My Girl's a Vegetable - by Paul Crenshaw
My Girl’s a Vegetable
When I was in Basic Training, one of the cadences we called was “My Girl’s a Vegetable,” and tells the story of a man whose girlfriend lies in a coma in the hospital, hooked to machines. The refrain repeats the phrase “I would do anything to keep her alive,” which sounds loving and caring, but the verses say otherwise. The narrator makes fun of the girl, this girl he loves, this vegetable. “She’s got no arms or legs, that’s why I call her Peg,” one stanza says, and the next follows with, “One night I played a joke, pulled the plug and watched her choke.”
I was eighteen then. I’m sure now many former military would tell me it’s only a joke. That men will be men, but I think about it more and more as my two daughters go out into the world and the news grows worse for women every day. How a cadre of men who are often named heroes in this country sang this cadence while laughing at the line that called her EKG a new TV, and that she had no hair, just patches of it here and there.
Note that in the song this girl was a burden to the singer. Dying, with machines taking care of her, she was still a burden to him.
***
On May 23 of 2014 a man named Elliot Rodger stabbed three men to death, one by one, in his apartment in Isla Vista, California. Later he went to a sorrority house and shot three women, two of whom died. Rodger then drove around Isla Vista shooting at people until he crashed his car. He shot himself in the head before police could get to him. In his manifesto, Rodger called his shooting spree retribution for women spurning him, as if it were their fault, as if sexual intercourse is a right men are owed and women are obliged to provide.
On May 24, 2014, late the afternoon of the day after Rodger’s murder spree, a man attempted to run over my then 17 year old daughter. She had called me for a ride home from high school, I missed the call, and she decided to walk.
It was less than a mile. She had to cross two roads, and at the second one, a green car a quarter mile away saw her start across. The driver gunned it. Pressed the pedal to the metal because a young girl was crossing the street. Went to 40 miles an hour. Then 50. Switched lanes as she began to run.
***
Because she is a burden to him, this vegetable of a woman who is dying, the man feels he is owed certain allowances. He gets to make fun of her. He gets to pull the plug and watch her choke. We might argue he is using humor to hide how he feels at the thought of losing her, but I suspect the song is to prepare soldiers for life away from their wives or girlfriends, either because of divorce or deployment.
The cadence could also be to harden men to the horrors of war—they will see their buddies blown up, see machines keeping them alive. They will stand over hospital beds and make jokes that keep them from facing the inevitable truth of violence.
But another version of the cadence becomes sexual in nature. One stanza says:
“Her ECG does not rise,
but still she can part her thighs.”
And another:
“She's got a tracheotomy
She can breathe while giving head to me.”
The part of me that sees my daughter crossing the street, the part that worries when another Elliot Rodger will appear with his knives and guns and hatred for women and the parts of themselves they keep from him, understands too well that the woman in the hospital is not the sum of her parts, but the parts themselves, the ones that fulfill the desires of men. The woman has no quality of life in the cadence: she cannot talk, cannot walk, relies on machines to breathe for her. Since she cannot deny the man’s desires, he would do anything to keep her alive.
***
The car coming down the street toward my daughter could be the end, but there’s another part to this story.
My daughter didn’t tell me what happened when she got home. Not because she was afraid of my reaction. Not because she thought she had done anything wrong.
She didn’t tell me because she didn’t think it worthy of comment. She mentioned it casually to her mother, hours later.
As if it were only a slightly scary joke, nothing more.
As if someone had pushed her in the hallway at school.
Or asked for a blowjob.
Or called her a cunt.
Or any of a number of things men have already done to her, like all those things I just mentioned. They all really happened. They happen every day. One in five women will be a victim of sexual assault. One in four will be a victim of domestic violence.
Some of those women will be shot and killed. Some will end up in hospitals hooked to monitors and there will be a man standing in the hallway telling the doctor to do anything to keep her alive. Many of them will never talk about it. All of them will be traumatized. They will be angry and sad and despairing and a hundred other things.
