The Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad (12 page)

Or picture this: a boxer swings at no opponent, then raises his hands high over his head in victory. Of the very few people in the crowd, most are women knitting. The referee hands the champion a knitted belt.

Or this: a baseball player pitches to an empty home plate, then walks in and picks up the ball. He picks up a bat, tosses the ball and swings. A pop fly! He's under it, he's got it, he catches it, he's OUT!

Or this: A guy shows up to a frat house party. Woo! But wait, where's the thumping music? Where are the strobe lights? Where are all kegs? Where are all the drunken girls who have been plied with alcohol until they're ready for action (i.e., barely conscious)? He enters the quiet room. PAR-TAY! Woo! Woo! He glances around nervously. This guy is a survivor. He's not stupid (at least, not in that way. Confidentially, he's not the brightest student ever to grace the university. But he is smart enough to have lived this long, and that's saying a lot, considering the company he used to keep). He approaches the bar and pours himself a nice tall glass of milk. He sinks into the couch in the room formerly known as the make-out lounge, alone. He drums his fingers. He grins—he hasn't had this much fun in weeks!

Or this: a man in an Air Force uniform looks at a radar screen. He sees a blip, picks up a phone. He shouts, “Enemy airplane observed. Prepare defenses!”

He stands, runs downstairs, out the building, and over to an antiaircraft gun. He picks up a phone. He shouts, “Ready to fire, sir! From which direction is the aircraft coming?”

He runs back into the building, upstairs, over to the radar
screen, picks up the phone. He shouts, “From the west. Fire when ready!”

He runs back downstairs, then slumps exhausted over his antiaircraft gun.

Or picture this: a soldier huddles in a trench. He removes a medallion from around his neck, closes his eyes, and kisses it. He hangs it on the side of the trench. He hears a voice shout, “Charge!” He leaps out of his trench and into no-man's land. He rushes across. He is alone. He reaches the trench on the other side. It is empty. He throws his arms in the air, shouts to the heavens, “We won!” He pauses, then adds, “I think.”

Or picture this: a group of middle school students crowd around their male teacher's desk. A female teacher stands nearby. One of the girls tells the male teacher, “We want to start a knitting club after school.”

He responds, “Um. I'm not sure that would be a good idea.”

The female teacher interjects, “Yes, that's a very nice idea, girls.”

The girls cheer.

Or this: a father teaches his little daughter how to hold a needle. She concentrates, determined to get it right. He says, “Hold it like this, and then thrust upward between the ribs. It's all in the execution, as it were.”

Or this: A man holds in his hands his birthday present. It is in a box smaller than Pandora's box, but certainly bigger than Mama's squeezebox. He looks at it with anticipation, like a little boy about to open a, well, present. He rips off the paper, tears open the box, and sees … a hand-knit sweater. He blanches, then looks fearfully at his wife.

She asks innocently, “Don't you like it, dear?”

All creatures respond to positive and negative reinforcement. It does not take long for men to begin to understand and respond to the message of the knitting circles.

It is a cold night. A burnt orange 2001 Pontiac Aztek is parked in an alley behind a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. The windows are steamed over. A man sits on the back seat, and a woman straddles him, moving mechanically up and down.

“This feels soooo good,” the man says. He closes his eyes. “Baby, do you really like me, or are you just doing this for the money?”

The woman responds, her voice as mechanical as her movements, “I really like you, baby. I like you so much.”

The man frowns, and gently pulls her off him. She settles next to him. He pulls his shirt down to cover himself and looks into her bored eyes. He says, “But will you still like me tomorrow?”

“Sure, I'll like you tomorrow, if you still got money.”

“So … you wouldn't do this for free?”

The woman answers immediately, without thinking, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Are you telling me you're doing this just for the money?”

“What'd you think, Jack? You think I wanna stand out here freezing my ass off waiting for losers like you to come and poke me?”

He says, “I thought you liked me.”

“I like you when you got some money for me. Now let's hurry up, cuz mama's gotta make her living.”

She tries to climb on top of him again. He holds her still. He says, “Wait. This is your job?”

She rolls her eyes. “Give the man a prize.”

He asks, trying to puzzle his way through this, “Don't you like sex for its own sake?”

