Day Eleven: Motorcycles

(Because tonight I rode in a tank top and jeans in a no-helmet state, legs wrapped around the driver (no pegs), arms wrapped around him, speaking softly into each other’s ears. Harley Nightster. I want one.)



* * *

Last year. My ex-student comes to visit, his Harley still not paid off, the loan from his ex-girlfriend one last tendril in his new relationship. He takes me for a ride around town. I lean into him, young, handsome, talented, totally fucked-up, and wish I was younger and the kind of girl he likes. A minivan pulls in as the left lane ends and he politely drops back.

“You could have made it,” I say into his ear.

“If I didn’t have you I would have.”

“Don’t stop on my account.”

* * *

Two years ago. Bike rally, Fourth of July. Kentucky. Three other girls and I watch fireworks and lounge on a riverbank. After the finale, we want to ride. Two of us have never been on a motorcycle before. "Come on," I say, and we head through the parking lot full of black and silver and red and yellow and every tattoo-like tank-paint job imaginable. I see a group of men. “There’s four of you and four of us,” I say to one. Wanna give us a ride?” We figure they’ll spin us around the block, nice to meet you, have a nice night. But fifty yards out of the lot My God I’m in fake pleather pants, not even vinyl, Power Girl’s in a halter top, two girls in skirts they pull left instead of right, onto the highway, into the fog. Fireworks are still distant in the hills, other towns not finished “GoAmerica!” yet. None of us have helmets. The bikes rocket up to 90, 95, 110, 135, I stop looking.

I realize, this could be it. One pothole, one bad bump, one careless motorist, we will all die. We don’t know these men, they might take us to their secret gang hideaway…does anyone have a secret gang hideaway any more? If one of us got separated, we’d have no way to find them…

Halfway, we pull into a Conoco to fill up, get Power Girl a pair of sunglasses. I ask my new friend, “So, how do you all know each other?”

“We don’t. This is th’ first time we rode together.”

“But I thought you guys were together! You said, yeah, we could all ride with you all!”

“Well, I didn’t figure they’d say no.”

* * *

Fifteen years ago.

My boyfriend Doug, chosen largely because he looked like my brother, takes me home from seeing the director's cut of Blade Runner. Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, and we rocket down the eight lanes by the water, the light on his jacket, my miniskirt, very MTV. Hair in the wind. Sunglasses at night. Doug deals with a traffic slowdown by striking up the middle of the lanes, and the cop who pulls us over is so disgusted he stomps up, huffs out, “If you want to kill her you should put her in front of the bike,” and stomps back without writing the ticket we richly deserve.

Later that week, I am in the parking lot of a grocery store, buying what I buy every week in college – cheap steak, eggs, potatoes, macaroni, canned tomatoes, broccoli, oatmeal, raisins, half and half, exactly twenty dollars every time. I set the bags in the back seat of my hatchback and watch a beautiful motorcycle cruise the parking lot – it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a reproduction vintage Harley, brand new and antique, everything shiny and silver and art deco turquoise.

“You want a ride?”

I do very much want a ride and since I am 19 and away from home and getting more reckless by the day, I hop on. It is wildly different from Doug’s tiny, shaky Kawasaki. This is like riding a bus, so stable and solid. The rider is an elementary school janitor, he has saved for twenty years to buy this bike, this machine, this moment of “wanna ride?” and the 19-year-old blonde with the nice tits says yes.

* * *
Twenty years ago.

I leave school, cut third period gym, walk down the road across the interstate where it becomes not a nice part of town (I am just now remembering this, this started as a story about motorcycles and joy and risk and wind and maybe a meaningful moment about the janitor) and hitch the four miles to my boyfriend’s house. I am fifteen. He is twenty-eight. I think that this makes me very, very cool. He lives with his mother, he has a six-inch scar from heart surgery as a child. We fuck on his bedroom floor. He is my third partner, he is “friends” with my second partner, but not friends enough not to go after his girlfriend. I make tickmarks by their names in my pink address book, once-twice-thrice-more. He takes me back to school in time for fifth period after lunch, English, which I never miss. People know I cut, but they do not know why. They know I am the girl who answers too many questions with too many words in class, the girl whose parents won’t let her get contacts, the girl we call names and put things in her locker and shove in the halls when teachers aren’t watching. They do not know about my cool grown-up boyfriend and my cool sex life and what I do when I am supposed to be showering with everyone else because I am sick of getting marked down for not showering, not being able to show a wet towel.

* * *

Yesterday.

“Want a motorcycle?” asks Power Girl.

“Ummmm…maybe?” because I already know this is a Candy Mountain moment, and I will be grumpy Charlie while Power Girl fills my world with magical wonder.

“Lie down on your back on the floor!” and everyone gets giggly, I can tell we have all had motorcycles, and yes, I should have a motorcycle, it will be good for morale, whatever it is.

She grabs my ankles, puts her foot in my crotch and jerks my legs up and down while going, “Vroom! Vroom!”

I laugh. Everyone laughs. The Boss played, and everything is OK. And The Boss plays as hard as she can, hoping the outside and the inside come closer.

Day Eight: Better Stories

At the gym, in a moment between sets, Power Girl notices my elbow. “You have a bump – do I have that bump?”

I hold my elbows side by side to show her the white, raised, dime-sized swelling. Right elbow only. No, she doesn’t have one.
flC
“How’d you get that?”

“Early in our marriage, Husband pegged me with a Coke bottle.”

Power Girl pauses.

“I bet you got a lot of mileage out of that.”

