The Devil, and Bobby, and Me
By: Emilie Mitcham
Tags: Recovery Success, Memoir, Coming Of Age, Feminism, Growing Up

The Kid-n-Babe appeared in white spray-paint above the Rock, on a large boulder facing the ocean.

Let’s put it another way — my capacity to know when I was in danger and to protect myself had been dismantled when I was a younger child. So, faced with this new world, the part of me that might have said RUN, didn’t kick in. My Catholic, hippie childhood led me toward the edge, not away from it.

Don’t judge. Have compassion. Love others. Say yes. Don’t say no. Love comes in all different forms. All of these things were refrains from my childhood. Bobby looked at me with his unblinking sea-green eyes and captured me easily.

He had a studio apartment and one day, he told me to come to a party. As far as I can recall, I was the only female in the room when I arrived.

Collage by Emilie Mitcham, 1992.

This wasn’t unusual. Bobby put rum and coke in a plastic cup, handed it to me and then took me by the hand to lead me into the bathroom. The other men waved goodbye to us merrily.

Bobby pulled a red chiffon scarf out of his back pocket and placed it gently over the vanity light at the sink. I watched big white bubbles form as he poured green dish soap into the running water. He wanted us to take a bath together. He wanted me to take off my clothes. The fuzzy pink light, the fuzzy white bubbles, the fuzzy feeling in my head — none of it was real. I was Babe. I was in a movie about a girl from Kentucky, new to Brooklyn. Or I was a breathless virgin from my paperback novel.

I was drunk.

I dropped all my clothes on the floor in a pile. I tried not to look at Bobby. I looked around the bathroom like I was assessing its dimensions. Bobby stepped over the tub’s rounded edge and held out his hand for me — he was a prince escorting me into a carriage. He leaned against the back of the tub and positioned me between his legs, with my back against him. His hands roved my body and I tried to be still.

My body floated in the tub with this man who said I was his girl, and I rose silently up and out of my body, to a corner of the room where I could watch the action from a safe distance.

Bobby stood up, dripping water on the skinny, small girl in the tub. She kept her eyes down, and she blinked as the water fell on her face. Bobby reached across for the towel and pulled her out of the tub. He dried her off gently, seemingly with great care. He was happy, smiling — looking at the girl’s face intently, and trying to catch her eye. Moving the hair out of her face, and kissing her.

She took a piece of the towel and bent her face into it, rubbing, and Bobby chided her. That’s not how you dry your face! You’re supposed to blot it, like this. He lightly blotted her face the right way.

See!? I said to myself, from up in the corner of the room. He’s gentle, not mean. He loves her! Look how careful he is being with her.

Bobby put the thin, wet towel down on the floor neatly. The floor was cold. Bobby wanted me to look at him. I worried about the chiffon scarf over the light and whether it would catch on fire. I noticed that the bathroom floor was made of tiny tiles and that the molding where the tub met the floor was old and grey. I listened to the last of the water drain out of the tub. Glug, glug, glug.

We got dressed and walked out of the bathroom to applause. Lots of applause. They had all been waiting for this moment, just outside the room.

The Stones’ Beast of Burden was playing on the radio. I steadied myself with the countertop in the kitchen, and someone handed me another cup. My stomach hurt but I drank up like a good girl and then ran back to the damp bathroom to puke.

I came back again, wiping my mouth and drinking water now. Bobby looked at me indulgently.

Do you trust me? Now you’ll always be my Babe. Bobby whispered into my ear as the others looked on attentively.

I stood uncertainly, taking gulps from the tap water in my hand, and then looking around at the men who were my friends.

Do you trust me? He asked again.

Yes, I said.

My breath felt jagged. I was dizzy. I felt like I was drowning.

Bobby put his arm around the girl who was me, but also wasn’t me any longer, and walked her to the door. She walked home quietly, and alone. Bobby went back to the party to be the big shot.

The voice inside my head said, Stupid, fat cow. I had one very clear dismaying thought — I’d always heard that you never forget your first.

I felt the settling doom of the rest of my life, laid out for me in Technicolor. The rest of my life.

I took the story and I tucked it away.

I took the dirty bathroom floor, the glugs of the water in the tub, and the burn of rum in my throat, and stashed them away in a corner deep inside me where I would try to never look, again.

The men’s applause, their eyes trying to catch mine, the crooked window shade in the ratty apartment, and the casual arm that Bobby threw over my shoulder afterward. The smell of alcohol on his breath, the shuddering urgency to run and hunch over the toilet, and the taste of vomit — I took all of that and I put it away. Gone. I lost my virginity to Bobby. That was all I needed to remember.

I didn’t need to remember it was in a bathroom, at a party just for me, while others waited outside, and that I was only just barely fourteen years old and he was twenty-two. It was enough that I had lost my virginity to a man I thought of as my romantic hero. That was enough.

Got it? Got it. Done. Fine. Good.