“Sure, I like sex, but that's not what we're doing here. This is called commerce.”

The man looks nervous. “But it's not, you know, the R-word, is it? And you don't have any friends who, you know, knit, do you?”

She says, “Don't worry, Jack. You're not raping me. You're exploiting me. There's a difference, albeit one of degree rather than quality. They're on a continuum. I'm not doing this because I want to, but because I need the money. I'm forced by my economic circumstances, even if you're not personally forcing me, get it? But I'm not going to kill you, baby. I like your free-flowing cash too much.”

“You're using me for my money?”

“Look. Women make, on average, in a normal job, 75 percent of what men make. Do the math. You try raising two kids on minimum wage. Now shut up and let me earn my eighty bucks.”

Now the man is really concerned. He says, “I thought fifty was the going rate….”

“The extra thirty,” the woman responds, “is for the economics lesson.”

Suzie is lying on her bed in her brand new apartment with her boyfriend Sam. They are both fully clothed. Sam is as gorgeous as is Suzie, who is as gorgeous as is Sam. Together they are as cute as a pair of chipmunks, as adorable as baby muskrats, as squeezable as baby bears (or maybe not), as lovely as a crashing stock market, as wondrous a sight to behold as a failing dam, as beautiful as a sharp kick in the … well, you know.

They gaze at each other with mad desire. Suzie reaches over to kiss Sam.

He pulls away.

She asks, “What's wrong? Don't you want to?”

He answers, “Desperately. But are you sure you want to?”

“More than anything!”

He asks, tentatively, “You're not going to … ?”

“What?”

“I saw you knitting earlier.”

“Yes, kneepads for Jaz's Grandma Ahn's Roller Derby team. So?”

“It makes me nervous. What if you later decide that you didn't really want to, and that in some way—even some subtle way that I'm not aware of—I coerced you, or you felt coerced even if it wasn't my fault, and that therefore it was rape?”

Suzie cries, “I'm not going to do that! I'm dying for you! Isn't that clear enough?”

“I'm dying for you too! But how can you be sure?”

“I just am,” she says. “I'm mad with lust for you.”

He responds, “I'm mad with lust for you, too. Oh my god.”

They look deep into one another's eyes, bring their faces closer and closer together. She closes her eyes, slightly parts her lips.

But he is a third-year philosophy major, and as such does not seem to understand that there are times for words and times to shut up. He says, entering full-on academic philosopher mode, “You may think you want to, but there might be underlying social and political forces affecting you psychologically that you're not aware of. I need to know if you want to want to.”

Suzie opens her eyes slowly, sighs, then says, “Yes. I want to. I want to want to. I want to want to want to.”

“But,” Sam says, really getting up his philosophical steam, indeed his philosophical high dudgeon, or to put it another way, having gotten his philosophical knickers in a twist (instead of getting his knickers the way they're supposed to be, which is off), “how do you know that what you want is really what you want, and isn't just what you've been told you want by a patriarchal culture?”

“I know what my body says. And my body says I crave you. I craaaave you.”

Sadly, once a philosopher gets a hold of an idea (as opposed to a body), it can be hard to get him to let go. He says, “I believe that you believe you crave me. But I'm worried about how much free will we really have in a culture as utterly coercive in every aspect as this one is, and how untainted our desires can really be.

“If we grow up believing in culturally constructed gender binaries and their coexistent roles, if we grow up in heteropatriarchy, indeed if we grow up immersed in compulsory heterosexuality—shaped by these ideas, really—plus commercially distorted standards of beauty, plus grow up burdened by the overwhelming weight of thousands of years of the institutional oppression of women, and the social relations and power disparities that flow from that to infect every aspect of this culture, contaminating every personal interaction between men and women, and, for that matter, men and men, and women and women, and children and everyone, in countless ways, ways we often can't even perceive because we're so immersed in them, sort of like how fish are said not to think about water because it's just their world, then how can we be sure that our sexual feelings and desires in general, and the people we're attracted to in particular, and the intimate acts we believe we want to do with them, would be the same as they would be without all those
influences? How can we be certain of what we truly want, deep in our hearts?”

Suzie does not reply.

Sam fears he may have somehow offended her. He says, softly, cutely (cute as a baby porcupine, though not so prickly), “Suzie?”

