Underage Lipstick Lesbian: Part 4

It's been difficult to write as of late, so sorry for the delay. As it happens, I am recently out of the hospital from a bad fall wherein I needed surgery to put some broken bones back together. The narcotic pain killers have also numbed my ability to tell my story, though, truth be told, this is my third attempt at writing the next installment of my story. It became hard to write before the hospital hiatus, and I feel like the fall had something to do with a nudge from the Universe to not just walk away from the hashing at this point, so let's hope the third times a charm. Thanks for being so patient, and do enjoy reading this next bit!

Summer between junior and senior year were full of work and play. Starbucks took up much of my time and the rest went to trying on adult behaviors with Edie. All of my life I have loved to sing, and at times when I put practice into it, I have done it well. I always wanted to grow up to be a jazz singer, but like most of our childhood dreams, I realized this world doesn't support such things and I put it aside for more practical answers to the big questions of survival.

But on nights when Edie and I would get drunk together in her cold, lonely, moist Pacifica bedroom, I would sing the blues to her. She would pet my hair and I would wail away about loneliness, lost love, and the one that got away. We both knew I was still in love with Knoxey, and we both knew I'd never love Edie like I loved her. She was content to hear the beauty in the heartbreak I carried for Knoxey, and I was satisfied to at least sing the blues well; throaty, soulful, mesmerizing. In drunken song I was all that I wanted to become in the world. I burned bright with talent and a message to share. In that place nothing else mattered, there was no point b, no place to get to, nothing to make happen. When I sang the blues for Knoxey all the love that sailed out of my mouth was enough to satisfy the craving for authenticity in the moment. Music was all that existed.

Although I was the one who finally broke it off, I saw my life as always including Knoxey when we were together. I believed we would heal together, get married, and make our own little poetic San Francisco lesbian family together. We'd paint pictures, plant gardens, and have arts and crafts day in our living room with all our other healed lesbian friends. Make no mistake about it, I loved her with all my heart, and I wanted a life with her in it.

Edie was perhaps the character in the play who made the world feel big enough to be willing to wait and see what happens next. The sadness I felt for Knoxey wasn't enough to kill me anymore, but it was enough to weigh my heavy heart down low. If I wasn't working to be well enough to make a life with Knoxey then what was I working for after all? I had learned to set the bar low and at that point all that mattered to me was feeling loved, no matter how I got the feeling.

Edie and I would regularly find lookouts and scenic parking lots to post ourselves and makeout for hours. Our only breaks were for me to smoke my endless cigarettes and talk about social goings-on. We made our plans on hillsides overlooking grey foggy beaches. I honed my sexual craft on Edies lap alone in deserted parking lots where no one cared to watch the budding sexuality of a young lipstick lesbian.

The power I felt I had over Edie to do anything I wanted, give me anything I wanted, or take me anywhere I wanted in exchange for my intense sexuality was like the hit of some ferocious drug. I didn't know it at the time, but I was sucked in and addicted before I had time to really think the consequences through. I just knew that when I hopped on her lap, kissed her slowly and softly, and swirled my hips, she melted, and said yes to the numerous requests I had that were yet un-granted by any other person. I found a way to get someone to say yes to me! I didn't have to work a grueling eight hour shift after an eight hour day of school and homework to afford the pretty dress I wanted. I didn't have to deal with my parents telling me why what I wanted was wrong. I didn't have to argue with anyone about my desires, or fight to materialize them. All I had to do was make Edie feel like a sex goddess for having me wiggle on her lap and all was well. In the meantime, I enjoyed the sexual intensity and energetic output, like I was finally naturally great at something that took little practice.

One day, in one of our more intense makeout sessions, Edie, out of the blue, said to me, "Please don't ever become a stripper." "A stripper? What an odd thing to say", I thought. I smiled and giggled, and continued on. Once we were done, I asked why she said that. She told me she used to frequent strip clubs before we met and I had the sexual makings of a stripper. She told me she was so turned on by me because I was like a stripper she didn't have to pay, one that also offered the payoff of actual sex once in a while as opposed to extreme sexual frustration. She said I gave better lap dances than any stripper she'd ever paid, and my ego soared. A stripper... strip clubs... what novel ideas! I'd never thought of such things, but I was intrigued. The idea was planted and it quietly gestated in the back of my subconscious mind for some weeks before I asked Edie to take me to a strip club with her male friends some time.

A month or so passed before we went to Crazy Horse on Market Street in San Francisco one rainy Saturday night. My trusty fake i.d., as usual, got my seventeen year old self in without a wink from the door man, and that night history was made. Edie, her friends Andrew and Hector, and I sauntered through the doors of the ghetto-swank club set aside for unknowing tourists and shamed locals alike. We walked in to a large open area with a stage in the middle that was lined with front row seats. Somehow I'd always thought strippers were a look but don't touch sort of commodity, but at least at the Crazy Horse, I couldn't have been more wrong. I watched as these women rode the faces of eager customers, dripped hot wax on their naked bodies on stage for onlookers to peel off for a price, and swung around poles flailing into the most amazingly acrobatic positions I had ever seen. "How, with all my sexuality and sexual experience had I not paid more attention to this?", I would ask myself. I saw the women stripping as ultimate goddesses, commanding the attention of the audience and making fun again what was largely perceived as frustrating and taboo. The power the strippers embodied was enough to make me envious. I saw no shame here, no second-guessing or hesitation to be sexual. I saw freedom to be as sexually powerful as one was born to be. It was that night that I put the stripping idea on the list of possible plan b's to my retail adolescence.

