Gold Star Girl

Kissing Sara was just like kissing anybody else I guess but it had been a long time since I’d been with someone other than Leslie. Sara had a blister on the inside of her lip. We were parked in my car outside The Taproom. Sara leaned over the stick shift and slid her hand down the back of my pants. We bumped teeth and she pulled away.

“Too soon,” she said, but her hand was still on my thigh. “I just keep imagining that you’re Marcy.”

I had to pee. And I was suddenly aware that I was drunk. We’d run into Sara’s ex when we were eating dinner at The Taproom. Marcy was eating alone and I was not and that had made me feel celebratory and I’d had four Moscow Mules.

“I should really check on my dog,” Sara said. “I barely ever leave him home alone.”

On the drive to Sara’s house I ran my car up onto a concrete median. I’d been looking over at Sara and not paying attention to the road. The car made an uff noise then kept on going. I laughed but Sara was silent.

In the window of her apartment there was a silhouette of a cat. I could already smell the mildewy scent of her mattress under my face. But Sara didn’t invite me in. As soon as she was gone, I realized I had meant to ask her if I could pee in her toilet. Now it was too late but I stayed there in her driveway. I could see her moving through the rooms, opening the refrigerator, turning the T.V. on. It almost didn’t matter that I wasn’t being fucked with a giant pink dildo because that is what Marcy was almost definitely imagining right now. Unless Sara was already on the phone with her.

Before I married Leslie, Sara and I were supposed to go on a date. Sara thought it was cool that I worked as a stripper. She never said it outright but whenever we ran into each other our conversations rarely detoured from the subject. She had a friend who had a friend who was a professional makeup artist. She was always offering to have her come into the club sometime and show us some techniques. 

I called and asked her to go out to dinner with me at The Taproom because it had always irked me, the unfinishedness of our relationship. A year before, we’d gotten as far as trading numbers but then I met Leslie and we got married and months passed. Somewhere in there Sara and Marcy fell in love and then broke up. 

It was not exactly a year later but close enough and Leslie was out of town for the 10th Annual Heart Failure Holiday Symposium at Northwestern University and I did not want to go to my therapy appointment. Leslie and I had decided that it would be best if I kept myself very busy while she was gone so I’d gone to my Alcohol Abuse group where I learned that Paul the Python had used after a debilitating experience at Starbucks. He’d placed his order for his triple macchiato and was waiting for his name to be called when another customer accused Paul of stealing a gourmet candy bar. They got it all worked out, Paul said, but afterwards his self-confidence tanked down to about 0 and he went home and used. Robin the Rooster sighed heavily and asked us all to repeat aloud the steps Paul could have taken instead of using. 

The Alcohol Abuse group met every Wednesday at the Lighthouse Recovery Center and it was run by Robin the Rooster, a three hundred pound rage-aholic who called the group limp dick AA, recovery for those of us who have problems with alcohol but can’t admit that we’re addicts. Robin insisted that we each introduce ourselves by picking an animal that began with the same letter as our first name. I chose Natasha the Neanderthal but Robin said that a neanderthal wasn’t an animal so I had to be Natasha the Newt. I pointed out that Robin’s name was already an animal but he didn’t think that was cute. I was only attending so that I could eventually get my driver’s license back. Alcohol wasn’t even really my problem. I loved speed, coke, ecstasy. 

After my meeting I had just enough time to grab a cup of coffee and get to my therapist Leona’s office but when I came out of the recovery center I turned left instead of right and walked past the Greek diner and on towards the river. It was very cold but I’d forgotten to wear gloves so I traded my cigarette back and forth between my hands and shoved my fingers in my pockets when they weren’t in use. Christmas was over but the lampposts were still strung with droopy tinsel strings that shed their shiny bits of red and green down among the dead oak leaves.

Recently Leona had started drawing things on a big blackboard during my sessions. 

A (event/trigger) + B (thought/feeling) = C (behavior/lie)

She moved fast, her ankle length floral skirt tangling around her legs as she drew a giant triangle with revolving arrows: Action leads to Thoughts leads to Feelings leads to Action leads to Thoughts leads to Feelings leads to Actions. They looked like math equations. I was never any good at math but I was really great at these equations. Each week I would bring in a trove of stories and Leona would match them up with the model: Something triggered me—I had a feeling/thought—I did something fucked up. It seemed to make Leona incredibly excited, how obvious my problem was.

