You Never Forget Your First

In South East Asia the way they break an elephant is to put it in a cage for several days and poke it with sharpened sticks. Throughout this time the animal is given no food or water. There is a point that the elephant caves to the process, its spirit so weathered that it can no longer fight back, though any of them die during this process. I’m told that it’s a necessary thing in order for the elephants to become trainable, that there is no other way to take the jungle out of them, even if they’re with you from birth.

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve ridden an elephant, my feet tucked behind its enormous ears and my jeans rubbing against the coarse hairs on its neck. At the time I had no idea what had been done to get her tame enough to get her to allow me to ride her like a giant heavily-wrinkled grey horse. I know now though and I regret it. I’ve since been to the sanctuaries where elephants stumble along on legs that have been left a little too broken; places where you’re allowed to wash the elephants but never to ride them.

I’ve heard about the elephants on Chang Mai streets at night, where there are still elephant beggars, though I’ve never seen it. In Bangkok elephant begging is banned, but up North supposedly you can pay steep prices for handfuls of bananas to feed to the elephants as they stalk the pavement, thin like something out of a Dali painting, incongruously pausing in front of a shopping mall, so very far from home.

I used to think about the elephants all the time when I was at work and someone was doing their best to break me. I found it always helped to put things in perspective, but it never made the unkind things that people said go away. Though the gropings I’ve received over the years are the most memorable of all.

Recently while I was in Budapest I turned around to some sort of kissing noise behind me, and saw it was coming from a thick-shouldered Greek man, checking me out and informing me with his shriveled lips that I had interested him enough to make noise about it. I was reminded of the tuk tuk drivers in Thailand and the way they make little popping sounds with their mouths when they’re trying to get you to come out for a ping pong show, the noise supposedly reminiscent of the popping noise the women’s vaginas make when they expel ping pong balls out of their vaginas.

The exchange reminded me of my first boss in the service industry, a thick-shouldered nightmare named Marcel. When his favorite waitress, a thick-bottomed blonde, got married she came back from her honeymoon aglow with stories about the beach and how in love she was. While the rest of us poured over her photos and listened intently to how her extensions refused to dry in the tropics, Marcel, never one to miss an opportunity, asked if he could see her tan lines.

I was freshly eighteen at the time, still getting used to myself and not overly sure of my environment still. Our clientele was made up of mostly rig pigs and so I got very used to the sort of men who’d slide their room key across the table with my so-called tip tucked around it. I fantasized about stealing their valuables, and some of my dignity back, when they left for work in the morning. I fancied myself as the sort of girl who had enough patience to stake-out a hotel room—wait to see the man who’d had his hand on my ass the night before slip into his lifted one-ton and drive away—before swooping in to loot the room of its electronics and any sort of liquor that he’d left behind in the mini bar. It was unfortunately this rather growing dependence on liquor that caused me to sleep until roughly the time they finished work, put on a thick coat of makeup and rush to yet another shift. I was preparing for a life at Denny’s, the place old waitresses go to die, or so I’ve been told since about the age of twenty-three, when the elasticity of the skin over my triceps first started to go slack.

Marcel was just the cherry on top of everything, brushing the top of your ass whenever he walked past and squeezing you against the cooler though there was plenty of room for him to get past. I had a habit of pretending that nothing was going on. My relationship with Marcel went like this: he palmed my ass and I pretended it was an accident; he shoved me against buckets of wet lettuce in the cooler with his groin and I pretended it was an accident; he closed me in his office and went over the schedule with me, pinning me against his desk as he leaned into my shoulder and I pretended his vision was bad. It wasn’t until he thrust me, groin first into the corner of a deep-freeze, his hand cupping my ass hard and leaving me with a deep purple triangle-shaped bruise above my pubic bone for a week, that I had to admit he was doing all of this on purpose.

The only person who could rein him in was Marcel’s girlfriend, a woman that we all knew was married and whom we referred to as the Queen Bee. When she got pregnant and left her husband for Marcel it just seemed like karma to all of us. She’d come in for lunch and we’d all watch Marcel slink up to her table, his spawn expanding inside her like the web we watched twisting around him. She was like an embodiment of karma, the implications of his future responsibilities increasing around her heavy hips and waist. There was nothing I liked more than when the restaurant emptied out and I could flit around them, stripping table cloths, drinking a tumbler full of wine and listening to the soon-to-be mother of his child berate Marcel. She was a twisted sort of answer to prayer. 

When I finally quit and went off to college it was with a sort of resignation. I’d gotten used to the odd sort of routine that my life had taken on. The endless parades of men who worked dangerous jobs, men who cackled the odd time that I still turned red, men who asked me if I knew what it was like to fingered my a man who’d had all of his digits on one hand cut off up to the second knuckle.

Since then I’ve worked almost another ten years in the service industry. I’ve had better bosses and I’ve had worse ones—though now I know to extract myself from those situations in a timely manner. And that working under the table is a good way to get abused under it too. But I will always remember my first. The towering hairy man who put me in touch with my instincts, instincts that awakened against the corner of a deepfreeze, my neurons suddenly firing all at once as if occurred to me that yes, this was indeed what sexual harassment felt like, and that in future, it just wasn’t worth that sort of price of admission to keep my job.