I laugh. “Yep, with the guy I was dating at the time.”

* * *



* * *

If you see me, Mandy, in the street, here is how you will know me. I have a scar across my upper chest, in the shape of a chain, 5 ½ links burned into me. The raised flesh does not tan. It is no longer the first thing people notice about me, but it’s still fairly conspicuous. If we meet in conducive circumstances, I will tell you how I got that scar.

Chicago.

1994.

It’s a good story.

* * *



* * *

Not the first time I ran away, but the first time I ran away at night, on my bicycle, past my middle school, hiding in the bushes at a church where two nice young women found me and took me home. I remember eating a sandwich I had either saved from lunch or made for the next day’s lunch. Probably ham salad on white. My bike in the back of their minivan – minivans were new. My father coming in through the front door, back from looking for me, throwing his car keys hard to the tile floor.

I got better at running away. Ditch anything with your name on it, rip out the inscribed page of Richard Bach’s Illusions, hand over the first grown-up present from my parents to the friend’s mom who drove me to the shelter, “I heard you liked earrings.” Gold ones, bought retail (never pay retail for jewelry), still in the blue velvet case.

* * *



* * *

“Scars are tattoos with better stories,” I saw on a t-shirt. I have good stories. I have good scars. I like where I am and so I must be at peace with what I’ve come from. It’s not your problem, Gentle Reader, that I’m white, middle class, “misunderstood.” It’s not your job to rescue me, solve me, open me up and reassemble the machinery, get rid of the knock, the ping, the way I shake over 75mph, start slowly on cold mornings, overheat too easily on a Texas back road. Something drives me to the iron, the razor, the hot edge of the oven door. Thank God it’s the same thing that drives me to words, to tell, tell, tell and not be silenced.

What will that feel like?

Only one way to find out.

Bits and Pieces

Gentle Readers - I am so darn cold...I'm in a geographical location right now that just involves being cold all the time, and it's sapping my will to live. I swear I'm trying to write, but between the cold and the cold and the worrying about gaining weight and the cold and the working 15 hours a day and the being around other people and the cold, it's been challenging. Until such time as I pop out something better, I hope you will enjoy this. Just keep hitting "random"...

* * *

...I'm working with a member of a local team who is 100% Survivor Called, They Want Their Fan Back. He has long straight hair with poufy bangs, tight jeans, and wears a lot of vests. He has become less openly skeeve-y since the last time I worked with him, now appearing merely socially inept and wanting to play a flirting game he hasn't properly learned rather than oozing slime over every woman he meets. As I think this, while executing some work tasks with him, my hand brushes his and I realize, shit. If I was sixteen/fifteen/fourteen, I would have dated you. And not the you at that age, the you now. We'd have made out in your backseat, you'd have picked me up on your motorcycle when I cut Gym, it would have been you coming over when I was babysitting, asking if you could "just see if it fits." Sobering...

* * *

...due to some wacky phone zone issues, I'm not able to call ex-Lover. And work has been busy enough to keep me from texting much, or emailing at all. Which is a lie. If I wanted to badly enough, I'd make it happen, just like always, slide into the bathroom, the closet, get five minutes alone however I could. But there's a new stage happening, sliding up on me like a Prague pickpocket. The footsteps get closer, closer, why doesn't this guy pass me? The sidewalk's plenty - oh! and then I check my bag, change purse, postcards, pens, notebook, camera, what's missing is trust.

Merry Christmas!

Ahh, Gentle Readers, you suspect that Mandy has, in the post-prandial haze of the Big Day, gotten lost in the calendar. True, there was a longish celebration, starting with the pre-holiday kitchen scrub (this is the time of year when I take everything off of the shelves and out of the cupboards so as to start clean, bless my mother for taking off the back of the fridge and vaccuuming that part you're supposed to vaccuum but never do), moving through cranberry sauce, stuffing and apple pies, culminating in broccoli, roast asparagus with parmesan, mushrooms sauteed in merlot, root vegetable salad, vegetarian stuffing (yes, it can be done), mincemeat pie, a vat of gravy and a 22 pound bird, because Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. All the fun and none of the stress and disappointment of That Other Winter Holiday. Plus, since we typically spend it alone, Husband and I view it as our anniversary and Valentine’s Day wrapped into one. This year there were guests, so I wore a dress with the pearls, heels, and pink gingham apron.

But on to Christmas. Or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, La Posadas, O-Shogatsu, St. Lucia Day, Eid al-Fitr, Yule, whatever you celebrate. Probably not appropriate for Ramadan. The last time I offered a prize it went over so well that I’d like to up the ante a little and send out some holiday gifts. It's also a bit of a commemoration, given that I started writing here on Christmas Day last year...

Inside the gold-wrapped box that doesn’t rattle, light enough to hide in the branches of the tree…the Muse Mix CD. Nifty songs that inspire me, some of which have been quoted or referred to here. Some you will have heard, others will be obscure, some unreleased. There *may* be music from ex-Lover, Folk Rocker, Beautiful Girl, Famous, Man Who Loves Stars, Secret Scientist and/or Hairline Boy (I’ll never tell, you’ll have to guess). Some will make you laugh, others will make you thoughtful, one makes me cry.

Tell us, Mandy, how do we obtain such a prize? And without compromising our privacy?

Email me (see box at right. Your right. The left hand makes an L.) with an address at which you can receive your pressie. Some ideas:

1) I don’t care, send it to my real name at my real address.

