Goodbye, ‘Rock and Roll Sexy’

“I knew that it would cost something sooner or later…but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.”
– Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

“Every wish is an experiment in consequences.” - Adam Phillips, Against Inhibition

One sunny afternoon my friend Kate and I sat in my front yard in lawn chairs, wearing 70’s style short-shorts with halter-tops and cowgirl boots. The newly warm mountain air teased our exposed bellies, coyly pale from being under wrap all winter. We leaned back and scuffed the toes of our boots in the dirt where the grass was supposed to be.
“We should become strippers,” Kate said, eyes closed, head tilted upward.
Kate was a fair-skinned girl with a pixie face and a slight lisp. She had just cut her curly red hair short and it stood out in impish sprigs around her head.
“OK,” I said.
Let me say here that only a few years before I would have balked at the idea of stripping. I’ve always been something of an introvert. I’m a Leo on the cusp of Cancer but tend to err on the side of Cancer—shy and sensitive—with undercurrents of exhibitionism surfacing only now and then. 17 I remember wearing baby tees and the occasional mini skirt—comfortable by then with my group of friends, my niche in the microcosm of my high school. In my first year of college I was once again vulnerable, unsure about where I fit in. I discovered women’s studies and began wearing army pants and Doc Martins with oversized tee shirts. I wore a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes and listened to Bikini Kill on my headphones as I walked across campus, attempting to create a barrier between myself and the scrutiny of strangers. But feminism was expanding, becoming more multifaceted. You could be into mini skirts and painted fingernails and still call yourself a feminist. The hip thing was to be “sex-positive.” I had moved from Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem to Michelle Tea and Eileen Miles, women who were sexually transgressive and not ashamed of it. And I was once again comfortable in my niche, feeling safe enough to expose myself—literally.
Although neither Kate nor I had much in the way of boobs, something I’d always been self-conscious about, lately we’d started referring to ourselves as ‘The Flat Girl Revolution,’ mocking social norms and our own insecurities. So what did it matter that we weren’t typical Playboy types? We were hot! We had bad, rock and roll attitudes! Clearly, we would become strippers.
I was living, at the time, in Asheville, North Carolina: a town of about 69,000 in the Blue Ridge mountains with a quaint, cobble-stoned center full of cafes and antique stores. A liberal town heavily flecked with dreadlocks and Birkenstocks, rainbow stickers and dreamcatchers. A historical town, home of the lavish Biltmore Estate and the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe. Especially beautiful in the fall when the air grew crisp and all the leaves burst into flame. I lived with five of my friends in a charmingly ramshackle house only a few blocks from downtown. Kate lived just down the street, and we knew several other people in our neighborhood, mostly kids in their early 20’s like us. We would loll about on each other’s porches an in each other’s living rooms, smoking cigarettes and dashing out one-line poems on typewriters. We walked downtown to Vincent’s Ear, a bar that sold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon for $1.50. Every Wednesday we went to Broadway’s for 80’s dance night and once a month we went to an opening at Food, the new up-and-coming art gallery, to drink free wine. Everywhere we went we knew people—the bartender, the record store clerk, the DJ, the crusty punk rocker lingering in the corner. Although most of us had only lived in Asheville for a few years we had grown bold in our sense of familiarity and felt the town belonged to us.
No one I knew had a “real job.” We were all students and/or waiters, aspiring writers and filmmakers and musicians who spent most of our nights at the bar. Some of us worked construction, some delivered flowers. Some avoided employment entirely by selling pot and collecting food stamps. The mountain town economy—bastioned largely by tourism—made it difficult to nurture anything you might call a career. We were bohemians, artists; we scoffed at the small population of nine-to-fivers—bankers, secretaries, and the like—dismissing them as boring, ridiculous; suckers.
Kate knew a couple girls who drove to a strip club in South Carolina to perform on weekends; in North Carolina you needed a license to strip, which cost several hundred dollars. So we considered going to South Carolina, and then a few weeks later we were presented with a closer and less intimidating alternative: a friend was having a benefit party at his new art gallery, and he would be more than happy to include stripping as part of the entertainment. We wouldn’t make much money doing this, but it would give us a chance to try the whole thing out in a friendly, safe environment.
Enter Cheri. Cheri was like a piranha. We’d see her on the dance floor at the bar with her legs wrapped around some guy’s waist. Rail-thin with short, choppy, dyed-blond hair and a perpetual smudge of eyeliner beneath her eyes. She claimed to be a photographer, an actress. No one knew what she did to pay the rent. She had a 2-year-old kid, a situation that seemed less than ideal, but we were all reexamining our conventional conceptions, and who’s to say she was any worse than your average dysfunctional suburban family? Cheri had been a stripper in New Orleans. When she heard about the upcoming striptease at the gallery opening, she took a perversely maternal role with Kate and me. She told stories of violently coked-up customers and pole-burn in awkward places and exhausting 8-hour shifts. These were warning stories, but there was a nostalgic tone in a voice. She decided she’d perform at the gallery opening too, if only, she implied, to add a shade of professionalism to the show.

