David McElroy

I hadn’t seen Angie for several years. When I had first known her — about five or six years ago — she had been a straight-laced college student working her way through a nursing program. When I saw her this week, everything had changed.

The last time I had bumped into her, it had been about three years ago. She had been in a restaurant on a Sunday evening with a group of people from her church. She had seemed happy and content — looking and acting the part of a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her.

This week, though, everything was different. She’s pregnant. She’s miserable. She told me the father-to-be disappeared as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The guy was immediately living with another woman and wants nothing to do with the baby.

A female friend who was with Angie that night started telling me about the man who helped bring our mutual friend to this point. Between the two of them, they painted a picture of a loser — an arrest record, drug habits, bad character, no future — who Angie had put up with for no good reason.

As I listened to their story, things seemed obvious. Angie had lowered her standards a little bit at first. She had lied to herself about what the man was. She let him lead her — one little step at a time — into things that had been completely foreign to her.

And now she’s alone and miserable. She slowly painted herself into a corner — one tiny bad decision at a time — and now she sees no way out of the hole into which she dragged herself.

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I found myself in a time machine Monday night. My body didn’t move, but my mind and my heart were transported to the years when I was a teen-ager.

I didn’t mean to take this trip into the past. I ran across a YouTube video promising snippets of the most popular song from every month of the decade of my youth. I was curious whether I’d know all the songs. It never occurred to me that the music would awaken something disturbing.

At first, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Then the songs reached the years when I was about 14, 15 and 16.

All of a sudden, I was feeling emotions I had experienced during those years. Some of the sounds awakened specific memories. My mind was a blur. What I didn’t expect was the flood of emotions.

I can talk clinically about the experience of growing up with a narcissistic father and an absent mother. I can outline the ways this affected me, but I almost always talk about it with the matter-of-fact tone of reciting facts.

What I felt tonight wasn’t about reason or psychology or dry narrative. It was a flood of feelings such as fear and shame and pain. They were emotions I was too terrified to openly feel at the time.

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When I first heard the words, I thought it had to be a joke.

“I’m such a good slut for my daddy,” the woman purred in a sensual tone.

I looked over and saw the woman lean in toward a man at the table in a seductive way. Surely this is some kind of strange joke. But I quickly realized it was no joke.

I was in a fast food place near my office Monday night, somewhere I almost never go. The place is large, but it was quiet because there were only two tables in use. I was alone with my MacBook. Another nearby table was taken by three men and a woman.

The men were dressed in what I’d call business casual. The woman looked as though she was trying to be as sexually provocative as possible while still wearing expensive clothes. I’d say they were all in their early to mid 30s.

They talked a lot about sex, but what made it noteworthy was something more than that. They seemed to casually talk about sex as dirty — and they all seemed to agree that the more nasty and filthy and “slutty” a woman could be, the more attractive she was.

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