On the shame and splendor of being gross
How to become the disgusting creature you know you are
New York City in the height of summer is a vile place. The sun shrieks at you for daring to step into the sauna of streets that stink with yesterday’s garbage, dog piss, and food trucks. The breeze from the subway train barreling toward your platform is your respite before stepping into a car filled dozens of other people and their sweaty crevices, their bodily secretions that might even smell worse than yours, their heat rashes and acne and cracked heels. You might go to a crowded public pool or ferry to the beach to escape the discomfort, but each of those offers its own special horrors. New York City in the height of summer is relentless, and I love it.
Maybe it’s because I don’t think of myself as a particularly “clean” person. I shower regularly, follow a skin care regimen, and take out my trash. But I have a red, sweaty face and I hate doing my nails. My clothes never lay the right way. I’ve got big feet and greasy hair and a bunch of weird dots on my upper arms. Most of the time it feels like I’m better suited to pull up potatoes in my ancestral Czechoslovakia than socialize at a tech mixer.
In college I spent a week on a communist farm where we went dumpster diving and only showered once. We shit in outhouse toilets layered with coffee bean shells that would eventually be made into the next season’s soil. We slept six people to a tent. It still reigns as one of the top experiences of my life, and I’ve been drawn to similar work since then.
While the physical labor is a nice change for me, I think the bigger draw is that these places allow me to be gross without apology. In fact, it’s kind of the point — what decent person could expect you to be clean when you’ve been packing tires full of mud to build an Earthship home in central Colorado, or working at a cattle farm in the Andes?
Still, there are some people who breeze along like earth angels, undirtied, unoily, perfectly perfumed, expertly laundered. They’re equal parts fascinating and disquieting. Why can’t I imagine them ugly-crying, or farting, or having an ingrown hair? Are they all right? Do they know they’ll be forgiven for a double chin or pit stains?
Despite this acknowledgment of my own grossness — and the resentment I hold toward the ungross among us — I feel pretty ashamed to be “dirty.” As with most shame, this goes deeper than just living in a flawed human body. As I’ve written about before, I have hang-ups around being good. And perhaps the opposite of good isn’t bad, but disgusting.
In seventh grade, my Catholic school gave us a sex ed talk. We’d already had “the talk” on periods and penises a few years earlier, but this one was focused on maintaining our virginities. A perky woman who was definitely not our teacher led the session — she unrolled a long strand of clear packing tape and asked for volunteers to step up. She pressed the tape to the first kid’s arm and tore it off. He flinched in pain, then the lady showed us all of the boy’s arm hair and skin flakes still stuck to the tape. She placed the same piece of tape on a girl’s arm, and less hair came off. They went down the line, tearing less and less material from each kid’s body as the tape became filled with pubescent peach fuzz.
At the end, the teacher proudly displayed the sticky monstrosity, making this an allegory for having sex with too many people. I guess the more people you sleep with, the less attached you’ll feel to them? Or the dirtier you’ll be? Or you’ll have less effective arm waxes?
Whatever the metaphor, the point was that sex was shameful, except if we were married and doing it to have a baby, but only then, and anything else was perverted. And Jesus and God and the mysterious Holy Spirit were all very much invested in us not being little perverts.
Unfortunately for Jesus, I’d been a pervert for awhile. As a six year old I was deeply invested in Leonardo DiCaprio and would slyly try to watch the Titanic drawing scene before my parents caught me. I fantasized about dating Nick Carter. The image of Lil Kim’s purple pastie jumpsuit at the 1999 VMAs probably rewired my brain. Britney Spears’s music video for Toxic was a game changer, and I would often take off all my clothes and tie ribbons and doilies around my body, prancing around my room to emulate her.
None of this seems particularly depraved, but it certainly felt like I was holding back feelings unwelcome at a Catholic school. At the time of the seventh grade tape talk, I continued to have celebrity crushes — Orlando Bloom and Jake Gyllenhaal — and real-life crushes who were largely uninterested in dating an overweight ginger nerd girl. The fact that I was an overweight ginger nerd girl further compounded my feeling of grossness, which only accelerated my forbidden lust.
Along with sex, I was fascinated by horror, which my parents were surprisingly cool with. I read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, particularly a tale called “Wonderful Sausage,” where a butcher grinds people into meat and, well, you know the rest. I consumed all the cursed children’s media I could (Goosebumps, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?,” “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” Beetlejuice) as well as foraying into more mature stuff like “The X-Files,” The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and Halloween. In the early 2000s, I remember my dad saying he heard a guy was going to cut off his own legs with a chainsaw and post it online, and I begged him to watch it, feeling equal parts terrified and captivated. My dad obviously said no. (This feels like a fake memory, but I did find internet proof that a paralyzed man tried to raise money for it in 2001. I don’t think this macabre event ended up happening, and I’m only slightly sorry for putting the image in your head.)
I still consume a lot of scary media, and much has been written on the taboo and catharsis of horror. It’s a genre where things are allowed to be gross, downright deviant, and we’re invited to the party. The recent slasher film MaXXXine and its prequels are deranged, and yet when I marathoned them all a few weeks ago, I felt an ironic sense of peace. The repugnant things on screen are just a magnified version of our own sick little minds, and it’s a welcome escape. You don’t have to be good in a horror film; in fact, maybe being good disqualifies you, as oxymoronic as being clean on a farm.
One of my favorite books, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, is a gorgeously written deluge of disgust. A murderer grows up in eighteenth-century Paris, having been birthed and left to die in a street food stall by his mother. He has an otherworldly sense of smell, becoming France’s top perfumer as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the scent of a particular woman. It’s got sex, it’s got bodily secretions, it’s got murder, and yet the prose is pure beauty from some of the first lines:
“The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired pallors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots… People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.”
Have you ever read a passage so visceral and stunning? I’m in the French streets, surrounded by this terrible stink, fully a part of this story. No angels exist here, thank God.
Carl Jung allegedly said, “I’d rather be whole than good,” and the saying’s stuck with me lately. What good is being good if you end up as Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the idiot, with benevolent intentions that ultimately result in tragedy? Without our gross parts, we are not whole.
Though a New York summer might not stink as much as Suskind’s Paris, it is gross, and its grossness is why I chose to live here. It shows you exactly what it is and does not apologize. It is eight million people living in one place, with our sweat and breath and taboo thoughts, our pock marks and our heat rash. We may not be good, but we are whole.
All images are from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
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