projection. It inspired me to research and, along with a friend, to purchase the internet domain name, Cuntsville.org.
Using it as an internet placename, the root word of Cuntsville does not refer to connotations relating to female genitalia. Cunt is used to define a contemptible or unpleasant person, a person who does not care about anything or anyone and loves to cause misery…people who purposely spin unpleasantness into otherwise pleasant circumstances. Or, in other words, a person who farts at a party then blames it on another.
The earliest recorded use of the word cunt was in the 11th century as part of the name of a London street, Gropecunt Lane. In the 1800’s nautical terms included a cuntline as the space between the bilges of two casks. Or the surface seams between the strands of rope. And strands of rope were joined by a cunt splice. In the 1950’s cunt hair was used to signify a very small distance and it was around this time cunt came into fashion as a slang word.
Much later, Germaine Greer, one of the founding feminist authors suggested that cunt “is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to “shock.” A copy of her book, The Female Eunuch, sits on a pine plank bookshelf, I measured and sawed within the length of a cunt’s hair inside the log cabin central to my Babe in the Woods book series. Which brings me back to the writer’s workshop where I was cunted.
It started on the first day of the workshop. During introductions I said, “When I was 18, I bought 80 wilderness acres with an inheritance left by my parents who died when I was a kid and built a log cabin and lived there alone. This is what I mainly write about.”
Sourpuss snarked, “Sounds like you got a lot of money just to play around in the woods.” It did not stop there. Every piece I read about life at the cabin was criticized or dismissed as “lies” by her. Other participants were under her influence including the workshop leader whom I respected before this slaying in the Swiss alpental.
I feared reading out loud to the group. Each time it was my turn to present, my palms sweated, and anxiety erased fluid pronunciations. I excused my racked and faulty voice to some high-priced black licorice sucked just before the workshop.
Since I’d flown across the world and laid down a nonrefundable cash bundle, I rode out the nearly two weeks of Babe in the Woods bashing. For example:
“We come to memoir to read about a specific person’s life, but we are always looking for some commentary on the human condition.” Followed by “Memoir as I understand it happens in the space between the past and the present-day narrator reflecting on the past. Sometimes I desire more of that play in your work. Think it could deepen your work.”
This was written by the same woman who commented on another part of Babe in the Woods which read, “After classes one day I fed a hobo six scrambled eggs, cheese, apples and bread, all the food except for a cellophane sack of popcorn stored in the trailer’s overhead cupboard.”
When she returned the edited pages the word Hobo was circled in red followed by her handwritten response, “The modern-day reader will not understand this word.” The next sentence she critiqued: “I named him Hobo, because I assumed he was part of the pack of homeless men camping beside the railroad tracks beyond my trailer,” she critiqued by commenting, “No reflection on this? On naming a human condition? On dehumanizing him this way?”
I called the man Hobo in my non-fiction account because the word fit the transient men who squatted in brambles by the train tracks where I lived while attending junior college.
Although on a student budget I fed these men, who addressed me as ma’am, even taking one with a broken arm to the hospital and giving him the last folding money in my wallet. Further into the story this reader had also written in the margins to take out the word Olivetti, when used in the same sentence as typewriter, because “modern day readers” could not identify the word.
Look it up then!
Since childhood, a hardbound dictionary has always been at my ready. Solid as a brick shithouse this Miriam Webster is well over half a century old and still in use. My mother got it as a gift when she opened up a bank account when I was a preschooler. Ever since then I’ve paged through this definitive tome when a word tripped up my reading or writing. For “modern day readers,” who don’t crack books, definitions are a keystroke away.
And who in the hell is “WE?” As in “We come to memoir to read about a specific person’s life, but “we” are always looking for some commentary on the human condition.”
I do not write for the imperial pronoun but from my singular experiences, to simply tell my story. If it informs, inspires, or inflames that is the interpreted choice of the reader.
After returning from that writer’s workshop, I have a psychic hangover, cannot rid my head of the resounding negativity and the question…What did I do wrong? This malaise seeps into my dreams where cards are stacked against me, backs are turned, and I am persecuted for crimes others are committing.
Weeks later, I am telling the story to a couple of friends, about the woman who begged a bash to her kisser and that I’d purchased the domain Cuntsville.org because I want to develop a social media platform to expose and to explore what it is like to be cunted.
“Oh,” said my male friend who is built like a brick, with a face that begs his wife’s kiss, “that’s like when men get chippy.”
“Maybe you should register the domain name “Chippyville.com?”
“Naw,” he replies, “not worth my time.”
Only a year before, I had been in the Swiss Alps at a writer’s workshop. Now, I was on the road, between the rolling Columbia River and Oregon’s staggering basalt outcrops. I was driving to my log cabin to edit the final draft of the book that was criticized for using the word Hobo, when I stop on the highway to pick up one. Actually, in passing the man waving his arm beside a bicycle, I assumed, was a broken-down cross-country cyclist far, far, from a station of repair.