When I crossed Church Street I glanced left, Leslie’s house was only five blocks away but I kept going down the hill towards Riverside Drive instead. On the counter at home was a list Leslie made me before she flew to Chicago, a list full of Things To Do to Keep Busy. It included making black bean soup because just the thought of black beans made me feel stable. I was sure that even the farts I got from them were fulfillingly healthy. The rest of the list was mostly school stuff. I was enrolled full-time that semester, taking a biology class and Spanish and other things that I’ve forgotten, but the only class I cared about was Introduction to Philosophy. I didn’t even really care about the class actually, I cared about one project, one paper that I had written where I argued that the Existentialists and female medieval mystics were talking about the same thing: soul hunger. A feasting that leaves you hungry, a lover who leaves you longing, a fetus whose yearning engulfs the mother. To live is the opposite of to know. I took Hadewijch (How does Love’s refusal create hunger?/ Because we cannot come at what we wish to know / Or enjoy what we desire: / For Love comes, and we cannot bear her / She withdraws and we complain / That increases our hunger over and over / New assaults of Love, new hunger so vast / That new Love may devour new eternity) and matched it up with Jaspers’ boundary situations: man encounters true reality only in death, suffering, guilt, and the sudden violent accident. I took Beatrice of Nazareth and matched her up with Maslow’s peak experiences and Sartre’s accidental contingency. They all talked about Enlightenment and Search for Purity, they talked about Transcendence or Final Fusion with Christ but what they were really all saying was: this can’t be all there is to life, we need to feel more.

Even after I turned the paper in (B+ “interesting connections!”) I couldn’t stop working on it. I barely touched any of my homework, instead I kept reading Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Introduction to New Existentialism. I knew I was flunking my classes and that sooner or later Leslie would find out but it had been her idea, not mine, for me to go to college anyway.

When I reached the river, it was frozen over and looked scraped and damaged somehow. All the dirt and trash and scum trapped there.

I’d pulled out my phone and was surprised to find that I still had Sara’s number. She answered on the third ring and I asked if I could pick her up and take her to dinner. I wasn’t supposed to be driving and I could have just asked her to meet me downtown but I wanted to feel like I had the upper hand. When she came out of her house I saw that she was chubbier than I’d remembered, pear shaped, and I couldn’t stop staring at the way her thighs chafed together as she walked towards my car. I’d paid for dinner because Leslie made more money in a month than Sara probably did in a year.

When the light came on in Sara’s front room, I realized that I had been sitting in her driveway in the dark for a long time. My phone vibrated in my back pocket. I was sure the call was Leslie and I felt a gushing warmth behind the bones of my chest. I would lie and tell her I was in bed, reading and drinking Tension Tamer tea and then I would get off the phone and drive home and do just that.

The call was from Sara. She was staring out the window at me, nothing but a black silhouette with a tiny patch of blue from her cellphone screen.

“When does Leslie get back?” she asked.

If I concentrated, I could see the outline of her right arm, bent to hold the phone to her face. From here the arm looked muscular but I knew it was soft. 

“She’s good for you, Tasha.”

I lay the phone down on the passenger seat and put the car in reverse.

I took Buchanan Avenue down to Merrimon, from there I was supposed to take a left but instead I found myself flicking the right blinker and heading towards the highway. That was not the direction home. That was in fact the direction towards the Painted Pony Gentlemen’s Club. I didn’t think I was heading there though. I hadn’t been there in over nine months. I wondered instead if I might keep driving until sunrise and by then I would be way out past the mountains.

The first time I met Leslie I vomited red wine all over the white carpet in her living room. I had been hired to dance at her surprise 50th birthday party. She was not the type of person you hire a stripper for. She was a cardiologist at Minton Memorial Hospital. She loved Jane Austen and had a koi pond in her backyard. I think Ronnie hired me more for himself than for her. Ronnie was the head nurse on Leslie’s floor and he was best friends with Kim who was the DJ at Painted Pony. 

Leslie looked so horrified when she first saw me that it momentarily punctured my warm bubble of molly-and-vodka-numbness. I didn’t really have a strong opinion of what I looked like but I imagined something along the lines of Shirley Temple meets Betty Page. In Leslie’s eyes though I could see: cellulite, thick ankles, hair more orange than red.

Kim swooped in and steered me away towards the makeshift bar. You want something to drink? It looks like we’ve got red wine or white. Ronnie came over and apologized, said Leslie was just nervous, did I mind hanging out for a while and dancing after a bit? I shrugged. I’d been paid up front and it was more money than I would make working all night at the club. Leslie’s house was big and very clean. She lived there by herself and had a huge Christmas tree.

