Poles Apart (14 page)

Around noon, while I was offline, hanging out at the rehab hospital as my mother and father circled one another in a rare post-divorce encounter, whoever was managing Candace Sharpe’s official Twitter stream and her 25,678,369 followers (not kidding) retweeted my tweet promoting my Mason Bennington post on the
Eve of Equality
blog. Let me run that by you again in case, for some reason, you missed it or tuned out for a moment. Not to put too fine a point on it, Candace retweeted the link to the lead post on my new anonymous feminist blog to every one of her 25,678,369 ardent, devoted, crazed followers. That’s when things kind of got out of hand.

I clicked through to the blog and logged into the administrator’s back end. (Yes, I know, there’s something mildly suggestive about that last phrase.) Because I was never expecting much traffic, I hadn’t turned on “comment moderation” on the blog. This meant that whenever a reader left a comment, it appeared on the blog directly without having to await my approval. That was probably a minor oversight on my part, or maybe even a humungous oversight. I activated the comment-moderation function. There were already several hundred comments appearing on the Mason Bennington post, and fewer but still plenty of comments on each of the other thirteen posts. I had a following, and it was massive, very vocal, and overwhelmingly supportive. For every forty or fifty supportive reader comments, there lurked messages
that were crude, suggestive, sometimes anatomically impossible (or at least very difficult), and occasionally violent. It was clear that men had written most of these horrible comments, dwarfed by the deluge of encouraging ones from women. I stopped reading and closed my laptop.

Then I flipped out for a few minutes and walked around the apartment at a brisk pace, hyperventilating, largely because I didn’t know what else to do. I briefly prayed for a time machine. But when nothing materialized, I gave up on that plan. After a final deep breath, I sat back down, lifted the laptop lid, and opened my Twitter profile. And there it was, staring me in the face and clenching my bowels. It was worse than I thought. Having started out that morning with nineteen followers, I was a little unnerved, okay I was just a few synapses short of a complete mental meltdown, when I saw the modest little increase to 237,453 followers. I immediately refreshed my screen and the number jumped to 237,602 followers. Shit. There was an endless stream of retweets from thousands of Candace Sharpe’s acolytes. There were hundreds of tweets directed specifically at me. When I say that, I mean they were directed at the blogger behind EofE. Most of the tweets were from women who had read the Bennington blog post. But there were plenty more from those who had clearly read some or all of my other posts, too. By eye-balling the stream, I’d estimate that over ninety per cent of the tweets were positive, even laudatory. I stopped counting how many used the shopworn phrase “You go girl!”

I left Twitter and went to Facebook. Mistake. A big one. A basic search of the
Eve of Equality
name generated literally thousands of Facebook posts, each one driving even more traffic to the blog. I feared my index finger might be headed for a repetitive stress injury from endlessly scrolling the wheel on my mouse. Enough Facebook. I wanted to stop this online torture trip, but I really needed to assess what had happened, how big it had gone, and what the hell I was going to do about it. So I kept working my mouse.

YouTube was my next port of call. That might also have been a mistake, though it did clarify matters. I pumped “Eve of Equality” into the search bar and was greeted by dozens of the very same clip. Every one of them had been uploaded that afternoon. So here’s the deal. It seemed that Candace Sharpe had not only retweeted one of my tweets, but she’d singled out my blog on her show that afternoon. You know, on the air! On
TV!
I kid you not. Through a coincidence of monumental proportions, my blog went live the very same day that Candace’s show was dedicated to examining “the current state of feminism in America.” Great. Just great. I played the brief clip, oh, I don’t know, about twenty-seven times, just to allow the full significance of it to wash over me.

I then hit Play a twenty-eighth time and watched as the familiar and beautiful face of Candace Sharpe filled the screen. One of the most powerful women on television wore a smile a mile wide as she looked directly into the camera.

