The Lost Girl
I remember the girl who always gets in to shit. Sitting in the corner of the dressing room, hunched up with a backpack vomiting shoes and make-up and fake tan and thin, lycra slivers of dresses.
“You not working?”
She looks up and her eyes are dull, shadowed, tired.
“Got suspended.”
“You got suspended? Whaddya do? You punch’d a guy again?”
She waves a hand listlessly as if to brush the question off like a fly.Melanie stomps up, pulls the ironing board over, starts to butcher her dress into a semblance of acceptability.
“Hey girl. You wanna go out sometime?”
She addresses the question like it’s an option, a flippant, enticing prospect, but really it’s a desperate plea. She starts to talk, her words running out like viscous phlegm.
“…Cause I’m stayin’ in a hotel with my girlfriends – I don’t live here – and they’re drivin’ me crazy. They’re promoters, we can get into the clubs for free if we go out tomorrow, I really admire you, movin’ over here and startin’ on your own with nothin’, we should hang out sometime…”
Melanie’s face is pockmarked with huge craters defining a landscape of acne, filled in carefully with thick wedges of Maybelline. A sweet girl. Lonely.
“…I heard you got suspended, that happened to me when I worked at my last club, I got so drunk I kept forgettin’ who’d bought me drinks, so I’d go and give a guy a dance an’ the waitress would turn up and say ‘Who’s gonna pay for this drink?’ an’ I’d forget who it was…”
Mercedes, Lola, and Giovanna rush up in a mist of perfume.
“Girl! Don’t leave us! You can’t leave!”
The girl looks up, takes another cigarette, flips a lighter, inhales.
“Got no choice. I don’t wanna leave you guys either.”
She’s popular, the girl. They like her because she looks out for them. If there’s a guy, she’ll sell a double dance, call another girl over, make good for them. If she gets a drink, she’ll share it. If a girl’s under-age, she’s the first one at the bar smuggling drinks to them. She’s fun, she laughs a lot this girl. She’s fiery and she says ‘cunt’ loudly, so the rest of the strippers gasp and giggle. “Geez, I’m so fuckin’ horny. Masturbated three times today. I just want my guy to come along, push me against the wall and fuck me hard.” The girls will screech when she says this, fall about laughing, because for someone so tiny and sweet, the incongruity of these words is hilarious, and she knows it. She’s a tomboy with a pretty face, never wears jewellery, popular because she’s fun. The management are divided. Half of them want to fuck her, the other half want to string her up from the rafters, because she’s different, that girl. Creeps them out. No one knows where she’s from, what she does in the day. No one asks. Sleep, perhaps. What they all do in the day. Shut it out behind luminous lids filtering light like onion skin.
The girl met a friend today, from long ago, an NYC guy.
“God you’re so different. You have this Philly wall around you. You’re so blunt.”
The girl just laughs, takes another sip of vodka.
“So you’re in love now?”
“Yeah. This woman is amazing. First person who’s come along and actually done something for me, picked me up, instead of the other way around. You know, I’ve learned that it’s OK to say you need someone, you want warmth and love and affection. I feel so…”
“If you say ‘blessed’ I’m gonna fuckin’ hit you.”
“I haven’t changed that much! But you…”
“I get worried. I think I should give it up. Go get a real job. Move home. But then I realize that the only time I feel like I shouldn’t be doing anything else is when I’m writing. It’s not really an option. I’ve suffered and now it’s helping me make sense of things.”
“I get it. You don’t need to explain. One more drink?”
“Yeah.”
When I look at the girl she’s doing it all wrong, I can see that. She’s too proud, too stubborn, she yells if someone yells at her, she stamps her feet at injustice, throws herself headlong into situations, cares too much, cares too little. She’s tough and it’s not just a shell – she is tough. She’s also gentle, unbelievably soft, naive. Pathetically naive. She’s unforgiving – she looks at those who haven’t suffered with a prejudice borne of pain, her own. She’s isolated, because the fire driving her rages out of control, in contrast to the trimmed wick of other people’s candles. She keeps it all locked in, her personal contradictions, saves it for the word. Honest, incapable of lying. Offensive, social niceties saved for a rainy day. Seductive. When she talks to you, leans in confidentally like she’s known you for years, your anger melts, and you warm to her, and it flits across your mind that she’d be great in bed, fuck! push that thought out.
She’s sitting on the empty stairwell now, trying to get away from the chaos of the dressing room, not ready to go home and leave her aborted night in the Emerald City behind. I pass her and walk on. She doesn’t look up but she knows I’m there. She’s smoking, depositing little piles of ash onto the cold concrete floor, swirling them around aimlessly with a cigarette butt. When I come back later, she’s gone. All that’s left is her dancer name spelt out neatly in ash, over and over, as if she were trying to convince herself:
dixie dixie dixie dixie
daisyfae said,
January 27, 2012 at 7:21 am
this needs a larger audience. the song “Shadow Stabbing” (Cake) pops in my head. “Adjectives on a typewriter, (s)he uses words like a prize fighter”