spandex & lucite shoes: part 31, the good enough

I haven't written a stripmemoir post in a while, primarily because I've been frozen like a deer in the headlights of all these strip memoirs hitting the publishing market, and of course I want to whip this series into publishable shape and of course I want a book deal and of course I want Pamela Anderson to option it and of course I want to pay off my student loans and maybe buy a real couch and a flat-screen television and go on a trip to a place requiring many stamps on my passport and of course this all means that I can't write at all.

So below the fold, the most recent installment. Call it a sign of both my block and my shame of my block that it's below the fold. Let's not read too much into it, shall we? That's what I pay my therapist for.

Previously in spandex & lucite shoes, I was a naughty stripper minx. Here, not so much, but there is ice cream. Enjoy.

The summer before my second year of Master’s degree, I discovered Dazed and Confused, and I watched it compulsively. I went out and bought the soundtracks and the books. I visited fan websites compulsively. I downloaded audio snippets—“You just gotta keep livin’, L-I-V-I-N!” played as my mail alert. I was a hungry and desperate acolyte and Dazed and Confused was my Master.

It all came down to this one piece of advice. “You gotta do what Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd wants to do,” the slacker Wooderson tells the jock conflicted about signing his football pledge, an act in his mind tantamount to turning his back on his freedom. I heard this sagery and latched onto it.

I just gotta do what Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd wants to do, I thought to myself. I just gotta keep living, L-I-V-I-N.

See, the year before I had driven myself literally crazy. I was stripping two or three nights a week, I was working about fifteen hours a week at my graduate assistanceship. I was taking three classes each semester and I had gotten an “A” in all of them. I was in the gym for, conservatively, twelve hours a week. I was in the best shape of my life and I was weepingly miserable.

I couldn’t keep it up, this pace this stress this pure ceaseless production. I couldn’t take it, and I was hating it all with an extra flamey white-hot passion, but mostly I hated myself. So I took this Woodersonian wisdom to heart. I just gotta do what I want to do. I just gotta keep living. I just gotta give myself the permission not to go on and finish my Ph.D., to just stop with the Master’s degree.

It doesn’t have to be good, I told myself, it just has to get done. And I went back to school with the idea in mind that I wouldn’t be Dr. Hottness, and I was ok with that.

It made it more bearable, somehow, to go in to FlashDancers on those Thursday and Saturday nights and surf the room in my platform shoes and spandex, to gladhand and gladsmile the men, to rub my taut tanned haunches over their hungry laps, to charm them out of their freshly minted twenties, to float in and inhabit my CeeCee space. I didn’t have to do it well; I just had to get it done.

It made it more bearable, somehow, to get up at 8:00 a.m. on Friday mornings after three hours of sleep and make my way up to school, spend my four-hour shift helping students write, and then trundle off to class to learn something about something literate.

It made it more bearable, somehow, to get home at 7:00 after that day, eat something, walk the dog, and go to the gym, empty because it’s Friday night and most people are out having fun, unfathomably.

It made it more bearable, this permission not to be perfect, even if I didn’t actually avail myself of it. I was still perfect, but apparently being perfect was what Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd wanted.

And in this state of perfection, one night at work I met the third Dave (Dave #1 was the very bad date; Dave #2 the spongy bikeracer). He asked me for a cigarette for his friend. I’ll endeavor to procure you one, I said, because sometimes I liked to play the Diane in the Cheers that was FlashDancers, and he fell in love.

I danced for him. I found him charming. I’m not sure why. He asked for my number. I gave it to him. Again, I’m not sure why. We talked in person and later in that week we talked on the phone.

I’m not sure how it happened, exactly, but it transpired that our first date was spending Halloween weekend at a bed and breakfast on Cape Cod. We had  spent no time together out of the swirly, vertiginous atmosphere of Flash and there we were with my dog in a rented 4x4 at a rest stop on the way to Truro. Sitting at a picnic table, we decided it was time to kiss. I liked it, I remember. I liked kissing Dave #3.