2) I’m a little cagy. Send it to a fake name at my real address, or my initials at a friend’s address, or my first initial and last name or vice versa.

3) I’m willing to put in some effort. Send it to General Delivery at the big post office in my city. I’ll either give enough of my real name to show ID when I get it, or I’ll take my chances that they’ll give it to me without ID, especially if Mandy writes on it, “please, no ID needed for pickup”.

4) I’m willing to put in some effort and spend some cash. Send it to a PO Box, or a business like Mail Boxes Etc where I’ve made a deal to get one piece of mail and vanish into the night.

5) I have a better idea. And I’m mentioning it in the comments so that other people can use it, too.

I will, of course, be sending them from a city in which I do not live. Or even live near. Which means the deadline for you to get it in time for the holidays is December 5th. Requests received later will not be honored until January, in which case you may celebrate by opening your trinket on Twelfth Night.

I’m a little uncertain that there may yet be some huge snag I haven’t anticipated, or that Gentle Readers will not want to be contacted in any real way, but hey, it’s worth a shot. No-one has to play unless they want to.

Best wishes and Happy Holidays.

Oh, and around the dinner table? Somehow, “by the way, I’m a whore” never really came up…

Mandy's Mailbag

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: ZurichDate: 02/11/2007

I've had a beer.

Im at [place I work].

Just saw your new photos and wonder what I DONT have to be invited along…

and I want to fuck you lots.

ok?

--Z


This one’s easy.


--------------------Reply------------------------------
From: Mandy
Date: 02/11/2007

I've had a Nyquil. It's numbing the pain.

I'm in [my town].

You weren't female or possessed of [unique skill]. But there will be good jobs coming up.

I'm in too much pain right now to return the last sentiment wholeheartedly, but trust me, it's in there somewhere. I'll check back in a couple of weeks...

Loved the last pic you sent!

Mandy

--- Original Message ---
From: Circus Guy
Date: 23/10/2007

Hello [Whorename]! How have you been. I haven't heard a peep from you in a long while. How's the [realjob] world?? Have you been in my area lately? Would be nice to see you again you don't have to put me down so. I haven't been doing much lately just working hard, i could really use a vacation. Send me a line or two from time to time and let me know if you are in my area so i can come and see ya.
Hope your well
Circus Guy


Ooooo! Subtext! My favorite! Let’s see…ummm…he wants to fuck me. Just a guess.


--------------------Reply------------------------------
From: Mandy
Date: 2/11/2007


Hi Circus Guy! Nice to hear from you :)

(clearly, my plan of ignoring your emails has only stirred your ardor)

I got to see the circus when I was in [City]

(WITH ANOTHER CLIENT WHO DOESN’T TRY TO MAKE ME FEEL GREEDY FOR EXPECTING MY AGREED-UPON FEE),

which was neat - they are a small, one-ring show, but very good. I have been gone for a few months and just got back - I'd love to see you sometime later in November maybe?

(Like if I happen to be passing through your city and have two hours to kill at my old rate?)

I'm not really doing a whole lot in that line anymore

(I don’t do hourly, but hey, neither do you, Mr. Overstay),

and what I am doing is on a bit of a different scale

(I cost five times as much as the price you bitched about),

but I'd love to see you at our previous arrangement if that is workable for you

(You will pay my full rate and you will pay the hotel, mofo).

Hope to see you sometime soon :)

(And teach you to distinguish between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’, after all, cunnilingus only gets a man so far in life!)

[Whorename]

-----------------------------------------

Meanwhile, Brit Boy has contacted me, out of the blue. We dated circa 3 B.H. (Before Husband), meeting in the passport line at the Hoek van Holland/Harwich Ferry, in the days when sleeping on the boat was better than paying a night’s lodging. Lounging uncomfortably in the reclining chairs in the sleeping room, he passed me a card, having written, come here and kiss me, Holly Golightly… I did… Now he’s agonizing about his latest affair, and thinks I’m the one to ask for advice:

…here's what you introduced me to (the non-rude stuff obviously): New York, Bagels with Cream cheese for breakfast, lapdancing (bit rude), guns in shops (your dad had one!), Janes Addiction, US Road Trips, sex in swimming pools (v rude - and slippery as I recall) and Lincoln Town Cars. And flower deliveries!

And total admiration for someone who just got on with things. Just like that. "Here's the problem; here's what I need to do; here's how I do it. Now. Done it!"

Prevarication [nickname only my father, brother and special lovers may use], still my middle name!

X Brit Boy

It’s a lot to live up to.



(Nyquil photo from Everything That Remains).

Rape Fantasies

Jeans, work boots, stubble. I’m naked. I’m on a pool table. Green felt rubbing my knees raw, unflattering fluorescent tubes in the over-table light. A man under me, his cock slick with the semen already in me, his hands below my hipbones, grabbing the place where legs and body meet, sliding me back and forth on his body, his belly rubbing my clit. Another man stands at the table edge, impatient for his turn. There are other men, their faces in shadow, their hands rough and eager on my breasts, my ankles, pinching my nipples, pulling my legs apart. Some of them are betting on how many times I’ll come, how soon I’ll come again. “Fuck her with this,” says one, light flecking in his eyes and on the beer bottle in his hand, “This’ll make her come.”

That’s what makes me come, what pushes me over the edge if I’m almost there. Sometimes Lover is there watching. Sometimes he’s the one who’s given me to the group. Sometimes it’s more subtle, Jodie Foster on the table in my place, surrounded by chanting low-rent rednecks.

