The banality of being a dumb bitch.

I want to be evil instead.

I’ve been thinking about how stupid everyone is lately, myself included. This is not a radical or original thought. It’s crass and ineloquent and unforgiving. It’s a thought that lacks nuance and feels as flat as a belly flop. But it’s my gut reaction to the news cycle, and a litany of social interactions. We often hear about the banality of evil, how everything from tech companies to fruit brands are soaked in blood. We read profiles about ordinary people pulling the death levers: eating muffins, drinking coffee, throwing children in jail. We trace historical archives detailing the mundane ways we crush each other. We see just how weaponized a harmless sheen can be.

But I’ve been thinking about the banality of being untactful, of saying the absolute wrong thing, of pouring salt in a wound because you’re too self-obsessed or sheltered to see the depth of the wound. I’ve been thinking about the deep cringe, and dark humor of being a dumb bitch in a serious situation. All of us have been the dumb bitch in serious situation or watched the dumb bitch during crisis. Dumb bitch moments drop out of the sky like Looney Tunes anvils. They’re clunky and violent and absolutely no one asked for them. They’re an off-tune beat drop in the desert, or a surprise ice cube sliding down your back making you shiver in annoyance.

I keep returning to a pro se legal clinic in NYC in 2019. I was a volunteer who helped fill out asylum paperwork, and occasionally went to court (as a witness and/or emotional support). I was sitting with Jessi* (anonymized), a woman who fled Honduras with her son because her family was involved in environmental activism. They were land defenders, and local gangs (working with police) were trying to seize their land and intimidate them. During the process of her asylum application, Jessi was forced to tell me traumatic stories in detail (which I won’t repeat here) — so I could assist with the English formatting/editing. The paperwork required her to write, rewrite, and verbally testify her near-kidnapping experience. This was all to audition for the US government’s “empathy,” to justify her seeking asylum in the US and ultimately grant her the pathway to a green card.

Because it was volunteer-run, the pro se legal clinic involved lots of waiting. Social workers and lawyers made cameos like celebrities, offering expertise over reading glasses while sloshing back coffee. They were greatly outnumbered by the rest of us, which meant tables of us sat anxiously in purgatory, papers stretched out for legal advice.

Being on tenterhooks made space for long pauses and jolts of awkward small talk. You’d hear a proud grandma extol the virtues of Paddington 2 while a woman wept about how she couldn’t feed her child. A college student would crank up a Mr Beast video to explain a meme, while the man next to him nervously scanned his ticket to a new life. I once punctured the silence by asking Jessi if she thought Ben Affleck was hot (she liked J Lo). She said no, mostly confused by my curiosity. I then tried to make fun of Boston men, but since she’d just arrived in the US and we had a strong language barrier, my regional jokes bombed. These moments of awkwardness weren’t full-scale dumb bitch, they were relatively normal stupid. There are always small weird conversations in heavy settings.

People don’t stop drinking coffee or being interested in movies just because the government is twirling an evil mustache. There’s always small and petty conversations in Big Heavy Settings. Paddington 2 IS a good movie! But, it’s not the most tactful topic to broach when someone’s full-on weeping next to you. At least, offer them a tissue before giving them your IRL Letterboxed review. This distinction is important to make, because being a dumb bitch in a serious setting is a spectrum. Everyone occasionally bombs in conversation or fails at connection during times of stress. But there are clear funnels into full dumb bitch mode — the gong of a bell that says “hello, this person has harnessed their powers of tactlessness to another level, promote them to dumb bitch CEO status, QUICKLY!”

Enter the lawyer. He was a man. A lot of dumb bitches are men — don’t get my wording twisted, this phrasing is the opposite of gendered. Dumb bitch status transcends the confines of gender, it’s as genderfluid as the ocean.

Jessi and I were sitting alone at a table, while her three-year-old son played with Legos in the corner. Other clinic attendees were still there, but many had left after getting legally advised. She was fucking tired, both because of the stress of immigration, but also being a mom and being alive. The lawyer — who was bilingual, greeted us in both Spanish and English and started the conversation by joking “Look alive, ladies!” He then encouraged Jessi to SMILE.

While he skimmed the papers, he asked both of us if we were “going out to the clubs” tonight (it was a Monday), and told Jessi she had beautiful sparkling eyes. She did not engage, and I followed her lead. If she wanted to riff or flirt — I’d support it, but I wasn’t going to encourage this guy to yap if it was pissing her off. Unfortunately, for all of us in the room, he was a real dumb bitch, and did not clock the lack of reception. No, dear reader, he doubled the fuck down. As he marked her papers with notes, the very papers that TOLD THE STORY of why she fled Honduras, he asked if she came to the US for “the fun entertainment vibes.”

In a parallel universe, where he had an ongoing rapport with her — this could have been a fun riff, a comedic release valve in a shitty situation. But this was their FIRST TIME meeting, this was an emergency asylum clinic, and she wasn’t giving any indication she enjoyed this.

Jessi, deeply ready to go home, ignored his antics. She asked if her papers were on track, and what she’d need to be considered for a work permit (if all went well). This was the perfect exit door for the lawyer, he could’ve easily switched gears and avoided Peak Dumb Bitchery. But he did not.

As someone with a heavy history of being a dumb bitch, I believe there must have been a cosmic intervention from hell. Some demon of dumb bitch chaos was whispering in his ear, because what he did next was astronomical NASA levels of dumb bitch. He lifted his finger, to pause her inquiry, and reached in his bag for his water bottle. Then, he placed the water bottle on the table and said (I AM UNFORTUNATELY SERIOUS):

“Who wants to play spin the bottle first?”

We both stared at him and each other, waiting for a cartoon anvil to drop on his head. Or better yet, we waited for the roadrunner to whiz through the church hallway, to remove us from this dumb bitch moment and hurl us into a magical mural. But alas, there was no cartoon intervention. This lawyer was really trying to play a junior high kissing game with a woman who had been detained by ICE weeks earlier.

The silence was collective and deafening. I’d like to think he truly felt it, that he felt useful shame that could mold future interactions. But he seemed impenetrable, fully cloaked in his dumb bitch armor, unable to feel the deep exhaustion. His smile stayed on, and he shrugged at us as if to say “wow, bummer, dudes.”

After the silence marinated us, he lifted his eyebrow and drank out of the bottle, accepting his spin-the-bottle rejection.

He then turned to Jessi, in his only moment of professionalism, and said: “I think you’re in good shape, just send it into USCIS.”

Jessi, luckily, was eventually granted asylum, but we are unfortunately all living in the asylum of very dumb bitches.