spandex & lucite shoes: part 34, the wily one

I'm slowly moving out the door of the stripworld at this point in my stripmemoirs. Need to get caught up? Here's the previous installment of my so-called flash life, and here's the full freaking index, for those of you who need it all. We're closing in on the end...soon I'll be putting my clothes back on for good...

Her name in the FlashDancer world was Wiley. Like the coyote. Which in some ways was apt because she had a kind of lupine quality to her face, a sort of wary hungriness, a sort of wolfy skulking to her posture.

Beyond the cartoon association, Wiley was an euonym. Her choice of name should have warned me, but it did not. I have begun to reach the end of my strippy tale, and no story of how I quit dancing would be complete without my telling about my friendship with Wiley.

At the time I was gradually exiting FlashDancers, at the time I was beginning to hit the strip wall again and again in my strip/graduate school marathon, I met Wiley. She was a tall, willowy bottle blonde with a slightly pointed face, rock-hard architectural fake boobs, and long legs brutally scarred along the backs of her thighs from what she called “a fight with a shower door.”

Wiley was smart. You could see it in her eyes in a white moment. She was funny. She was engaging. She could remember battle scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and act them out with toothpicks and wadded up cocktail napkins while half-drunk at the bar. She had long hands that ended in long fingers, which she used to great effect when she spoke. She would answer the Flashpatron’s incessant question of what she did in her real life by saying, “During the winter, I drive a Zamboni, and in the summer I drive an ice cream truck. It’s seasonal, mostly”; or she would say, “I’m an improvisational dancer working on a piece I call ‘The Onion.’ It’s about layers.”

She was also a hot mess. Her hair often looked as if she’d slept in it and not brushed it. Her make-up seemed to slide off her face. She was habitually late to work, blowing in the door as the DJ was calling us to stage, dragging her dance bag that trailed pastel bits of spandex and fake ponytails. Barry, the visible owner of Flash, would pull her off stage regularly, telling her to get herself together and presentable, nearly reducing her to tears in the process.

When I met Wiley, she was pregnant. She was graduating Hunter College and she was getting ready to apply to law school—I offered her my typewriter for the applications and my company for the abortion; she took me up on the typewriter. She was in a frazzled, fragile place, and I opened my life to her, as I do occasionally, rarely, really. I am not a sucker. I do not feel the need to clasp broken beings to my breast and heal them. I am not one of those people who feels good about themselves because they’ve helped other people. I help people when I want to, because I like them as individuals, but I am a tough sell for a hard luck case.

Wiley, though, insinuated herself in my life quickly and but good. Before I knew it, we were best friends. Bosom buddies. We had favorite meals, favorite nail salons, favorite occupations. We had a routine. We went to kick-boxing class together on Saturday mornings and then went to Cowgirl Hall of Fame for egg-white omelets. We met each and every one of the men we were considering dating, and we just about held up scorecards.

We had private jokes. We imagined ourselves as Feature Dancers, but instead of calling ourselves “Wet and Wild” and oiling one another whilst simulating Sapphic loving, we would call ourselves “Blonde and Neurotic” and Wiley would sit on stage while I colored her hair, and then maybe we’d order in from Sargon and eat shrimp skewers. And that would be our act.

We were a “we,” as much of a “we” as I’ve ever been part of. Wiley came home to Vermont and met my parents. She told me more about her wretched childhood than she ever had told anyone. I knew about her mother the wire monkey. I knew that her parents had been Communists and that she had been taught the Communist National Anthem. I saw the youth home to which she had been consigned when she ran away one too many times.

She threw me birthday parties. We would traditionally kiss at them, usually while eating my birthday cake. She accused me of biting.

One day, I recall, she phoned me eleven times. I would feel, almost, like it was more than I could bear, to have to be available to Wiley when she needed me and to get my work done. For things always seemed arranged around Wiley’s schedule. She was almost always late, for one thing, thereby forcing me to wait for her to do whatever it was we planned to do. I called her “Princess Monkey,” in part because of her extra-long limbs and prehensile intelligence, and in part because she seemed to reign supreme.

In my test quitting from Flash, I kept Wiley as a friend. I knew that while I wasn’t working, she would tell me what was going on, what was changing, what wasn’t and who was doing whom. When I prepared to go back to dancing that Memorial Day weekend before my Last Summer of Flash, I took her back home with me. We arranged our schedule so that we worked together, always having the other one to lean on when it sucked hard.

Wiley was my last best friend. We acted like little girls together—we were inseparable and indistinguishable. We were a package deal. And then, as she got into law school, she began to pull away. She found other friends, she stopped having time for me.

To be honest, it hurt a lot. But with the clarity of space, I saw how often Wiley manipulated people and situations to her benefit, which given her totally suck-ass childhood made total sense. I saw how she played one ex-boyfriend against off against another, how she made sure that she had at least a couple of boys waiting in the wings for her. I saw how she had an affair with a married man, a man who over the six years since I first met him at one of my birthday parties—the incongruous sight of this old guy placing his bony hand proprietarily on my friend’s well-toned ass—has risen to political prominence. A Republican man, who helped Wiley with her law career, Wiley who loved Hilary Clinton so much that she carried a picture of her in her wallet.

I saw her use and abuse and to charm people with her avowed “playing The Sun Also Rises” as she opened another bottle of red wine. I saw myself cast off, only to be taken up again around 9/11, no doubt because I was comforting. Like mashed potatoes, like flannel, like the smell of wet dog.

If I sound angry, that would be because I am. I make friends skeptically. I have great marble citadels surrounding myself. I don’t trust easily, or well, or at all. I have a tendency to keep people a bit at arm’s length, even as warm as I am. Wiley got all my love and trust and she could have given sweet fuck-all about it. I could tell some stories, I could name televised names, but I won’t. Here you’ll have to trust me, and you’ll have to imagine some world-class deception and cruelty, if not to me, then to another friend of mine who became a casualty of hers.

And yet, in all that loneliness that swaddled my last days at Flash, I still remember my last best friend, how we would dance together, her angular limbs pointy and unaccommodating to the serpentine world of my hips. I remember our shared love of coffee, of oatmealy deserts, of black flippy shoes, of Kid Rock. I remember long, endless, curvy conversations, round and full as bosoms, and I remember how much I loved her, that wily one, she who seduced me and left me to dust.

Comments

[ella]

You cast a spell with words, Chelseagirl.

[Suse]

That, I think, is worse than anything a lover could do.

[Luhtarian]

You are a beautiful writer. My favorite of your essays are the ones like these, that are complicated portraits of one person.

...she had been taught the Communist National Anthem.

What do you mean by that, though? Communism isn't a nation, so it can't have a national anthem. Various Communist countries had and have their own anthems. Do you mean 'The Red Flag', you know, that goes 'the workers' flag is deepest red' et cetera?

[Shylah]

Oh, chelsea.. this entry makes my heart ache for you. I'm sorry she hurt you.