When I babysat, I always hunted for the porn. The Bechtels kept theirs in the bathroom – the main bathroom! Right there under the counter next to the hot rollers! – and Hustler was much, much better than Playboy if you didn’t really care about Norman Mailer. The picture in my head still: a blond prison guard, breasts falling out of her ripped bluegrey institutional-yet-flattering jump suit, the men holding her down careful not to obscure the shot. Later I found Brit porn better still, actual penetration instead of the thick black cock frozen inches from her pussy. She asked for it…


On my knees again, a tavern this time, straight out of Blackadder. The worn-smooth wood of the table under my hands while I suck at the cocks thrusting into my face, my hair already sticky with come, sweating, face a mess of tears and spit and everything else, the men are laughing and shouting. The youngest one is the leader, he takes his sword and thrusts the hilt into my pussy. “Let’s see you fuck that, slut.”

I mentioned the commonality of “rape fantasies” in the hearing of a puzzled friend of Powergirl’s.

“Why would anyone want to be raped?”

“Not by a stranger with a knife, but being overpowered, or someone wanting you so badly they have to have you no matter what.”

I played rape with my ex-lover Writer, I play it with Lover, even with new men there is power and gratified hunger in teasing them until they snap, grab my arms, pin me against the wall or the bed or the hood of the truck, wrists above my head while the other hand slides up my skirt, inside my panties, inside my pussy to see how they make me feel, thrust their wet fingers into my mouth, the pressure that says suck for me.

Rollercoasters do it for me, too – the metal frame shaking, did some old guy assemble this on the weekend with a ratchet set? – sandals and water bottle in the cubby, safety bar down hard, the floor drops away, bare feet dangling and the cars whip around, never screaming, just breathing hard. Maybe this is the day that makes headlines.

First bent over the dirty white sink, then on the floor of the theme park bathroom right after closing, I’ve gone back for something forgotten, a purse, a bag, it doesn’t matter but that it’s something the ride attendant makes me beg for, first playfully and then in earnest as he roughly lifts my skirt, sets me on the counter, his fingers leaving red marks on the inside of my knees, a red mark across my cheek, “Shut up bitch. I’ve been thinking about this all day…”

Will met me in a Laundromat. I’d like to think I was wearing my tight black spandex crotch-length minidress, horizontal slits from bottom of breast to collarbone, because it was the only thing clean, but more likely I was just being eighteen. I sat on the sidewalk, legs out, back against the window while he chatted me up. That night his fingers in me hard, his sister turning the TV up louder and louder and the neighbors calling over to find out if she was OK. The next night Taco Bell, and in the tall weeds between that parking lot and the next we made out, me play-resisting and Will pushing back my hands, prying open my mouth, holding down my shoulders until suddenly I was fighting for real in panic and terror, trying to keep my legs closed while he pulled back my hair, opened my thighs and took me, his excitement enough to come in a quick minute, then adjusting our clothes, back to the car, and me quiet for a long time, realizing, this could really happen to me.

Will raped me twice more, both times in the context of our relationship, anally, and with the memories lasting longer and more pleasantly than the acts. The first time was among my first anal, no lube other than what came out of my pussy, no condom, thrusting in with me on my stomach, protesting until he finally said, “You can have it in your ass or I’ll put it in your mouth.” I couldn’t sit for days without the memory. The second time, the front seat of his car (bench seat, older car) we were making out before breaking up, parked in a field in the woods where kids in upstate Eastern states go to do that sort of thing. Later, “I thought you wanted it, you turned over so easily.”

He’s still in my top three lovers of all time. None of your business. 90th percentile or better.

I’ve never been raped by a stranger, but I’ve felt coerced or badgered or worn down quite a few times and escaped date rape once, I think before penetration but the memory is distant and all that remains is cold terror in the front seat, parked at the end of the runway to watch the planes, a tan and muscled body holding me down. My rapes are fantasies, men I liked and wanted to fuck, just maybe not right that minute. No-one holds a weapon to my head, and their whispered “hold still” comes from longing and not contempt.

Emma Kelly and her husband Scott write about cuckolding, his “tiny” penis, the way she fucks other men while he watches. The photo of her white body wrapped around Don the Marine carved from wood, his brown skin playing half my rape fantasies and every stereotype in the book, made me wet when it first flashed on my screen. The first man I cheated on Lover with was black, we played that fantasy for weeks afterwards, going in the space of days from,don’t ever fuck anyone else again, that’s my pussy to describe it for me while he came.

He doesn’t have to be black. He doesn’t have to be better endowed. He only has to be there, and the fear of being replaced by something bigger, better hung, just better, becomes an erotic plaything, something to wank to rawness over, just as the fear of strange cock, strange skin, strange hands, the unthinkable and constantly present unreality of me-and-a-gun-and-a-man-on-my-back every time I walk home from the station alone becomes rape fantasies, multiple solos, the shove over the brink of pleasure.

Motorcycle gangs who offer me a ride and waylay me to the hideout. The Hispanic guys at the carwash, covered in soap and water, bodies sliding over each other and me. Brit boys on a stag who find me lost in the alleys of Prague. Malkovich as Valmont, Rickman as anything. Force, dirt, darkness and power. Lust overpowering all.

Now I remember. The Southern Town Girls Club. After the fair, the leader of the volunteers, a man I crushed on for months, sleeping in his shirt long after it stopped smelling of him. The women who lived with him wore collars, I aped them with a homemade necklace, a blue bead on a leather thong. After the fair, dressing up and playing and finally having friends because they were from different high schools and friends because they were older than me. After the fair, in the room where the punch cups lived, the last of the red bug juice poured down the drain, the yellow barrel coolers hosed out and turned over to dry. After the fair, a man to whom I owe a major life skill and thus can never purge. After the fair, on my back bent onto the table, “that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

Thank you for the skill. Bought and paid for, Dan.

Thank you, don’t come again.

Gala

(since Beautiful Girl has been visiting lately...)


This is the Hallucinogenic Toreador, which means, the bullfighter that you see in your imagination. Can you see the woman in the blue bathing suit on the yellow raft? That’s Dali’s way of saying that the tourists are ruining Port Ligat. And here, where the artist has signed his name: Gala Salvador Dali. He wrote his wife’s name first, to show that she inspired all of his paintings.

In Museo Sophia Reina, the labels are less explanatory than my fifth-grade self on Student Docent Day, my whole gifted program class each given a painting to memorize, me with the longest one, a page and a half single-spaced. The parents and teachers and the unsuspecting public subjected to our practiced spiels followed floor paths of red and green tape from painting to painting, stopping off at the ones with a sweaty-palmed grade-schooler standing in front, carefully not fidgeting in our dark pants and white shirts. Beautiful Girl and I have only two days in Madrid, Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, and we are not going to waste it on minor paintings by minor artists, for us it’s the Lichtenstein special exhibit, the Guernica room, Dali, only as much as our attention spans can handle before going back to the hotel for siesta, late dinner, coffee, and the street of clubs that beckon with Spanish techno and Euro techno and American techno which is really Euro techno at its heart, remixes and dance mixes and Kylie, Kylie, Kylie.

Here, there are three Venus de Milos. Notice how they fade into the background and become less complete. This is Dali’s way of showing that classical art is disintegrating, and it reflects his earlier painting, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. The first Venus de Milo is next to the cliffs. See how the fabric draped over her hips is also part of the cliffs, and at the same time, it makes the cape of the toreador.

I say to Beautiful Girl, do you want to see a bullfight? It is Spain, after all. She does not. I do not. I've heard you have to buy a really expensive ticket to get a seat in the shade, and we are both nearly broke, I’m charging the hotel on my card and Beautiful Girl can pay me back in the fall. She would be shamed if she knew I wrote that, as much as she loves me, as much as she knows she would do it for me if the situation was reversed, as much as we are the kind of friends who do that for each other, there is still shame packed in the imaginary backpack she still carries despite her transition to a rolly suitcase, to big-girl luggage, to traveling in skirts and the pretty heeled thong sandals that hurt her, so she will not look like a hippie any more. Beautiful Girl is also a vegetarian. Compromises have been made in Morocco, where it is almost impossible to get food that is only vegetables, you would think that a couscous country would have dishes that are only vegetables and grain, but even the lentils are flavored with fat. A bullfight would not be a compromise. It would be a capitulation. I wish that I felt as strongly about something, that I was able to stick to my guns on one thing, one lousy thing that I wouldn’t give in on, no matter what.

The toreador has a pink cape, with gold sparkles, and the curve of the arena above him is also the curve of his hat. Here, below him, you can see the bull, his shape emerging from the cliffs. The straight lines sticking out of the bull’s shoulder are banderillas, long spears with hooks in the end that the bullfighter’s assistants use to distract the bull and tire him out. The bull is kneeling, which means that he is very tired.

Guernica, what we came for, the one thing in Madrid I really want to see, is huge and in black and white, a surprise. I have been imagining blood and gore and Bosch-like excess, but it is spare and cubist and terrifying. Beautiful Girl comes over to me, and says in a whisper, “It’s Picasso.” I don’t know why she’s telling me this, is it a joke I’m not getting? I give her the “and?” look. She says, “You’re looking for Guernica. This is by Picasso.” I say, “Beautiful Girl, Guernica is the name of the painting. I know it’s by Picasso.” There must be something in my tone (shame again), because she looks around at the room of people gazing at Guernica, gazing at a painting finally freed from bulletproof glass with the change of government, a painting whose commissioners’ sole instruction was “Make it big,” a painting famous enough to be our reason for this museum, and says “Oh.” I have already shamed her once, refusing to put our things in a pay locker when there was a free coat check, saying in front of the clerk who almost certainly spoke very good English, “They’re employees of a national institution, they don’t make their living robbing bags.” In Morocco, it’s a legitimate worry.

Later, I shame her yet again, walking down the street, handing her a condom just in case, saying, “Maybe I should be passing over my vibrator instead?” She shushes me and scolds, “Mandy, you’ve got to stop assuming that no-one here speaks English!” I say, “I’d say it in New York.” But that is later. That is on the way to the airport, on my way back to Prague, on her way to the Prado that turns out to be closed on Sunday afternoons. How do you go to Madrid and not see the Prado? How do you go to Amsterdam and not see the Rijksmuseum, to London and not the Tate or the British Museum? In the end, it’s not really what we’re there for.

Notice the collar button here at the toreador’s neck. It’s painted so realistically that most people think it’s real. You can see that it’s not by moving to the side of the painting and looking for the edge of the button. Below the button is the toreador’s tie. See how the vertical dark line of the tie leads your eye to the blue water below. The water is in the place that the bull’s blood would be, but it’s a swimming cove in the cliffs instead.

We see one more room of paintings after Guernica, that’s all we have the eyes for, we’re cloudy with images and need ice cream to revive. But we’re here, and we might as well, room 12 has the Dali’s and the other Spanish surrealists. I recognize them from down the hall, the first glimpse through the doorway. There’s something snobbish in knowing a painting’s artist from across the room, I can do it with Vermeer and Hals and Renoir and Monet (Impressionists are easy) and sometimes Judith Leyster although of course the opportunities for recognition there are much fewer, but Dali is the easiest. It’s not the brush strokes or the colors or the subjects alone, it’s all of those, recurring images, recurring themes, the nurse from boyhood and the cliffs of Ligat and the Venus de Milo and drawers in bodies and Dutch merchants and Gala, Gala, Gala.

We stand for a long time in front of Bust of Gala, her head an island of light in the low right, the rest of the board black as ink. I softly read the signature aloud, “Gala Salvador Dali.” Beautiful Girl looks at me, and I say, “do you know why?” I hope to ask the right question, I hope not to shame her yet again, to presume ignorance instead of enlightenment as is my wont. She does not know. She would like to know. I say, “Gala was his wife. He wrote his wife’s name first, to show that she inspired all of his paintings. As if she was part of him.” Outside the museum, we eat ice cream, Magnum bars with truffle and dark chocolate and the tiny paddle-shaped stick inside after the last and best bites. When we sit on the bench, the men turn to us like sunflowers as they pass. I cannot kiss her, so I take her to a sex shop filled with the same plastic as Amsterdam, equally out of our price range. I cannot kiss her, so we siesta from eight to ten at night, dress, make up, tell each other you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful.

At the first club, I realize, this is what the man feels like. She’s lovely and fun and smart and I can’t keep my eyes off her breasts and while part of me knows she’ll welcome it, I’m afraid to kiss her in case it’s wrong, in case it wrecks everything. We hold hands, we dance together, we see the sunflowers turning towards the only blondes in the bar. We walk, hand in hand, to the big club, the twelve Euros cover even with our discount flyers club, the club we really cannot afford to go to. We’re on my money. I am already planning to tell her not to pay me back until the fall, I am already hoping drinks will be bought for us. They are. And in the end, we walk home as the sun rises. I make Juan Carlos say the “star light star bright” rhyme in broken English and Catalan, and she falls behind with Santiago, so far behind they finally call us on Juan Carlos’ mobile to find out where we are. We are on the way to the hotel. We are in that hazy morning place after dancing all night. We are safely away, safely averting danger, the kind of danger that comes when you kiss someone you really like instead of someone you met in a club.

Here is the curve of the toreador’s face. His chin is the stomach of the second Venus de Milo. His nose is her breast. His eye is her face. Below his eye, you can see a single tear. Perhaps he is mourning the fate of the bull, or perhaps he is sad that the tourists are ruining Port Ligat.

History: Marlene on the Wall

Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As she records the rise and fall
Of every soldier passing

But the only soldier now is me
I’m fighting things I cannot see
I think it’s called my destiny
That I am changing
-Suzanne Vega

It happened a long time ago.

Yesterday.

I was lying in the bed where we’d fucked, despite not having a condom between us, and I ended up faking it for the first time in a long time because he was insistent about it even though he didn’t come himself because, “It’s giving away too much isn’t it.”

Yes, it is.

I’d been prowling, walking alone, making eye contact with the last man in every pack of the Brit boys roaming the streets looking for cheap beer, getting thrown out of strip clubs by the same big black men in day-glo safety jackets who’d cajoled them inside with bigger and bigger discounts on cover, “Fifteen minutes free, you want fifteen minutes?”

The last man is always a little behind the others. He’s glad to be with the lads, he is, but he’s also a little bit sorry that all he’s seeing of Prague is the insides of pubs and bars and the restaurants that don’t have No Stag Parties signs. He almost always has pretty eyes, blue ones. And if I make eye contact and smile, instead of doing the quick, down and right, please-don’t-rape-me-I’m-a-tourist slide of the eyes, he’ll turn and look back when I’m fifteen paces past, which is when I turn and look back. And we laugh, because we’ve caught each other, and take another five steps and look again. Then I stop, and he comes to me, and asks me where am I going, love/sweetheart/darling (it sounds much less demeaning from a Brit boy, they all call all women their pet name of choice, eight to eighty) and I say, “I think you have beautiful eyes.” And he says, “I’d quite like to kiss you.” And I do, and his mouth is soft and tastes of fresh beer and sometimes cigarettes, Friday night tastes, and he puts his hands gently on my hips, careful not to take too much.

It’s safer to walk near a pack, on the way home. Not really. But I like listening to them tease each other and picking out their voices, Manchester, East London, Suffolk, Geordie, Scottish sometimes, best of all. They tell how hard they were for the lap-dancer, what an effort it’s taking to be faithful, how many beers they’ve pissed into the gutter or against the six-hundred-year-old walls. Tonight’s pack is Cheshire, older than the average, all with buzzed hair that they tell me later they got done this morning, to match the groom. When our paths part, they wave goodbye, but I want to see if I can hold them so I ask about the hair, end up patting and judging, Paris-like, whose is softest. Like to go to the last bar of the night with them? It’s quite near their hotel, it’ll be lovely, come on. I know I won’t pay to get in or pay for drinks; I’ll escape the metal detector wand and the bouncer’s frisking hands.

Orange juice, orange juice, orange juice, while they put away vodka and Red Bull and I cut out the one who dances in place like I do. We shout into each other’s ears, a good reason to be close, on a white dance floor, watch the plasma screens over our shoulders. “You don’t dance like an American,” Sean’s a barrister, he gets to wear a wig and argue before a higher court. He’s sharp enough to know when something I say is rehearsed, and that impresses me. I know before the last round of drinks I’m going back to his hotel room, and it only stings a little to see his friends give him the thumbs up. In all seriousness, the pack would walk me home and leave me at the door if I felt scared enough to need it. The coat check girl is sleepy, or maybe has something wrong with her left eye, and I leave her twenty crowns on the way out.

The room costs as much in a night as I’m paying for a month’s rent in my flat-share near Florenc, probably more. There is mineral water on the table and we drink it while he tells me about his dad in the SAS, and how he didn’t go into the army. Every two or three sentences, one of us has to repeat something, the accent, the phrasings tangling in our ears, making us listen harder. 3AM, showering, head, his hands soapy on my breasts, I’m thankful I’ve dropped weight, the water is warm and cool enough to feel like bed. In the bed, he wants to be an athlete, four or five positions, wants to please me, wants me to come, and finally I’m sore enough to fake it, hoping we can quit.

“How can I help you?”

“Hit me,” I whisper back. Below me, he shakes his head. Afterwards, I explain about hitting and spanking and the different feelings from constricting the windpipe and pressing on the arteries leading to the brain. He could never hit a woman, he cannot wrap his head around anyone wanting to be hit (today, there are bruises on the eyes of my elbows and the insides of my breasts from the strength of his touch).

He thinks I am asleep when he comes back from the bathroom, and gathers up his wallet and his cash, plucks his mobile from the charger, puts them in the room safe, I hear the buzz of the lock. By now I am bemused and angry, and as he lies back down beside me, still sweaty from the effort of faking, I say, “I’ll try to avoid rolling you for your wallet in the night.” Then I have to explain the slang.

In my travels, I have danced naked in two countries, planted my flag on nearly a hundred lovers, known good sport sex and can I please have a hundred dollars sex and hey, it’ll make him happy and what the hell, I’ve got twenty minutes sex, but whoredom is a foreign country. The buzz of the safe sends me beyond risk and power and the granting of secret wishes, past the first adultery of a barrister trembling on the threshold of middle age, past a good story to tell my lover who will hit me for the pleasure of the details, past penance and joy and detachment and tourism and sometimes even pleasure, into the hallways of the Renaissance Hotel and the realm of the girls who stand on the corner, waiting to be invited upstairs.



(I took this picture)

What I Like About You

The best kind of money is money I made myself, on my own time, that doesn’t count. It’s not for the house or the groceries or the bills, it’s not share and share alike. It sits in my purse and buys each little caprice.

Getting off the airplane and buying a chai latte and a water right there at the airport instead of choosing one or the other and then buying it at the convenience store thirty minutes later to save 75 cents.

Going into Target and choosing five things from the travel size and sample aisle, Kleenex in a purse pack (not the store brand), lotion that I might not even like, contact lens solution, ibuprofen, handiwipes for my purse, not buying more because there’s nothing that catches my eye.

Sitting in my first choice restaurant and ordering what my body says it wants, extra side of vegetables, maybe I won’t even finish, won’t even take it home (though nothing’s great like cold steak at breakfast).

Trashy checkout magazines even though the newpaper’s cheaper.

Not driving across town to save 35 cents a pound, not caring too much if the “regular” pump is out of order, an extra pack of mints at the checkout, not worrying and saving and hoarding every last penny because good people save up for what they want for twenty-five years and bad people call home from the airport, “I’m in Reno, Atlantic City, the Bahamas, I’ll be home in a few days, honey.”

Once she packed us up and took us to her parents, two babies on the plane must have been a nightmare, God only knows what last-minute tickets cost back then. Perhaps if she’d come back after he did, something might have happened.

On my first big road trip, he gave me $100, two fifties, in case of emergency. I didn’t use them when the alternator went, when the head gasket went, when I took the bus from Cleveland to Buffalo and then hitched to Syracuse. My brother flew me home. I still have the fifties, they’re the older kind.

As long as they sit in the back of my planner, I know…something. Maybe someday I’ll know what it is.

That’s why he gambled. That’s why I whore.

History: Famous

“So what do you do?” I ask, because he already knows what I do, we’re at my work.

“I’m a musician,” he says, and we both know that’s not all, that the twelve people in the private room and the tension in the dressing room on his arrival don’t have a lot to do with music. But we pretend it is, pretend we can have a normal conversation, pretend there’s lots to find out about each other and that we both care.

He’s nearly forty now, or perhaps on the far side, it’s hard to tell grey from blond. In the poster on the wall of my rented one-bedroom, over where the funky part of Dallas becomes a bad neighborhood, he’s thirty, or maybe a drugged-out twenty-five, fronting a band that will be famous always but always a little less famous than him. He’s drinking brand name gin and tonic, three green olives on a plastic sword balanced on the edge. I’m drinking champale, which is house code for a six dollar cranberry juice and ginger ale. I’m underage, my Poloroid’s on the Do Not Serve board in the back hall, but I don’t drink anyway. He’s either a boobs man or a brains man, because if he was an ass man, I wouldn’t be here, being a little softer around the backside than the rest of the Dallas girls. My bet is on brains. I’m hoping it’s brains. I figured out pretty quickly I wasn’t a Barbie body, was never going to be the tightest girl in the bar no matter how many reps I did, my money comes from conversation and climbing – they’ll pay twenty bucks for the fun of watching me climb two stories up, wrap my high boots around one of the cage bars, lean back and slide down, squeezing my thighs to stop short when my hair brushes the platform. Sometimes thirty.

