The First Bad Man

“I'm the first man,” she said.
“The one in denim?”
“The first bad man.”
It was the way she was standing when she said it – her feet planted wide, her big hands waiting in the air. Just like a bad man, the kind that comes to a sleepy town and makes all kinds of trouble before galloping off again. She wasn't the first bad man ever but the first I'd ever met who had long blond hair and pink velour pants. She snapped her gum impatiently.

This was my first reaction upon finishing The First Bad Man, and it bears repeating: “I smiled and winced through the whole thing and then ended it in tears.” It would be patronising and dismissive to call this book merely “quirky” or “kinky” (but it is both), and Miranda July – award-winning filmmaker and short-story-writer, performance artist, and first-time novelist – is presumably too busy and too thoughtful to waste her time writing a book that can be dismissed that easily. I don't think July wrote a shocking book for shock's sake, or reached for the ludicrous just to be funny (but it is both shocking and terribly funny), but in a way that reminded me somewhat of the classic-of-the-absurd A Confederacy of Dunces, she created a character so outside the bounds of reality that she opened a window upon the hearts of all of us; Cheryl Glickman is the exception that proves the rules for this messy human project. This wasn't a passive reading experience – I had physical reactions, smiling and wincing, on every page – and I can't help but admire any book that pulls that out of me. Let's meet Cheryl Glickman:

I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching – windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?

Who is she? Cheryl is a frumpy forty-three-year-old single woman (her best physical features are her shell-like ears, so she tends to enter rooms ear-first) who lives alone (with a bizarre system of housekeeping rules meant to stave off decrepitude), who remote-manages a women's self-defense centre (Open Palm) that has transitioned over the years into selling self-defense-as-fitness DVDs, and who has a vivid and long-running sexual fantasy involving a sixty-five-year-old board member, Phillip; a wrinkled, balding jerk who thinks it's funny to grab Cheryl by her chunky necklace and lead her around the office (but as this is the only action Cheryl gets, she's willing to laugh along as though Phillip is just making fun of the kind of jerk who might actually do something like that unironically). As the novel begins, two situations arise that rattle Cheryl's smooth-edged equilibrium: Phillip has fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old, and through a series of crude texts (he describes his “stiff member” and how he wants to “cream” on the girl's “jugs”), he asks Cheryl's blessing before bedding the girl; and Cheryl's bosses ask her to allow their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, to temporarily move in with her. Cheryl is so passive and uncomplaining that she neither balks at Phillip as he downgrades her from potential partner to asexual arbiter, nor at Clee as she refuses to follow the household rules, looming large and beautiful, stinking of foot rot. 

Cheryl unintentionally begins therapy at this time, and for the first time ever, has someone to talk to. Putting aside the fact that the therapist invites Cheryl to pee in empty Chinese food takeout containers behind a ripped paper screen in the corner of her office if she needs to use the facilities, Cheryl finds the experience enlightening; and especially when Dr. Tibbetts shares the fact the she and the colour therapist she shares the office with like to engage in “adult games” involving fantasy and role-playing. Cheryl is able to use this idea of game-playing to reinterpret (and gain power in) her relationships with both Phillip and Clee. When Clee becomes physically abusive, Cheryl reacts with the popping and butterflying of Open Palm's old self-defense videos, and once Clee recognises the moves and the scenarios that Cheryl starts intentionally setting up, she responds in kind and the pair begin wrestling around the house like a cross between Fight Club and Cato jumping out of the shadows at Inspector Clouseau. It's creepy enough to have Clee reciting “Yum yum yum” from the bushes as Cheryl approaches to unlock the front door, but what the young woman doesn't know is that on the inside, Cheryl is imagining that she has a “stiff member” that can't wait to “cream” on Clee's “jugs”. And while the game-playing does allow Cheryl to overcome her lifelong impotence, her therapist recognises that Cheryl has begun to dehumanise everyone around her; turning them into pawns for her fantasies. And then things happen and stuff changes and Cheryl finds love in an unexpected place.

Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.

I liked that we don't learn anything about Cheryl's childhood that might explain the why of her strange existence – other than the time that she intensely bonded with a visiting infant when she was nine; an event that caused Cheryl to seek out a psychic connection with every baby she sees for the rest of her life – and meeting her in middle age, it was touching to watch as Cheryl transforms from someone with a wholly fantasy-based life to one who has a physical presence in the world. The ending was earned but not predictable, and as I opened with, I was in tears by the time I closed the book's covers. Loved it.