I pull to the shoulder and back up. As he gets closer to the truck, I can see in the rearview that he is not the biker I thought. His face is dirty. His clothes are grimy. He is not wearing
high-vis spandex or a helmet. He is carrying a small pack and water bottle in his left hand and a little bike in the other. Oops. Stranger danger. I could speed up and leave him by the shoulder.
Instead, I get out and open the truck bed, reluctantly. The man says the valve on the front tire is broken. I pinch it to make sure it is flat and that he is not bluffing. “You aren’t going to mug me,” I ask, seriously. Seriously afraid now on a deserted stretch of highway with a man who wears and smells like axle grease. “No,” he says spreading out his arms. “You can check my pockets for weapons if you want.” I do not. Although I glance at the stained work pants then up into his trimmed goatee and mustache. His half-smile is white teeth, straight, counterpoint to the cruddy cap on his head.
On the drive to the nearest station of repair, I listen to Tyler, keeping my cell between my thighs in case I have to dial 911. He started hopping trains years before, stopped, then took it up again. Twice, he mentions his mother dying. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking this put him back on the rails, not just for the adventure, but to take him away from something he can’t ride out.
Tyler casually announces that he is a hobo.
“Really? You call yourself a hobo? Isn’t that a bad thing?”
Tyler smiles with his eyes as he tells me, and I’m not sure if he used the exact word endearment but being called a hobo is a term of endearment to define a way of life he has chosen. Then I tell him about being criticized for using that word to describe the men who hopped the rails beside the trailer I lived in as a college student. His widening grin changes the shape of his goatee.
A little bike in tow, Tyler peddles between populated stops that include dumpsters. “There is a lot of good food thrown out,” he says adding he does not rely on food stamps but luck and the occasional handout. He says he has never been thrown off a train. He could be fined though.
“How much?”
“Five hundred dollars, I think,” he says.
“How are you going to get five hundred dollars from a hobo?” I ask.
Tyler’s smirk raises his eyebrows. “That’s just it,” he replies, and we let it go. Halfway to the truck stop where I’ll let him off, I roll down my window when I realize
I’m sitting a foot away from a stranger, trailing whatever he passed through, at a new height in the COVID-19 pandemic; cases are higher in July than they were when Corona was first detected. At the same time Tyler rolls down his window. “Sorry, I know I must smell.” He does. But not of oily, body odor but of the metallic air a person whiffs when walking between coupling train cars.
Tyler lives out of a backpack, really more of an army rucksack. There is a rope, duct tape and a cover for his sleeping bag. Tyler does not list a stove or food. What clothes he has, except for mustard-colored Carhartt coveralls and spare t-shirt, he wears.
At a truck stop, I let him out near a McDonalds. “You must be ready for breakfast,” I ask, as it is that time of the morning just getting warmed up to be a scorcher. “I’m hungry,” he says, “but I don’t have any money,” he adds. Maybe he is planning on dumpster diving although nearby bins are secured behind enclosures.
I ask if I can take his picture and post it to Facebook. Tyler says sure and strips off his shirt to reveal a once white tank top. I’m thinking he wants to pose in it when he whips out a black t-shirt and dons it. Coors Beer is emblazoned across the front. He takes a knee beside the upturned bike, pack, water bottle, and what resembles a box of Tic Tacs. Later when I look at that photo, I enlarge it on the computer to examine that container because it doesn’t seem that carrying around breath mints is a hoboing necessity. Try as I did, amplification only blurred the box more.
While Tyler prepares his small parcel of possessions I rummage in my purse, pulling out the only folding money in my wallet.
“Here, this might get you some breakfast, I’m thinking an egg McMuffin or at least a large coffee, two bucks doesn’t have much stretch. He takes the bills and with both hands cups mine, “Thank you, ma’am,” he says with an expression direct as the rails taking him to places where hobos find strength, camaraderie and kindness, or not.
This is the second time in my life a hobo called me ma’am. The first time I was a teenager living in a tiny trailer and feeding hobos. Now, I am middle-aged with two homes and rooms to spare. If I’d met Tyler closer to my side of the tracks, I’d invite him in for a shower and a meal, maybe even a clean bed for the night, even during this pandemic.
Days later I find Tyler’s Facebook page and message him about the little green box.
It does not contain breath mints but is a patch kit that didn’t help fix the valve because it was cut off at the stem. Tyler bought a new one at a Walmart in Kennewick. By the night of the same day, I first met Tyler, he was in Idaho. The next day riding freight near Yellowstone. He informs me of this and ends his Facebook message with “Keep being you. Kindness and
understanding are dying forms. People like you allow people like me to keep faith in humanity alive within ourselves.”
In all his journeying I wonder if Tyler ever got railroaded in a Cuntsville.