We’re supposed to do two sets in the cages after two songs on stage, but he’s had a word with the manager, or rather, his manager’s had a word with my manager, and a girl who never liked me to begin with and now is into full-blown hate is taking my sets. Lock my locker for sure tonight, or better yet, take everything home, shoes, dresses, makeup, anything that can be ripped or cut with nail scissors or smashed on the tile floor. I learned in Florida never to leave money in a locker, as fast as you can make a hundred and eighty bucks it still burns to lose it. Dallas is better, there are house mothers who police the dressing room and iron and bandage and pass out cups of liquid latex in the clubs inside the city limits, where if the cops come in, your fake nipples have to peel off in one piece and be opaque to a dollar bill. Here outside the city limits, we’re bare up top, but in the Cabaret we’re also in dresses “appropriate for street wear” when we sit with the customers and we don’t cross the invisible wall in front of their knees, the barrier between us and their groins.

I’m not even supposed to be here. I work next door, in the less-exclusive room of this two-club complex squatting beside the ring road, fronted like a mansion with pillars and a fountain and a circular drive where even the dancers use the valet. In my room, Club Concert, the girls can wear lingerie on the floor and the men don’t have to have ties. We are also less pretty. They call it “a different look,” which means we have smaller or possibly real breasts, softness in the belly, baby fat still around our cheekbones. My placement in the second room seems to me a logical extension of high school, the punchline of finally finding out I am pretty and I can be popular, as long as I leave school at 2:30 and work the 3-to-10 shift.

In Dallas, it’s 7 to 2, but there are so many girls here they check our ID cards when we come and we leave when we’ve made enough. It’s Sunday, slow, but Sundays have always been my lucky night. Tommy closed our room at midnight, told us, “Since it was so slow tonight, you can go over to the Cabaret if you want. Don’t forget, ladies—” and we chorus back, “Appropriate for street wear.” We are a mixed blessing to the girls in the other room. More girls means less time on stage, where no-one makes money, but it also means more competition for dances on the floor. I go up to the same two songs as always, and near the end while I am getting bored and cursing the lack of pole on the main stage, a man comes to the edge of the stage.

“He would like you to join him in the VIP Suite.” I know who “he” is. Even in the other room, we knew he was here. Bulletins came through the dressing room mom — he’s here, he’s in the Suite, he’s not buying dances, he’s sending people down with tips, no, they’re going on their own, no, it’s his money. The DJ finally locked his door and announced that he wasn’t going to play the song, that song, his song, for anyone, so could everyone please stop whining?

I tell the man at the edge of the stage I have to do four more songs in the cages before I can come up, and he nods and goes to arrange something because the room manager comes to me before Annie Lennox finishes her final “hey” and tells me that Dani will be covering my cage sets and would I please put on my dress and go upstairs immediately. Backstage, I struggle into my dress as Sassy waits for her music. “Good luck,” she says, because nothing is secret, and I am grateful that she’s a nice person who talks to the new girls in the dressing room and just laughs when they ask her why she’s called Miss Six-to-Eight.

The door to the VIP Suite is shut, and I don’t know whether to knock or just go in, finally deciding to knock on the grounds that servants don’t. The man who came to the stage opens the door, asks me what I want to drink, and motions to a wing chair by the window. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, the lights are lower here, so we can watch the floor through the glass window.

He leans back in the wing chair, watching the girl on stage through plate glass. The music is piped in, the DJ announces Crystal who is one more whining voice refused the song, the song we all want to dance to tonight, his song. Crystal plays to the floor crowd, refusing to look to the second level, ignoring the window we’re watching her through, you can either be starstruck or you can pretend he isn’t here. I’m with Crystal – I’d rather act like everything’s normal, as normal as the VIP Suite can be, just like oil money or software money or Cowboys money, only it’s famous money. In the end, what matters is that it’s money.

He’s telling me about his wife, he misses her, it’s hard being on tour without her, she couldn’t come this time. I have seen their wedding picture. She’s in a red dress, on horseback, the lead rope falling to his hand, both laughing. He is at this moment unfamous to me, one of many, working on Topic #2, My Significant Other, after a quick slip through Topic #1, My Job. There are only three topics. I pray for the sake of being able to listen to his music forever after this that he will not get to #3, Will You Go Home With Me. As Sassy says, why would you leave the bar for a hundred-dollar blowjob when you could stay here and make six to eight? I do not know if he would offer money or expect fame to pay, but I also do not know if I cost enough to say no.

“Would you like to dance?” he asks, and it takes a moment to realize that that means for him, not with him, because my brain is remembering the Prom and thinking, yeah, you fuckers, look at me now. “Next song, so you get a whole song?” I say, realizing, I am rationing out pleasure to the face from my poster.

The DJ is psychic, or perhaps Sierra has blown him in the booth because as she walks on stage he puts it on, the song, his song. The guitar is laying down the rhythm and every girl on the floor is up, arms overhead for good breast position or hands on the parts we want to emphasize, never bending over past the ninety degree limit set out in the training video that also showed us where the line was and how not to fellate our drinking straws.

I drop my appropriate-for-street-wear dress to the floor around my ankles and give the eye to a hanger-on, who turns away. It is just us. I would like to pretend that it is just us, that we are alone in the suite, alone in the club, alone in the world. What rock star would you like to be on a desert island with? I turn away, I arch my back, I brush him with my hair, I turn back. He is mouthing the words. His eyes are closed. So I dance for twenty bucks, and for me.