We spent the cold and gray weekend at this bed and breakfast—the biscuits the owner made us are probably served at Valhalla to the especially good Vikings—and we went to the Halloween parade at P-town (there were three people dressed as the Titanic and another dressed as an ice burg, they would stop, ring the bell and shout, “Ice burg, dead ahead!”). He bought vanilla ice cream and ate it off my taut, tan ass.

Vanilla ice cream. That really should have been a clue that we were not compatible, Dave #3 and I. Granted, if you eat ice cream off someone’s ass, it ought not be an ice cream with chunky bits. You don’t want to be searching out nut pieces from your nethers. But there are so many smooth and creamy flavors that are not vanilla. But it was Dave #3’s fantasy, and so it was vanilla that he ate off my upturned ass.

Dave liked me because I was smarter than he. He liked me because my body was perfect. He liked me because I was complicated. His previous girlfriend, a girl so recently removed from his apartment that her Degas prints remained on the walls and a few stray bits of fluffy sweatery items remained in his dressers, was a dancer. She had a perfect body and complications; she was not smarter than he.

But, see, the danger of getting a girl who is smarter than you is that she has the infinite ability to be cruel. And cruel I was. I willed myself to be in love with Dave #3, but it was a fake plastic love. I knew I was lavishly acting, but I’d been so desperately lonely and I convinced myself that it didn’t need to be perfect, it just needed to be.  I never cheated on him or anything like that, but I was an emasculating stripper-bitch and I emasculated him. I emasculated him to his face and I emasculated him in my dreams. And while no exact memories remain of the former form, one does of the latter.

One night in a dream that remains wet paint fresh in my memory, I saw arranged in careful rows the disembodied dicks of C, Dave #3 and the Goat-Gatherer. I saw them all in a little line, and I knew whose was whose and C’s was the one I caressed and fondled like a little cock rag doll.

I was cruel to Dave #3, but then in all reality, I was the rebound girl in his dancer-reduced world. I complicated matters by ceasing to work out so hard, so long, so arduously, and my previously ice-cream-worthy body began to morph and change, to subtly alter and drop from its previous halcyon form to one of a mere mortal-like.

And then I quit stripping. I took a break. I took out loans. I gave myself permission to just get it done. And Dave #3 was not pleased. He had picked me to be hott, smart and a stripper. And now I was just smart.

I’d just picked him to be good enough. We parted ways in a high-drama moment fueled by my own screaming needs and wailing fears as well as my lingering adolescent love of scenes. I tried to force a rapprochement in the form of the lyrics of the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong.” Dave #3 didn’t nibble. He was smarter than I’d given him credit for.

And I quit stripping, but first I cut my hair. But that, that self-Samsoning, Keri Russellizing moment, that deserves its own post.

Comments

[Tony Comstock]

Everlong? Ewww. I still can't get that emo Howard Stern version out of my head.

[Jeff]

"I saw arranged in careful rows the disembodied dicks of C, Dave #3 and the Goat-Gatherer. I saw them all in a little line, and I knew whose was whose and C’s was the one I caressed and fondled like a little cock rag doll."

I'm terrorfied beyond the capacity for rational thought, and am now having a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man moment. I think we need to cross the streams. Total plutonic reversal. See you on the other side cg.

[greenlacewing]

I love the details and feelings. I need insight about relationships that are uneven. I really like when you talk about how smartness-levels affect relationships. I was a lot smarter than my first husband, which became more of an issue as time passed. Anyway, this is engaging. I love reading your blog!

[Romancing Simplicity]

"But, see, the danger of getting a girl who is smarter than you is that she has the infinite ability to be cruel. And cruel I was."

This part of your post astounds me. It's so hard to be honest about something like that, about being knowingly cruel to someone else, and I really think it's amazing that you could be so open.

Well done you. This is an incredible post!

[Danielle]

Are you seriously considering writing a book? I'll be the first to buy it, but I would hope you'd personally sign it due to the fact that you're my fuck salad and all. I hope you know how proud of you, and all of the experiences that made you the woman you are.

Excellent post.

xo, Me.