Although I was new to the world of stripping, the seeds of sexual exhibitionism had been planted a few months before. One of my housemates had started a garage rock band called the Make-Out Room—they played at Vincent’s Ear and various other dive-y bars. I would dance in front of the stage with my friends and after a set we would jump up on the stage and “make out” with the band members. We were lascivious, we were reckless—it was all part of the show. There was also my infatuation with the bass player, a stereotypical bad boy who wore a leather jacket, walked with a swagger and rode a motorcycle. I was fooling around with the Stereotypical Bad Boy while my sweet and sensitive boyfriend was across the country, going to school in Santa Cruz, California. We had agreed to something of an open relationship—only because of the distance between us.
The Stereotypical Bad Boy was the sort who left cigarettes burning in ashtrays. In the morning he would be in three places at once—putting on a record, tapping out a drumbeat on his leg, making coffee and a telephone call because he was late to work. All with the cigarette burning in the ashtray. The Stereotypical Bad Boy drank too much, got in fights. He’d spent the night in jail on more than one occasion. He slept around. But he looked like Bruce Springsteen in his tight blue jeans and cowboy boots. A boy who kissed me one night and ignored me the next. I have a shell around my heart, he said.
I wanted to melt it with my tongue.

The tattoos were another form of exhibitionism, although I don’t think I realized it at the time. I already had a couple, but they were small, discreet—a moon the size of a quarter on my thigh, a delicate woman-symbol on the back of my neck, easily hidden by my hair. Then one day a friend and I walked into a tattoo parlor in downtown Asheville and I walked out with a snake and dagger inked on my forearm. I joked about how it signified my newly developed toughness. A few weeks later I got one on my other forearm—a cityscape in black and gray. I was asking people to take notice of me, even though I often resented their stares. I was tired of inhibition, tired of the voices (internal and external) that told me what was and wasn’t acceptable. I wanted to turn my brain off and live by instinct alone. Adam Phillips describes inhibition as a safety tool, one that “renders a person apparently predictable to themselves,” whereas becoming uninhibited is “making oneself available to danger,” but “also the possibility of being suffused with feeling, or what Freud calls ‘a continual flood of sexual fantasies’.” Further, he notes, we can presume that “a continual flood ceases, eventually, to be called a flood, and becomes, say, a lake, or a river. In other words…sexual fantasy would become in time no longer invasive or overwhelming; it would be just what we were, what was in our minds, or just what our minds were… The imagined uninhibited life would be a radical metamorphosis. We would no longer feel flooded, we would be a flood.”
This was what I wanted, to push past the boundaries of my own inhibitions, to move beyond the flooded and become the flood.
In May, when my parents drove up for my graduation, my mom had seemed un-phased by the new tattoos, but my dad was less than thrilled. After the ceremony we’d had a barbeque, and over several beers he’d expounded upon the importance of staying fluid, of being able to change shape. Now I realize he was right: I was so busy reinventing myself that I didn’t stop to think I might later want to leave this identity behind, that it is important to maintain the possibility of reinvention. I was branding myself in part so that I would be unable to slip back into mainstream culture—become normal, average, dull—and was unable to imagine at that particular point why I would ever want to.

By June, the month in which the strip show was to take place, my boyfriend had returned from California and I was no longer messing around with the Stereotypical Bad Boy—although the sound of his boots on the porch still made my heart flinch. My boyfriend, with whom I’d been so long infatuated, now seemed too tame, malleable. He’d once told me I was ‘librarian sexy.’ Now, in bed, as I knelt over him with my new tattoos and Joan Jett haircut and black underwear, he said, “Wow, you’re scary.” He meant it as a compliment.
“When I moved away we were all dorks, and now I come back and suddenly everyone is cool.”