Still more silence.

More cutely still, he says, “Suzie?”

Suzie snores softly, as adorable as a baby panda.

Brigitte and Nick are at Brigitte's home. From her stereo come the soft sounds of Che Guevara singing:
I left my Kalashnikov in San Francisco.

Nick pleads, “You promised to give me something to do! When will I receive my assignment? I want to experience the glory, the glamour, the adventure of the knitting circle.”

Brigitte looks at him. “You haven't forgotten about it yet?” She sighs. “Okay. I have your first assignment, Mr. Secret Lone Wolf Undercover Agent. This is pretty easy, but has glory, adventure, and glamour up the wazoo. You're going to be in arms procurement.”

Nick's eyes open wide.

Brigitte says, “I need you to obtain three sets of new knitting needles. No more, no less. Three. Got that?”

Nick responds, “Got it! Aye-aye, Captain!”

Brigitte smiles. “Wrong genre, sweetie.”

Daisy's Craft Barn is the essence of Americana. It's as American as apple pie, baseball, the Fourth of July. It's as American as invading small Latin American nations. As American as bombing people in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
As American as land theft from the indigenous. As American as a phony democracy where no matter whom you vote for, the corporations win. As American as “free trade” policies enforced by the largest military the world has ever seen. As American as the importation of cheap crap manufactured in sweatshops around the globe to fuel a meaningless and frenzied consumer culture.

Nick hides behind a building across the street from Daisy's. He wears a fedora, a trench coat, and sunglasses. As he peers around the corner at the front of the craft store, he hums the theme song from
Mission: Impossible.

The coast seems clear. Nick is not quite sure what the coast not being clear would look like, failing machine-gun nests and rolls of concertina wire throughout the parking lot.

He glides around the corner and makes his way, hands in his pockets, to the front door. It opens automatically, with a whoosh and a blast of cold air. He peers inside before entering. The store has a farmyard motif, with bales of straw at the ends of the aisles and the sounds of chickens and ducks coming over the loudspeakers.

A greeter, wearing a straw hat and overalls, says to him, “Welcome to Daisy's Craft Barn! Can I help you find something?”

Nick replies, “No, thank you.”

“Really, I can take you right where you want to go.”

Nick mumbles in the negative and tries to walk away quickly.

The greeter follows, saying, “Whatever you need, we got it here in The Barn! What's your pleasure, partner?”

Nick says, “Go away! I just want to browse.” When the greeter remains at his heels, Nick points toward the front door. “Look, a greeting emergency! Someone else is coming in the
door, ungreeted! What will she think?”

The greeter turns toward the door, and Nick slips down an aisle. Once alone, however, he begins to regret his decision. Daisy's Craft Barn is huge: Notre Dame Cathedral huge, airplane hangar huge, aircraft carrier huge, Superdome huge, Grand Mosque huge, outer space huge, unbearably huge, agonizingly huge, with a vastness that exposes the emptiness of the human soul and leaves people feeling alone and vulnerable and needing to buy that special thread or Sculpey modeling compound to make them feel once again alive. Besides, Nick's commitment to pro-feminism only goes so far. Treat women well: of course. Not feel entitled to their bodies: naturally. Support them in their struggle against oppression: 100 percent. Procure arms for them in this struggle: you bet. Go with them to a craft store: not on your life. So he has no idea where to go.

Nick slinks around the store, peering around the edges of his sunglasses and over the straw bales at the ends of the aisles. He tiptoes past ceramic piggies and past bins of beads (formed of glass, crystal, wood, seed, semiprecious stone, plastic, moose dung, rhino horn, tiger penis, bone shard from St. Peter, ectoplasm from the ghosts of Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, William James, and Robert Plant [despite Plant not yet being dead, except perhaps musically]), down aisle after aisle of scrapbook materials, from one hundred and seventy-five styles of albums to sixty-three kinds of adhesives to Cuttlebug, Cricut, Sissix, and Slice die cutting aids. After several miles of walking, Nick becomes thirsty, and after several miles more he begins to hallucinate. The chicken and duck sounds over the loudspeakers coalesce into a poultry choir clucking and quacking the Sons of the Pioneers version of “Cool Water”: