The Gangbang Girl

In 1997, after graduating college, I got my first apartment in Bethesda, MD. It was in what my grandfather called “the old hotboxes” on Battery Lane, and it was pretty cool for a first apartment. Big, bright, and not a dorm room or my grandparent’s back bedroom. He called them hotboxes because they were squat, brick buildings and he said “they’re just like the punishment boxes the Japs put us in!” (I should say right here that my grandfather spent the war guarding German POW’s at a resort in the California desert.)

My job at the time – which was horrible and insane – paid me peanuts, so I had to find a roommate. My old high school buddy was in a similar situation so, bang, problem solved.

Life in Bethesda is just slightly terrible. This isn’t something you’re consciously aware of though, it’s more a sort of subconscious, background malaise. It’s that unnameable thing that wakes you up at 3am. In 1997, the town was just beginning to shed the things that made it interesting and taking the first steps on the path towards the runaway homogenized and urbanized tall condo building nightmare it’s become today.

So, for folks in their early 20s, Bethesda in 1997 wasn’t really the place to be unless you wanted to go down the Flanagan’s rabbit hole. But I managed because I was entering my “working six jobs seems like a good idea” mode. I picked up jobs on the weekends, and at nights, and on holidays… Someone very close to my life story, editorially-speaking, recently dropped a revelatory bombshell on me. He said, “So all of this working was how you avoided contemplating suicide, right?” And, yes! Of course. The busier I was, the less I was thinking about how much the world sucks – something taught to me early on, administered by the original parents from hell. But that understanding of the world was somewhat lost on my roommate.

He was some sort of low rent engineer working for a company way down in southern Maryland and had to drive nearly two hours each way. This job (and the commute) was just about the uppermost limit of stress he was capable of processing rationally. Finally, one day, he came home with a large bottle of Jagermeister and put it in the fridge. He wasn’t normally a drinker, so this seemed odd to me, but, being a drinker, I knew not to ask questions.

The next morning, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my oatmeal and reading something I’ve long forgotten when he stormed in and ripped open the fridge. He sat down across from me, not saying a word, and poured himself an eight ounce glass of Jager. He drank it with these huge guzzling gulps, like a kid drinking milk. Then he filled the glass again and repeated this procedure till half the bottle was gone.

Still not speaking, he stood up and left for work.

When he got home that night, he made a bee-line for the fridge and finished the bottle – not even bothering with a glass — with a shuddering, shaking frenzy. He also brought another bottle home with him.

Every day – one bottle. Half in the morning, half as soon as he got home. So, finally, I just had to ask.

“It’s the only way I can handle the commute.” He told me, his eyes haunted. At this point, there was a constant reek of Jagermeister that seemed to ooze out of his skin and clothes.

I clucked my tongue and shook my head – “Why Jagermeister?”

“It’s healthy for you.” He paused, rocked back and forth, and I seriously started to wonder if I was sharing an apartment with a serial killer. Then, slowly, he added: “It’s a digestif.”

Around this same time, he fell in love with a 17 year old girl. And then things got complicated after the first gangbang.

When I first met this girl – we worked together at a bookstore while I was in college – she was 15 and very proud of how many men she’d had sex with. She threw herself at everyone and, really, it was slightly comical. (In hindsight. At the time, I was confused and frustrated.) You’d turn away for a second, then turn back and she’d be in her underwear. Like that chick in Star Trek: Into Darkness. On an alien planet about to defuse what you think is a mega missile? Get into your slinky Victoria’s Secret gear and…pose!

So it’s one thing to have this girl that’s been handed around to everyone, but it’s another to decide that the thing to do is enter into a committed relationship with her and have her over at the apartment all the time.

My roommate and I double-teamed her one night at his childhood house in his parent’s bedroom. (She swore it was her 18th birthday, ha ha.) I was drunk and angry and finished quickly and, when his turn came, he took hours. I watched the entirety of The Keep because I love Nazis and ghosts and then I went to check on them. She was sitting in the bathtub, in about five inches of water, shivering and facing the wall. He was sponging her down, fully clothed and crouched on the floor next to the tub. He swiveled his head to me and mumbled, “I…like…bathing…her…”

I’ve always been an advocate of the old rule — gangbang girls aren’t really part of the gang. So everyone was understandably awkward when she became a fixture in our group. With the Jager-fueled lifestyle and the creepy shit with this girl going on, a little part of me felt that things were…wrong. I think the wrongness was because, suddenly, I was the fucking moral compass. And when I’m the moral compass…then all is not right in the world. If I’m the voice of reason, then it’s really not a leap to assume that the angels are about to start opening the seven seals.

She, of course, did what most young women in her position would do and started quietly driving wedges. This anxiety quickly started to break up our group and one of our mutual friends – my roommate’s alleged best friend – decided to execute a series of particularly disruptive pranks. He’d go through the dumpster and bring weird trash to my roommate’s bedroom – like junk lawn mowers, railroad ties, and other bizarre shit. Then he’d lay them out as sort of strange exhibit pieces. When my roommate came home, guzzled his Jager, and stumbled to his room, he’d open the door to find something crazy laid out for him. Once, this best friend took all of my roommate’s weird outdoor wicker furniture out of his bedroom and piled it up poltergeist-style in the living room.

Perhaps not aware of the severity of these pranks, or my roommate’s fragile state of mind, this guy was stunned when things came to a head. My roommate finally slipped over the precipice into a screaming rage and what’s the first thing the so-called best friend does? He says everything was my idea and I goaded him into it.

Now, of course, I had been sitting there watching as all this stuff happened. But, as one does when they share a space with someone who’s not a family member, I didn’t pay much attention to the goings on. I watched repeats of Highlander: The Series and just turned up the volume whenever the best friend would come in – using a spare key given to him by my roommate – wheeling a baby carriage full of old lettuce heads or something.

When the finger got pointed at me, I had one of those wide-eyed, “Huh?” reactions which the best friend jumped on right away – see how duplicitous he is! You can’t fool us, Nacho!

All of this, of course, was fuel for a 17 year old gangbang girl trying to change her station in life. I was public enemy #1. Within weeks, the lease was broken and my roommate was moving out. This, of course, was a relief. I was pretty sure he was about to start stalking around with an axe.

When he moved out the last load of his shit, he walked over to where I was sitting on the arm of the couch and he looked at me with a flat, expressionless face. Then he said: “Why’d you do this to me?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t do anything,” I replied.

He shook his head, looked at his shoes for a full, silent minute, then he looked up again and fixed me with a stare. “If we were a man and a woman, we’d be man and wife by now. I’ve always loved you.”

Speechless, I watched as he spun on his heel and marched out the door. That was the last I ever saw of him.

I think I’ve spent most of the last 18 years trying to parse that statement. There’s a whole lot that’s wrong with it. But one thing I do know – he married that gangbang girl, and they’re both still alive. I ran into her once on the Metro and she hung from the handholds, swinging with the movement of the train, and grinned devilishly at me. Almost as if it were a prepared speech, she said, “We’ve been watching you, Mr. Sasha. We know everything about you. We know where you work, and what you do, and everything you write and say.”

That was in 2005 or so. I think she was trying to scare me but, of course, by 2005 I had been writing about every facet of my life on this blog for nearly 5 years. So, if they wanted to, everyone in the world could have watched me and learned everything about me.

When she got off at her stop, she slipped me her number. Ah, my. You can take the girl out of the gangbang, but you can’t take the gangbang out of the girl.