On the day after Elliot Rodger drove around a medium-sized American city shooting and stabbing and hitting people with his car, my daughter reached the safety of the sidewalk just before the car went by. She walked the rest of the way home and didn’t mention it when she got there, because she had already learned at her young age that this is the way women must walk in this world. That men might try to run them down. She has learned these things happen. That there’s nothing she can do except keep going.
***
Another cadence we called in Basic Training was “Who Built It?” This one was simple. A drill sergeant would bark “Who built it?” and our entire platoon would rise and chant back “Who built the motherfucker? We built the motherfucker. We tear the motherfucker down. Uncle Sam don’t give a damn, Donald Duck don’t give a fuck, fuck this shit, fuck this shit, oo-sha.”
This was another favorite. We liked the way the word fuck filled our lungs. We liked the idea that we could, bare-handed, tear down what had been built. In our awful imaginations we wanted the world to burn. We hated Basic Training and at that time we hated the army. We saw the barracks and bases that had been built for us torn down, we saw the bombs hurtling downward to bust up everything beautiful. We imagined the world a smoking ruin. It would be years before we realized we never tore anything down except ourselves. Everything else around us—all the institutions of men and masculinity—stood just as strong as they always had, and were still being built.
***
I keep coming back to this cadence in the wake of the recent Roe V Wade ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, a ruling that will certainly kill women. I think of it when I hear friends or online acquaintances say they’re survivors of domestic abuse. That they would have died without an abortion. An intervention. Unless they packed up and left in the middle of the night, hoping a car didn’t come out of nowhere to find them. I think about how the military is supposed to defend, how police are supposed to protect, how politicians are supposed to serve, but more and more it seems they only build upon what has come before and never tear down the old institutions.
They never make way for the new. Never look at what causes the violence. Never question the structures around them. The Violence Against Women Act still has not been renewed. The military is still so masculine the word female is often considered an insult. Men are still walking around armed and armored with their anger and AR-15s, and men who look just like them can’t seem to come up with any laws that might stop them.
After my daughter told me about the car, I drove around for an hour looking for the man who had tried to run her over. Which means I drove around for an hour raging at the world we live in, the world that allows this to happen.
I can only imagine the rage, the anger and pain and despair and total fucking blackness the family and friends of those who were killed in Isla Vista feel. Or the family and friends of the 4000 women a year who die to domestic violence. Or the tens of thousands who have been beaten.
Or the rage they feel at the systematic stripping away of their rights.
Or the way they have to watch the world around them, always aware.
Or the way they must always be ready to appease angry men.
Or the way they must feel crossing a street.
Or walking home at night.
Or riding an elevator alone when a man gets on.
Or leaving their drink unattended in a bar.
Or stepping out their front door every morning.
Or. . .
Or. . .
Or. . .
***
Some days, when the sun got so hot it sucked all the strength out of even the drill sergeants, they would quit calling cadence. We’d just march, the last line of whatever song we’d been singing still echoing in our heads under the awful summer sun. We were little more than boys then, still unsure of what kind of men we’d decide to be.
Now, in the silence of myself, I hear the refrain “keep her alive” on echo all the time: when my younger daughter drives home from college; when my older daughter goes out at night; when I show my class a documentary about sexual assaults on college campuses and half my female students have to excuse themselves at some point in the film.
I think about the man I am now versus the boy I once was. What institutions we build, and how those buildings often block our view of what the horizon might look like. I see cars coming out of a rainy afternoon to run down our daughters. I think about the violent deaths, the rapes, the assaults, the drugged drinks, the campus protests over coverups, the light sentences handed out to boys so a sexual assault conviction can’t hurt their careers.
I see the anger of men manifest itself in our culture while the worries of women go unguarded. We would do anything, we say, to keep them alive, except the things that might actually save them.
ncG1vNJzZmiokaq5pL7Ep6qhmadjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89opLJll56%2Frb%2BMmmSvnZeawaKuy54%3D