The only other private party I’d ever done was two years before when I first started working at the Painted Pony, a week after I turned twenty-one. This other dancer, Cassandra, had asked me to come with her. We’d danced for the hour we’d been paid for but then Cassandra wanted to stay and drink and hang out. We hadn’t let anyone touch us while we were dancing but afterwards, sitting on the couch, Cassandra didn’t seem to care how much they fondled her. I guess it was different for me though because I’d never had sex with a man. When the girls at the club found this out they’d crowded around and cooed over me. They called me Gold Star Girl and Virgin Baby. I told them I definitely wasn’t a virgin, I’d just never been fucked by a dick that wasn’t plastic. They said same difference.

When Leslie told me her version of my arrival at her party, she looked so sincere it made my stomach ache. This was four days later. It was Christmas eve and we were naked in her bed. We’d gathered every pillow from the whole house and made a nest and we were curled together watching the stars through her sunroof. 

“That’s not just a dot in the sky,” I said, “That’s a ball of fiery gas that died a hundred billion years ago.”

Leslie kissed me and told me how the first thing she’d thought when she saw me at her party was that she’d have to upgrade her security system, now that I knew about her house and all her nice things, now that I knew how to get there. She cupped my face in her hands and told me that she’d been so scared that I might come back sometime and now she was so scared that I wouldn’t.

Leslie was the kind of person who knew exactly what she liked and how to get it. She bought things in bulk—clothes and groceries—because she never worried about changing her mind or getting tired of something. I was so excited to be one of those things she wanted in great quantity. That’s the way it felt when she asked me to marry her, like she’d decided she wanted to bulk buy me.

In a therapy session once Leona asked how I’d known that Leslie was the right person for me to marry. I admitted that I hadn’t thought a whole lot beyond being delighted to find that I was a person who could make someone like Leslie happy.

“Someone like Leslie or Leslie?” Leona asked.

“Leslie,” I said real fast but what I was thinking was: my whole life has been a series of yes-or-no questions and I’ve never yet seen a good reason not to say yes.

I got off the highway and pulled into the gas station out at the edge of Carriesburg. I still had to pee. This was the same place where I used to stop every night to get coffee and snacks before going to the club. I wondered if the employees would recognize me, I’d been friendly with a few of them, an off-to-work-the-night-shift camaraderie. But it had been nine months and the girl behind the counter was new to me. I got a coffee and sat down on a stool near the hotdog steamer. The girl was pretty cute, good ass and nice legs. Back then I used to do this thing, actually I still do it sometimes but back then it made me feel both demented and powerful. I would pretend that I had a dick, real flesh, not a plastic one, and I would pretend that I was old, at least as old as Leslie, and as I watched the girl my ugly old dick would get stiff. I liked that she could never ever guess that inside me lived the creepiest horniest old man.

“You travelin’ through?” 

I nodded. Maybe I would stick my dick between her tits.

“Where you from?”

I looked up. Her eyes were blue-green and watery. “New York,” I said.

“And you came here?”

“I’m having an affair with an airline pilot,” I said, the words coming out before I even had time to think. “We meet up in nondescript places all across the U.S.”

The girl looked at me with lavish disgust like I’d just shown her some kind of open wound. I felt a kick of adrenaline. I thought of Leona’s models, her A+B=C triangles and I wondered if she’d missed me that afternoon, missed having the chance to fill in her equations. She and Leslie were both so keen on making science and math out of my irrationality. They fed me yellow mood stabilizer pills shaped like little bells. Only I didn’t always swallow the bells because I was afraid they would dull the hunger and I didn’t want to be rid of that.

Beatrice of Nazareth said she wanted to feel a Love that was nothing short of “Hell or Pure Insanity.” She cut her arms and burnt her feet and consulted medical professionals on how she might drive herself further into Insanity. Some of us have a very strong appetite for what ifs. Not Leslie though. Leslie came home from work once in a sad, confused rage about a certain patient. A colleague had told her about a woman who had come into the E.R. four times over the past year. She was a painter and she was diabetic. She liked to let herself go into diabetic shock and in that state of near death she would have visions and she would paint them. It made Leslie howlingly mad. 

“She’s going to go blind,” she yelled, “she’ll lose a leg!”

“What do her paintings look like?” I asked and Leslie threw me a black-hot look. I loved Leslie for her unequivocal upset but I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist either if there was a door inside me that led to visions like that.