“And just before we go, I was grazing on the Internet this morning, as I’m wont to do, when I stumbled upon a new and fantastic site that has officially become my favourite feminist blog. In light of today’s show, I took it as a good omen, as a sign. So I paid attention. The address is on your screen. Check out
Eve of Equality
if you want a clear and thoughtful take on a whole range of issues affecting women and our continuing fight for equality. I particularly liked her post taking down Mason Bennington. She captured my thoughts precisely, and maybe yours, too. Definitely worth a read. We don’t know who’s behind
Eve of Equality
, but she is one smart cookie who knows how to write. Find out for yourself, and we’ll see you back here the same time tomorrow.”

The clip I was watching ran for another thirty seconds or so as the credits scrolled up the screen, with the
Eve of Equality
URL
anchored in the bottom right-hand corner for all to see.

I felt a little sick to my stomach. No, that’s not quite true. It felt more like I was about two-thirds of the way through my own autopsy. Then I realized there was one more piece to the puzzle I was forgetting. It suddenly occurred to me that my phony EofE Gmail email address was provided on the Contact section of the blog. Shit. I zipped over to Gmail and watched as several hundred emails loaded before my eyes. I started reading but stopped after the first dozen or so. Most of them were remarkably similar. A snippet sampling:

“Love this blog!”

“Where have you been all my life?”

“Eve, whoever you are, you just put my own mixed-up feelings into words and made sense of them. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“For the first time I feel like I can be a feminist without having to carry the giant coat-hanger in the Women’s Day protest march. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)”

“Please, please, please, keep writing. This is great stuff. I need it.”

Then, occasionally, there would be more militant expressions:

“You were way too soft on that asshole Bennington. He should be strung up in the public square by the balls, and thrashed.”

“It’s time to accept that women have no future in a world run by men.”

“We need to answer violence against women with violence against men.”

There were also many anti-feminist comments, most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, obviously from men. I won’t bore you with their imbecilic and profane sentiments.

Finally, there were several emails that suggested new topics for me to write about, including
LGBT
issues, women and gun control, gay marriage, just to cite a few. I scrolled down to the bottom end of my Gmail inbox. It took a while to make it all the way down to the first email. It had arrived at 2:58 p.m. I was done. There were too many emails to read. It was overwhelming. I stopped when I thought I had a handle on the general categories
and the proportions of emails in each. By this time it was well after midnight.

So I shut everything down in surrender and climbed into bed. It probably goes without saying, but I pulled the comforter right up over my head. For the first time I noticed the music pounding from below me. Perhaps it was opening night downstairs. I just lay there in the pitch black, thinking, trying to take it all in. It took twenty minutes for the pinprick of light to cut through the darkness of my jumbled thoughts. The glow was barely discernible at first, but it slowly and steadily grew and brightened. A question circled my mind, flitting from the shadows to cut through the edges of the light. It took a while for the query to land, fully illuminated. It then evolved into a cascade of questions.

By two o’clock in the morning, I’d nearly fully recovered my faculties. Sure, it was shocking to go, in the span of about four
hours, from a tiny blog with no visitors to what Google’s search algorithm now ranked as the world’s most authoritative and popular feminist blog. But after I thought about it for what seemed like a very long time – first in a crazed and psychotic way, and then eventually in a more thoughtful and logical fashion – I came to a place of peace and calm. While this unbelievable turn of events was certainly unexpected, it was undeniably a precious gift, and a rare opportunity. To squander it would be a crime against the very principles that spawned
Eve of Equality
in the first place. I would not waste this chance. I could not waste this chance.

By half-past-two in the morning, the fear, anxiety, and, yes, abject terror ebbed, as reason, confidence, and even a little of the old excitement, flowed back in. I was starting to feel myself again. Of course, it could also have been throwing up twice that settled my nerves and restored my resolve. Regardless, I was too wired for sleep. Besides, I doubt anyone could sleep with the music pulsating below. My chest buzzed with the bass line. So with a “no time like the present” attitude, I pushed back the covers and returned to the kitchen table. I avoided the Internet and simply opened a new document in Word to start the women and post-secondary education essay for the
Eve of Equality
blog. It was time to feed the beast again.

I started by reviewing the notes I’d already made. Then I reworked my outline to heighten the impact of the message. Finally, I started to write. The words were flowing reasonably well as I typed in time to the beat downstairs. I’d gotten into the
habit of resting both feet around the nut and bolt emerging from my kitchen floor. The vibration was very faint at first. The soles of one’s feet are quite sensitive. I wondered at first if my legs had fallen asleep, leading to that pins and needles sensation. But it soon became clear that the nut-and-bolt assembly was in fact vibrating. Ten minutes later, I could not only feel it in my feet but also in my calves and thighs as the tremor grew. Soon, metal-on-metal squeaking sounds in time with the music escaped from under the kitchen table. Finally, the vibrations morphed into straight-up shaking. The whole fixture was moving beneath my feet.

Shit. I feared the chandelier was about to crash onto hundreds of happy, dancing, drunk, opening-night patrons in the bar downstairs, assuming it was a bar. Not an auspicious beginning. I got down on my hands and knees to take a closer look at the large, polished nut and bolt sticking up through my kitchen floor. Uh-oh. That was not good. I could now see it moving. I watched the nut slowly coming loose, as visions of missing lock washers danced in my head.

I’m not very handy. My knowledge of tools hit the wall after hammer, saw, drill, wrench, and screwdriver. But I was pretty sure when that nut finished unscrewing itself from the bolt in my floor, something bad was going to happen. I tried to tighten it with my hand. I could turn it a bit, but it seemed to reverse itself and loosen again each time I stopped. I looked at my watch. It was ten to three in morning. Why was the place still open,
anyway? I knew that last call in Florida bars was 2 a.m. I didn’t want to go down there, but what choice did I have? I was the only one who knew that a heavy light fixture would soon have its Phantom of the Opera moment and crash to the floor below.

I pulled a sweater over my head and slipped on my running shoes. I went downstairs and out the door at the front of the building. Fancy cars were still parked up and down the street. A silver Audi R8 pulled in between the Valet Parking signs and stopped. I watched as an older, nattily suited man got out and handed the car key to an attractive young woman in a rather skimpy red vest. She slid into the driver’s seat, started the car, and pulled away, presumably to a parking spot nearby. I just stood there off to the side, my eyes following the man as he spoke to the same big security guy I’d encountered the other day. The muscle-bound bouncer was wearing a black suit and tie, accessorized by an earphone. He referred to his clipboard, nodded to the stylishly dressed man, and then pushed a button on the small black remote control that hung around his neck like a pendant. Instantly, the beautifully polished and lacquered wooden double doors behind him opened automatically to admit the owner of the silver R8.

Believe it or not, it didn’t strike me when I first looked at the great doors moving on their own. But it hit me like a sledge to the head three seconds later when they closed. The two large and shiny brass door handles met again in the middle when the doors swung shut. I’d already had one serious shock that night.
Having a second was almost physically painful. I stood there transfixed, wrapping my arms around my chest as if to prevent my lungs from escaping. I couldn’t take my eyes off those two big lustrous metallic door handles. There they were, in all their polished glare and glory – a big brass X on the left door, a big brass Y on the right. Oh shit.

The big black burly security guy broke my trance.

“Hey, dude, move along. You’re blocking the way.”

“Um, I live here” was all I could muster.

“I know where the fuck you live,” he replied. “But you’re still clogging up the entrance. I got cars lined up. Go on back upstairs or take a long fuckin’ walk. Your choice.”

I was pretty sure he was not the guy I wanted to talk to about my loose-nut issue, and my name was certainly not on his gold-plated invitation list, so I started toward the alley. But one step later, grasping at a teeny-tiny straw, I turned back to the man in black.