The new gallery was a large, unfinished studio space in a tiny downtown alley. Old wooden doors and window frames hung from the high ceiling to create makeshift walls; there was a small living area set up in the back. People drifted in and out as the first band set up, cupping sweating cans of beer. Around 7:30 everyone gathered inside to watch a 10-minute monologue, which I could barely hear past the buzzing in my ears. I was trying to consume as much alcohol as humanly possible in the short period before I had to go on. Somewhere along the way we’d picked up a fourth performer: Danielle, a giggly, redheaded hippie type who I didn’t much like. The four of us clustered in the back room of the studio, clammy-palmed and giddy, tugging on costumes and putting on makeup. Cheri showed us how to apply powder beneath our breasts to create the illusion of cleavage.
Kate went first. She performed her strip tease in roller skates to, fittingly, “I’ve Got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates,” by Linda Rhondstat. Danielle’s act involved black lingerie, a whip and a ceramic pig. Cheri wore a white bustier and writhed about on the floor to a Portishead song in a very dramatic fashion. She was the only one of us who didn’t go topless. “Been there, done that,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to prove.”
I’d chosen T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong” as my soundtrack, and my 70’s style short-shorts with a white tee shirt, accessorized with a hula-hoop. Underneath I had on a simple black pair of cotton bikini underpants. I walked out in front of the crowd of about 75 people, put the hoop around my waist, and began to gyrate.
Well, you’re dirty and sweet
Clad in black, don’t look back, and I love you…

My boyfriend was in the front row, a surprisingly good sport, cheering me on. I managed down to my underpants without too much struggle and was just finding my stride when the CD skipped. I froze for a moment, but the music kicked back on and someone in the crowd called out to me to keep going.
Well, you’re an untamed youth
That’s the truth, with your cloak full of eagles
You’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl…

All eyes were on me, and they wanted to see more. So I kept going. I shimmied, I swayed, I hula-hooped. I sashayed into the crowd and encouraged friends and strangers to stick dollar bills into my underpants. I felt powerful, elated, free. This was it, I thought, the clincher of my transition from ‘librarian sexy’ to ‘rock & roll sexy.’ I was no longer the type to give you a stern, if coy, look. I would be receiving the stern looks, and ignoring them, from here on out.

A few weeks after the gallery opening, Danielle performed at a strip club in South Carolina. I’d planned to go with her, but chickened out at the last moment. I got hung up on things like, how the hell was I going to dance in the club-required 6-inch heels? Or, was I actually capable of giving a lap dance to some slimy, middle-aged asshole in the midst of a room full of slimy, middle-aged assholes? This wouldn’t be the semi-enlightened, pseudo-intellectual group of Asheville hipsters I’d danced for at Eli’s studio. There would be no sense of irony in the eyes of this audience, no post-feminist rhetoric tempering the lustful gaze. My friends and I thought we could do things like strip and have non-monogamous relationships because we had taken gender studies, we knew about Riot Grrl, we knew that only some men were from Mars. We thought we could pick and choose what was useful to us. If that meant hairy armpits and fishnets, so be it. But at a real club I’d have to shave, and I wouldn’t even get to pick my own music. I didn’t want to dance to Destiny’s Child in 6-inch heels, naked or not, for anyone.

Instead of going to California with my boyfriend at the end of the summer as planned, I broke things off. I was too caught up in the intoxication of summer and the possibilities of new mouths to kiss. But summer is fleeting. Once it was over I was lonely and sick with regret: I had traded love for lust, security for excitement. In the cold gray months my skin grew thin as paper; I thought I might blow away. I’d been floating along with no sense of foundation, and when I finally looked down I realized the ground had disappeared beneath me. In December, with no stable job to speak of, a poorly heated apartment, and credit card bills lurking in the mailbox, I left Asheville and moved back to my hometown.

In the years since then, I’ve never felt such a sense of abandon as I did that summer. It seems that, for a brief period, my body was in sync with the outside world. I strode around in my sharp-heeled boots, enjoying the clack they made as I walked. I could put money in the jukebox at the bar and danced unabashedly to Aretha Franklin or I could spend all day on the porch smoking cigarettes and what did it matter? I could sit meekly in the back row of my Romantic Lit class one day and take my clothes off in front of an audience the next. It was an experiment in identity, a rejection of predictability. But I couldn’t keep it up. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t dissolve my own hardwired inhibitions. Phillips writes, “the inhibited person…has the most acute sense of the experimental nature of our acts.” The whole thing—the place and time and the person I was in it—was something I tried on and then grew out of, with nothing else hanging in my closet to wear.

Now, in many ways, I have become the person I was so sure I would never be: working a full-time office job, wearing long sleeves to cover my tattoos. I rarely go to shows anymore, much less dance wildly or jump on the stage (although admittedly, I still spend more than a healthy amount of time at bars). At the gym I go to downtown I opt for yoga rather than pole-dancing classes. ‘Librarian Sexy’ no longer seems like such a bad thing. At the age of 28 the allure of sex, drugs and rock and roll has abated, if not entirely disappeared. But sometimes when the air starts to turn warm and the days grow long I feel that inner surge of excitement, that desire to let go—to dance wildly to the jukebox, kiss strangers, strut around in knee-high boots—to show a little skin.

This essay is pending publication in the debut issue of Whore! magazine.