The gas station girl went outside for her cigarette break and the door banged behind her. I’d asked her if she knew anyone I could score some coke or molly from and she’d screwed her face up into a smug stamp of judgement. I tipped my coffee into the trashcan and stood up. It was still early, just past midnight. I was pretty sure I could get some at Tammy Rae’s. I knew drugs were a cheap, stupid way to further my inner cartography but sometimes you just need a shortcut. I felt sure that Beatrice of Nazareth would have used coke, or maybe acid, if she’d known about it in her day.

From the highway overpass I could see the pink and blue lights of the Painted Pony. I could score there too but it was so loud and chaotic. I’d stopped working there soon after I met Leslie and had been back only once, to interview some of the other dancers for a school project. When I told my Foundations of Western Thought teacher that I wanted to examine Marx’s alienation of labor in terms of the strip club he’d blushed so hard I could see the pink showing through his combover. I’m not kidding, I said and he’d nodded and approved the project but couldn’t look me in the eye the rest of the semester.

One time Leona asked me why I’d wanted to work at the Painted Pony in the first place. I told her that Paula Abdul’s music video for “Cold Hearted Snake” had set goals in my heart and the strip club was as close as I could reach: stage, lights, audience, adoration. Leona wanted something more Freudian but I didn’t have an answer for her that included repressed trauma or childhood sexual abuse. Sometimes I felt jealous of people with great grief, it worked as an answer to anything.

Tammy Rae’s had the usual gay bar spread of rainbows and sparkles but it had Confederate flags too. Sharon was working. Sharon and Leslie were old friends. I almost walked right back out but Sharon had already greeted me. I ordered a Rolling Rock and glued my eyes to the T.V. and before too long a baby butch I’d never seen before came over. She asked me if I wanted to play pool and I said yes, if she’d teach me. I’d known how to play for years and had already pulled the same innocence trick on pretty much every other woman in that bar and I could feel them all watching me, even if they couldn’t hear me over the roar of Lucinda Williams crooning about Slidell, they all knew what I was saying. I almost laughed out loud but managed to keep my cool. I thought of taking this girl’s hand and leading her out of Tammy Rae’s, telling her to take me anywhere.

She said her name was Laura or Laurel or something and she made a big deal out of buying me whatever drink I wanted. 

“Double shot of Patron,” I said.

Sharon smiled. “How’s Leslie?”

“Fine,” I said.

Laura/Laurel was too busy digging through her wallet to notice. She pulled out a military I.D. and set it on the bar. “Ya’ll have discounts for veterans?” 

Sharon shook her head.

“Oh, okay,” Laura/Laurel said. “I always check cuz, you know, a lot of places have discounts for vets.”

She left the I.D. on the bar while Sharon poured our drinks and I took my cue. “When’d you get back?”

“Yesterday!” Her face bloomed. “I keep pinchin’ myself, thinkin’ I’m dreamin’. I still can’t believe I’m here, havin’ drinks with a beautiful woman!”

We walked over to the pool table and then her arms were around me and she was leaning in, positioning my hands for the shot. We could play this game, I thought, and then leave and go to wherever she was staying and I could let her be so excited about my body, I could let her incandescent joy fill me up.

“You want to imagine a straight line from the ball,” she said. She smelled like a kid’s idea of what a man should smell like and I could feel her sweat soaking into my back.

I let go of the pool stick. “I have to pee.”

“Oh,” she said, “okay.” She stepped away.

I walked to the bathroom. I got my phone out. Leslie had called six times. I put my phone back in my pocket.

When I came out of the bathroom Laura/Laurel was gone. 

“Did you scare her off?” I asked Sharon.

She shrugged. “I told her you’re married.”

I laughed and ordered another Rolling Rock.

“Fucking marriage!” A woman at the end of the bar shouted. The room had nearly emptied out and we were the only two up at the counter. “Fucking husbands! Fuck ‘em! Am I right?”

I didn’t correct her. 

She got up and staggered towards me with her drink held high. She had hip length copper-blonde hair and jeans with sequined studs on the pockets.

“Cheers!”

She sat on the stool beside me and ordered us another round. I thought Sharon might tell her she was cut off but she didn’t. I lit a cigarette. Natural Born Killers was on the T.V., Juliette Lewis’s veil floating out over the Rio Grande.

“I mean at first it was just verbal,” Blondie was saying, “but then it got worse. And he always blames me. He says, like, what man could stand for his woman to dance naked in front of other men? I said a real man, and he didn’t like that. I had to leave.”

Sharon was watching her with a wicked half-smile on her face. “You an adult entertainer?” she said. 

“Stripper,” Blondie said.

Sharon winked at me. She could never quite get over the fact that Leslie had married an exotic dancer. Back when I first started at the Painted Pony Sharon had been a Monday regular, her one night off from Tammy Rae’s. She never bought private dances but always left good tips on the stage. 

“Our Natasha here used to be quite the pole performer,” she said.

Blondie turned to me. “You’re a stripper?”

Her hand was on my shoulder then in my hair. “You’re so pretty,” she said.

I ordered another tequila and watched Juliette Lewis laugh.

“I keep having all these dreams about hair,” Blondie was saying. “First I dreamt that I had so much hair, like it filled the room I was in and I was drowning. Then I dreamt my hair was gray and I kept dyeing it and the dye wouldn’t take, it just kept washing out and leaving it gray.” My phone was vibrating again.

“Let’s get out of here.” I turned to Blondie and she stood up.

She drove a Honda Civic and in her glove box she had Adderall which we crushed and snorted. Then we kissed. I remembered the blister on the inside of Sara’s lip. I realized that I hadn’t asked Blondie her name yet. There were balls of trash on the floor of her car and it smelled like diapers and baby powder and old food. 

I gave her directions to Leslie’s house and put my seatbelt on. There was something under my leg. When I pulled it out it was a sippy cup. 

“Sorry,” Blondie said. “I’ve got a two year old.”

“Where?” I half expected the child to be curled up in the back.

“With my husband,” she said. “I left while they were asleep.” 

I felt exhausted suddenly, despite the Adderall. All I wanted to do was sleep and really I thought maybe that’s all that I’d wanted all evening ever since I left Lighthouse Recovery. 

Blondie reached for my hand. “Such beautiful long fingers,” she whispered, “just like your legs.”

I don’t have long fingers or long legs.

“Watch out,” I said, pointing at the stoplight. “Left up ahead.”

The house was dark. I’d forgotten to leave any lights on for myself.

“Can I walk you to your door?” Blondie asked.

“No I’m fine, thank you.”

She reached out to stop me from leaving. “I’m only thirty-four.”

I didn’t understand what she was saying and then I did. I laughed. “My wife’s fifty-one,” I said.

“Wife?”

I nodded.

Blondie leaned past me to look at the dark silhouette of the house. “She’s in there?”

“Not tonight.” I opened the door and stepped out, the cold air felt good but I’d moved too quickly and had to grip the car for balance.

“Hey,” Blondie said, “hey, if you get in there, into your bed I mean, and you feel lonely, just flash your light on and off and I’ll come.”

I didn’t particularly like the idea of her sitting in my driveway waiting for me to get lonely. I pushed the door shut. I pushed it harder than I meant to and it closed with a sound that was too loud and final.

Inside I was scared to turn on any lights for fear that it would summon her so I crept through the shadowed house, past the kitchen where a year ago Leslie had made me ginger tea to soothe my stomach after I barfed on her carpet. She’d been so obviously relieved that I’d gotten sick and therefore wouldn’t be able to dance for her that it had made me laugh and we’d started talking. She sent everyone else home but I stayed there that night and nearly every night after. 

My phone hadn’t vibrated since I’d left the bar. I wondered if Sharon had called Leslie and told her that I’d gone home with some random woman. I wondered if that would be Leslie’s final limit.

I could see Blondie’s car through the bedroom window so I ducked down and climbed straight into bed. I took my clothes off under the comforter and lay still, counting backwards from 100 the way Leona had taught me to calm myself. Mice scrambled in the rafters up above. Leslie kept threatening to call an exterminator but I liked listening to them, there was something comforting about their industrious sounds. I imagined a whole mouse family snuggled together, cozy and happy in their nest. One time a regular I’d had at the Painted Pony told me that during the final months of his marriage he and his wife had gone to stay in her uncle’s cabin in Vermont to work on their relationship but the cabin was infested with rats and at night while the two of them lay side by side, not touching, they could hear the rats in the walls, fucking or maybe fighting.

I counted all the way down to zero and then sat up. Blondie’s car was still parked in the driveway but the engine was shut off. The night was a chill blue with sharp shadows and very yellow stars and from that distance I couldn’t see if she was sleeping or still waiting for me to be lonely.