Time passed, parties became familiar, and functional partying became a way of life. Over the summer Edie and I took a road trip to Los Angeles (for what purpose I can no longer recall) and we loved it down there. The whole place was alive with sunshine and newness. We were captivated by the idea of starting afresh in a place where no one held any expectations for who we should be or how we should behave. Stripping moved further into the back of my mind and normalcy offered itself up in L.A. We also, for the first time, were more like lovers than codependent abusers and it was on that trip that we finally found comfort in one another. Edie and I grew beyond our sexual adventures and decided that in L.A. we could make a quiet life together. We decided that in L.A. we could simply be in love.

By fall I was back in school and forming a plan with Edie to move to our new promised land. We wanted to be normal and were elated to find a place far enough away from my pain, my family and Knoxey to have room to just breathe. My lesbianism was a sore spot in my family and social life. My stepmom was ashamed of me, my father avoided me, and my piers were constantly wanting to know what the details of lesbian sex were like. Once the novelty wore off, I was tired of being found interesting for the way I fucked.

We both looked into transferring our jobs and I found out that I had enough credits to graduate a semester early. When Knoxey got wind of our plans she began to show up inconveniently to make public scenes of discord, in true keeping with lesbian code. The drive to get the hell out of the bay area grew, and we planned on moving to so-cal just after my 18th birthday in January.

Edie, though older than I, was afraid to go out into the world away from the safety of her parent's home. No matter how much trouble she got into her mom and dad were always there to bail her out when she was arrested for D.U.I's or held up at drug deals gone awry. I envied the concern her parents had for their daughter, but I also began to see how this concern hindered her growth as a person. I was ready to dive into taking responsibility for the details of my life and Edie was like a wimpering puppy at the idea of signing a lease on an apartment or renting a U-Haul truck.

Just one month before we were to leave, Edie bailed on our plan, and I broke up with her promptly. If she wasn't going to help me escape then I wasn't going to play the game anymore, and it was at this point that I realized I was with her in order to be taken care of, to be tamed, not for love.

If, after Knoxey and I broke up I went a little crazy, then one could say that after Edie and I broke up I lost all control. One of my Starbucks co-workers sold coke on the side, and one night after closing I did my first line with Ryan and his friend Cesar in the middle of the dark closed coffee shop. When coke and I met it was the beginning of a new end. She became my new lover and she made everything not simply okay, but incredible. Music sounded better that night, and my hour long trek home took what seemed like minutes. The cold didn't bother me, and when I got home at 11:30 and my stepmom started an argument about my talking on the phone while cleaning the kitchen, it was inconsequential. She went into my room and ripped my phone out of the wall to make her point, so I picked up my cell phone and started up my conversation where I left off. After all, I paid for the phone line and the cell phone withvmy own hard-earned money. I'd be damned if I wasn't going to use them. I was calm, cool and collected as she wailed and flailed. When the tornado was winding up I coldly told my father that when I didn't tell him where I was going the day I moved out this kind of shit was exactly why.

Two days later I purchased my first stash of coke, grabbed a handful of straws at Starbucks, cut them in fourths, bought a package of razor blades and put together my first drug kit in an Altoid tin. I have always been an all or nothing kind of girl, and with coke this part of me was even more exaggerated. Cocaine had this vibration of possibility and strength for me. With her in my nose I felt like I could be ballsy enough to do anything, and I mean anything, I wanted. I had the inner umph to say exactly what I thought, to choose my most outrageous choices, and to be my most extreme self. All of these things got me the sort of starlet attention I craved, and within two weeks time I was using coke for every waking moment of life. I always had a smile, my makeup was better, my hair was tended right down to the most minute strand, and I said the most hilarious and outrageous things. Coke, in my mind, made me magnetic to everyone round me, and it erased every trace of sadness I had hauled around since the day my mother left me in that dingy apartment with my little brother to care for.

My high school finals were three weeks before my 18th birthday, and throughout the tests I was preoccupied with my need to go to the girls bathroom and do a quick line to rev my brian up. Looking back I think my teachers and professors must have known something was up with me, but I was days away from being out of their scope of consciousness forever. What were they really going to do about it? My co-workers also took notice that something about me had changed. Of course, Ryan already knew, since he was regularly selling me coke or sending me to his friend Cesar for a stash when he ran out. But the others, they saw me get rail thin over night. They saw my drawings become more exaggerated, my laughter become too jagged, and my cheekbones ever more pronounced.

Two weeks was all it took for me to commit myself to my new lady love, Ms. Cocaine. With my new love I was sure I'd find a way to give myself all that I needed and all that I missed living in my parents house. It didn't matter anymore that Knoxey and I weren't making a family with babies. It didn't matter anymore that Edie was too afraid to deal with life in the way I was soon to be forced to. My mother didn't even exist to me anymore, and my stepmom shrunk into an itty bitty bitchy neighbor I would soon no longer have to cope with. With cocaine nothing else mattered, and I felt fine. In fact, it wasn't just fine, it was fucking incredible. There was nowhere I was supposed to go, nothing I was supposed to be, no one else's rules I'd have to continue to play by. I was flying freely with no bounds, and my desire to burn bright lost its bounds as well.

That little idea that had embedded itself deep into my subconscious came birthing itself right out one night while I listened to my favorite D.J. Shadow album in my friends car on my way home from a particularly hard-working shift at Starbucks. That was the night I decided I'd go to the first amateur audition I could find in a San Francisco strip club. I was out for money, for the spotlight, for a hearth to burn in.

Stay tuned for the next installment soon! Thanks for reading!

SH